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kindkitWell, I think I may be done with Susan Hill's books. Her second most recent Simon Serrailler mystery, The Betrayal of Trust, finally includes queer characters, in this case a lesbian couple.
One of whom turns out to be the murderer. In a fit of jealous rage, she struck the teenage girl to whom her partner was giving piano lessons, causing the girl to fall, fracture her skull, and die. Then, still in a rage, she killed their housekeeper, who had witnessed the girl's death. Her partner, although horrified and feeling guilty, helped her dispose of the bodies.
Just . . . no. When you have a whole series of contemporary mysteries set in contemporary Britain, and there are no queer people in them until book six, and then one of them's a killer and the other's an accessory . . . no. No no no.
Just to add ludicrous insult to injury, not one character, in a contemporary-set novel published in 2011, was comfortable describing the two women as a couple. The was a lot of "Miss Mills and her . . . you know" and "they were together" and that sort of circumlocution. Spoken by characters including doctors and police officers who in the real world would deal with queer people all the time.
Unrelatedly, but adding to my disgust with this book, there was a subplot about physician-assisted suicide in which it was presented in the most sinister light possible, and heavily implied to be the moral equivalent of murder. Now, there are legitimate arguments to be made about the medical ethics (the argument against legalizing it that I'm most convinced by is that, especially in countries like the United States, the horrific expense of medical care might push patients into suicide because they don't want to impoverish their families) but Hill wasn't really making an ethical argument. She just started from the premise that it was wrong (based in the Christian prohibition of suicide--Hill is a Christian and so is the doctor character who is meant to be one of the moral centers of the series) and that any doctor willing to help a patient die must be creepy, reluctant to give good palliative care, and perhaps in it for the money. This infuriated me--having see my own mother suffer and die with dementia, going through years of a kind of non-life she'd never have chosen, I felt personally insulted by the implication that bodily survival is paramount, that truly good and brave people will always choose to live with even the most horrific illness rather than choose to die, and worst of all, that good people have good deaths and that if, for example, dementia leads to violent behavior, it's because that person was violent all along. My mother's dementia sometimes made her violent, because she was afraid, frustrated, and distressed. Not because she was a murderer.
/rage
Oh, and the novel also showed a major character as not knowing about a big familial secret that in fact her father told her about two books ago. It's not as important as the homophobia and the sermonizing, but careless writing bugs me.
One of whom turns out to be the murderer. In a fit of jealous rage, she struck the teenage girl to whom her partner was giving piano lessons, causing the girl to fall, fracture her skull, and die. Then, still in a rage, she killed their housekeeper, who had witnessed the girl's death. Her partner, although horrified and feeling guilty, helped her dispose of the bodies.
Just . . . no. When you have a whole series of contemporary mysteries set in contemporary Britain, and there are no queer people in them until book six, and then one of them's a killer and the other's an accessory . . . no. No no no.
Just to add ludicrous insult to injury, not one character, in a contemporary-set novel published in 2011, was comfortable describing the two women as a couple. The was a lot of "Miss Mills and her . . . you know" and "they were together" and that sort of circumlocution. Spoken by characters including doctors and police officers who in the real world would deal with queer people all the time.
Unrelatedly, but adding to my disgust with this book, there was a subplot about physician-assisted suicide in which it was presented in the most sinister light possible, and heavily implied to be the moral equivalent of murder. Now, there are legitimate arguments to be made about the medical ethics (the argument against legalizing it that I'm most convinced by is that, especially in countries like the United States, the horrific expense of medical care might push patients into suicide because they don't want to impoverish their families) but Hill wasn't really making an ethical argument. She just started from the premise that it was wrong (based in the Christian prohibition of suicide--Hill is a Christian and so is the doctor character who is meant to be one of the moral centers of the series) and that any doctor willing to help a patient die must be creepy, reluctant to give good palliative care, and perhaps in it for the money. This infuriated me--having see my own mother suffer and die with dementia, going through years of a kind of non-life she'd never have chosen, I felt personally insulted by the implication that bodily survival is paramount, that truly good and brave people will always choose to live with even the most horrific illness rather than choose to die, and worst of all, that good people have good deaths and that if, for example, dementia leads to violent behavior, it's because that person was violent all along. My mother's dementia sometimes made her violent, because she was afraid, frustrated, and distressed. Not because she was a murderer.
/rage
Oh, and the novel also showed a major character as not knowing about a big familial secret that in fact her father told her about two books ago. It's not as important as the homophobia and the sermonizing, but careless writing bugs me.
