Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2009 people. Change is already on the way, like Galadriel, I feel it in the earth. It does help knowing that we only have 15 more days until the inauguration. I am inexpressably happy about this.

Anyway, on to the first review of the year, yes?

Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt, reviewed by N. Vivian on January 5th.

Mistress of Mellyn is a modern Gothic romance, which means it had a ton of the traditional Gothic tropes, but focused more on the romance aspect, and lost most of the horror/terror aspect. For example, there's nothing particularly scary in the book; no black veils shrouding worm-covered "corpses," no keening voices, no blood-stained clothing, not even a lustful monk. There's a manor on top of a hill overlooking the sea, but the house itself is in perfectly good condition, kept neat and spotless, with nary a cobweb or scuttling rat in sight. The heroine hears odd voices that almost sound like people calling for the previous mistress's name, but she's informed (without any prompting) that it's just the sound of the sea. The master is brooding, but not menacing, the servants aren't stand-offish--they're only too willing to gossip; no dark and dangerous secrets in this house. Hell, the protagonist doesn't even end up lost in the woods, or the moors, or in the sea caves! To be fair, she never visited the sea caves, sea caves weren't even mentioned in the movel, but she COULD HAVE. And the protagonist, the gentlewoman in poverty who chooses to become a governess? Does she swoon even once? No!

The problem is, I don't know enough about Victoria Holt as an author to see if she's serious, or just messing around. If it's parody, then it's more subtle than Northanger Abbey, (which, to be fair, was as subtle as a brick to the face. Austen was having a lot of fun making fun of the genre). The book is well-written enough for me to assume that Holt knew the tropes and was deliberately subverting them, but there is always the possibility that she knew the bare bones of the genre, and added just enough window-dressing to get the novel called 'Gothic.'

Regardless, I really enjoyed this book. It was predictable in the way that most formulaic genres are, but I don't mind that. In fact, I really enjoy those; if the plot is a formula, then the author has to spend more time making the characters real. Well, the good authors do, anyway. Martha Leigh, is a genteelly impoverished woman. She has two options: marry or become a governess. The marriage option didn't really pan out, so it was off to Mellyn to teach. She doesn't really like this option; not because she'd prefer to be married, but because she's prickly and prideful. I can get behind that.

The Master of Mellyn is a widower, of course, his wife had run away with their philandering neighbor, but they had died in a horrible train wreck. The neighbor's body was identified, but the wife was burned too badly for recognition, the neighbor's sister was only able to identify her by the brooch she was wearing. It seems a bitter end to a troubled, stormy, loveless marriage, leaving the not-so-grieving widower free to look elsewhere for love--and all the village gossips about his (probable) mistress, the wealthy, beautiful, and ambitious Lady Treslyn. Could there possibly be something more to his wife's death than meets the eye?

There were some aspects of the book that I really liked. First of all, while Martha does become a little creepily obsessed with finding out what happened to Alice, the first wife, she never lets herself get stupid about it. Sure, there's a time when she thinks she hears Alice speaking (in a dream, conveniently telling her that she should do what exactly the thing that she wants to do), but other than that, Martha stays pretty sensible. She doesn't believe that Alice is trying to contact her from beyond the grave, she doesn't think Alice is haunting the manor house, and she never lets her imagination run away from her (I'm looking at you, Catherine Morland, and you too, Emily St. Aubert). I like to see a practical, no-nonsense woman, especially after the dingbats of the eighteenth century. This may have been more impressive had there been more suggestions of supernatural spookiness, but I still liked it. I also liked how that practicality carried over to her interactions with her employer and their flirtatious neighbor (younger brother of philandering neighbor)--she pretty much remembers her dignity through the entire thing. There are times when she uses her station as a weapon, which disconcerted them highly.

I liked that the villain was a female. Often, at least in the older Gothics, if there was a woman involved, she was two-dimensional. At best, she's a side-kick/helping hand, assisting the villain because she's desperately in love with him and is either willing to give him the heroine so he'll be happy, or working to remove the rival. Either way, she's of secondary importance: acting as a jailer, or delivering a tray of poisoned food. In this book, it's all her, beginning to end. I knew who it was immediately, but I will admit, I misread her motive entirely. That impressed me a lot. The murderess wasn't particularly bright (once she tried to kill the heroine by shoving a boulder down a hill) or amazingly creative, but she was a pretty convincing actress; the protagonists have no idea that she's a killer, and it's not because they are stupid or suffering from the "blind-to-the-obvious-because-the-plot-demands-it" syndrome.

What impressed me the most was the few moments of indecision I had towards the end of the book. There's all sorts of drama and impending doom which may implicate the employer in something shady, and, out of no where, he proposes to Martha, offering her his undying love. I honestly debated for a few minutes whether he was being genuine, or if he was using their to engagement to deflect attention away from him and his activities. Part of my uncertainty came from a lack of visible signs of growing attachment on his behalf. Well, they were there, but, again, it was very blatant: "LOOK HERE IS THE HERO FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE GOVERNESS! HE TOUCHED HER HAND, IT'S SIGNIFICANT!" There was nothing unique about his falling in love, might be the best way to describe it, and their 'courtship' was very bare-bones. Still, to give credit where credit is due, the rest of the uncertainty comes from Holt's setting up that expectation; she deliberately handed out two common tropes and said: "C'mon, guess which one I picked."

As for flaws, I have only two real ones. The first is the ending--the heroine is rescued from the obligatory horrible experience, and then the story stops. Not ends, just sorta...stops. The last real chapter ends with her rescue as she's delirious from shock and fear. What comes next is an afterword, where she relates the details (sparingly) from the future, when she is a great-grandmother. We don't even get to see the lovers' reunion, she's just like, "Yup, I was rescued, villain was punished, I married guy, we lived happily ever after. Wanna hear how many children I had?" I don't see the reason for that. I wanted to see it, not have it related almost second-hand. If I wanted that, I'd've asked a friend how the book ended. Bad form, Victoria, bad form.

My other critique is more pervasive in the novel, but didn't bother me as much. I felt as if the narration was a bit, well, bare-boned, like the courtship. Characters were somewhere between two-dimensional and decently developed, there were descriptions of her surroundings, but I still don't have a real idea of what things looked like, and since it was a first person novel, there was a conflict between showing versus telling sometimes. Holt occupies a very odd space: her books are Gothic (but not), her characters are developed (but not), her narration is descriptive (but not). It almost reads like a very detailed outline--but not. This would possibly be less irritating if I didn't have higher expectations of her--but I've READ Jean Plaidy (both nom de plumes for Eleanor Hibbert) and so I expect lush detail and rich narration.

Of course, this was originally published in 1960, so this might just be an example of her very early work, before she hit her stride. Or, she might just have spent more time and attention on her histories, as they are in a more respected genre.

So, the bottom line? I had a lot of fun with this book. It was interesting and engaging, I like the characters, I never had a moment when I was tempted to fling the book into a wall, and only rarely had to yell at the characters because they were being stupid. True the suspense-to-romance ratio was very low, but I think that's just a characteristic of the 'new' Gothic novel. I know I spent a lot of time pointing out flaws of the novel, but only because it was a good read, and so there were things that jumped out at me that would make it better. If I didn't really like it, I'd have less to say other than, "Well, this was crap. Nothing specific to critique because it was all one uniform lump of suck." Fun book, would read again--I'll probably add another few books of hers to my shelf; books I actually have to spend money on.