Destiny and Volition
Saturday, 7 June 2014 18:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lea_hazelNow and then I deal with a section in a book that upsets me so much I have to seriously evaluate whether I want to keep reading it. It happened to me twice, recently; once, with Jacqueline Carey's Naamah's Curse, and the second time, with Robin Hobb's Blood of Dragons (just now). Because I'm stubborn, I tend to try to delay this moment as long as possible. Invariably, this turns out to be a grave error. Someday I will be able to train myself to put the book down before I'm so angry that I can barely restrain myself from tearing it to shreds.
As the ancient elven saying goes, this is not a book to be set aside lightly.
Naamah's Curse is the middle book in a series that, by an large, I greatly enjoyed. I quibble with some decisions, and I have some misgivings, but I don't regret reading it. And I definitely plan on picking up the third book, and expect to enjoy that as well. Without an elaborate plot write-up (or too many spoilers), there's a section in the middle where the heroine is in peril. Now, I'm pretty used to vast amounts of violence in books and, while I'm often indignant on behalf of the protagonist, I can keep reading to see whether the assailants get their just desserts or not. This plot, however, tripped up some bizarre hang-up I didn't even realize I had about villains who abuse heroes while pretending they are doing it for their own good. I skipped ahead a massive chunk of pages and read the rest of the book, mostly to my delight.
Hobb's most recent offering, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, is by far her weakest yet. On every level. When reading earlier books I found their ponderous pacing very appealing, like a slow burn that eventually reaches a satisfying conclusion. RWC is just slow. She's been laying on the rape and torture nice and thick for a while now, mostly for no seeming point and to very little effect. Her romantic plots got steadily weaker, until eventually they ceased to represent either feature. A review that I can't find of the second book in this series shone a very bright light on its gruesome sexual politics, forcing me to acknowledge their grossness that I had been trying to ignore for all the usual reasons.
I was about four fifths of the way through the last book in the series when I put it down and resolved not to pick it up again. It was reminiscent of my ultra-aggressive break-up with my first major fandom, all those years ago: you put the pieces together and suddenly there's too many and you can't ignore them anymore. And you just feel disgusted, with your whole brain and body, just revolted. Again, as in the previous example, the violence and coercion masked as caring were too much for me to bear, with one notable difference:
In Naamah's Curse, the perpetrators of this gentle violence are clearly antagonists. At no point does the heroine acknowledge or accept their narrative of coercion in service of bettering her character, or making her discover her true, authentic self. The same cannot be said of Blood of Dragons -- the culmination of a series featuring a "love triangle" consisting of the heroine, and two teenage boys who repeatedly stalk and badger her even as she tries to avoid them, and harass her for sexual or romantic favors until she's tired enough to give in.
Unless the plot makes a giant about-face in the last hundred or so pages, these characters are still meant to be seen as heroic.
All as part of the general breeding-program-slash-meat-market ambiance that grew to replace the initial dull roar of heterosexism. Yes, indeed. In this book, compulsory heterosexuality is so powerful that even the (ostensibly) queer characters are tinged with it. I could write a great deal more on the subject, but I don't want to. I just... don't want this material in my head anymore.
I worked nearly an hour on this entry and I'm still nervous about it so I might as well just hit post.
As the ancient elven saying goes, this is not a book to be set aside lightly.
Naamah's Curse is the middle book in a series that, by an large, I greatly enjoyed. I quibble with some decisions, and I have some misgivings, but I don't regret reading it. And I definitely plan on picking up the third book, and expect to enjoy that as well. Without an elaborate plot write-up (or too many spoilers), there's a section in the middle where the heroine is in peril. Now, I'm pretty used to vast amounts of violence in books and, while I'm often indignant on behalf of the protagonist, I can keep reading to see whether the assailants get their just desserts or not. This plot, however, tripped up some bizarre hang-up I didn't even realize I had about villains who abuse heroes while pretending they are doing it for their own good. I skipped ahead a massive chunk of pages and read the rest of the book, mostly to my delight.
Hobb's most recent offering, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, is by far her weakest yet. On every level. When reading earlier books I found their ponderous pacing very appealing, like a slow burn that eventually reaches a satisfying conclusion. RWC is just slow. She's been laying on the rape and torture nice and thick for a while now, mostly for no seeming point and to very little effect. Her romantic plots got steadily weaker, until eventually they ceased to represent either feature. A review that I can't find of the second book in this series shone a very bright light on its gruesome sexual politics, forcing me to acknowledge their grossness that I had been trying to ignore for all the usual reasons.
I was about four fifths of the way through the last book in the series when I put it down and resolved not to pick it up again. It was reminiscent of my ultra-aggressive break-up with my first major fandom, all those years ago: you put the pieces together and suddenly there's too many and you can't ignore them anymore. And you just feel disgusted, with your whole brain and body, just revolted. Again, as in the previous example, the violence and coercion masked as caring were too much for me to bear, with one notable difference:
In Naamah's Curse, the perpetrators of this gentle violence are clearly antagonists. At no point does the heroine acknowledge or accept their narrative of coercion in service of bettering her character, or making her discover her true, authentic self. The same cannot be said of Blood of Dragons -- the culmination of a series featuring a "love triangle" consisting of the heroine, and two teenage boys who repeatedly stalk and badger her even as she tries to avoid them, and harass her for sexual or romantic favors until she's tired enough to give in.
Unless the plot makes a giant about-face in the last hundred or so pages, these characters are still meant to be seen as heroic.
All as part of the general breeding-program-slash-meat-market ambiance that grew to replace the initial dull roar of heterosexism. Yes, indeed. In this book, compulsory heterosexuality is so powerful that even the (ostensibly) queer characters are tinged with it. I could write a great deal more on the subject, but I don't want to. I just... don't want this material in my head anymore.
I worked nearly an hour on this entry and I'm still nervous about it so I might as well just hit post.
