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Georgette Heyer: These Old Shades
Jul. 5th, 2010 10:26 pmI read my first Georgette Heyer earlier this year. Unlike all the amazing writers I'd never heard of until I started hanging out at LJ, she's always been a familiar presence, but I'd never read her. No particular readon; or, if you will, in my teens when I might have been ploughing through the Georgette Heyers on the library shelves, I was reading my way through Jean Plaidy (I make no comparison between the two as novelists, but Jean Plaidy wrote about "my" period). Since I came here, however, I have been told how wrong I was, so when I found a copy of These Old Shades at a book sale, I bought it, read it and - yes, I quite enjoyed it.
But that's all, I'm afraid.
Perhaps it wasn't so foolish, after all, to dismiss Heyer as "not my period"; not that I wouldn't read a book set in the eighteenth century, but that the period is not, in itself, enough to charm me. These Old Shades starts with a gentleman walking home one evening through Paris, wearing shoes with high red heels, a purple cloak, a purple and gold coat, a flowered silk waistcoat, "faultless small clothes" - and more. This does not make me go "wow!", it makes me think: "Aha! Clothes porn!" I don't hate it, but you're going to have to offer me something else.
Maybe the characters? That well-dressed gentleman, Our Hero, His Grace the Duke of Avon, has a reputation for wickedness which he does nothing to maintain. We are, I assume, intended to be intrigued: what are his motives in bringing home a young urchin whom he proceeds to groom as his page? But it is soon clear that, whatever his initial purpose, beneath that fashionable exterior there is a tender heart, and he has fallen for the child. This could be misleading, but if it weren't clear from the first that Léon is really Léonie, the jacket copy spells it out. So His Grace brings his new acquisition home to a domestic setting in which Hugh Davenant is sitting up awaiting his return, reading a book of poems by the fire in the library, having first arranged for a cold supper to be set on the table. This cosy domesticity is disconcerting, and the tone of the conversation between the two friends, a long-suffering tolerance of those aspects of the other which each knows he cannot chance - well, there's something very long-married about it. But all this is illusion, and Hugh is just another of the people who persists in being Avon's friend despite his notorious wickedness. He is less Byronic rakehell than Percy Blakeney?, but it is Percy Blakeney without the Scarlet Pimpernel, Peter Wimsey in his fastidious tastes and 'unfortunate manner', but without the nerves or the intellectual curiosity.
As for Léonie, she is as bright as a button, brave, impertinent, charming, devoted. If she were ten years old, she would be as irresistible as her author thinks she is - but if she were ten years old, there would be the prospect of her growing up. At nineteen, she is an adult, and I found her very hard to take. To some extent, the plot dictates her age: there must be a difference of a generation between herself and Avon, but she must not be so young that he cannot decently fall in love with her. More than a historical novel, this struck me as a romance: if the story doesn't enlist you in willing on the uniting of the lovers, then you are missing much of its appeal.
As, it must be obvious, I was. I didn't even find much in the way of plot** to distract me into wondering not whether but how the course of true love might run smooth. I'm not asking for activity, events, hand-to-hand combat: I'm just suggesting that if - for example - just when all is about to be revealed, the heroine misguidedly runs away, then you might want to create some suspense about where she has gone and whether the hero will be able to find her. If she has run away to somewhere which has already been established as the one place she might go, and the hero shows no anxiety on her account, then the reader isn't going to be very worried either.
Finally: I am not fond of the assumption that an aristocratic baby removed from her parents at birth will grow up more refined and charming than her plebeian foster-family, while a peasant baby substituted for her with grow up, despite all his education and advantages, cloddish and dull-witted. Just saying...
*Actually, I was confused by this. My initial assumption was "well, of course she's a girl!" but Léon shows no reluctance to being taken off, bathed and clothed by the household servants, and the servants don't seem to notice anything amiss. So I revised my reading: presumably Satanas is going to wreak his wicked vengeance by dressing Léon as a girl who will break the hearts of his enemies. But no, as you were: it turns out that of course the servants noticed, they were just too well trained to let on to the reader (and presumably Léon knew this would be the case). You think s/he'd have been allowed to bath in private? Really? Oh...
**"Plot?" said![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance. "You're reading Georgette Heyer for the plot?"
But that's all, I'm afraid.
Perhaps it wasn't so foolish, after all, to dismiss Heyer as "not my period"; not that I wouldn't read a book set in the eighteenth century, but that the period is not, in itself, enough to charm me. These Old Shades starts with a gentleman walking home one evening through Paris, wearing shoes with high red heels, a purple cloak, a purple and gold coat, a flowered silk waistcoat, "faultless small clothes" - and more. This does not make me go "wow!", it makes me think: "Aha! Clothes porn!" I don't hate it, but you're going to have to offer me something else.
Maybe the characters? That well-dressed gentleman, Our Hero, His Grace the Duke of Avon, has a reputation for wickedness which he does nothing to maintain. We are, I assume, intended to be intrigued: what are his motives in bringing home a young urchin whom he proceeds to groom as his page? But it is soon clear that, whatever his initial purpose, beneath that fashionable exterior there is a tender heart, and he has fallen for the child. This could be misleading, but if it weren't clear from the first that Léon is really Léonie, the jacket copy spells it out. So His Grace brings his new acquisition home to a domestic setting in which Hugh Davenant is sitting up awaiting his return, reading a book of poems by the fire in the library, having first arranged for a cold supper to be set on the table. This cosy domesticity is disconcerting, and the tone of the conversation between the two friends, a long-suffering tolerance of those aspects of the other which each knows he cannot chance - well, there's something very long-married about it. But all this is illusion, and Hugh is just another of the people who persists in being Avon's friend despite his notorious wickedness. He is less Byronic rakehell than Percy Blakeney?, but it is Percy Blakeney without the Scarlet Pimpernel, Peter Wimsey in his fastidious tastes and 'unfortunate manner', but without the nerves or the intellectual curiosity.
As for Léonie, she is as bright as a button, brave, impertinent, charming, devoted. If she were ten years old, she would be as irresistible as her author thinks she is - but if she were ten years old, there would be the prospect of her growing up. At nineteen, she is an adult, and I found her very hard to take. To some extent, the plot dictates her age: there must be a difference of a generation between herself and Avon, but she must not be so young that he cannot decently fall in love with her. More than a historical novel, this struck me as a romance: if the story doesn't enlist you in willing on the uniting of the lovers, then you are missing much of its appeal.
As, it must be obvious, I was. I didn't even find much in the way of plot** to distract me into wondering not whether but how the course of true love might run smooth. I'm not asking for activity, events, hand-to-hand combat: I'm just suggesting that if - for example - just when all is about to be revealed, the heroine misguidedly runs away, then you might want to create some suspense about where she has gone and whether the hero will be able to find her. If she has run away to somewhere which has already been established as the one place she might go, and the hero shows no anxiety on her account, then the reader isn't going to be very worried either.
Finally: I am not fond of the assumption that an aristocratic baby removed from her parents at birth will grow up more refined and charming than her plebeian foster-family, while a peasant baby substituted for her with grow up, despite all his education and advantages, cloddish and dull-witted. Just saying...
*Actually, I was confused by this. My initial assumption was "well, of course she's a girl!" but Léon shows no reluctance to being taken off, bathed and clothed by the household servants, and the servants don't seem to notice anything amiss. So I revised my reading: presumably Satanas is going to wreak his wicked vengeance by dressing Léon as a girl who will break the hearts of his enemies. But no, as you were: it turns out that of course the servants noticed, they were just too well trained to let on to the reader (and presumably Léon knew this would be the case). You think s/he'd have been allowed to bath in private? Really? Oh...
**"Plot?" said
desperance. "You're reading Georgette Heyer for the plot?"
