I'm going to try to write a review of this, even though I finished it about a week ago, so my memory of some of the details have faded a bit.
Queen's Man is a science fiction novel featuring gay characters, not so much a gay romance novel. It is set on a somewhat backward planet on which the political forces -- when the world was originally settled, people settled into familial groups and tribes -- have been warring with each other in a never-ending cycle of attacks and revenge killings. The political entities beyond the planet have isolated it, preventing the flow of technology and people on and off the planet until they can get their shit together. Some of the tribes are interested in peace and a more democratic system, while others are not.
The main character is Joss Ravid, an off-worlder who works as a guard and enforcer for Lady Rukya, one of the people trying to get the planet to get its act together. Joss is wild and flamboyantly gay, as well as being a man who never backs down from a fight and revels in the violence. He is drawn into the events of the novel when the man he'd picked up and spent the night with is murdered in front of his eyes in what is obviously a political hit. The police have clearly been instructed to not bother investigating, and to make matters worse, the man's 12 year old daughter has just arrived from off-world in time to watch her father be killed and she is left on her own on a strange planet with no one to turn to. So she latches onto Joss.
Joss is not very comfortable with females or with children, so he takes young Paige to Lady Rukya, who decides that she can use Paige to try to force her colleagues into an honest pursuit of law and justice, as a good example for the off-world forces. Meanwhile she assigns Joss to work with Zeke Cayden, heir to the leader of one of the most powerful tribes on the planet. Zeke is infatuated with Joss, and is willing to go along with Rukya's peace project if it means he can spend more time with Joss. Joss is exasperated, as he views Zeke as nothing better than a stalker.
Lady Rukya's plan to use Paige's situation as leverage toward her goals goes wrong, blocked by another member of Zeke's family, and the three of them -- Joss, Zeke, and Paige -- end up running for their lives. They have many adventures, and have some rather harrowing experiences as Joss tries to keep his two somewhat naive companions out of trouble and figure out how to get them safely back to Lady Rukya's compound and, eventually, foil Zeke's ambitious and dangerous sister.
Throughout all this, the relationship between Joss and Zeke is simmering along as they're forced to spend a good deal of time in one another's company under bad circumstances. But they're far too busy with important matters like staying alive for the focus of the book to really be the romance, which is good. I love a good gay romance, but I prefer a good novel with a good plot that happens to have a romance in it as well.
The novel is told from the point of view of all three characters, as I recall, and we are constantly told how beautiful Joss is, how graceful, how charismatic, how much he stands out from the crowd. I got a little tired of that. It's very nice for him and the people who care about him that he's beautiful, but it's annoying when his looks are emphasized far above and beyond his other qualities. But then, Joss was just a bit too, too much sometimes. Too good-looking, too competent, too deadly, too tough, too hyperactive, too flamboyant. Yes, he is fortunately balanced from perfection by being rather a jerk, but he also grows through a lot of that as the novel progresses. I enjoyed his company, but he was clearly too good to be a real person.
There were a couple of times when the plot hinged on Paige doing something stupid. The second time was forgivable, especially when we remember that she's just passing out of childhood (though at times I thought Paige was written a little too mature for twelve), but the first one was a bit hard to swallow. They also need to figure out who in Lady Rukya's camp is a traitor, and that was really very obvious.
There were a couple of minor bumps along the way, but overall I thought this was quite enjoyable. We met some very interesting characters along the way, including women, which means that Sarge handles female characters better than 85% of M/M romance writers. The worldbuilding was a bit sketchy, but it was enough to provide a reasonable backdrop for the characters' adventures. The story was long enough to really explore the story in the depth it needed without hurrying, unlike so many ebooks I've been reading the last couple of years. This was well done, and quite entertaining.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Why you're not going to hear much from me for a while
Yesterday I closed on a house in Hudson. It's a lot closer to work, and I'm really excited about it, but now I've got a lot of stuff to get done. I need to get the house into move-in condition (nothing big, but there's stuff that needs to be done, and the prior owners painted the entire inside of the house brown. I hate brown. I will not live in a brown house); have a garage sale to clear out as much as possible of the stuff I don't want to take with me; pack; move; finish getting the old house fixed so it's in salable condition; list it; and sell it, hopefully fairly quickly.
This is all really very, very exciting, and also really very, very exhausting.
This is all really very, very exciting, and also really very, very exhausting.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Miss Marple
I have recently been listening to some Miss Marple mysteries in the car, plus I'm switching over to reading paper copies of the ones the library doesn't have as audiobooks. Miss Marple was always my preferred detective of Christie's--I eventually got through the Poirot mysteries, but had a hard time swallowing the idiocy of Captain Hastings. Miss Marple, on the other hand, is a harmless-looking old lady with a sharp eye who tends to see through people. Also, I was introduced to them first, and that may have swayed my preference (though my introduction to her was the movie version of The Mirror Crack'd, which isn't actually very good. Somehow I got past that).
I hadn't read most of the material since I was in school, though, and the TV adaptations--even the ones with Joan Hickson--just aren't the same thing as reading the original text. I am finding that reading these books when I've got twenty years of additional experience and maturity is proving to be worthwhile. I'm taking more time with the setting, and have a greater appreciation of the things that Christie says about her characters and about life in general. I can appreciate, now, how a woman with a distant husband and no circle of close friends in her neighborhood could have trouble keeping herself occupied, and that she might regret the life choices she made. When I was twenty, I probably skimmed right across that without even giving it much thought because I was so focused on finding out who the killer was. I get it now.
Since I got my ebook reader I've been reading old detective stories that are in the public domain, and I discovered Father Brown, the dumpy and unassuming little priest who nevertheless knows the darkness that lurks under the surface because of all the years he has been taking confessions. As I was reading that I realized that he was probably the inspiration for Miss Marple, the woolly old lady who has a deep understanding of how people tick, and can see right through their masks because she can compare them to the people she knows in her little village. Both seem harmless and have led quite innocent lives, but they know the evil that people hide inside, through their observations of those they deal with.
I think that the most striking thing about the Miss Marple mysteries, though, is how classist they are. Everyone is always judging everyone they meet, and either approving of their class or finding them lacking. It was particularly striking in The Body in the Library, which is a relatively early story in the series--Ruby Keene, who ended up dead, was ultimately a cheap little thing aspiring above herself, so no one mourned her. Adelaide Jefferson, on the other hand, was a lady in every way, and referred to in constantly approving tones - so attractive, so pleasant, so well-mannered, over and over again. To know her was to admire her. In A Pocket Full of Rye, we have the poor, murdered parlormaid Gladys, who was not only of low station but also stupid, unattractive, and credulous, which led to her murder. No one really mourned her, either, because she was so lacking in any likable qualities. But Pat Fortescue, now she was a proper lady - again, attractive, well-mannered, lovely in every way, and a delight to be with. Everyone who met her approved of her at once. The fact that she was a serial marryer of bad men was glossed over, because she was such a lovely girl, poor thing, what rotten luck she had. In The Moving Finger, on the other hand, it is decided that the author of a series of anonymous letters must be educated, which immediately narrows the suspect list to a small group of the "good" people. And then in Nemesis, two young women disappeared at the same time. Both were murdered by the same person, though no one knew about it at the time. Beautiful, cherished Verity Hunt was deeply mourned, while no one seemed to really care about Nora Broad, who was lower class, not very smart, too fond of boys, and whose aunt and friend, respectively, predicted that she had become either a hooker or a stripper. Christie's repeated assertion that the lower classes don't matter and no one cares much about them is deeply, deeply offensive.
I do not doubt that a good deal of this classism was a fairly accurate account of how people thought in England at the time. But it's not a particularly admirable picture to me. And the constant mourning that things are changing - new houses are being built, servants are so hard to find any more, people move around and you don't know everything about them, so you have to take them at their word, how awful! - is, to me, not at all admirable. I am currently reading Nemesis, which is quite a late story, and the women mourning about how it was impossible to have a garden any more, because they couldn't hire a man to do the work for them, is really quite nauseating. I cannot get my mind around the idea that gracious life means living at leisure while servants do everything for you, and you eat your breakfast in bed while reading your newspaper and then go around to the neighbors' for tea, and smoking cigars with your whiskey after dinner while someone else clears up. I suppose that it was very pleasant for the lucky few who had sufficient money and social standing to be able to have that lifestyle without someone sneering at them for being pretentious. On the other hand, for the tens of thousands of people who were looked down upon, or who had no choice of lifestyle other than going into service or maybe, if lucky, getting a job in a shop, I rejoice that the old world Christie mourns has crumbled. The comfortable life for the few may have faded, but the quality of life for everyone else improved markedly.
I am probably annoyed at the moment, though, because Nemesis isn't very good. It is a very late Christie, and I think that she was declining in quality. It's dull and repetitive. We watch Miss Marple through a long scene in which she goes into the post office to try to dupe the postmistress into giving her information. Then we listen to her recount the whole thing to another character later, and when he doesn't understand her explanation of what she did, so she explains it all again. Then, in the explanatory scene at the end, she once again gives a lengthy description of that, plus most of the other things we've already read, to someone else. Really, it wasn't that interesting the first time, let alone going through it four times. But I also think that the book may be hindered somewhat in being told from Miss Marple's point of view. It turns out that it's much more interesting seeing what Miss Marple says and does from outside than it is to listen in as she tries to think her way through everything, and runs it over and over and over through her head before reaching any conclusions, but still not sharing the interesting stuff--who the killer is--until the big reveal at the end.
I hadn't read most of the material since I was in school, though, and the TV adaptations--even the ones with Joan Hickson--just aren't the same thing as reading the original text. I am finding that reading these books when I've got twenty years of additional experience and maturity is proving to be worthwhile. I'm taking more time with the setting, and have a greater appreciation of the things that Christie says about her characters and about life in general. I can appreciate, now, how a woman with a distant husband and no circle of close friends in her neighborhood could have trouble keeping herself occupied, and that she might regret the life choices she made. When I was twenty, I probably skimmed right across that without even giving it much thought because I was so focused on finding out who the killer was. I get it now.
Since I got my ebook reader I've been reading old detective stories that are in the public domain, and I discovered Father Brown, the dumpy and unassuming little priest who nevertheless knows the darkness that lurks under the surface because of all the years he has been taking confessions. As I was reading that I realized that he was probably the inspiration for Miss Marple, the woolly old lady who has a deep understanding of how people tick, and can see right through their masks because she can compare them to the people she knows in her little village. Both seem harmless and have led quite innocent lives, but they know the evil that people hide inside, through their observations of those they deal with.
I think that the most striking thing about the Miss Marple mysteries, though, is how classist they are. Everyone is always judging everyone they meet, and either approving of their class or finding them lacking. It was particularly striking in The Body in the Library, which is a relatively early story in the series--Ruby Keene, who ended up dead, was ultimately a cheap little thing aspiring above herself, so no one mourned her. Adelaide Jefferson, on the other hand, was a lady in every way, and referred to in constantly approving tones - so attractive, so pleasant, so well-mannered, over and over again. To know her was to admire her. In A Pocket Full of Rye, we have the poor, murdered parlormaid Gladys, who was not only of low station but also stupid, unattractive, and credulous, which led to her murder. No one really mourned her, either, because she was so lacking in any likable qualities. But Pat Fortescue, now she was a proper lady - again, attractive, well-mannered, lovely in every way, and a delight to be with. Everyone who met her approved of her at once. The fact that she was a serial marryer of bad men was glossed over, because she was such a lovely girl, poor thing, what rotten luck she had. In The Moving Finger, on the other hand, it is decided that the author of a series of anonymous letters must be educated, which immediately narrows the suspect list to a small group of the "good" people. And then in Nemesis, two young women disappeared at the same time. Both were murdered by the same person, though no one knew about it at the time. Beautiful, cherished Verity Hunt was deeply mourned, while no one seemed to really care about Nora Broad, who was lower class, not very smart, too fond of boys, and whose aunt and friend, respectively, predicted that she had become either a hooker or a stripper. Christie's repeated assertion that the lower classes don't matter and no one cares much about them is deeply, deeply offensive.
I do not doubt that a good deal of this classism was a fairly accurate account of how people thought in England at the time. But it's not a particularly admirable picture to me. And the constant mourning that things are changing - new houses are being built, servants are so hard to find any more, people move around and you don't know everything about them, so you have to take them at their word, how awful! - is, to me, not at all admirable. I am currently reading Nemesis, which is quite a late story, and the women mourning about how it was impossible to have a garden any more, because they couldn't hire a man to do the work for them, is really quite nauseating. I cannot get my mind around the idea that gracious life means living at leisure while servants do everything for you, and you eat your breakfast in bed while reading your newspaper and then go around to the neighbors' for tea, and smoking cigars with your whiskey after dinner while someone else clears up. I suppose that it was very pleasant for the lucky few who had sufficient money and social standing to be able to have that lifestyle without someone sneering at them for being pretentious. On the other hand, for the tens of thousands of people who were looked down upon, or who had no choice of lifestyle other than going into service or maybe, if lucky, getting a job in a shop, I rejoice that the old world Christie mourns has crumbled. The comfortable life for the few may have faded, but the quality of life for everyone else improved markedly.
I am probably annoyed at the moment, though, because Nemesis isn't very good. It is a very late Christie, and I think that she was declining in quality. It's dull and repetitive. We watch Miss Marple through a long scene in which she goes into the post office to try to dupe the postmistress into giving her information. Then we listen to her recount the whole thing to another character later, and when he doesn't understand her explanation of what she did, so she explains it all again. Then, in the explanatory scene at the end, she once again gives a lengthy description of that, plus most of the other things we've already read, to someone else. Really, it wasn't that interesting the first time, let alone going through it four times. But I also think that the book may be hindered somewhat in being told from Miss Marple's point of view. It turns out that it's much more interesting seeing what Miss Marple says and does from outside than it is to listen in as she tries to think her way through everything, and runs it over and over and over through her head before reaching any conclusions, but still not sharing the interesting stuff--who the killer is--until the big reveal at the end.
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