Designed for Women?
Jun. 1st, 2014 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselNov 2013
The Magicians and Mrs Quent - Galen Beckett - Spectra, 2008
* * *
This is another smorgasbord fantasy where the borrowings from other books are more evident than the author's original concepts, but the choice of influences shows good literary taste. It combines the comic social milieu of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde with plot elements from every gothic novelist you can think of from the Brontes to H.P. Lovecraft in a fantasy setting where wildwoods have power and the aristocracy practises magick. The combination works, although the fantasy element is the least convincing.
The main character and her family will be immediately recognisable to lovers of Jane Austen. Ivy Lockwell is the eldest of three impoverished sisters living in the city of Invarel, the capital of the island of Altania. Her father is rarely seen out of his room, having been driven mad by magic, her mother is a bit silly and her sisters Lily and Rose are hopelessly romantic and dreamy and strange respectively. They have an oily cousin called Mr Wyble who possesses the deeds to their house, and he introduces them to two other viewpoint characters, Mr Rafferdy, the louche son of a lord of the realm, and his friend Eldon Garritt, an impoverished student with a pretty sister called Sashie to look after.
The Austenesque borrowings are pretty obvious, but Altania does have some unusual features, the most original being that the lengths of days and nights (referred to by the inhabitants as luminals and umbrals) vary considerably and are forecast in an almanac. This is a great idea and the story features an orrery depicting a Ptolemaic solar system to explain it, but my scientist's mind can't help wondering why the constant changes in angular velocity don't cause vicious winds and tectonic instability. Normally this could be hand-waved away with magic, but the types that exist in Altania will be very familiar to fantasy readers and don't really lend themselves to that sort of application.
The borrowings continue in the central section of the book where the tone veers abruptly from Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte as Ivy becomes a governess and goes to live in a lonely mansion belonging to the mysterious (and frequently absent) Mr Quent. Even the narrative voice shifts from third person to first. I lost count of the references - suspicious yokels, mysterious white figures, strange children, a disapproving housekeeper, a mysterious locked room. They are strung together entertainingly enough, but it was odd to lose track of all but one of the characters so carefully introduced in the first section for several hundred pages.
It comes together in the end in a satisfactory conclusion, but one cannot help feeling that there is something rather calculated about the whole exercise. The careful selection of literary references, the large number of female voices and the emphasis on character rather than world-building suggests that this is a sequence that has been carefully targetted at women readers. Given the amount of genre fiction aimed at the male of the species I don't object to this, but if the author had focused on coming up with more original plot ideas rather than shoving in elements that he thought his target readership might recognise and respond to, the result would have been more satisfactory as a work of art.
The Magicians and Mrs Quent - Galen Beckett - Spectra, 2008
* * *
This is another smorgasbord fantasy where the borrowings from other books are more evident than the author's original concepts, but the choice of influences shows good literary taste. It combines the comic social milieu of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde with plot elements from every gothic novelist you can think of from the Brontes to H.P. Lovecraft in a fantasy setting where wildwoods have power and the aristocracy practises magick. The combination works, although the fantasy element is the least convincing.
The main character and her family will be immediately recognisable to lovers of Jane Austen. Ivy Lockwell is the eldest of three impoverished sisters living in the city of Invarel, the capital of the island of Altania. Her father is rarely seen out of his room, having been driven mad by magic, her mother is a bit silly and her sisters Lily and Rose are hopelessly romantic and dreamy and strange respectively. They have an oily cousin called Mr Wyble who possesses the deeds to their house, and he introduces them to two other viewpoint characters, Mr Rafferdy, the louche son of a lord of the realm, and his friend Eldon Garritt, an impoverished student with a pretty sister called Sashie to look after.
The Austenesque borrowings are pretty obvious, but Altania does have some unusual features, the most original being that the lengths of days and nights (referred to by the inhabitants as luminals and umbrals) vary considerably and are forecast in an almanac. This is a great idea and the story features an orrery depicting a Ptolemaic solar system to explain it, but my scientist's mind can't help wondering why the constant changes in angular velocity don't cause vicious winds and tectonic instability. Normally this could be hand-waved away with magic, but the types that exist in Altania will be very familiar to fantasy readers and don't really lend themselves to that sort of application.
The borrowings continue in the central section of the book where the tone veers abruptly from Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte as Ivy becomes a governess and goes to live in a lonely mansion belonging to the mysterious (and frequently absent) Mr Quent. Even the narrative voice shifts from third person to first. I lost count of the references - suspicious yokels, mysterious white figures, strange children, a disapproving housekeeper, a mysterious locked room. They are strung together entertainingly enough, but it was odd to lose track of all but one of the characters so carefully introduced in the first section for several hundred pages.
It comes together in the end in a satisfactory conclusion, but one cannot help feeling that there is something rather calculated about the whole exercise. The careful selection of literary references, the large number of female voices and the emphasis on character rather than world-building suggests that this is a sequence that has been carefully targetted at women readers. Given the amount of genre fiction aimed at the male of the species I don't object to this, but if the author had focused on coming up with more original plot ideas rather than shoving in elements that he thought his target readership might recognise and respond to, the result would have been more satisfactory as a work of art.