Notes on Heyer's "The Black Moth"
Apr. 27th, 2022 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_los
- In some ways Black Moth is just a G&S plot taken seriously. ‘They are all noblemen who have gone wrong—‘
- I’ve no idea how people eat so much in historical fiction. Between Black Moth and Penric’s Demon, dinner for two or three people seems to often consist of four or more cooked animals. How does one even make an in-road on that? After only a couple pieces of chicken, I’m good! They’re always talking about ‘doing justice’ to this buffet of food. I’m like, ‘girl maybe just order 1 food at the tavern inn’. I assume someone’s eating the leftovers, but you don’t have to pay for all that, sheesh! You’re at an inn, these aren’t even your servants?
- Some of Heyer’s extra-Austen influences are perhaps more palpable in this story than in Heyer’s later works. The merchant-and-clerk highway robbery feels a little “Henry IV”, the banishment has perhaps a trace of “Richard II”, the theatre scene later has a ghost of W&P, and these provincial characters dealing with the aftermath of the robbery are Dickensian down to their names. The spa portion feels softly Dombey and Son.
- At the time they speak, the clerk who lies about what this highwayman looked like/this posh highwayman feels like the real ship.
- Heyer expects the common people to care a lot more about their lords than I think probable, in ways that are personally invested and worshipful rather than just 'he left me alone, B+’.
- Interestingly I enjoyed this more than the last Heyer novel I read, which was undoubtedly more ‘mature’.
- ‘He's not a regular highwayman, he's an M&S highwayman!! We couldn't possible execute anyone who robbed because he didn’t need the money to live!!' Bitch, do you hear yourself?
- Between the clerk and the highwayman, and the elderly lawyer and Jack (also DBA the highwayman), and Duke Cad and the friend he saved from the—I think opium den?, there is a tone of weird proto-slash energy in this het romance text.
That said, the eventual love interest, Diana, is at times well-drawn—never more so perhaps than at Bath, before the male lead enters the scene. At that point, she feels a little like a refugee from Dickens—somehow temporally out of step with other characters, and different in the quality of her concerns about money, etc. She rather loses this definition, as the book progresses.
- The romantic leads only meet after fully 1/3 of the book has elapsed. Heyer. Girl.
- Jack’s manservant is also deeply gay for him. We spend our time watching the manservant gently bind Jack’s wounds (by the time the book was 42% done, the heroine and male lead had exchanged perhaps ten words).
- English guy: Duke Cad may be a kidnapper and rapist, but in other respects he’s fine!
Irish guy: …yeah, I don’t have any time for that shit, myself. Fuck that guy.
- Heyer is really trying for a tragic woobie Kerr Avon vibe with this villain. It doesn’t hurt that the voice actor has chosen to just straight up read Duke Cad as Paul Darrow. But for all these hints at deep unhappiness, the man has no real problems and is a sex offender, sooo.
- The male lead withholds Duke Cad’s actual name from Diana, even though Duke Cad has already put Diana in danger by trying to kidnap her for the express purpose of sexual assault. What is our male lead doing effectively protecting this jerk by withholding such information?
- ‘But I did something worse than robbing and possibly hurting or killing people for money—I once cheated at cards.’ Man, eat the rich.
‘So you’re letting this one incident ruin your entire life, then?’ GIRL that is what I have been thinking? He is so dumb.
- ML keeps thinking that his suffering is ‘for Dick’s sake’. Not even a danmei this time, damn.
- Dick’s wife Lavinia, who, six years ago, both brothers wanted to marry, is a crazed infant who as good as flushes money down the yet-to-be-invented toilet. I’m not sure what these brothers were thinking. I do rather like that she heard out her brother’s ‘kidnapping and sexual assault’ plan and began to seriously think about getting her shit together. It seems to dawn on her that her idolised brother sucks actually, and that she could attempt to be a better person and wife to a guy who actually loves her rather than listening to her sex-pest brother, who hardly gives a shit about her, in everything. But I guess Heyer decided Lavinia’s decent character development wasn’t sustainable, because Lavinia seems to forget this ever happened. This doesn’t feel unrealistic, exactly, but in a literary sense, it’s annoying.
Lavinia is a key figure in the social scene of people who Flirt as Hobby. I suppose this must have been sustainable for them as its own form of social engagement akin to friendship, but from the outside, especially a Not 1% PoV, it’s a bit vacuous. Everyone dances attendance on this married woman, who never plans to cheat and actually fuck any of them. Like courtly love, but there’s no art coming out of it, just the pissing about. And why? Lavinia is a demanding, terminally uninteresting woman-child. There’s no real prospect of sex in the offing. For the better part of the book she, like so many of Heyer’s characters, seems to be competing for a prize in ‘caring about nothing and no one, at least beyond whims’: Most Nonchalant. This is what everyone fawned on her for, not her eventual growth as a person.
- But man, the prose is so solidly written. It’s pleasurable just be in the hands of a very decent prose writer. The character work is good, it’s just that 2/3rds of the characters are irksome people. This is like 1751, and high Georgian rich people are even more unbearable than Regency ones.
- The historical fiction aspect is already at a higher standard than a lot of later imitators will achieve, despite Heyer’s young age. Heyer was famously the expert in Georgian to Regency daily life, combing reams of letters for expressions and able to tell you the price of butter in Bristol in May, 1801. As far as like the 1%ers she’s looking at here, this is probably a fair description. In some ways Heyer’s more exact than Austen, who wrote most of her work in the 1780s and 90s, couldn’t get published, shelved the drawer fic, then later lightly scraped the serials/adjusted the time by decades and brought them out. But Heyer is also, by nature and due to the narrative demands of the genre she’s shaping, interested in people who circulate in society in ways liable to get them married and people they know. This does somewhat curtail her purview.
- It’s always funny when historical people, really living it up, announce an intention to go to Exotique Vauxhall. Where, to a chicken shop? The gay spa? There’s nothing in Vauxhall, mate— ‘You know the meh park? Well it was once very cool—‘
- We’re in the very weird era where people got around London by chair/palanquin. This was some deal, for a hot minute. You see it in awful Barnaby Rudge, too. And then everyone went back to boats/carriages, aka the normal London modes of transit.
- There is really a case for not using ‘incontinent’, in the ‘uncontrolled’ sense, to describe a woman at a public ball. It no longer works. Heyer, you just have to let this go. Much like—
- They've decided that Walk-On Walpole will be characterised by an Extremely Gay Reading Voice. This is up there with 'the villain is played by my best Paul Darrow' in Great Delivery Choices.
- The ML’s full name is John Antony St. Irvine Delany Carstairs. Fuck everything.
- Everybody’s always drinking a dish of bohea—enjoy your poisonous food dyes, kids.
- For a good chunk of the final third of the book, Heyer seems to forget about the main love story to concentrate on serving a Tolstoy theatre scene knock off and a married couple that might separate because of misunderstandings. They don’t realise that neither of them actually want that. It’s compelling! But structurally a strange choice. More serial novel shaped than her mature books, perhaps—more seriously invested in an ensemble cast.
- There are some quite good payoffs here at the end regarding Jack’s knowledge of the countryside and this horse we’ve talked up all book having her moment. I was afraid for Jenny’s life—I like that horse better than most of these fuckers.
- WE’RE ALL JUST GOING TO EAT DINNER WITH THE KIDNAPPER SEX CRIMINAL NOW?? WE’RE STAYING AT HIS PLACE, FOR DINNER????? ALL HAVING A LAFF?
‘OHOHO, WASNT IT DROLL WHEN YOU KIDNAPPED MY GIRLFRIEND FOR ASSAULT PURPOSES?’
- Toasts my buns that Heyer’s like, ‘it’d be weenus to get too mad about kidnapping, shit happens’. Uh, it is not what it is.
- The villain ends up holidaying in Venice with his friend the English Opium Deleter, aka the only person who actually loves him. It’s very gay, but Heyer doesn’t seem to know that.
- Heyer attempts to draw a parallel between the Jack and Duke Cad having made or been caught up in an error, ‘begun badly’, and then their both having made a bad situation worse. But Jack’s “Common People” Highwayman Period is never taken that seriously and isn’t well explicated in the moral world of the novel, so this parallel falls flat.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 01:10 am (UTC)'the villain is played by my best Paul Darrow'
A choice I approve of, ofc.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 08:56 pm (UTC)But do you think they were the celebrities of the time, and accordingly watched. *thinky face*
Is bohea not just a specific kind of tea?
no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 08:59 pm (UTC)It's just a specific kind of tea but it's ALSO the centre of a big Georgian food-adulteration crsis on both Chinese and English market ends. Everyone was dying this shit.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 09:06 pm (UTC)https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea-heist-9866709/
Meanwhile this is the UK side: https://about1816.wordpress.com/2019/04/16/a-nice-cup-of-tea-in-the-regency-not-always/
no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 09:15 pm (UTC)