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x_losProper English: I didn’t make notes on this while reading because I had a therapy assignment to simply read something I didn’t immediately turn into fodder for some kind of playbour. Suffice it to say, this was pleasant: well-written, easy to read, refreshingly competent. The evasiveness around the sex scenes, however, confused me a little. Pages of description of a hunt, two sentences of description of a cunt. A quite brusque ‘and then I guess orgasm’ for Pat, and then a prompt fade to black for Fen? This is direct-to-Kindle, no one will fine you for indecency. At least they both came (I presume: that’s the implication, not that Fade to Black really enables me to swear to it) and no one was The Top.
1902 country lesbian in this romance book: Why is this guy such a weird aggressive asshole?
1902 city lesbian: That’ll be the coke.
Country lesbian: the *what?*
City lez: Okay, so let me get into the general concept of ‘tweaking’, because you are about to find it a really useful point of reference.
People ate mulligatawny in this, which I don’t think I’ve ever had. Aisha, however, had strong feelings on the matter: “Just eat sambhar, there is no need to eat the white people facsimile. (Historically it's a bastardisation of rasam, but they made it thicker and weaker, so it’s closer to sambhar now.)”
Me: This is like how you hate kedgeree, and I only ever see it in books.
Aisha: Rasam is the food of the gods. Sambhar is a perfectly fine staple. I could like kedgeree; I like "curry" (whatever that is), and rice, and fish, and eggs; and yet.
Unfit to Print: I was listening to Pope’s “Iliad” while at work, but in the mornings it went a bit hard for me. When I wake up and I force myself to look at a spreadsheet, there are few things I want to do less than attempt to follow the poetry of Alexander Pope (as read by Some American). I switched over to “Unfit to Print”, a KJ Charles novella I ended up liking significantly less that “Proper English”. I was attracted to the premise: a young couple with a close friendship that’s interrupted by a long, unhappy separation comes back together, yet is still slightly at odds. This basis offers a short piece some built-in interest and investment. You're not really starting from scratch with 'he's hot’, there's a lot to rely on. I’m beginning to think, though, that some writers don't do their best work at novella length.
The book is strongly written in many respects, but perhaps Charles tried to crash through this piece without getting too held up on the language, etc. There were some significant sources of friction for me:
1. LANGUAGE: Charles' dialogue rhythms are a bit off in this book. The male leads went to school together, but after 16, their lives took difference courses. The less fortunate of the two has a quite modern-feeling chav accent. We're late Victorian, fine, okay, and then bam, it's all ‘Christ, mate’, and it feels as though half the pairing isekai'd here from a chicken shop in Peckham. I almost think Charles writes Gil as slightly Jack Sparrow, ‘savvy’ and all. (I very slightly wonder if this in some way started life as a Sparrington fic?)
I do think this comes of Charles writing across several time periods; 1880 and 1910 are actually very different, just as 1960 and 1990 don’t have the same speech patterns, either! People often read a lot more stuff set in the Victorian era than stuff written then, and can thus develop a fuzzy idea of what the same place is like at various points in time. Different dialogue rhythms can feel quite out of tune. Reading this, at several points I went “oo, that's kind of—not how you'd think about or express that concept then, is it?” The Indian lawyer feels fine: nothing about his dialogue throws me. But Gil, the half-black male lead with a posh dad and an excellent formal education who now moves in rougher circles, has some Spike from “Buffy” dialogue. I guess you could say Gil is putting some of this on, though the book's not really arguing that.
2. Relatedly, CLASS: I don’t know how often Charles writes in the various registers she’s employing, here: late Victorian, working class, London, black (Yinharn wasn’t thrilled by her Shanghai expats book, as one data-point). The dialogue here can feel wrong for working class London in that era (insert many caveats here about our filtered access to working class speech via court reports, middle class fiction, etc.). Further, I don't fully buy that someone who received a public school education until he was 16 would be thoroughly “oi oi mate!” in his twenties, no matter what turns his life subsequently took. Perhaps Gil’s ‘chav’ accent is affected, but even if it has been 13 years, I'd kind of expect that when speaking to someone from the same public school, Gil would have to struggle a bit against an instinct to code switch to answer them in his own original register. He still learned to speak while and spent most of his life: posh.
When Gil was turfed out of public school with no money he turned to prostitution to support himself. He later claims that he was a novelty for men who had sex with men because he is half black. Surely a massive class divide also notably separates him from many, many people working in this trade? That difference will be fairly obvious, and will intersect strangely with race: Gil is still going to sound different and perform Poshness in a way his clientele would find unusual and marked. I think modern writers struggle to grasp the shifting ways race and class signify over time. This is pretty fundamental to understanding race in its contemporary usage as a convenient, politicised construction and class as something now deliberately rendered less visible (but hardly less potent). I think Gil’s class could be more functionally important, in late Victorian very pre-Windrush England, even than his race.
3. CULTURAL REFERENCES: It is wild that a character in the late 19th century talks about how he loves Radcliffe’s gothic novels because they’re Lush. This indicates that Charles has not recently read Radcliffe, who is positively prim: about as Lush as Clapham junction. Maybe Radcliffe’s fare still did it for the girls when Northanger was actually composed, so in the late 18th century, but by late 19th, you can just read sensation fiction. You don’t have to fuck about with these sub-Monk thrills! We still know Radcliffe’s name because she was formally innovative, but fun she is not. On purpose, too! Radcliffe desperately clutches at Rationality like a nervous church lady in a Bad Neighbourhood clutches at her handbag.
4. MATERIAL CULTURE: Charles has characters buy a couple of mugs of tea from a stall they pass in the street. What exactly are the logistics of that one? It strikes me as remarkable at least. They didn’t drink the tea there, they took the mugs with them. No mention is made of returning these mugs. Yinharn said it reminded her of how, in a ‘remixed “Treasure Island”’, characters bought a takeaway that came with disposable chopsticks in 1828. Now, you could indeed buy street food in Victorian London: see the whole conversation about tripe in “The Chimes”. But I believe in such cases, you mostly brought the needful take away box yourself. In modern situations, continental Christmas markets in Austria et al will have a refundable mug deposit. Yinharn says that when she was a child in Malaysia, herbal tea stands would have mugs you had to give back, which were then washed on site via a hose connection from the nearest shop.
But in 1885(?), based on, for example, how the family has tea in the admittedly-earlier 1857s Dickens novel “Little Dorrit”, I do think tea brewing was a different affair than we now regard it: not really casual ‘I’ll have a cuppa’, but more associated with meals? You can absolutely buy gin in 1880s London, but it will be in a glass bottle. So if you buy a HOT drink on the street, in (explicitly) a mug (and not a disposable cup of some kind), how does the stand deal with washing the mugs, transporting the mugs, and getting the mugs back?
I think if you go into a pub, you could get a hot drink. There’s negus and shit like that (though does one make negus at a pub? Because the poker method can split the vessel!). But would that hot drink actually be tea? It seems counter-intuitive, but I kind of think no. There were coffeehouses, though that era’s a bit past by the time this is set, and has yet to come again. I believe, based off the China History Podcast’s ten-part tea serial, a coffee house would have served you tea. But to go? And as late as 1885? I think the rise of taxi stands for hansoms, et al, is kind of later, and reliant on disposable cups. But I could be wrong!
Yinharn asked about workmen’s breaks, but a surprising amount of time one went home from the factory for tea, etc. The pooled cafeteria in “North & South”, which eliminates this necessity, is slightly remarkable in this respect:
“Thank you; but I’d rather not. They pay me rent for the oven and cooking-places at the back of the mill: and will have to pay more for the new dining-room. I don’t want it to fall into a charity. I don’t want donations. Once let in the principle, and I should have people going and talking, and spoiling the simplicity of the whole thing.”
“People will talk about any new plan. You can’t help that.”
“My enemies, if I have any, may make a philanthropic fuss about this dinner-scheme; but you are a friend, and I expect that you will now pay my experiment the respect of silence. It is but a new broom at present, and sweeps clean enough. But by-an-bye we shall meet with plenty of stumbling-blocks, no doubt.”
The other thing is, there are always things historical people could or might have done, but mostly didn’t. Yes, you could have tea entirely disassociated from a meal (or from formal receiving contexts, or coffee houses). But oddly, I can’t think of any occasion where I've read about a working class family doing that in the Mid-Late Victorian. In some ways, the development of restaurant culture in Europe is really halting, and sometimes even retrograde. Classical Rome had more sophisticated facilities for street food than one would easily find for a long while after its decline. Eating on the road in Medieval Europe was so underdeveloped it was stupid.
Helena asked whether this book was meant to be set in a particular period, or simply to luxuriate in an amalgam old-timeyness. This is an interesting question because unless you’re writing a fantasy, English prose doesn’t really allow for loose ‘historical romance’ in the sense she’s talking about anymore. (Whereas modern Chinese historical fiction still very much does.) In this specific case, the book mentions real people several times in a concrete, temporally-moored way, attempting to place itself in these contexts. We’re told that the Reform Act passed recently, but unfortunately there are three ‘reform acts’, so this doesn’t actually make dating the piece a snap. We can use this datapoint to guess that the book is set either soon after either 1867 or 1884, though it’s a bit tough to say which based on this detail alone. William Dugdale (the pornographer) died in recent memory in this story, so the action must take place after 1868. I’m going to guess ‘around 1885’, because the popularity of music halls tilts it to that end of the spectrum for me.
Helena suggested that it might be harder to find resources for the materiality of food culture or economic details than to identify when a given person lived, and further said that this sort of error might be difficult to correct. I’d agree, especially regarding the difficulty of proving a negative. It’s often not obvious that a given material culture claim is wrong: I’m not dead sure about these mugs! But something will often feel textually jarring to me because I’ve read a range of period texts and never seen a comparable example of a practice.
I’ve seen people rather breezily claim that Charles is faultlessly attentive to historical fiction details. I don’t know that this is necessarily true, or terribly well-earned praise. I think she’s a competent writer, and that people don’t necessarily pick up on friction because they don’t read a lot of stuff from the period in question. To me, and again I could be quite wrong or insufficiently informed on this particular point!, this feels like a modern understanding of food/economies, rendered Oldey Timey. That’s not egregious, but neither does it develop my implicit trust in Charles as a historical fiction writer.
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Date: 2022-09-11 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-19 01:07 am (UTC)