Well, we have made it through February, when I did a post about something I love every single week. Phew, I’m certainly glad that is over with! What a relief to get into March, and start writing about stuff I hate again.
Just kidding. I didn’t hate this book; in fact, I mostly really enjoyed it. It just wasn’t a perfect bull’s-eye like all the stuff I posted about last month.
This 2024 book is narrated by Jolene, a Canadian woman whose mother is Iranian-Canadian and who works in a regular, that is to say fairly miserable, office. She has social anxiety, a moderate drinking problem, a big cohort of Persian Aunties (her mom’s friends) who really really hope she will get married, and a dark trauma from high school. Oh, and she has a habit of adding passive-aggressive postscripts to her e-mails to her colleagues, hidden in white text.
One day she forgets to turn the text white, and that kicks off her madcap adventures.
If this setup sounds like it’ll be boring and full of self-pity, all I can say is it’s anything but. Jolene, despite her hermitlike ways, is a keen observer of human nature and is mistress of the witty, cunning turn of phrase, which is exactly what makes her e-mail postscripts so devastating, and this narrative so fun to follow.
This little human [baby] doesn’t even realize the greatness of this: the only time in your life when people will simply ignore your public outbursts. The rest of us must cry without actually crying. This child, I learn as Celeste continues to soothe it, is named Thomas. I watch his little eyes dart around the room, taking it all in. Maybe Thomas is just now realizing that eventually he will grow up to spend all his daylight hours under fluorescent lights and water-stained ceiling tiles.
I don’t mean to chuckle at this depressing thought, and I stifle it as soon as I can, but that doesn’t stop a few eyes from drawing my way while I pretend I didn’t just cackle at a technically crying baby.
Then Thomas begins being passed around like a hot burrito. I curl my hands close against my chest and try to back away. When Caitlin takes said bundle, it stops crying in an instant, and her face softens in a way that makes me realize how hard it’s been lately.
“So, how is being a mom?”
Celeste starts describing things that sound dire as sh-t.
Gregory randomly pokes the ——- baby in the belly, and the cries start again in a screeching pitch.
Has anyone ever punched him in the face?
“How was the birth?” Stu for some cursed reason has to ask. I take a step back in order to avoid sticking around for Celeste’s answer.
Rhonda flashes me a disapproving stare. Why is it socially acceptable to discuss a human getting pushed or cut out of a body, yet somehow, it’s unprofessional for me to simply work rather than hold the tiny person I don’t even know?
page 102
That’s a pretty good sample of the writing style — and also a pretty good, lively description of what it’s like to be a woman with social anxiety or maybe autistic tendencies. Very very relatable.
I finished this book very quickly because of the good writing. However, it’s not uplifting or heartwarming. Jolene is engaging in some pretty significant deception throughout almost the entire book, which made it hard to enjoy. She’s under a lot of stress with several different crises bubbling (including one with the Persian Aunties), which keeps the pace fast, but makes the read also stressful. I knock off one star for this dynamic and for the author’s use of the phrase “white-passing.”
Welcome to February! This February, instead of doing a bunch of posts about the gooey stuff (after all, we already read a Barbara Cartland), I’ll be doing posts about stuff I love. I hope you will love it too, and that these posts and the resources they direct you to, will bring joy to your bleak February.
If you have not seen the debate below, you are missing a treat. It may be the most entertaining debate in history, at least for those who have any interest in the Bible, ancient history, or textual criticism.
It’s two hours long, but you could just watch the first hour and be entertained. Or, you could watch it in half-hour snippets for your nightly giggle. Then it would be sort of like watching a reality show, if one of the participants on the reality show was an adult who knew what they were talking about.
Billy Carson, a prominent YouTuber who pushes a Gnostic/neopagan version of the Bible, monologues until fact-checked by an extremely patient Wes Huff, an actual New Testament textual scholar. The moderator interrupts periodically to ramble about how much he loves Jesus because Jesus got rid of all the old sexism.
No matter who has just spoken or how long a turn they have taken, Huff manages to give them a response that is calm, respectful, and adds actual biblical knowledge to what they have just said.
To recap, I joined a readalong with Bookstooge of a book with a cover that looks like this:
and whose author looks like this:
… which gives you a better sense of what the book is like than the cover does, really.
Barbara Cartland turned out a book every two weeks for the last twenty years of her life. Keep that in mind.
So, I finished this book pretty quickly. I was expecting a formulaic romance, and that’s what I got. The book does not drag. I can’t say I was super invested in it emotionally, but that’s because I’m a cynical middle-aged woman. And when Richard thinks to himself,
Oh, God, he loved her so much.
page 109
… I believed him. Behold the magic of Barbara Cartland!
Now, this book remains a first draft, and there are some first draft-y things in it, such as a shawl starting out as “lace” in one chapter, and getting transformed into “green silk” in the next. My favorite of these “first draft” moments is this one:
But now — how can I bear to be his wife knowing that he is already be in love with someone else?
page 106
I mean, I can relate. The most comical and confusing typos always show up in my most emotional scenes … and I always get so carried away when re-reading the scenes, that I can never catch them myself.
So, all in all, this was a not-terrible romance novel that read sort of like an outline, because it basically was an outline. If the book had been re-written to be much longer, then I feel certain that many of the minor plot holes/historical vaguenesses would have been ironed out, plus the potential emotional heft might have been successfully deepened to actual emotional heft. But, every author has to say “done” at some point, and in Cartland’s case, that was after whipping up the first draft, because that was her business model. She let readers take care of the historical details and the emotions, handling them with suspended disbelief and imagination. And that’s fair.
There was only one thing I did not like: the angry almost-kiss. (“Almost” because the couple are interrupted by a maid, so they don’t actually kiss except once at the very end of the book.) Anyway … “angry” and “kissing,” they do not go well together, no precious, they do not. I do not want Tiana’s marriage to be the kind of relationship where Richard ever kisses her angrily. And in fact, in most of the book, that is quite out of line with his character. It just happens in one scene, where they both lost their tempers “horribly” (actually quite mildly), and then were nearly overcome with passion. I don’t know why this is a romance trope. I guess I’ve missed something during my four decades of living. But, tip for you guys, in the middle of a fight is not the greatest time to start kissing your beloved.
I catch my reflection in a glass door and jolt at my frizzy brown hair and puffy eyes. I may be entitled to compensation for that. It’s not that I’m a terrible-looking person, but I haven’t slept well this week, and I always seem to look my worst when I don’t expect myself.
from I Hope This Finds You Well, by Natalie Sue, p. 4
Actually, that calls for a lot of explanation, doesn’t it?
The Setup
Carl is a faithful Mormon who is grieving his family. His wife, Sharon, and their three small children were killed by a drunk driver who ploughed over them on the sidewalk. But, Carl knows that if he remains faithful, he will be reunited with his family in the Celestial Kingdom. Per the Mormon promises, they’ll be together forever.
Then, Carl’s sister, who has had a troubled history, is killed by a mysterious woman in an alley. Carl becomes obsessed with finding the killer (the police seem to have given up). He tracks her to what appears to be a sex cult with gothic trappings. Thinking he is just going undercover to collect evidence, Carl takes an oath he doesn’t mean and finds himself becoming a vampire.
He doesn’t finish the ceremony, though. As soon as it becomes clear that he is supposed to drink the blood of an innocent girl, Carl instead breaks free and takes her to the nearest hospital. There, he collapses, and is rescued by Moira. Moira is another well-intentioned vampire (a “Penitent”), who works at the hospital so that she can work nights and have access to blood without having to attack people. Moira shows Carl the ways of surviving as a vampire without doing evil. Incredibly, it later turns out that she too is Mormon. She actually became a Mormon after she was already a vampire, thanks to two very persistent missionaries. For about fifty years, one Mormon bishop after another has handed down to his successor a letter explaining Moira’s special “condition.”
Like I said … Mormon vampires.
Pros and Cons, and Why I Was Crying in Public
(P.S. This section turned out kind of long. Sorry about that.)
C. David Belt (shown here with me at the recent Fantasy Faire) is a fantastic horror writer because he pairs the horror writer’s instincts and penchant for research with a uniquely right-side-up view of the world.
Take, for example, his take on vampires. I don’t usually read vampire books because the vampires are usually presented as like mortals, but better: they don’t age, they’re beautiful, they’re sexy. Mortals who don’t want their blood sucked are prudes and bigots and super intolerant. Not so with Belt. In his books, vampires are actually, you know, evil. Vampirism is actually a horror, like it would be if you encountered it in real life. That’s what I mean by a right-side-up view of the world.
Now, this strong sense of the wholesome can shade into a bit of naivete about the human heart. The whole premise of this series is based upon the idea that Carl took the vampire oath and even allowed his own blood to be drunk … “innocently.” Because he “didn’t mean it” and “didn’t think it was real,” he is blameless. He is, in all of history, the only Unwilling vampire.
This raises two questions. Now, perhaps these will be raised by the author himself later in the series, but I’m taking The Unwilling on its own terms. So here we go.
First, is it really possible to take an oath and not be responsible for it because “you don’t mean it”? That would be an extremely convenient thing, if so. Picture this: you are a follower of the One True God. But you live in a pagan environment, and you’re being pressured to take an oath of loyalty to Kukulkan, or Zeus, or the divine Caesar, or Big Brother is requiring you to “just say” there is no God but Big Brother. I think you see where I’m going with this. Now, granted, in The Unwilling Carl was not clinging to secret reservations just to get out of martyrdom when he took the oath to be loyal to Lilith. We know this because he fled the ceremony room, endangering himself, as soon as he realized what he was really being asked to do. So there are degrees of culpability, and of self-awareness. However, the principle that “I didn’t really mean it” or “I thought it was a game” is a dangerous one to introduce. As G.K. Chesterton has pointed out in The Everlasting Man, there is an element of game to much of pagan worship. It’s not always 100% clear how seriously the pagan followers themselves take all their superstitions. However, God still tells Israel in no uncertain terms not to pour out libations to any foreign god or take up their names in oath. So, “it was a game” or “it was maybe partly a game” is not going to cut it.
This leads directly to the second question. How is it possible that, in all of history, Carl is the first person to take the vampire oath without realizing it is real? Wouldn’t we expect that to be true of almost every person that gets inducted into the vampire cult? Or true of at least 50%? In modern times, most people do not really believe that vampires are an actual thing. Surely, the majority of the people that join this “empowering” gothic sex cult think of it as a sort of cosplay.
After all, this is how people join cults: there are concentric circles. There are the hangers-on or wannabes, then the neophytes, then the journeymen, and so on. Typically only the people in the inner circle know what the cult is really about. By the time someone gets that far in, however, they have so much trauma bonding, Stockholm syndrome, sunk cost fallacy, mental confusion and spiritual deception that they tend not to be repelled by even the most bizarre and obviously evil beliefs.
The only way I can square this circle is to figure that, if there were any other Converted who didn’t take the vampire element seriously, then when it came time to commit the ritual murder, unlike Carl they didn’t balk, but rather went ahead. And this because, we can assume, they were not as strong-minded as Carl, or not as pure of heart and motive.
One downside of having a right-side-up view of the world, where you recognize that good and evil actually exist and that people can choose to do good or evil, is that there’s a tendency to think as though the world consists of some good people and some bad ones. Belt falls prey to this, to a certain degree. I don’t want to overstate this flaw, because on the whole he is quite insightful about human psychology, as any good novelist has to be. But here are some examples of what I mean.
Vampires, it appears, can “smell” when a person is truly depraved, truly far gone in their evil. Such a person’s blood “calls” to the vampire, creating an almost irresistible urge to kill. In this book, occasionally Carl will encounter such a person. One is a crooked cop, who is also molesting his stepdaughter. Another is a random mother we encounter at the Mormon church service. The precise nature of her evil is never revealed, but as Carl puts it when he warns the bishop about this woman, “something is very wrong” in that house.
So far so complex, right? I actually love the scene where Carl and Moira have to restrain themselves from attacking this apparently pious Mormon woman. My beef with this phenomenon is that there are far too few of these people who call to Carl with their rotten/sweet-smelling blood.
Technically, on an orthodox Christain view of the world, the taint is in everybody. “There is none righteous, no, not one. All have turned aside; they have together become corrupt.” But let’s grant that this does not mean (as indeed the doctrine of total depravity doesn’t) that everyone is as bad as they could possibly be. Nevertheless, part of a mature Christain world view is realizing more and more uncomforable truths like the following:
Given the intervening steps, anyone is capable of anything.
I am far weaker and more sinful than I ever realized, but the grace of God is far deeper and stronger than I ever realized.
“I know that in myself lives no good thing.”
“Cheer up! You are worse than you think.”
“Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.”
So, to modify our illustration, if The Unwilling had been written by an orthodox Christian, it would show a world where every single person had this taint in their blood, but some of them were in remission. Nevertheless, the proportion of people who had gone far down the road towards “capable of anything” would be quite large – large enough that Carl would be certain to be distracted by their intoxicating scent every time he went out in public.
But Belt is a Mormon, so although his worldview is basically right-side-up, it doesn’t include total depravity. His picture of the world is basically a bunch of lost, but essentially wholesome and well-meaning people, and a few stinkers. Furthermore, in the Mormon cosmology, salvation is not for the stinkers. It is for the well-meaning people who do their best to save themselves and trust God for the rest.
Take this scene, where Carl and Moira are trying to convince a mortal-turned-vampire to repent of his sins. Things start out well enough:
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” I ask him.
He laughs bitterly. “Lapsed.”
“Go to your priest,” I say. “Or go to a Mormon bishop. Only God can help you now.”
So far so good. Carl continues,
“Stop killing. Go to your priest or to a Mormon bishop. Pray. Lean on God. I believe you can find your way back. Atone for your sins as best you can. Put your trust in the Savior to take care of the rest. It’s the only way you can ever find redemption.”
And there we have the difference between Mormonism and orthodox Christianity. Ephesians 2:8 – 9 says, “For by grace you are saved, through faith, and this [faith] is not of yourselves, not of works, lest any man should boast.” The Mormons have a similar verse, but it runs like this: “We are saved by grace, through faith, after we have done all we can.” What this misses is that, if we are “doing all we can,” then one of two things is going on. If we are truly repenting and making restitution, then that itself is a gift and is a sign that the Holy Spirit is already revivifying our heart. Which means that He started this good work in us before we were repentant. The other possibility is that we are “doing all we can” in a cynical way, as a work of our own righteousness, so as to put God in a position where He “has to” forgive us. This is a grievous sin against God, probably far worse than the original bad things we did.
To an orthodox Christian, “Atone for your sins as best you can. Put your trust in the Savior to take care of the rest” is a HUGE insult to the Savior. Did He really suffer torture and the wrath of God to take care of our leftovers? Doesn’t it seem that we could have done a little more and spared Him all that? Or, if there was a portion of our sins that called for torture and death on His part, then doesn’t that suggest that the rest of them were equally bad and probably can’t be dealt with by “doing the best we can”?
These are the things that crossed my mind as I read this book. The psychology is good, and somewhat deep, but it’s not the deepest of the deep. That is reserved for writers like Dostoyevsky and St. Paul.
Finally, I won’t give the background of this because you really should read the book, but there was a certain character whose story had me in tears in the doctor’s office. I had brought this book with me to my son’s doctor appointment, to read in the waiting room, as one does. And – well, it was a really hard to put down part, and so it was that the doctor came in to see us just at the moment when my heart got broke. And I had to knuckle a tear away and say, “Sorry, we are fine. This book made me cry.” Good job, Mr. Belt, good job.
This painting is me in twenty years. I hope. Note my cottage in the background.
Our Friend Mary Harrington
I want to talk about another lovely gift that I have been given by reactionary feminist author Mary Harrington. I reviewed her book, Feminism Against Progress, here.
In the video below, Jordan Peterson interviews Harrington. She gets to talk a lot. I don’t know whether this is because Peterson is mending his monologuing ways, or because Harrington is confident, articulate, and not afraid to take long turns, but in any case, we definitely get to hear her thoughts. They are not the exact same thoughts as the ones she expressed in Feminism Against Progress. You can see that her thinking is still developing, particularly the terms she likes to use to describe things.
It’s a very long video, and well worth the listen if this topic interests you, but for your reading pleasure I have transcribed the section that I want to talk about. Here it is:
At about 46:24, Peterson says, “The thing about women is that their mythological orientation is multidimensional and complex.” He mentions Beauty and the Beast, and Woman and Infant, as two possible hero myths for women, but notes that “our society does not hold sacred the image of Woman and Infant as a fundamental unit of female identity” (so we’re really only left with Beauty and Beast, which gets us into trouble).
Then at about 49:00 he asks Harrington, without asking a direct question, what she thinks is the woman’s Heroic Journey. And she’s got an answer for him!
After a detour into why she felt lonely as a young mother, Harrington answers at 51:45,
“In my observation, there is a hero’s journey for women, it just doesn’t follow the same track as the male one. And in fact, it has three parts, which correspond to a very ancient female archetype, which is the Maiden, the Mother, and the Matriarch. The triple goddess. And anecdotally, it stacks pretty closely to me with actually what a majority of normal women’s lives look like.
“You know, as the Maiden, you’re free, you do have more of a warrior aspect. The Mother is more oriented towards home and the domestic sphere, and probably bluntly just doesn’t care about [outside] work as much.
“But then, later on – and this was something I found very interesting when I did therapy training in the late aughts and early tens, was just how many of the trainees on that course were women in their 50s and 60s. So these were women who had pretty much done the motherhood arc, and they were moving into a new phase of life. They were moving into the Matriarch space. I mean the classic, three-part-goddess term for this is Crone. But they were some way from cronehood. These were lively, vital, energetic, public-spirited women who had some life experience. They had a lot of connections, they had a rich social life, they had met lots of people, and they were ready to give something back.
“And in my observation, there are a huge number of women who reach the end of the Mother part of that journey, and will then re-train. And those women are a huge, rich force for deepening reflection in the culture, for public service, for all manner of incredibly productive, usually quite self-effacing, but incredibly productive, life-giving contributions to the social fabric. And they’re incredibly marginalized. They’re almost completely invisible in terms of the liberal feminist narrative, which really centers the Maiden. And it wants to foreground the Maiden and to tell women that the hero’s journey means essentially being the Maiden for their entire life. At best, if the Mother is noticed, it’s as a problem to be solved. And the Matriarch doesn’t really get a look-in at all, and if she does, it’s only so that she can be denounced for being a TERF, or in some other way spat on for being a dinosaur or obsolete or old-fashioned or out of touch, or in some other way irrelevant or ridiculous.
“And in fact, these [older] women are the backbone of the social fabric. I mean, those are the women who are making weak cups of tea for slightly traumatized new mothers like I was in small-town England. (laughs) And telling me I’m doing fine. And really, that mattered a lot at the time. I mean, those are the women who are running Brownies groups for no money every Wednesday because they can and because they want to give back. Those are the women who are re-training as counselors and helping traumatized people for free. Those are the women who keep things going. (laughs again) And yet, somehow, the liberal feminist version of the hero’s journey just doesn’t see them at all.”
About that word “Crone”
I love what Harrington has to say here. But I must make a note of how she shies away from the word “crone” in favor “matriarch.” Based on the qualifications she puts around even mentioning the word, it’s apparent that Harrington thinks crones are women at the very end of their lives, who are listless and isolated: the opposite of “having a lot of energy” and “lots of connections” and “a rich social life.” The word crone in Harrington’s mind apparently conjures up a bedridden hospice patient who enjoys her only social interaction when the pastor visits once a month.
I got a similar reaction out of my editor when I went to describe Zillah (one of the main characters of my trilogy) as a crone. The word crone, said Editor, reads “old and ugly.” I convinced her to leave it, because I wanted to broaden the meaning of the word, or perhaps recover some of its original meaning.
Zillah, in my series, is in her sixties when we meet her in The Long Guest. I’m cheating a little with having a protagonist in her 60s, however, because my books are set in the immediate post-Flood era, when people lived into their 250s, and a woman in her sixties could still be fertile. Zillah has grown children in The Long Guest, but she still looks like a young woman, and in fact she gets her own romance arc.
In later books, Zillah gets older. By The Great Snake, when I was calling her a crone, she was over one hundred. By the standards of the time, this is only middle-aged, and in fact she is strong enough to hike all day, do dryland farming, and so forth. However, her role in the community is definitely what Harrington describes above as Matriarch. She practices emergency medicine and herbology, innovates in farming maize, counsels her family through crises, and brings potential problems to the attention of the patriarch (who is not her husband but her son). She can’t do everything, and in fact she has had some costly failures. But my trilogy would be much darker without Zillah.
I’m not saying my books anticipated what Harrington is saying, but … my books anticipated what Harrington is saying.
Hats off to Grandma! Or are they?
Of course, she is not the only one saying it (though she may be saying it the most eloquently, and with the biggest platform), and she is not the only one thinking it. Every woman is thinking through these things, whether she realizes it or not, and most women come to some kind of resolution. You have to, if you don’t want to live your life with a pathological fear of aging. This is not an attractive look, and most people figure this out and make some kind of effort to “age gracefully,” that is, to embrace their status as an older person.
This task is made more difficult in modern Western society, where we as a culture don’t value our elders at all and don’t really have any special role for them in the community. This is true of old men, to a lesser degree, but it’s really true of old women. Has anyone heard the phrase, “old women of both sexes”? It’s usually used in the following context: “I want to do bold plan XYZ, but when I said so, it really upset the old women of both sexes.” Old women, we learn, are fragile, risk-averse, set in their ways, and prudish. Probably bureaucrats. Also, they are not athletic or healthy (two other things our culture really values).
Our culture’s disdain for old women traces back to its disdained for motherhood and family life. If you don’t value mothers as such, then you are less disposed to respect your own mother when she is old. Further, if a culture does not have a lot of young moms who need help at home, then there really is no job for the old ladies to do other than go to work in an office, where the hours, tasks, and working conditions are often uncongenial to their nature and where admin would really like to push them out before they develop a bunch of expensive health problems.
On the other hand, if your culture prioritizes a large, thriving household of the kind described in Feminism Against Progress and in Proverbs 31, then there is plenty of useful work for Grandma to do. Furthermore, it’s exactly the kind of work she has spent decades becoming good at. She’s baking her famous dessert, she’s sewing outfits for the little kids, she’s quilting, she is babysitting. She’s answering Mom’s panicked questions about how to garden, get that stain out, and how in the world do I manage everything. This is work that is actually useful and needed (which is the kind of work that keeps people alive and happy). But it’s not like going to work in a shop or office in your fifties. There is more variety, and the schedule is freer. There is room for Grandma to go home and be by herself for a few days. There is room for her to take a nap. And unlike admin at the office, your grown children will not fire you and wash their hands of you when you develop health problems (not ideally, anyway).
Of course, all this is the ideal, and we all know that reality is different. Not every family relationship is a happy one that would allow this kind of close community (especially 60 years after the Sexual Revolution began its relentless campaign to break up families). And even in ideal circumstances, we can get on each other’s nerves. That’s why, in the painting, I am living in a cottage in the woods, where I can garden, paint, and keep a library. Ya gotta’ know your limits. But there is a world of difference between having some tension with your children in a context that values and honors older people for their wisdom and experience, and having to get a 9 to 5 job that really calls for a younger person, just to prove you’ve still “got it” and to justify your existence. This is the difference between Zillah’s world and ours.
Looking forward to being a Crone
I have been fortunate that I was a given a husband and children. I’ve moved through the stages and am now standing on the threshold of matriarchy/cronehood. And I’m liking the view.
Don’t get me wrong … I’m frightened as well. What scares me most is the prospect of chronic pain or disability — my own, or a loved one’s. But I’m not scared of aging itself. I like the idea of less pressure to look beautiful, of a lightening of parenting responsibilities (in exchange for others), and of time to keep getting better at my various crafts.
As a Christian, I am surrounded by a world that despises motherhood, families, and old women … but I have access to a world that honors them. I am in the world but not of it.
Also, I realize that I need to do a better job appreciating the older women who have surrounded me since I was small, my own mother included. I didn’t ever like being taught new things, because of the amount of correction it involved, but now I see how much we must listen to these ladies, honor them, eat the food they cook for us. Send in the crones!
Zach arrived on schedule. He stood about six foot two, lean and wiry from triathlon training and mixed martial arts, thirty-five years of age, bearded and chewing tobacco. After losing his bid for mayor’s office, he’d taken up fighting for money, a common enough career path.
The Whisper on the Night Wind, by Adam Shoalts, p. 17
“When Kath and her boyfriend arrive at a remote cabin, they find a mysterious young couple already there. But when her boyfriend disappears with the young woman, Kath becomes obsessed with finding an explanation with the help of an unlikely supporter.”
I checked this 2022 film out of the library so I’d have something to watch while knitting in the evening. I like Winona Ryder, although her character in this film is very different from the beloved Joyce of Stranger Things. As you can see from this cover, she doesn’t look at all like the same person.
This is a mystery/thriller. I won’t give away the plot, except to say that it is disturbing. Instead, I want to talk about the movie’s theme: aging and the way our culture fears it.
Gone does a fabulous job of working the theme into almost every scene. (And, now that I think about it, it’s even arguably present in the title … you wake up and your youth has “gone in the night.”) Some things are very subtle: for example, when the boyfriend (I think his name is Max) gets out of the car to retrieve his hat, the camera lingers on Kath, sitting in the driver’s seat. She opens the mirror on the sun visor and looks at her reflection, then wrinkles her forehead and touches the lines there.
Max is having a beer with a young couple. The woman is flirting with him. She asks how old he is, and he jokingly replies, “Fifty.”
“Fifty? You look good for fifty,” she responds. “You look like you work out.”
“Oh, God, no, I was kidding! I’m not fifty!”
In fact, Kath and Max are both probably closing on 40, or perhaps in their early 40s. They don’t have grey hair or use a walker. They are not old enough to be grandparents. They are middle-aged. Kath seems OK with this. She would be happy to live with “my books, my plants, and have it quiet … forever.” Max, on the other hand, seems to be trying to cling to lost youth. He wants to go to raves and concerts, hike up mountains, and do all the things done by adrenaline junkies in their 20s. He and Kath, since they are not married and don’t have children, are still sort of trying to live in youth culture, but they keep getting messages that they don’t belong.
“How long have you been married?” the twenty-something woman asks Kath.
“What makes you think Max and I are married?”
“Oh! It’s just that people like you are usually either married or alone.”
“What do you mean, ‘people like me’?”
Awkward silence.
In another scene, Kath is following someone. The person leads her to what appears to be a rave happening in an old warehouse. Kath says to bouncer, “I need to get in for a minute. I can pay whatever.”
The bouncer, who is eating a snack, eyes her up and down and then says through a mouthful of food, “Dyahavakidinere or somethin’?”
“What?”
With an eye roll, he clears his mouth, and then articulates very clearly, “Do – you – have – a – kid – in – there?”
Fear of aging – and ultimately, of death – ends up being highly relevant to the plot of Gone. And, really, unless you happen to be a Christian with the certain hope of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, how could you not fear it? As Kath says, in a memorable line, “We are all scared.”
As you might expect from a Ludlum novel written by somebody else, this book has the feel of something made on an assembly line. It has all the parts and doodads that you expect from the genre, and it does what you want it to do (in this case, be thriller), but it has no particular artistry or character. To be fair, this also means it’s lacking some of the flaws that might show up in quirkier, more idiosyncratic books.
Pacing and Action: A+
This is, I gather, the outstanding characteristic of Bourne books. The action is almost constant. Nevertheless, the author does a good job of introducing characters and explaining the setup and the stakes, so that we don’t get the phenomenon of action that we don’t know the significance of. I will say that to a certain degree, tension is inflationary, so the shock and horror isn’t quite as shocking and horrible as it would be with a slower buildup.
Tours of Foreign Cities: A
Traveling the world is one of the things we expect from the Bourne novels. Freeman does a good job of making us feel as if we are familiar with the cities where the action takes place by mentioning particular roads, parks, markets, and squares. He also does a decent job with the weather and atmospherics.
Russians Betraying Each Other: A
Also other spies betraying Bourne, and Bourne possibly betraying other people (who knows, since he lost his memory). The hypocrisy of people in espionage, as well as the messed-up kind of person that years in espionage makes you, is a major theme of this book. Speaking of which:
Character Development: B-
The book tries to do some character development with Bourne discovering his past, wishing he could get out of the espionage game, and realizing that he has been made into the kind of person who probably isn’t capable of anything else. There’s a fair amount of character development given that this is a thriller. But, the thriller distinctives limit the emotional impact of all this, at least for me. The pace is too fast and the writing too matter-of-fact for character development to get really emotional. Speaking of which:
Relationships between Men and Women: C-
Okay, so there is a lot of sex. Including one scene that lasts several pages. But it’s written the way a man would write it, which is to say, the emotional element is minimal. Speaking of which:
Portrayal of Women: D
Hmm, where to start?
Obviously, we are talking about spy women, so that skews the sampling. But these ladies are ruthless killers. They are also … how to put it …? Not overly concerned with monogamy. They can go from killing to kissing, or worse, in no time flat. They don’t seem to get emotionally attached as a result of sexual involvement, the way a normal woman would. They aren’t adversely affected by all the gruesome things they have to do, even as much as Bourne is.
There are two women who don’t appear to be nymphos, but they are both cool as cucumbers. One only cares about science, one about spycraft. You know, like most women you meet.
Also, spy goddess is petite and very athletic, but also has “deep curves.” I dunno. Deep curves (such as wide hips) affect the way a person runs, tumbles, throws, etc. I went through most of the book picturing her as wiry and boyish, and then all of a sudden the author threw these curves at me. Also, their hair is always loose. Not very practical, ladies.
I’m not even trying to be feminist here. I just find these women hella unrealistic and unrelatable, which in turn makes the “romance” (such as it is) tepid.
Russians Talking: F-
This was the thing that annoyed me the most, because it messed with the verisimilitude even more than the Bond-style spy women. Many of the characters in this book are expatriate Russians. Many of them need to monologue to explain their positions. All of them talk exactly like an American explaining something in a business seminar. Listen, Russian sentence structure, word choice, and so on, is very distinctive, even when they are speaking English. It should not have been hard to watch a few movies where this was well done, and then imitate it in this book. If you are going to research foreign cities and bring them to life, why not make the dialogue believable too? I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if the Russians had sounded like Russians. And it would have supported the theme. Make them sound like Russians!
Out of Babel Books 