As explained in my last post, myself, Jessica, Meriam and RfP agreed to do a Book Club-style group review some months ago. RfP nominated The Edge of Impropriety by Pam Rosenthal.
Finally, we're ready to go! So here's my review. Pop on over to Racy Romance Reviews (Jessica), Rape and Adverbs (Meriam) and Read For Pleasure (RfP) to read the others - hopefully very soon if not straightaway. Without giving too much away, I think I can safely say that I rated the book the most highly of all of us.
The best word I can think of to describe this novel is 'rich'. It is rich in ideas, and indeed it is principally the ideas in the book that I'd like to focus on this review. But it's more than just the ideas; it is rich in the quality of the writing. On every page there is something to savour and enjoy. I found myself reading lingeringly and going back to re-read particularly enjoyable sentences again.
Having read and been impressed by Carrie's Story and Safe Word (erotic novels written by Rosenthal under the name of Molly Weatherfield) I had been somewhat disappointed by Almost A Gentleman and hadn't troubled to seek out The Bookseller's Daughter or The Slightest Provocation. RfP had suggested The Edge of Impropriety for the book club and had she not done so, I may never have read it. How glad I am that she did!
Briefly then, the plot. There are two romances in this book. Firstly and principally, Jasper and Marina, and secondly Anthony and Helen. Many years ago, Jasper - a classical scholar - had fancied himself in love with his brother's wife. They had an affair and she became pregnant. But instead of wanting to run away with him to Greece as he hoped for, she went back to her husband and pawned the child off as her husband's son and heir. That child is Anthony.
Thirteen or so years later, Jasper visits his brother and sister-in-law at Lake Como. Anthony is still in England at school but their small daughter Sydney is with them. Jasper's brother and his wife are suddenly drowned in a boating accident and Jasper has to take over bringing up his niece and nephew (who is in fact his own son). The main part of the book begins over a decade later when Anthony is a grown man of twenty five.
Marina is Lady Gorham, a widow and celebrated novelist who is well known for her short lived peccadilloes with young men. She and Anthony are friends and this brings Jasper into her house. In fact, Marina and Jasper have already shared a moment's observation of one another in the British Museum, a moment that made a strong impression on them both. In short order, Jasper and Marina become lovers but agree that this will be a temporary state of affairs, believing that this is something they can easily compartmentalise.
Anthony is the handsome, careless Earl of the somewhat depleted estate that Jasper has been trying to restore the fortunes of. He is the very antithesis of Jasper and the two do not share a close relationship, unlike Jasper and Sydney, who, like her uncle, is fascinated by classical mythology. Helen is Sydney's governess. Her buttoned-up appearance disguises a bright-burning torch for Anthony.
This is a book rich in ideas and I'm going to concentrate on some of these in this review, perhaps to the detriment of other aspects of my reading experience. But since there are four of us simultaneously reviewing this book, I'm hoping that others will cover the areas I am not. My thoughts can be collected under three headings: Connection, Recognition, Balance.
Connection
I don't think that Rosenthal's decision to have two love stories running together is coincidence. Nor do I think it is coincidence that we have one set of older lovers and one set of younger lovers. Nor that one story is conventional (the secondary one; poverty-stricken governess and handsome Earl) and that one is not (thirty six year old former harlot and forty seven year old classical scholar with libidinous depths).
The involvement of the four characters enables Rosenthal to compare and contrast innocence and experience, youthful ideals and hard-won realism, youth and age, lovers and beloveds, separation and connection.
There is something too about time and motion here. References to the movement of bodies through time and space. And a fascination with the idea of coincidence, by which I mean coincidence in its most literal sense: the co-incidence of events and existences, giving rise to unexpected connections. The various references to weaving and tapestry lend a further dimension to this sense of lives that knowingly and unknowingly overlap throughout the story.
This idea of overlapping is introduced at the very beginning with a prologue that belongs entirely to Jasper yet which features Marina. On the day that Jasper's brother and sister-in-law are drowned in Lake Como, Marina arrives at the same resort with her new, much older husband. We are given to understand that Jasper and Marina would certainly have met had not the accident occurred. As it is, it is a decade before they set eyes on one another, by which time, Marina is no longer the 'ravishing' girl in her twenties and Jasper is no longer the dashing 'romantic adventurer'.
There are references throughout the novel to connection and separation; time and opportunity. There is a lovely passage at a masked ball where Jasper recalls the advice of dance master. The advice is memorable because he was humiliatingly singled out as a boy to receive it:
Never cling to a partner's hand, Master Hedges. You must learn to balance force and weight, support and freedom.
Later he muses as he is dancing with Marina:
His dance master had been right about one thing. You couldn't cling. You moved through time. You moved with time. Moments counted: If you wanted to make a compliment, it couldn't take longer than the few beats needed to pass and circle - as he and she were doing now, paying precise attention to the measure.
Reading this book, I was reminded more than once of E M Forster's famous mantra: only connect.
In both of the romances, and in the relationship between Anthony and Jasper, there is a sense of a connection made against the odds. For Marina and Jasper, age means some wisdom, but it also means lost ideals and an inability to trust others. For Anthony and Helen, there is a yawning social gap that makes her invisible to him. For Anthony and Jasper they are utterly different to one another and lack common ground. In each story, Sydney (a delightful character) is a key agent in bridging these gaps and bringing the connections about. For me, Sydney was a sort of personfication of coincidence. Or perhaps a storyteller within the story capable of active agency.
Recognition
Recognition may not be the best word to use here, but the idea of 'being seen' comes up again and again. And there are numerous references to costume and disguise. At various points in the story the characters both see and fail to see one another; at times taken in by another's costume, at other times, seeing below the surface to the truth of the person below.
The novel is set in 1829, a year before the death of George IV, previously the Prince Regent. The choice of period is significant. We are in the last days of the Regency period and moving towards the Victorian era with its preposterous crinolines and tiny waists. Already, fashion is headed that way and Marina mourns 'the passing of the fluid, Grecian-inspired white muslins of her youth' loathing the wide skirts and voluminous sleeves that have replaced them. Marina wears clothes with expertise, making the most of her beauty, seeing herself as an advertisement for her novels and her social position as part of their 'puffery'. She tells Jasper that 'Sometimes the name Lady Gorham feels to me rather like a costume for a fancy dress ball.'
Jasper, by contrast, is positively threadbare, the combined result of a lack of interest in his appearance and the 'cheeseparing life' he has been living in order to restore his son's inheritance after the excesses of his brother and sister-in-law depleted the estate.
Poor Helen is hidden away inside her dreary clothes. Anthony notes that he can barely see her face inside the long poke bonnet she wears. It is only when he sees her at a masked ball dressed in an old-fashioned Regency gowns as the goddess Athena, that he sees the true Helen. (Interestingly, he is dressed as an Albanian at the ball, underlining the gap between these two).
As for Anthony, like Marina, he is decorative and used to admiration. He is famous too for his exquisite taste in waistcoats (a seemingly frivolous expertise that Jasper eventually accords some weight to).
Marina and Anthony are the beautiful, showy ones whilst Jasper and Helen's attractions are much less obvious, though recognised powerfully by Anthony and Marina at key co-incidental moments. It's interesting that in each romance, the visual appeal that is most concentrated upon is the appeal of Jasper for Marina and Helen for Anthony. Not nearly as much is said about the more obvious attractions of Marina and Anthony. Incidentally, I think I read in this book the very best description I have ever read of hazel eyes: 'the bronzy green of ripening pears'. Gorgeous.
There's a lovely bit where Jasper talks about the appeal that mortals held for the classical gods:
The gods you see are like big spoiled children who like to sneak down to the servants' hall - or the wealthy young dandy who'll stand his coachman to mug after mug of ale in return for being allowed to take the ribbons now and again. Like all of us, the gods want what they can't have.... And what thrills them, what torments them with curiosity and desire, Lady Gorham, is the possibility of death. Mortality. The fragility of our bodies. Their vulnerability to the passage of time. Human limitation is something the gods can never truly know, but they find its pathos quite beautiful. And the only way they can experience death's pathos is through a human's touch.
Balance
I'm brought back to the advice of Jasper's dance master here that I quoted above: 'You must learn to balance force and weight, support and freedom.'
This is the ideal of love that - to my mind - Marina and Jasper eventually find. (If I'm going to be picky, I can't say the same for Anthony and Helen. In all honesty, that secondary story didn't fully work for me and was the weakest part of the book).
It's not insignificant that the villain of the book, Rackham, is the antithesis of this ideal.
The very nicest expression of this idea is the story of a statue that Jasper had found on his adventures, 'the little kneeling Aphrodite'. This little statue follows a parallel path to Marina, and first features in the prologue. Jasper is showing the statue - and another in the form of Eros - to his sister-in-law. The statue has left her home in Greece but Jasper (unlike most Englishmen of the time) wants to repatriate her. At the same time, Marina has arrived in Lake Como with her older husband, a man who - from the little we hear - likes to have Marina on her knees or other submissive positions.
Marina doesn't meet Jasper in Lake Como and the Aphrodite doesn't make it home. Jasper has to compromise his ideals and sell the statue given how depleted the estate is. However, a decade on, he is able to buy her back again and his dream of sending her back to Greece is renewed. At the same time, Marina comes into his life and through Jasper she too comes a point of freedom and return. **SPOILER** At the end of the book, Marina goes back to Ireland to make peace with her own past; her own repatriation. We are told that Jasper will go to Ireland with her one day - but not for the first visit. He follows his dance master's advice. He does not cling; merely supports. He is no would-be conqueror, like Marina's first protector and her husband and Rackham. There are references to Imperialism that pick up further on this theme (and that the statue storyline is also a neat symbol of). However, for me, the ideas of Imperialism that were hinted at, were not explored as fully as they might have been.
Nevertheless, I really loved this book. And I found I didn't judge it quite as I usually judge romance novels. Although the secondary romance of Anthony and Helen didn't really work for me as a romance, its inclusion worked on so many other levels, helping to develop the themes so satisfyingly, that I cannot fault its inclusion.
All in all, it's a highly recommended from me.
Having read and been impressed by Carrie's Story and Safe Word (erotic novels written by Rosenthal under the name of Molly Weatherfield) I had been somewhat disappointed by Almost A Gentleman and hadn't troubled to seek out The Bookseller's Daughter or The Slightest Provocation. RfP had suggested The Edge of Impropriety for the book club and had she not done so, I may never have read it. How glad I am that she did!
Briefly then, the plot. There are two romances in this book. Firstly and principally, Jasper and Marina, and secondly Anthony and Helen. Many years ago, Jasper - a classical scholar - had fancied himself in love with his brother's wife. They had an affair and she became pregnant. But instead of wanting to run away with him to Greece as he hoped for, she went back to her husband and pawned the child off as her husband's son and heir. That child is Anthony.
Thirteen or so years later, Jasper visits his brother and sister-in-law at Lake Como. Anthony is still in England at school but their small daughter Sydney is with them. Jasper's brother and his wife are suddenly drowned in a boating accident and Jasper has to take over bringing up his niece and nephew (who is in fact his own son). The main part of the book begins over a decade later when Anthony is a grown man of twenty five.
Marina is Lady Gorham, a widow and celebrated novelist who is well known for her short lived peccadilloes with young men. She and Anthony are friends and this brings Jasper into her house. In fact, Marina and Jasper have already shared a moment's observation of one another in the British Museum, a moment that made a strong impression on them both. In short order, Jasper and Marina become lovers but agree that this will be a temporary state of affairs, believing that this is something they can easily compartmentalise.
Anthony is the handsome, careless Earl of the somewhat depleted estate that Jasper has been trying to restore the fortunes of. He is the very antithesis of Jasper and the two do not share a close relationship, unlike Jasper and Sydney, who, like her uncle, is fascinated by classical mythology. Helen is Sydney's governess. Her buttoned-up appearance disguises a bright-burning torch for Anthony.
This is a book rich in ideas and I'm going to concentrate on some of these in this review, perhaps to the detriment of other aspects of my reading experience. But since there are four of us simultaneously reviewing this book, I'm hoping that others will cover the areas I am not. My thoughts can be collected under three headings: Connection, Recognition, Balance.
Connection
I don't think that Rosenthal's decision to have two love stories running together is coincidence. Nor do I think it is coincidence that we have one set of older lovers and one set of younger lovers. Nor that one story is conventional (the secondary one; poverty-stricken governess and handsome Earl) and that one is not (thirty six year old former harlot and forty seven year old classical scholar with libidinous depths).
The involvement of the four characters enables Rosenthal to compare and contrast innocence and experience, youthful ideals and hard-won realism, youth and age, lovers and beloveds, separation and connection.
There is something too about time and motion here. References to the movement of bodies through time and space. And a fascination with the idea of coincidence, by which I mean coincidence in its most literal sense: the co-incidence of events and existences, giving rise to unexpected connections. The various references to weaving and tapestry lend a further dimension to this sense of lives that knowingly and unknowingly overlap throughout the story.
This idea of overlapping is introduced at the very beginning with a prologue that belongs entirely to Jasper yet which features Marina. On the day that Jasper's brother and sister-in-law are drowned in Lake Como, Marina arrives at the same resort with her new, much older husband. We are given to understand that Jasper and Marina would certainly have met had not the accident occurred. As it is, it is a decade before they set eyes on one another, by which time, Marina is no longer the 'ravishing' girl in her twenties and Jasper is no longer the dashing 'romantic adventurer'.
There are references throughout the novel to connection and separation; time and opportunity. There is a lovely passage at a masked ball where Jasper recalls the advice of dance master. The advice is memorable because he was humiliatingly singled out as a boy to receive it:
Never cling to a partner's hand, Master Hedges. You must learn to balance force and weight, support and freedom.
Later he muses as he is dancing with Marina:
His dance master had been right about one thing. You couldn't cling. You moved through time. You moved with time. Moments counted: If you wanted to make a compliment, it couldn't take longer than the few beats needed to pass and circle - as he and she were doing now, paying precise attention to the measure.
Reading this book, I was reminded more than once of E M Forster's famous mantra: only connect.
In both of the romances, and in the relationship between Anthony and Jasper, there is a sense of a connection made against the odds. For Marina and Jasper, age means some wisdom, but it also means lost ideals and an inability to trust others. For Anthony and Helen, there is a yawning social gap that makes her invisible to him. For Anthony and Jasper they are utterly different to one another and lack common ground. In each story, Sydney (a delightful character) is a key agent in bridging these gaps and bringing the connections about. For me, Sydney was a sort of personfication of coincidence. Or perhaps a storyteller within the story capable of active agency.
Recognition
Recognition may not be the best word to use here, but the idea of 'being seen' comes up again and again. And there are numerous references to costume and disguise. At various points in the story the characters both see and fail to see one another; at times taken in by another's costume, at other times, seeing below the surface to the truth of the person below.
The novel is set in 1829, a year before the death of George IV, previously the Prince Regent. The choice of period is significant. We are in the last days of the Regency period and moving towards the Victorian era with its preposterous crinolines and tiny waists. Already, fashion is headed that way and Marina mourns 'the passing of the fluid, Grecian-inspired white muslins of her youth' loathing the wide skirts and voluminous sleeves that have replaced them. Marina wears clothes with expertise, making the most of her beauty, seeing herself as an advertisement for her novels and her social position as part of their 'puffery'. She tells Jasper that 'Sometimes the name Lady Gorham feels to me rather like a costume for a fancy dress ball.'
Jasper, by contrast, is positively threadbare, the combined result of a lack of interest in his appearance and the 'cheeseparing life' he has been living in order to restore his son's inheritance after the excesses of his brother and sister-in-law depleted the estate.
Poor Helen is hidden away inside her dreary clothes. Anthony notes that he can barely see her face inside the long poke bonnet she wears. It is only when he sees her at a masked ball dressed in an old-fashioned Regency gowns as the goddess Athena, that he sees the true Helen. (Interestingly, he is dressed as an Albanian at the ball, underlining the gap between these two).
As for Anthony, like Marina, he is decorative and used to admiration. He is famous too for his exquisite taste in waistcoats (a seemingly frivolous expertise that Jasper eventually accords some weight to).
Marina and Anthony are the beautiful, showy ones whilst Jasper and Helen's attractions are much less obvious, though recognised powerfully by Anthony and Marina at key co-incidental moments. It's interesting that in each romance, the visual appeal that is most concentrated upon is the appeal of Jasper for Marina and Helen for Anthony. Not nearly as much is said about the more obvious attractions of Marina and Anthony. Incidentally, I think I read in this book the very best description I have ever read of hazel eyes: 'the bronzy green of ripening pears'. Gorgeous.
There's a lovely bit where Jasper talks about the appeal that mortals held for the classical gods:
The gods you see are like big spoiled children who like to sneak down to the servants' hall - or the wealthy young dandy who'll stand his coachman to mug after mug of ale in return for being allowed to take the ribbons now and again. Like all of us, the gods want what they can't have.... And what thrills them, what torments them with curiosity and desire, Lady Gorham, is the possibility of death. Mortality. The fragility of our bodies. Their vulnerability to the passage of time. Human limitation is something the gods can never truly know, but they find its pathos quite beautiful. And the only way they can experience death's pathos is through a human's touch.
Balance
I'm brought back to the advice of Jasper's dance master here that I quoted above: 'You must learn to balance force and weight, support and freedom.'
This is the ideal of love that - to my mind - Marina and Jasper eventually find. (If I'm going to be picky, I can't say the same for Anthony and Helen. In all honesty, that secondary story didn't fully work for me and was the weakest part of the book).
It's not insignificant that the villain of the book, Rackham, is the antithesis of this ideal.
The very nicest expression of this idea is the story of a statue that Jasper had found on his adventures, 'the little kneeling Aphrodite'. This little statue follows a parallel path to Marina, and first features in the prologue. Jasper is showing the statue - and another in the form of Eros - to his sister-in-law. The statue has left her home in Greece but Jasper (unlike most Englishmen of the time) wants to repatriate her. At the same time, Marina has arrived in Lake Como with her older husband, a man who - from the little we hear - likes to have Marina on her knees or other submissive positions.
Marina doesn't meet Jasper in Lake Como and the Aphrodite doesn't make it home. Jasper has to compromise his ideals and sell the statue given how depleted the estate is. However, a decade on, he is able to buy her back again and his dream of sending her back to Greece is renewed. At the same time, Marina comes into his life and through Jasper she too comes a point of freedom and return. **SPOILER** At the end of the book, Marina goes back to Ireland to make peace with her own past; her own repatriation. We are told that Jasper will go to Ireland with her one day - but not for the first visit. He follows his dance master's advice. He does not cling; merely supports. He is no would-be conqueror, like Marina's first protector and her husband and Rackham. There are references to Imperialism that pick up further on this theme (and that the statue storyline is also a neat symbol of). However, for me, the ideas of Imperialism that were hinted at, were not explored as fully as they might have been.
Nevertheless, I really loved this book. And I found I didn't judge it quite as I usually judge romance novels. Although the secondary romance of Anthony and Helen didn't really work for me as a romance, its inclusion worked on so many other levels, helping to develop the themes so satisfyingly, that I cannot fault its inclusion.
All in all, it's a highly recommended from me.
Right, I'm off to read what about the others thought.
5 comments:
I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
"I had been somewhat disappointed by Almost A Gentleman and hadn't troubled to seek out The Bookseller's Daughter or The Slightest Provocation."
Funny that we agree on the author but not the books. I adored Slightest Provocation and found Bookseller's Daughter interesting rather than gripping. Which is much the same verdict I gave to Edge of Impropriety, but Bookseller's Daughter has added drama, injustice, and Dark Moments; you might like it ;)
I'm curious about the Molly Weatherfield writings, but since I haven't seen the eros in any of Rosenthal's "erotic romances", I'm not sure what to expect.
I love the link you identify between connection and their clothing. I would never have noticed that!
I thought a lot about Iris Murdoch when I read your review. She wrote, "Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality." ("The Sublime and the Good 1959)
RfP - I've since read TSP and liked it a great deal but not so much as this. It is an arresting book though and I find I still remember small details from certain scenes quite vividly even though it was months ago I read it now.
The Molly Weatherfield stuff is COMPLETELY different. It is erotica; some would say porn. i hesitate to compare it to The Story of O but it is the nearest thing in my experience in that it is literary and pornographic. I seem to recall that Rosenthal thought of the world she created as a sort of Pornutopia.
Jessica - one of the things I liked about reading this book was the way Rosenthal subtly drew attention to the layers of meaning in the text. RfP mentioned in her post that when she reads Rosenthal's prose she feels forced to slow down her reading - I had a very similar experience.
Tumperkin, lovely review.
The thing is, I actually did read it as a romance. I read it as an extremely well written and stylized romance, but it was still ultimately a romance and I graded it as such. Just as I can't bear to read a *badly* written romance, a beautifully written one earns points. For all the emotional intensity , the highs and lows and genre conventions adhered to in their novels, I still can't bear to read Hoyt, Ashworth or Laurens. To me, it's the literary equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
I think it's fantastic that we have a Rosenthal in the genre. It's a pity she's leaving it (I believe that's the case?)
"I actually did read it as a romance. I read it as an extremely well written and stylized romance"
I did too, and it's in many ways such a classic genre romance plot (as well as being character-driven in that particular "romance" way) that I can't imagine reading it as another genre. The intricacy and density of the writing are at the literary end of the genre, so I'd call it a hybrid, but I do basically read it as a romance.
Tumperkin, might you read it as non-romance because of the "lack of lower-brain payoff"? (if I'm using Jessica's phrase aright :) I have to say many romances that are clearly "genre" don't do that for me either, but I can imagine that being one criterion for slicing up genres.
"The Molly Weatherfield stuff is COMPLETELY different. ... i hesitate to compare it to The Story of O"
Curious that you say it's completely different! Because that description accords with my reading of the Rosenthal/romance sex scenes (which I would similarly call literary and pornographic... but I don't find "hot").
"Iris Murdoch... 'Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.'"
Ah, super. And I just quoted some complementary William James over on Rosenthal's blog: "Love... transforms the value of the creature loved." I find that Rosenthal's writing is so referential that it seems to pull interesting references out of me in turn. Even when I'm not reading a favorite book of hers, the ideas resonate.
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