Recent reading

[luzula]

Badort by Tove and Hanna Folkesson (2023) [Spatown]
Another of the slew of recent Swedish historical novels that looked interesting. This one is cross-class f/f set in 1938 in the dilapidated spa town of Borgholm on the island of Öland. I don't know much about the time/place, but I thought it had a very good sense of setting, with lots of specific detail of both place and attitudes. It's litfic and not genre romance; the authors are a married couple where one of them did the drawings in the book, which match up nicely with the impressionistic language. The two main characters don't end up together and never see each other again, but only meet during a few intense days which completely change the course of both of their lives. I enjoyed it!

The Fiery Cross by Lady Kitty Vincent (1930)
A Jacobite historical, which I originally hoped would be about Margaret and David Ogilvy, whose descendant the author is. Instead it follows another newly married Ogilvy couple (Ronald and Mairi) through the '45, though Margaret and David do appear. This book is definitely worth reading, even if I think it suffers in comparison to Flight of the Heron--the prose is not as good, I think, and she's not quite as good at...setting the whole thing up so that it hangs together well, I guess? But some scenes I enjoyed were Mairi getting her dilemma between honour and duty, when she is asked to get information by conversing with a enemy guest (which breaks the law of hospitality!) Also the scene where she, Lady Ogilvy and Lady Kilmarnock drink General Hawley under the table, thus making him late for the battle of Falkirk, is great. I appreciated the scenes of women interacting!

The book compares interestingly to FotH, because in a way it's a variation on the story of Ewen and Alison and Keith, with a different ending. Because yes, there's a Keith analogue: the young subaltern Tony Wylie, who is wounded and captured at Falkirk, is nursed by Mairi, and falls head-over-heels in love with her. Wylie has a strong sense of honour in common with Keith, but they are otherwise not similar, since Wylie is young and idealistic. Okay, I'm going to spoil the ending here, because this book is not accessible online and there is currently only one copy of it on abebooks.com, which sells for $70, so I don't think a lot of you are going to read it. So I suppose it is fairly predictable that when Ronald and Mairi are about to be captured after Culloden, Wylie is going to be with the party of redcoats! He protests against the senior officer who is about to kill Ronald and (probably) rape Mairi, and on account of his good family connections, he prevails. This is of course similar to FotH, which I suspect the author has read, but similar situations also occurred in actual history. So Ronald and Mairi end up in the Edinburgh Castle gaol.

Mairi wastes away and dies of consumption, and for a while there I thought Ronald was going to go willingly to his death on the scaffold. But no! He is moved to Newcastle instead, and who should be there but Wylie, who is deeply grieved by the news of Mairi's death. He confesses his love for her to Ronald, who only replies, 'of course you loved her, how could you help it?' Wylie also comes armed with rope and a file, ready to help Ronald break out of gaol. Ronald at first protests: he can't possibly let Wylie do this, and anyway he wants to die. But Wylie replies that Mairi would have wanted him to live, whereupon Ronald proposes that Wylie run away with him to America! He can't possibly want to continue serving in the British Army after this, anyway. And so Ronald breaks out of jail and, after a few further adventures, they get on a ship together. The end!

Obviously this is a very slashy ending, which is all well and good, but the thing is, most of the earlier relationship building is het--aside from the Wylie/Mairi, Ronald and Mairi are portrayed as still in the first flush of love. So it felt a little imbalanced that way. Also, Mairi didn't have to die--she could have lived, and they could all have had a happy poly life together! Hmm, I am now wondering if there exists a third Jacobite novel where the Ewen-analogue dies, and the Alison-analogue and the Keith-analogue end up married... Oh, and I should perhaps also say that the blurb lets you know that when Ronald and Mairi's noble deer-hound Angus dies, no reader's eyes will be dry! I confess that my eyes were indeed not dry when the dog died.

Comments

[sanguinity]

I didn't go down without a fight: before I clicked on that spoiler cut, I spent a good twenty minutes looking at every option I had for getting hands on this book that DIDN'T involve $100 (including shipping) from the UK, but even the academic library's ILL network failed me.

(And now search history is all borked to hell, because in the US, most books entitled "The Fiery Cross" are about the KKK -- and not all of the books are critical. Good thing I didn't use Google to search. :-/ )

Now that I've clicked the spoiler a cut, I am very much intrigued! You're right, that is an AMAZINGLY slashy ending, and I wish I could read it too! Maybe someday...

[sovay]

And now search history is all borked to hell, because in the US, most books entitled "The Fiery Cross" are about the KKK

I also had a double-take on seeing the title for that reason.

[sanguinity]

There's also clearly a Scotland connection of some sort for the phrase, because a half-dozen books were set in Edinburgh, or were about the 1745 Rising. One of the Outlander books has that title; there's some kind of historical romance about Montrose with that title; etc.

But yeah, those aren't the first things that come up when you're searching for that title in the US. :-/

[regshoe]

To add to luzula's explanation below: It's the full version of what Alan makes a miniature one of at Corrynakiegh to send a message to John Breck Maccoll! ‘This cross is something in the nature of the crosstarrie, or fiery cross, which is the signal of gathering in our clans; yet he will know well enough the clan is not to rise, for there it is standing in his window, and no word with it.’

[sanguinity]

Thank you!

[luzula]

I actually didn't know about the KKK connection. : / The fiery cross was something that was used in Highland clans to call people out to war; one of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books has that title, too.

[sovay]

The fiery cross was something that was used in Highland clans to call people out to war; one of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books has that title, too.

Considering how much the modern Ku Klux Klan was shaped by Thomas Dixon Jr.'s The Clansman (1905)/D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), I wonder if it was imported deliberately from the Scottish tradition in one of those heroic, romantic callbacks that nationalists go for. [edit] Ding ding ding! Jeez.

[luzula]

Ugh ugh. /o\

[sovay]

Ugh ugh.

It's like the runic alphabets that were just minding their own business.

[luzula]

The Frederick the Great fandom over at cahn's salon call these The Worst Fanboys (German Nazis, in the Frederick the Great case).

[sovay]

The Frederick the Great fandom over at cahn's salon call these The Worst Fanboys (German Nazis, in the Frederick the Great case).

I like that designation.

[sanguinity]

Oh, fuck. I physically recoiled from the screen.

Echoing luzula's comment about The Worst Fanboys.

[sovay]

Oh, fuck. I physically recoiled from the screen.

I am extremely sorry about providing cause for recoil.

[sanguinity]

No, it's good to know who your fannish neighbors are, so to speak, and especially so when you want nothing to do with them.

[luzula]

Well, I can lend you my copy, if you want? Although I guess you're spoiled for the plot now--do you still want to read it?

Fix-it fic would be very cute. They are all basically 20 years old and very earnest, and I'm sure they'd all blush sweetly when they got to the kissing. (At least Mairi and Wylie are explicitly that age? I can't remember if Ronald's age is stated, but he doesn't seem old.)

(Also, the post is now edited--I could not keep track of whether his name was Roland or Ronald, apparently...)

[sanguinity]

That is a kind offer! I hesitate over shipping costs, and also in that we've already had one book go lost between there and here, and I'd hate to have it happen to this one, too. But yes, I still want to read it. I wish scanning a book was easier!

[luzula]

Sorry for the late reply! I'm pretty I know why the other book was lost: I did not tape the package closed securely enough, and I would make sure to do so this time.

The shipping costs don't look like they'd be that bad: there are various options, but it looks like it should be possible for about $16? I'm willing to do it, if you want.

[sanguinity]

Let's give it a try, then! And maybe it'll be possible to get it scanned while I have it. (No promises, I don't have good access to a scanner anymore.)

[luzula]

Oh wait, that didn't occur to me: I could scan it myself! I have access to good scanners at work. Let's do that instead, perhaps? Although I guess reading from scans is less pleasant for you.

[sanguinity]

If you send me a scanned pdf, I think we can do what we did with Marryat's Signal book: OCR it with Adobe Acrobat into a text-based pdf, and then change that into an epub. The OCR process is seldom perfect, but I've read and enjoyed imperfect OCRs before.

[luzula]

Cool! And perhaps regshoe will take it on as a Gutenberg project when the copyright has gone out...

[sovay]

Also, Mairi didn't have to die--she could have lived, and they could all have had a happy poly life together!

I feel this way about both the book and film versions of The Citadel (1937/38), where a different character dies in each but I'd just as rather have kept all of them alive.

[luzula]

*reads the Wikipedia entry*

Huh, that seems like a story where the writers felt like they had to kill someone off to give the main character angst...but to me, it feels like there would be enough angst in the professional life/public health storyline.

[sovay]

Huh, that seems like a story where the writers felt like they had to kill someone off to give the main character angst...but to me, it feels like there would be enough angst in the professional life/public health storyline.

That's my feeling also and I demand fix-it. The stakes don't always have to be personal-loss high!

[regshoe]

Glad you enjoyed The Fiery Cross! I agree that the ending was unsatisfyingly unbalanced in the relationships (except that I wouldn't have found the everyone-lives poly resolution satisfying either)—the escape to America did feel weirdly undeveloped and sort of tacked-on; it felt as though Vincent was trying to write fix-it fic for FotH without actually dealing with all the interesting complexities of the better book. I really liked all the female-characters interaction we got (although the sad lack of anything remotely femslashy in there was annoying!), and that Falkirk bit is great :D

[luzula]

Whatever the unsatisfying aspects of the ending, it was definitely worth reading! : )

Now that I think of it: in the Falkirk bit, aren't they also betraying hospitality by being deceitful to their guests? And Mairi isn't in the least remorseful about that. Sure, they're not trying to get information from them, but they are trying to delay them. Not that I think this is any sort of terrible crime.

[regshoe]

Oh, that's a good thought! Hmm, I don't know—perhaps it's not deceitful in quite the same way (the soldiers could perfectly well work out that they were being delayed/refuse to be delayed if they were sensible about it, so it's their own fault they're not, kind of logic?).