Wimsey/Vane
Dec. 27th, 2008 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancing_crowWell, the little one is better and no one else is puking, yet.
I have been rereading Sayers' Peter and Harriet books, just skipping the non-Harriet narratives, and this time I could see some of the apparatus at work. I 've read all of them often enough that I know the details of the mystery, and really I am just reading it for the piffle and the characters. I am starting to understand fanfic, because if anyone was writing decent Vane/Wimsey fanfic I'd read it and even buy it in a heartbeat because there simply are not enough of them.
The unexpected reading for me this time was Busman's Honeymoon. I could see which pieces were part of a play, and which had been layered on to lend versimilitude. There were some sections that were extremely staged, or that felt like stage directions translated into descriptive prose. I hadn't seen them so clearly before, and it startled me. I still love best the letters and journal entries that go before the wedding. All the different points of view that go into our seeing the wedding make me so Happy!
Finally I found a copy of Jilll Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations which is written from notes Sayers left for a follow-on book. This felt like another place where I could tell the difference between the notes from Sayers and Walsh's interpolations. The book is much more stylized (?) than previous books - there has to be a better word but I can't think of it. The book contrasts two married couples; Peter and Harriet and another couple where the woman was "rescued" from poverty and a working life by a wealthy man. It almost feels like a polemic on the topic of How Marriages Should Work. Clearly Peter and Harriet are Doing It Right because they are happy. Clearly they are happy because they treat eachother as fully human and reasoning, rather than as handy but limited types.(I may have that backwards - they could be happy because they are doing it right) The other couple looks like a fairytale but they are Unhappy, and short pieces of their internal monologues reveal that they are Doing it Wrong. Somehow the failure to let each couple be happy in their own way is what distracts and distresses me the most. If there had been room for different pairs to have mutually mysterious or even unappealing ways of interacting I would have had a much easier time of it. While it was nice to spend time with Harriet and Peter, it is not a very satisfying read for me.
Walsh wrote another Wimsey/Vane book on her own, with fewer notes and even more interpolation and I like it even less. I don't think it is the fault of the author, at least not entirely. I think, after reading all the Lord Peter short stories this afternoon followed by an essay by Carolyn Heilbrun (who wrote the Amanda Cross mysteries) that Sayers lost interest in Peter, and I'm not sure anyone else can animate him. I feel the same way about Kermit - without Henson, it is merely a Kermit impersonator, sometimes getting it right, more often getting itwrong just slightly off. Which leads me to think that fanfic probably wouldn't work after all. Which is a gigantic bummer, but at lelast I have these books I can revisit when the going gets dark.
I have been rereading Sayers' Peter and Harriet books, just skipping the non-Harriet narratives, and this time I could see some of the apparatus at work. I 've read all of them often enough that I know the details of the mystery, and really I am just reading it for the piffle and the characters. I am starting to understand fanfic, because if anyone was writing decent Vane/Wimsey fanfic I'd read it and even buy it in a heartbeat because there simply are not enough of them.
The unexpected reading for me this time was Busman's Honeymoon. I could see which pieces were part of a play, and which had been layered on to lend versimilitude. There were some sections that were extremely staged, or that felt like stage directions translated into descriptive prose. I hadn't seen them so clearly before, and it startled me. I still love best the letters and journal entries that go before the wedding. All the different points of view that go into our seeing the wedding make me so Happy!
Finally I found a copy of Jilll Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations which is written from notes Sayers left for a follow-on book. This felt like another place where I could tell the difference between the notes from Sayers and Walsh's interpolations. The book is much more stylized (?) than previous books - there has to be a better word but I can't think of it. The book contrasts two married couples; Peter and Harriet and another couple where the woman was "rescued" from poverty and a working life by a wealthy man. It almost feels like a polemic on the topic of How Marriages Should Work. Clearly Peter and Harriet are Doing It Right because they are happy. Clearly they are happy because they treat eachother as fully human and reasoning, rather than as handy but limited types.(I may have that backwards - they could be happy because they are doing it right) The other couple looks like a fairytale but they are Unhappy, and short pieces of their internal monologues reveal that they are Doing it Wrong. Somehow the failure to let each couple be happy in their own way is what distracts and distresses me the most. If there had been room for different pairs to have mutually mysterious or even unappealing ways of interacting I would have had a much easier time of it. While it was nice to spend time with Harriet and Peter, it is not a very satisfying read for me.
Walsh wrote another Wimsey/Vane book on her own, with fewer notes and even more interpolation and I like it even less. I don't think it is the fault of the author, at least not entirely. I think, after reading all the Lord Peter short stories this afternoon followed by an essay by Carolyn Heilbrun (who wrote the Amanda Cross mysteries) that Sayers lost interest in Peter, and I'm not sure anyone else can animate him. I feel the same way about Kermit - without Henson, it is merely a Kermit impersonator, sometimes getting it right, more often getting it
