Tumperkin’s Take

I read Meredith Duran’s debut, Duke of Shadows last year and could tell that Duran was going to be an author I’d enjoy.  I meant to review it but it was one of those books that I miss the boat on (about 70% of what I read I never review despite the best of intentions.  I tend to find that if I don’t review something within about a month of reading it, it doesn’t get reviewed.  How the likes of Jane from Dear Author can review practically every book they read, I just don’t know).

Anyway, when Jessica suggested we jointly review BBYT, I was happy to agree.  And it did not disappoint.  It’s a better book than Duke of Shadows, a more accomplished and confident book altogether, with a stronger structure and a defter touch.

The hero is James Durham, Viscount Sanburne, heir to the Earl of Moreland.  The heroine is Lydia Boyce, the oldest daughter of an Egyptian scholar and a scholar herself, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge.  This circumstance, along with a plethora of other details, place the book in a richly-observed late Victorian period.

This is a setting I like.  My favourite historical settings are Regency and Georgian but this later Victorian period is also one that resonates with me.  It’s a society on the brink of true modernity with fast, efficient railways and mechanised industry.  The modern world with its looming changes: universal suffrage, the women’s movement etc. is within glimpsing distance.  Within a few decades, the privileged world of the aristocracy supported by its vast pool of underpaid servants, will begin to wither.

The main part of the book opens with James interrupting a lecture Lydia is giving in her father’s stead.  He is oblivious to Lydia and set upon creating a scene with his father.  We come to learn that James nurses a deep anger with his father and that he has made it his mission in life to goad and embarrass him.  As the book wears on, we learn the reason for the anger but at this early stage, we are allowed to judge James as Lydia does, as a spoiled, excessive wastrel.  James has purchased what he believes to be a piece of genuine Egyptian antiquity, a stela, that his father will covet.  But Lydia – irate at James’ interruption – publicly (and correctly) pronounces it to be a fake, thus setting off a chain of events that will bring her own beloved father’s reputation into question and indeed her very life into danger.

James’ raison d’etre is the animosity he feels towards his father.  By contrast Lydia treasures her role as her father’s right hand, idealising both him and his achievements.  Despite her own academic interests lying elsewhere, she devotes herself to being her father’s assistant.  Duran neatly contrasts how James and Lydia’s views of their respective fathers develops, and explores the idea of faith – Lydia’s unerring faith in her father, James’ complete lack of faith in his and then, ultimately, the faith they place in one another – to great effect.

Despite a few reservations which I mention later, I very much liked the character of James.  But then he is that archetypal romance rogue that I am a sucker for: he is beautiful and damaged; he is a self-loathing wastrel bent on destruction.  How many times have I written such a description of a hero?  Why is it so endlessly appealing?  Maybe it’s the healer complex that so many female romance readers have.

Lydia, by contrast, I struggled with a little.  She too is a ‘type’ that romance readers will be familiar with.  She is the brave/ forthright/ capable type yet vulnerable inside.  She is the academic heroine with a prickly skin and a passionate soul.  Do I find her harder to like because she is a heroine and I just give heroes an easier ride?  (I do find myself falling in love with heroes regularly but heroines only rarely).  Or is it because we demand our heroines to be less archetypal and more real than heroes?  I’m not sure.  But heroines will always find it harder to win me over.

Duran uses these very familiar types but she breathes life into them too.  Lydia, for example, shows herself in a quite unflattering light on a few occasions in her ongoing bickering with her middle sister.  I enjoyed that untypical facet of her character.  Duran managed to make it both unattractive and understandable.  The other thing that was good about Lydia was how she ‘read’ her encounters with Sanburne.  She will think he likes her, then worry that her instinct is wrong and that he is merely playing her.  These vacillating worries of Lydia’s felt authentic and won my sympathy.

I did have a few reservations about BBYT.  Neither the underlying reason for James’ anger nor how he expressed it against his father completely convinced me.  Similarly, the ease with which that issue was resolved disappointed me.  It made the whole thing feel manufactured and convenient.  I also rather wished that Lydia’s own scholarly endeavours had been made more of.  At one point, she objects to being referred to as a bluestocking – the implication being that she is self-educated – when she is a graduate of Girton.  I would liked to have seen this ‘professionalism’ demonstrated.  We got a little taste of it at the outset of the book when she denounces the stela as a fake and I would have loved a little more of that.

But really, these are quibbles.  BBYT is a quality read and I enjoyed it greatly.  I have great hopes for the next book featuring Phin and Mina.  We met Mina briefly in this book and she is very much more to my taste as a heroine.

In fact, I think I might just be able to fall in love with her.

Jessica’s Rejoinder

Isn’t Tumperkin smart? Love that review, and agree with pretty much all of it. So I’ll try to add a few different observations.

Like T, I had read Duke of Shadows last year and really enjoyed it. And I also think this is a better book. It’s very well written — beautifully, soaringly written in many places — and James and Lydia are intelligent, sympathetically flawed, and very interesting characters.

I admit I was reluctant to start this book. Yet another rake/spinster story?  But as soon as I read the first page, I was hooked. We begin with an incredibly gripping and heartbreaking scene in which Lydia comes to realize that the man she thought she’d marry wants another woman.

Duran does something in this book that very few authors of rake romances manage to do: she conveyed what the partying life was like among the rakish nobility. I have a secret fondness for the film Marie Antoinette. It fails on many levels, but it succeeds in three ways: the soundtrack, the cinematography, and finally, the way Sophia Coppola manages to convey the totally alluring, drifting quality of the privileged party set on the verge of dislocating downfall, giving you the feel that you are there, and, despite the dangers, want to be.

In BBYT, I thought the early scene when James emerges from drug induced fog at his own party captured it beautifully, and a later scene at the races also completely conveyed the odd mix of boredom and excitement, easy privilege and self-conscious unease, breaking and relying on social conventions at once, and friendships forged in a shared ironic attitude to nobility that are somehow both totally casual and very deeply felt.

Tumperkin mentions the feel of the threat of oncoming societal changes. I think this was a very important theme in the book. Here’s James thinking about his long friendship with Phin:

“Eggheaded dolts spoiled into uselessness: thus, at the tender age of ten, had [Phin] dismissed the majority of Britain’s future leaders. Eyeing James, he’d added Really, I have no idea how you turned out so interesting. I do hope you manage to keep it up.

James had tried. For years afterward, whenever he found himself in a situation where his position gave him advantages, he tested himself with Phin’s rule: Is this interesting? — which soon came to mean, Is this original? It turned out, far too often, that the answer was No.“

Lydia, too, has an emerging class consciousness — “He behaved very stupidly, and people adored him for it. Ah the wonders of a title!” she thinks of James — but, like James, her attitude towards privilege is informed not only by social consciousness but by her personal history, her experience of being an educated, strong, competent woman in a world where that makes her even more dependent and vulnerable than an ignorant, weak, but married one.

I wanted to point this out because I think, like their attitudes towards their fathers, this is another example of a kind of mirroring in the book, that worked very well to both say something interesting about the times and provide internal and external conflict between James and Lydia.

Like T says, there were a lot of hallmarks of the era, not just in the technology or clothing, but the emerging mass media, new awareness of sexuality — James’ every move is reported on by the press, Lydia thinks to herself that the male powers that be want her body to remain a stranger to her, for example.

I found the sensual scenes especially well done (and we all know how easy it is to go wrong here). Like this one:

The fit of their bodies startled her. It felt like an answer to some question she yet hadn’t thought to ask.

Or this one:

He praised her for doing exactly what she should not do, and the fit of his body against hers was causing something within her to unfold, to grow stronger and clearer as it developed. Like an anagram unriddling itself, or a maze slowly straightening.

You know how the heroes are always so much taller than heroines? And the only way you know this is the constant references to something hard prodding the heroine’s belly? I am happy to report that Duran actually uses the height difference beautifully in a scene where Lydia finds herself level with James’ throat and cannot stop herself from opening her mouth on his skin.  (although it must be said, given my last post, that Duran is a smell offender, when she has Lydia think James once smelled “civilized and predictable”).

I absolutely loved it that Lydia’s sexual awakening was a coming into personal power. I think every romance writer claims to do this, but far fewer manage it.

Did he like it? Oh, she did not care. This restless, breathless feeling knocking through her might have been desire, but it could as easily be anger. The only thing clear to her was that she’d had it wrong, worrying about what she revealed of herself of what he or anyone else might think about her. It was not their opinions that mattered. ‘I do not do this for you,’ she said. I do it for myself.

This sets James back in a way that romance readers expect and enjoy:

She had warned him, once. I possess a talent for a memorable exit. But he hadn’t listened. His opinion of her was much like a sand castle: it stood in constant need of repair.

As in all the best romances, James and Lydia need each other to become capable of loving each other. Duran reminds us that love requires a mature, resilient, open-eyed kind of faith, something neither has managed alone. As Lydia thinks in yet another wonderful passage:

Faith. She knew better than anyone what it was. More durable than any substance science had discovered — and when it shattered, more violent and cutting than glass. She would walk across its shards for the rest of her life. At every step the pain would be with her.

Like Tumperkin, I can’t wait to read Phin’s book, which I already own. The sequel baiting was pretty blatant in a late scene where we meet Mina, one of my few criticisms of the book, but it was also quite effective, so what do I know? I can say I ended up with seven pages of Kindle notes, every one of them a reminder of a turn of phrase or bit of characterization or setting that moved or awed me. It’s so nice to have another autobuy author for my very short list.

And for anyone who made it to the end of this post and would like a copy of Bound By Your Touch, I happen to have an extra copy. Make a comment by Monday at midnight EST to be entered in a drawing.