Like someone way above said (sorry, I’m not re-reading all the comments) my primary irritation with the book was that the character growth among both Graham and Submit was taking place separately. I read a romance to experience a couple growing together.

The backstory was nice, but I felt like the romance of it all didn’t really get started until around page 200, or perhaps later.

I thought Submit was a fool for taking up with Gerald at the end. She had 1/3rd of a massive fortune coming her way, and a new means to support herself otherwise in her writing. Why pick up with the leavings-off of Roslyn? I loved that Graham shouted him out of the house at the end, “What are you doing here? She’s waiting for you!” and Gerald scampers back to Roslyn, then Graham turns to Submit and says, “He only likes women who can’t love him.” A perfect insight.

The near-drowning of Submit in her dress with Henry at her side gave us a lot of insight into the man, but that wasn’t the scene that stuck with me the most.

The scene that made the most impact on me was after Graham and Submit have sex the first time, and she has confessed her alter ego, then nursed a ridiculous Roslyn back to the edge of sanity. Submit packs her bags and goes to board the carriage and Graham, in his _new_ wisdom, forgives her for the serial that has caused him so much pain, and even encourages her to keep at it. He’s grown enough to know that words on a page are not a true reflection of who he is. And he’s also grown enough to know that his actions have contributed to her situation – therefore makes amends in the simplest way he can.

My second favourite scene is right before that when he asks her to marry him the first time in front of everyone, knowing he will be fodder to even more vicious gossip, but laying his heart bare anyway.

I won’t be re-reading this one. I don’t even particularly like historicals, so it was more than a bit of a slog for me. I enjoyed the perversion of our expectations in the characters presented to us. Expecially how Graham was an absentee father, instead of being re-written into modern expectations of a loving and present man. But the love story wasn’t strong enough to put this book back into my hands.

Oh, of course!

Thank you for that very lucid explanation.

In a way a lot of latter-day romance is anti-literary modernism, isn’t it? The heroines simply accept the societal forces and then do what they can.

I tried to write a review for THE SHEIK some time ago, and then my head exploded–literally; had to mop it up–trying to come to grips with the rape/forceful seduction issue. So I gave up. But while preparing for the review I did read through the book more carefully and noted how systematically the author paved the way for Diana’s eventual life in the desert by pointing out at every turn how much she loved the desert and its solitude and wildness. Her love for the sheik, viewed in that sense, seems an extension of her love for the desert and a vehicle for her to remain in a place where she is happiest and most far away from the demands and expectations of her society.

The demands and expectations of his society, of course, is a whole different quagmire.

(And when I got to the part explaining the sheik’s origins, I totally went, so that’s where all these not-so-other sultans/pashas/amirs I’d read in the early 90s came from!)

Am I alone?

No, no, of course not. By now you’ve probably had a glimpse at the other comments and seen that quite a few other readers too feel “Huh?” or “meh” about it.

BLACK SILK is a strange book, no doubt about it. Frankly, I was convinced to nearly the end that they were not going to end up together. I’m still not sure the ending wasn’t put on to satisfy romance constraints.

Even when I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, I can’t believe what’s going on. And I never had a deep emotional response to the relationship of the H/H–rather I felt more for the relationship between Henry and Submit and between Graham and Peg.

For me, the sheer richness of the prose, the unpredictability of the characters, the equal unpredictability of where the narrative was going kept me returning to the book. I read it over a long period of time, months, probably.

But I can see very well how another reader could have dropped it altogether along the way. Or finished it and went WTF.

There are books that leave a deep emotional impact on me. This one didn’t but I feel it should be held up as an example for all romance writers, for its fearlessness, originality, and depth of characterization.

(Heh, if the dude at Huffington Post wants an intellectual love story he needs to look no further.)

Besides, I think Jessica would only choose books for discussion that lend themselves to opposing views–not that any book doesn’t, but some books do far more than others. And this is one of them.

I didn’t have a chance to reread for this discussion, unfortunately. However, I still vividly remember being blown away by the opening scene, because it was so different from other romances, and so gorgeously written, and so interesting. I still think that.

And now I want to reread them all, except I try not to do that too often, since I fear there will never be any more.

Look, if you want to say, “Graham is Graham — maybe he’s not the most typical earl, but he is as Ivory portrays him, take it or leave it,” I can accept that argument, even if I personally can’t accept Graham. But how we meet these characters matters, and for me as a reader, the book either opens up new worlds, or it closes down depending on whether the characters and their situations make internal sense. There are such massive logical disconnects in Ivory’s portrayals of both Graham and Submit that it stopped me cold. If an author can’t explain to me why an earl or marchioness would behave that way, she shouldn’t make them peers of the realm.

@Marianne McA: I completely agree with you RE Henry setting up these two to meet. I was internally disagreeing with Janet in her review on DA about the whole “did Henry plan this thing” but of course didn’t comment on it because –maybe I’m wrong?…but to me I’m so on the fence about it. It doesn’t seem like something he would do, but then again, I can’t deny the buildup of the story seems to support it, and maybe it’s my reading that’s flawed, and I’m missing something. But I was a little annoyed with the story while reading it that it appeared that’s what Ivory was hinting happened. It just seemed a little far-fetched, and unrealistic. I’m glad I’m not alone in this assessment.

I loved this book when I read it…it was the first really dense romance I’d ever read, and I really appreciated the fact that the author trusted the reader enough to engage at that level (not to say anything about those who didn’t enjoy it–I know several people who couldn’t wade through it)…it was just so outside the realm of anything else I’d read by that point in time.
Since then I’ve read several authors with similar writing styles, but this book will always hold a special place in my heart because it does so many things differently. I wasn’t particularly taken with either the hero or the heroine, but the story of them coming together is compelling.

I actually adored Graham – he’s the first and archetypal Ivory hero with his flawed charisma and incredible looks. I really didn’t much like Submit, but then had this acute moment of personal identification with her during the scene at the summer party when she’s watching the yachting and experiencing a sense of out-of-placedness. Which kind of made me think that on one level BS is quite a straightforward story (to appropriate the language of the American high school) of school nerd gets the popular jock.

I wouldn’t have finished reading this if it hadn’t been for the discussion: I’d have stopped at the end of part 1. My impression of the book is very much that the two halves were different – as if the author had written the first half, stuck the manuscript in a drawer, and finished it as a more experienced writer.
But there was a week between my reading the first and second halves: perhaps I was in a different mood as a reader.

The plot irritated me in the first half. I suspect Ivory did her research, and these things could theoretically have happened, but I couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Would a court really kick a widow out of her homes in order to hear a claim on the estate by an illegitimate (by definition unable to inherit through blood ties) son? Would a court really try a neighbour of the Queen on the say-so of someone who thought he might have seen a laundress getting into his carriage? It just all seemed preposterous. (And if Sayers did her research, wouldn’t the hero have been tried in the House of Lords?)
And then the pictures…

So basically, I was annoyed throughout that half of the book – and had then worked it out that the lawyer was the villain of the piece, deliberately sabotaging their lives – because why else would wealthy people be so badly advised? The only thing that kept me reading was Henry: I thought that was a genuinely interesting idea, that two people who knew him well could read him so differently – and I was intrigued to find out why.

So, in the second half, the plot went away. (Hooray!) Sadly, so did the interesting question of Henry’s character. I thought this part of the book was really readable. I disliked the protagonists, the hero especially, but I believed in the relationship. He was self-absorbed, selfish, emotionally stupid, and never proactive, but what was nice was that the author kept him that way to the end. You could absolutely imagine that they’d be HEA, in their lovely castle, with their tons of money. (He’d have been unfaithful to her, but she’d have accepted it.) I knew it wasn’t working for me as a romance when my heart leapt at the announcement that she was engaged to the other bloke. (Gerald?) I saw it as an escape for her.
In the second part, the things that annoyed me were the surprise inheritance – I didn’t believe he wouldn’t have known how the title was left – and the box of pictures. Because, you know, if my uncle had left me a box containing grainy pornographic footage of me in my student days, and a court sub-poenaed (sp?) the box – I’d take the film out and burn it, before giving them the box. Mind you, that’s the hero in a nutshell, always reactive, never proactive.

So, to sum up, I thought the first half silly, and the second, which was less about events and more about the characters, a good deal better. I have to like the protagonists to get the emotional lift I want from romance, so the second half worked for me more as general fiction rather than as romance. I wish she’d focused more on Henry – at the end she seemed to be suggesting that Henry had somehow deliberately chosen to initiate this train of events, which just seemed a feeble idea – how could he have predicted the peculiarities of each person’s reactions to events?

Maybe the more metaphorical meanings of the word “palpable” were the ones Ivory was hoping readers would bring to their reading of this phrase. But for me the primary meaning of “palpable” is that you can “palpate” or touch something. So since you can’t palpate a smell, this phrase is telling me that her sense of purpose isn’t at all palpable.

(sorry, I couldn’t get the quote thingy to work…)

Maybe that’s what bothered me most about this book. I didn’t like Sleepless in Seattle or Serendipity either. I want to see the journey the characters take together. I don’t find it satisfying for the main characters to be apart so much.