"Some people tell you the darkness makes you pretty / and light your cigarettes for you"

[larryhammer]

To jonquil and anyone else worried about the mashup language of Gail Carriger's Soulless: well, yes. But that's not really the problem.

A symptomatic sentence:

Mrs. Loontwill did what any well-prepared mother would do upon finding her unmarried daughter in the arms of a gentleman werewolf: she had very decorous, and extremely loud, hysterics.

This exhibits many of the virtues and flaws of the writing in this novel: it has abundant wit erratically deployed, a slightly off-kilter pacing on the sentence level, and not-infrequent lapses in precision, especially regarding things social -- in this case, that being the werewolf is actually a nobleman. If the first quality is enough to make you overlook the other things, and if you are interested in a steampunk paranormal romance with inventive worldbuilding, then this is very much the book for you.

The sentence above doesn't show two things. First, the language is a stew of anachronism, taking terms and manners of phrase from throughout the 19th century. There are signs, however, that this could be deliberate, as the setting itself is a stew suggesting a time anywhere throughout the second half of the 19th century. We are long enough after the American Civil War that resentment over taking sides is considered a long memory, but John Snow's cholera research of the 1850s is recent. The modes of fashion seem to be spread over about a decade (possibly the 1870s? -- but I'm too tired from this cold to look this up; bustles are currently shrinking in size, for what it's worth). Second, is the prose, which tends to maunder and repeat itself. The transitions between POVs and emotional states are not handled precision, and above all wit requires precision or it gets jarred off its tracks.

(Also, it does not take a couple hours after "sunrise" for the full moon to come up. Nor after sunset, assuming that was a typo.)

One particularly damning aspect for me: Alexia has no relationships with any servants except the family butler, and that only when plot machinations require it. This is unbelievable enough in a woman who at 26 is deemed a spinster by her very silly family and so somewhat cut off from them, but worse, in at least two ways the story would have evolved differently if she had just minimal contact with a maid while dressing herself, which breaks my willing suspension of disbelief.

I don't regret the time spent reading it -- see above about the abundant wit and my persistent cold. But it is definitely a flawed book.

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Decorum and high volume in one's hysterics are mutually exclusive. Really.

"Alexia" sounds like a euphemism for "illiterate" but that's certainly just me reading too much into a stray word.

[larryhammer]

Alexia is the daughter of an Italian man named Alessandro and an English woman of little sense, if that's any help.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I've tried to read it, but the little details of useage and attitude are off*, and the voice seems coy.

Maybe I just need another mood--a lot of friends adored the book.


*off as in making me see modern people in dress up, and not nineteenth C people in extraordinary circs.

[larryhammer]

Not so much off as all over the place. There's some Victorian mentality in there, mixed with the modern. The voice is only intermittently coy, I thought, apparently from attempting a Victorian narrative voice and not quite landing it.

It's fun, if flawed.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think I need to wait for a 'fun' mood and then go for it.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Good luck; I never found a mood indulgent enough.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I'm not willing to give a pass on "well, it's *supposed* to be an alternate-reality temporal stew", because it doesn't read like AR with surprising temporal changes. It reads like somebody didn't do her history. If you're going to do "history didn't run in the linear direction you're familiar with", then you have to do it blatantly once or twice to make clear it's a conscious choice. Have the Prince Regent strolling through leading a leopard on a leash. Have somebody pull out her pocket calculator. As it stands, there are no clues for the reader that the author is being cleverer than you think.

[larryhammer]

Well, there's no pocket calculator, but there's a Babbage machine in someone's parlour -- not to mention the dirigibles flying over the city and high-steampunk multi-lens magnifying goggles. But aside from that, yes, exactly that.

---L.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

All of those are bog-standard generic steampunk trappings.

[larryhammer]

Mm -- point. Aside from some medical apparatus out of a Frankenstein movie, which a different bog standard.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

It's sad how fast steampunk skidded down into bog-standard tropes and trappings, stereotyping, and general auctorial laziness by people who can't be arsed to do something creative. The genre lifecycle seems to have been compressed into a briefer than usual time.

[1crowdedhour.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I bounced off this book hard. Other people seemed to enjoy it, so I was questioning my senses.

[larryhammer]

I have a couple who very much enjoyed it as well. Only goes to show how different everyone's reading protocols are.

---L.