starlady: (bibliophile)
Dorothy Sayers got six chapters into Thrones, Dominations (the title comes from a Milton quote, which already indicates Sayers' general frame of mind at the time) sometime in the midst of the abdication crisis and putting on "Busman's Honeymoon" and never went back to it; the trustees of her son's estate eventually contracted with Jill Paton Walsh to finish it sixty years later. Somewhat to my surprise, Paton Walsh does a very credible job. 

I spent a lot of time talking about Peter's character development throughout the series in my posts on these books, and Paton Walsh managed not to make him regress at all, which I appreciated--there was perhaps a touch more of the old banter than I thought strictly called for, but it was by no means unbearable or wholly OOC, and I was pleased for that. I do think that if Sayers had continued the book it would have been rather more full of prose than dialogue, but all in all I quite liked it. The background politics are brought in a little more obviously than before, but not in a way that seems too horribly obtrusive, either; but then, I can't read anything from the 1930s without thinking of the war, so I would have been thinking about it no matter what. 

Anyway, if you like Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, I would recommend picking this one up. I don't have any desire to read Paton Walsh's other Wimsey books--I think her writing up The Attenbury Emeralds misses the entire point by a shockingly large margin, and I am no fan of what she did to St. George--but this one is a fun coda to the actual series of eleven. (In some ways, I have to admit that I consider Busman's Honeymoon a coda to the series of ten.)

Spoilers about the killer )
starlady: Holmes and Watson walking around New York (springtime in new york)
source: A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery (1987)
audio: Scala & Kolacny Brothers, "Heroes"
length: 3:20
download: 27MB on Dropbox
summary: We can be us, just for one day

A Festivids 2016 treat for josette-arnauld.

Original Festivids post



I devoured Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels last year and was blabbering about them to my roommate (who had only read the Vane novels); I convinced her to read the rest of the books and she showed me the Petherbridge/Walters miniseries. The casting is divine, but the adaptations start out good with Strong Poison and go downhill from there. This is my love letter to Harriet and Peter, though it's not the vid I initially envisioned because the footage just doesn't exist, from a combination of the exigencies of BBC budgets (minimal) and the bad choices made in the adaptation of Gaudy Night, which rob the story of a lot of its political heft. Peter and Harriet, of course, rise above such issues, mostly because Petherbridge and Walters rewrote their scenes wholesale on set. Their relationship--the fact that they find each other, and are able to become the versions of themselves who are able to hold onto each other through each other's influence--is an achievement, and it would be so even in this day and age, even more so in the 1930s.

Technically, vidding with footage this old was…interesting. I thought about trying to correct it, but the light levels are mostly tolerable (I did alter the light levels in the courtroom scenes for visibility) and in the end I lost my vidding energy for all of November, which obviated that possibility. (Fun fact: I finished the first draft of this vid on a plane on Halloween.)
starlady: Peggy in her hat with her back turned under the SSR logo (agent carter)
First things first: Happy Halloween.

What got me fired up to write about Gaudy Night was, ironically, the fact that the BBC adaptation of it is rather crap. It's a crying shame, because the cast is stellar, but the ways in which the adaptation not only cuts out significant chunks of the book but also misses the point of large parts of it is equally parts irritating and telling.

Still preoccupied with 1935 )
starlady: Peggy in her hat with her back turned under the SSR logo (agent carter)
I said when I started reading the Wimsey books that I was reading them explicitly by way of an obituary for the United Kingdom, for whatever it will be post Brexit is not what it was before, which admittedly has probably put a different spin on these books than many people bring to them, but which for me highlights the fact that Sayers is, by the era of MMA and T9T, cropping the action of the books very carefully, in a way that can't help but draw attention to what's going on outside the frame. I imagine her readers didn't need to be reminded, and frankly as a historian and a person with a heart and a brain in 2016 I don't need a reminder either. But by T9T, even for a book that is isolated and insular, things far outside England are shown to be on everyone's minds: Mussolini and the Showa Emperor are name-checked explicitly, and the much-maligned League of Nations is the subject of a running joke between Wimsey and the nameless sluice-gate keeper.

No more water, but fire next time )
starlady: (bibliophile)
So here's the other semi-secret reason that I wanted to finally read Sayers: Garth Nix has talked about having read her books, and now that I have finished The Nine Tailors, I am quite confident in saying that there is quite a bit of Sayers influence lurking in the Old Kingdom novels, which I love forever. Thematic spoilers )
Speaking of Lirael, I also think that there's something of Shrewsbury in the Clayr and their Glacier. Like Shrewsbury, the Clayr's Glacier is an all-female society, and it displays the same instinctive solidarity for which Peter commends the Shrewsbury dons and which thwarts the poltergeist who wishes them ill. Like Harriet, Lirael spends a good chunk of time longing for that community, but unlike Harriet, she also suffers a good deal because of its solidarity, which she is on the outside of through no fault of her own. And like Harriet, Lirael does flourish on the outside of that community eventually (and in a romantic relationship between equals).
starlady: Holmes and Watson walking around New York (springtime in new york)
As previously stated, I love Sarah Monette's posts on the Wimsey books—they're what got me to read these novels—but occasionally as a historian I have to shake my head in despair over English majors, and Murder Must Advertise is one of those times. Monette is very right to point out the elements of class conflict as symbolized by the lethal iron staircase and the ambiguous anarchy of the company cricket match, but there's a whole other level on which this novel is working: namely, a critique of capitalism.

Capitalism and the tarot )

And I haven't even gotten to the cricket match yet. It is, in other words, an entirely brilliant and deceptively straightforward book.
starlady: Raven on a MacBook (Default)
I am continuing to blaze through the Wimsey books. I'm just into the beginning of Have His Carcase now and adoring every second of it, but what's really interesting to me is how neatly the series divides at the halfway point.

Where my Wimsey takes me )
starlady: Peggy in her hat with her back turned under the SSR logo (agent carter)
Alas, I never did read these books as a child; I imprinted on the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels that Sayers is so devotedly skewering and paying homage to in the first two books. But in times of despair I find myself drawn to murder mysteries, which offer such a reassuring fantasy of justice being done, as well as to other depressing fare. At the rate things are going I'll have finished Jo Walton's Spare Change trilogy before the equinox.

I've been reading Sarah Monette's DLS posts, and they're wonderful even a dozen years on; I would buy a book of Monette's criticism so hard. Unnatural Death and the existence of God )

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