It's a magical world

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 )

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 )

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).

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 )