(Published in accordance with the
Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)
( So far this year... )(I'm willing to make a bit of comment on anything up there if anyone's curious. Just haven't had time to be book-reporting good and proper this year.)
#47 -- Patricia Briggs --
Iron KissedI was skittish on this one because of
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buymeaclue's
post on it back in January, but in looking for some candy books to break up the (lovely but dense) diet of John Crowley and Robertson Davies and Iain Banks I'm on currently, I came back around to this series. And it was solid enough, if embracing all those quirks of Paranormal Fantasy that somehow, in a very short while, because accepted canon: werewolves work like so. Vampires like so. The appropriate relationship between werewolves and people is thus. I have things to say about that, but I also have a way to say and explore them in fiction, and since I am a writer and not really a book reviewer I will save that for where I live.
What I do want to talk about is what happens to Mercy at the end, and the reactions around it: both fictional and those in the readership that were discussed on LJ last winter.
(Poor Patricia Briggs. All her reviews about one thing. I picture her sitting at her keyboard with her Google Alerts on, tearing her hair, going "but dammit, what about
the prose!")
I sort of walked into this book with armor. I knew that a secondary character rapes Mercy, and I remembered there was squickiness around it -- I didn't go to refresh myself on the reviews until afterwards. So I was kind of looking out for it, a little more emotionally divorced from the proceedings; either way, this was not going to hit me like a hurricane. So my reaction was never going to be as strong as Hannah's (which is going to be our exemplar reaction for today, sorry Hannah). The things that bothered her weren't the things that bothered me. Well. Not precisely.
I can see the rape happening. In terms of character arc, it was about time for Mercy to either get a kick right in the eyeball or begin the long slow road to invulnerable Suedom. I can only halfway see Tim doing it, because when you are insecure about your social skills, betrayal is
much worse than initial dismissal: you're always half-sure someone's playing you anyway, and when it's true, that's all your worst fears come to the surface -- you react
hard. So I will tentatively buy that, even though I don't buy his effective nice-geek cover and the sudden revelation of/transmutation into a dude who already had a few murders under his belt. That profile doesn't scan by me. In general, though, I felt that whole characterization a bit sloppy, in that
if you'd done that a bit neater it would have really tied into this thing you have going on here way. The hose works, but we could've had five times the water pressure out of that baby.
The other thing I believe the emotional logic of is Adam's initial reaction to it. I'm not sure it's necessarily a sign of domineering possessiveness. Because frankly, if I didn't have these cursed omnivore's teeth I would also rip the faces off people who hurt the ones I love. I do it with my words already. I half-jokingly call it my Mama Bear urge. The emphasis is on
bear.
The note struck totally
wrong, however, was Adam's reaction to her after he's been shit-talked about withdrawing.
Mercy, throughout, has had a tug-of-war going about agency and control: her agency versus the idea the werewolves in her life have about how one expresses love and care to women. After this three-book issue is brought to a head -- with the rape, which is the ultimate blow to agency and control -- and she's reeling, Adam's pep talk is basically "you've come looking for my help twice now, so you acknowledge we have an interdependence, so you're mine and I will come fetch you if you try to go."
And according to the narrative, she takes it as
you have a place here.
There is, in a sort of fucked-up way, that emotional content in there.
I will not let you amputate your life and lose things you don't have to lose for the shame of something that wasn't your fault. Except, that's not what he says. He says:
"Ben says you might run. If you do, I will find you and bring you back. Every time you run, Mercy. I won't force you, but... I won't leave or let you leave either. If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to. No more excuses, Mercy. You are mine, and I am keeping you."
My independent nature, which would doubtless reassert itself soon, would be outraged by this possessive, arrogant, and medieval concept. But... (265)
What he said is not what the narrative appears to hear. And that reassertion...it doesn't happen.
Fatal breach of three books' worth of characterization ahoy.
The neurosis of abandonment she's fighting right then -- the rationale under which Adam's purported emotional content works -- is widely acknowledged by that narrative to be an implanted one. We see it implanted by the force of
deus ex machina magic, in real time, on the page. If her personality is
not going to reassert, this calls for a fundamental and permanent change in her personality. If it does, later, this calls for one raging, furious, break-ties-and-drive Mercy once she gets her actual personality back in place. God knows if someone said that to me in a vulnerable place, in a place where my freedom of movement and choice had been restricted so severely? If someone said that to me while I was eating myself up with guilt over the idea that my inability to fight someone off me meant that I had somehow wanted it: "If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to"? I would go halfway across the world from that speaker and never come back.
So Briggs creates herself a serious choice: Mercy must change, or the consequences must also rebound and basically take a wrecking ball to Mercy and Adam's relationship.
But the choice doesn't get made.
What we get is neither: a sort of shadow-country wherein she tells herself to buck up and interacts with people approaching normal very quickly, notably acts with
confidence very quickly in confrontations both verbal and physical. She's attacked a bit later by someone who tried to kill her, and she doesn't flashback. She reacts like Old-Mercy.
And
that, gentle readers, is what makes me disappointed in a book.
You want to punch me? Throw the damn punch. And if the punch breaks your thumb,
take your lumps. Hit me and
make it count. Ducking the choices
you yourself set up is authorial cowardice. And I do not read for cowardice.
Write brave, folks. Write brave or just don't go there.
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