Reading: The Case of the Gilded Fly

[white_hart]

I've enjoyed a couple of Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels in the past, but this one rather left me cold (and it was the second time I'd tried it; the first time I gave up two chapters in). It just felt rather silly; the characters were thin and sometimes rather hard to distinguish, so that I kept having to flip back to the first chapter to remind myself who they were, the plot felt very contrived, and the Oxford setting wasn't well enough realised to give me any sense of the book being set in a place I know. This is Crispin's first novel, so it may just be that he improved significantly between this and the others of his I've read.

Comments

[legionseagle]

I really disliked it for his attitude to women having sex; it's practically slasher movie misogyny.

[white_hart]

Yes, I found the attitude to women quite unpleasant, too. I'll happily read Buchan and Tolkien, who are both somewhat problematic when it comes to including women in the books, and even Chesterton who only ever has them as idealised figures for the heroes to win through to, but Crispin's rather sniggery attitude left a nasty aftertaste. (It felt very undergraduate, in the worst possible way, which is probably because he was apparently still an undergraduate when he wrote the book.)

[legionseagle]

I rather like Buchan's women -- he's definitely got a type (the "high-minded boys in dresses" mould that Alison and Janet and Mary and to some extent Kore Arabin fall into) but they are allowed to transcend that type (cf Mary in The Three Hostages) and they don't usually need rescuing - well, Kore does, but it's a team effort. And I like his older women who aren't fooled.

[white_hart]

I like Buchan's women too, but some of his books are very light on female characters.

In "older women who aren't fooled", I particularly love Mrs Morran in Hungtingtower.

[tree_and_leaf]

Phemie Morran is fab.

[legionseagle]

The bit I recall was the white slave backstory, and the comment that the kind of women who get mixed up in that sort of thing are "more sinning than sinned against".


But Holy Disorders is even worse. That's got actual trufax witches in it.

[white_hart]

The one I enjoyed was The Moving Toyshop, but even there the women are all the fluffy empty-headed type. As are several of the ones in Gilded Fly, apart from the victim who is characterised as a bitch from the start.

[legionseagle]

The Moving Toyshop is the one with the epic breach of the fourth wall, isn't it? "Left fork or right?" "Better take the left, this book is being published by Gollancz, after all."

My favourite, and the only one I think I currently own (I disposed of some of the others to charity) is Love Lies Bleeding where there's a couple offemale characters who completely cut against the grain. Mind you, they're still at school, and I've often noticed authors (Saki, for one) giving young teen schoolgirls agency, intelligence and capability which adult women characters never get; the "harpy or idiot" switch seems to be thrown at age 18 or so for them.

[white_hart]

That's the one. I like it mostly because it does Oxford very well, which is odd given that The Case of the Gilded Fly and Swan Song, which is also set in Oxford, completely fail to give me any real sense of being set here.