A Shattered Visage: Thoughts on a Phone Call

"I'm impressed that with 2 eps to go, #BreakingBad has produced a moment inspiring as much debate as the Sopranos finale," tweets Dave Crewe yesterday.  And indeed, Breaking Bad's antepenultimate episode, "Ozymandias," has caused a flurry of online discussion, analysis, and argument.  Or, to be more precise, one scene, late in the episode, has spurred all this discussion.  In this scene, Walter White, cancer-ridden chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, calls home and speaks to his wife Skyler.  The police are at the house and listening in; Walt has been exposed as a meth cook and a murderer and has lost most of his ill-gotten gains; his attempts to persuade his family to go on the run with him ended with his own son calling 911 on him, to which Walt responded by kidnapping his baby daughter Holly.  As Skyler begs for her daughter, Walt rants and raves, calling her stupid and a bitch, bragging about his criminal empire, complaining about her attempts to curtail his crimes.  The camera remains fixed on Skyler's face for most of the conversation, but when we cut to Walt, we suddenly see that he is crying, not raging.  When the shot pans away from him to the safe haven of a fire house, we understand his ploy.  Having cleared his wife of willing complicity in his crimes (of which she is actually guilty), Walt leaves his daughter in a fire truck and drives off.

Almost everyone who has written about or discussed "Ozymandias" agrees that the phone call was planned for the sole purpose of exonerating Skyler, Walt's one last attempt to protect his family.  Where the question lies is in the substance of the ugly, hateful things Walt says to Skyler.  Is he merely putting on a show, saying the most awful things imaginable to make himself look like a monster and her like an abused, innocent woman?  Or is he giving free rein to real emotions, exposing the real Walt whom he has kept hidden behind a reasonable, occasionally bumbling facade?  If you've been following certain people on Twitter for the last few days, you'll have seen this argument rehashed again and again, with most TV critics tending towards the second view and defending it with increasing vehemence (Vulture reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz, in particular, has been repeating the point with subtle variations almost nonstop for the last 24 hours).  In longer form, too, there's been much insistence that the phone call was not, or at least not entirely, an act.  At The Huffington Post, Maureen Ryan writes that "Walt's no hero"; Seitz himself has written a slightly over-determined analysis which describes Walt as an almost schizoid personality, with the phone call representing Heisenberg, Walt's drug-dealing alter-ego, acting on Walt's behalf; perhaps the most subtle analysis comes, unsurprisingly, from Emily Nussbaum on the New Yorker blog, in which Nussbaum, who initially took Walt's rant at face value, analyzes the ways in which the phone call plays into fan perceptions, and mis-perceptions, of Walt and Skyler. 

My first reaction to this debate is that it is unfortunate how an obsession with the phone call has obscured the rest of the episode.  "Ozymandias" is one of Breaking Bad's most harrowing, heartbreaking hours, and the episode itself is impeccably made, tense and fast-paced without giving short shrift to any of the many world-shattering events that occur in it.  It deserves to be remembered, and discussed, for more than a single scene.  This is the episode in which Walt's criminal empire comes crashing to the ground, and in which the people he loves are destroyed in the wreckage.  Skyler, who has been abetting Walt at the expense of her bond with her sister Marie, finally has enough and tells him to leave; Walt's teenage son Walter Jr. learns the truth about his father and then witnesses a knife fight between his parents; Walt abandons Jesse, his former assistant and surrogate son, to torture and imprisonment, though not before revealing that he is responsible for the death of Jesse's girlfriend Jane; and, of course, Walt's brother-in-law Hank is murdered by Walt's former associates (as is Hank's partner Steve Gomez, Breaking Bad's only non-villainous adult male Latino character; in the midst of all the deserved celebration of the show, it's worth remembering how thoroughly Breaking Bad has failed in its depiction of brown people, for example through Garland Grey's searing indictment of it on this point).

The reason, I think, that the phone call is what people talk about when they talk about "Ozymandias" is that unlike the rest of the episode, it is a blank moment.  To clarify, it's not a moment that actually tells us anything about Walt.  Critics like Ryan and Seitz have taken the scene as a final, definitive statement on who and what Walt is, but the way that the scene is shot, directed, and acted isn't aimed at that goal, but rather at the switcheroo, the trick, of revealing Walt's final scheme.  For most of the phone call, we're supposed to fooled, not gaining some new insight into Walt's personality--as Nussbaum notes in her essay, the things Walt says are all things that fans have said about him, either in admiration or disgust.  This is certainly reflected in an interview with episode writer Moira Walley-Beckett and director Rian Johnson (best known for Brick and Looper, but who has also directed some of Breaking Bad's seminal episodes) who are almost surprised to discover that the phone call, which they seem to view more as a plot point, has spurred such debate (Walley-Beckett also gives her own definitive judgement on what the phone call means, but I'm with Ryan and Seitz in choosing to ignore this; not only because the author, as we all know, is dead, but because to take her word as gospel would put an end to all the fun).  It is also reflected in the fact that almost no argument I've seen for an interpretation of the phone call scene actually brings any evidence from the scene itself, because there is none--we see the call in isolation, without knowing what Walt did before placing it; we don't see his face throughout most of his rant; he remains grimly silent after it.  As a statement about Walt as a person, there is hardly any information here, and so, like The Sopranos's infamous cut-to-black ending, the phone call becomes a Rorschach blot.  Whatever you bring into it, in terms of how you see Walter White, is what you take out of it.

In light of this, it's easier to understand why there's so much emotional investment in interpreting the phone call scene, especially when you consider that high profile critics like Ryan, Seitz, and Nussbaum see a much broader swathe of fandom than the rest of us, and that they are repeatedly exposed to the kind of viewer who watches anti-hero shows in order to root for the lead (Seitz, in particular, has been quoting some of the pro-Walt interpretations of the phone call, in which Walt is seen as a hero doing one last thing to protect his ungrateful, betraying son and wife, on his twitter stream, and they are indeed baffling in their wrongheadedness).  But the result of this is a weirdly binary insistence: either you believe that Walt, despite also working to exonerate Skyler, was speaking 100% from the heart during the phone call, or you're one of those people who watched The Sopranos because they just wanted to see Tony whack people; if you think that Walt was deliberately exaggerating and playing up a monstrous persona for the benefit of the police then you probably also believe that everything he's done since the beginning of the series is justified because he was just trying to protect his family.

What I don't understand about all this is why such a stark division is even necessary.  In Breaking Bad's entire five season run, there isn't a single episode that does more to dismantle and explode Walt's "protect my family" ethos than "Ozymandias," which finally shatters what faint hope we might still have had that only Walt would suffer for his crimes, and that his family would be spared their consequences.  When Hank is killed, Walt, who has been frantically pleading and bargaining for the man's life, falls to the ground in a silent, agonized scream.  It's not because he loved Hank so much, but because he realizes what Hank's death means for his family.  Marie is a widow; she and Skyler will probably never repair their bond, already horribly damaged when Skyler helped Walt make a recording fingering Hank for Heisenberg's crimes; Walter Jr. has lost the man who would have stepped in as his father figure when Walt succumbed to his resurgent cancer.  Later in the episode, when Walt tries to salvage something from the wreckage by going on the run with Skyler and the children, Hank's death continues to reverberate and tear apart what's left of the White family.  It's the realization that her husband has killed her brother-in-law that finally shakes Skyler out of willingness to enable Walt's crimes, and it's what convinces Walter Jr. that his father is really a criminal.  Walt's inability to accept that Hank's death has irrevocably separated him from his family is what leads to the knife fight with Skyler, and is the reason that Walter Jr. will spend the rest of his life with the memory of having to come physically between his mother and his knife-wielding father.  And as we know from the flash-forwards that have appeared throughout the season, after Walt's escape Skyler will lose everything--her house, her business, her reputation--which might not have happened if Hank, a DEA agent, were still alive to argue for her.

Breaking Bad begins with Walt turning to drug production because of his desire to protect his family (officially, from destitution after his death from cancer, but under the surface, from having a paterfamilias so weak as to get cancer in the first place).  What "Ozymandias" shows us is how that desire actually ends up destroying Walt's family.  There will, no doubt, still be viewers who choose not to see this (as Nussbaum writes, some people just watch TV wrong), but that doesn't change what the episode's events are saying loud and clear: that everyone in the White-Schraeder clan would have been better off if Walt, upon receiving his cancer diagnosis, had just quietly bankrupted his family with medical bills and then died.  If anything, the phone call scene strikes me as offering some slight hint of a counterpoint to this conclusion.  It is a reminder that, for all its terrible destructiveness, the "protect my family" ethos is real.  If it's to be taken as a statement on the kind of person Walt is, then that person is the man we met in the pilot--a smart, resourceful, determined man who never met a problem he couldn't think his way out of.  The intervening five seasons, and all of "Ozymandias," have shown us the terrible consequences of Walt's problem-solving--how, by treating his medical bills and his family's financial future as a problem to be solved, Walt has created greater, insurmountable problems that will poison the rest of their lives.  So isn't it permissible for one final scene to show us that those skills, that intelligence, that ruthless capacity for self-sacrifice for the sake of some masculine ideal, are also real, and still there?

I think that "Ozymandias" teaches us how to read the phone call in its opening scene, a flashback to the pilot and to Walt and Jesse's first foray into cooking meth.  As he waits for the process to end, Walt steps away to call Skyler and explain why he'll be late for dinner.  We see him practice and hone his story, in which his boss has forced him to work late, and even compose a script for the phone call ("he's insisting that I... he's demanding that I stay").  But when he calls to deliver this story, the conversation turns into something real--he and Skyler joke about her side business selling ugly tchotchkes on eBay, and tentatively settle on Holly as the name of their unborn daughter.  It's a warm, loving exchange in the midst of the first lie Walt ever told Skyler about the criminal activities that would one day destroy their family.  I think that the phone call at the end of "Ozymandias" is the mirror image of this scene.  I think that Walt planned, scripted, and rehearsed what he would say for the police's benefit, but that when he actually made the call something real emerged from him--hatred, this time, instead of love.  In every marriage there are things that people think in their darkest moments--ugly, hurtful things that hopefully never get said.  How much more so, in a marriage like Walt and Skyler's, which has gone from loving to oblivious to abusive to steeped in blood?  That's what I see when Walt calls Skyler a "stupid bitch" and asks how she dares to tell his son the truth about him.

Because the fact is, the focus of the phone call isn't Walt, it's Skyler.  It's her face that we see throughout most of it, as we realize with her (actually a little after her) what Walt is doing.  The loving, happy phone call in the flashback can be seen as Breaking Bad's small, insufficient attempt to make up for its poor handling of Skyler in its first two seasons, in which she has almost no personality (this neglect has contributed--but is by no means the only reason for--the virulent, misogynistic hatred of Skyler evinced by some of the show's fans, which has even spilled over to affect the actress portraying her).  It shows us that Skyler is more than the happily oblivious nag she was before she realized that her husband was a drug dealer, and that her and Walt's marriage was real, and founded in love and affection.  The phone call at the end of the episode shows us that that bond, perverted and painful as it's become, is still there.  Alone in a room full of people who now see Walt purely as a villain, Skyler understands what her husband is doing, and plays along with his final, pathetically insufficient attempt to continue protecting his family.  It doesn't make him a good man.  It doesn't make up for anything he's done.  But it reminds us--maybe proves, for the very first time--that their marriage is real.

(The purpose of all this, of course, is to say that I'm on Twitter now, as @NussbaumAbigail.  I'm still rather dubious about the platform, or more precisely, about its suitability for me--as you'll probably have noticed, I'm not exactly someone who fits into 140 characters.  Nevertheless, if you feel like following me, and without making any promises, I shall endeavor to be someone worth following.)

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

"As I was a stranger in Olondria," the narrator of Sofia Samatar's debut novel tells us in its opening sentences,

I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses.  I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents.  I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea.  Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart; it is the light the local people call "the breath of angels" and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs.  Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom.  But of all this I knew nothing.  I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards.

It's a hell of a first paragraph, not least because of how much it tells us about the book we're about to read.  It tells us, even if we weren't already aware of this fact, that A Stranger in Olondria is a secondary world fantasy and a travelogue.  It tells us that this is a book whose power is rooted first and foremost in worldbuilding and language, and that both are executed in a manner that is ornate and even a touch overwhelming.  And if we pay attention, it also tells us something else: that despite its elaborate, eye-catching worldbuilding, what A Stranger in Olondria is about isn't its fantastic locations but their ultimate unknowability.  The book begins not with a litany of its fantastic world's wonders but with the narrator distancing himself from them.  The paragraph ends by stressing that distance, the wide gulf between the world the narrator knew and the one the story takes place in.  Despite the implicit promise of the paragraph's past tense--the narrator was a stranger in Olondria, suggesting that he isn't one anymore--it is that strangeness that lies at the heart of the novel.

The speaker here is Jevick of Tyom, a native of the Tea Islands, which lie to the south of the great empire of Olondria.  The son of a prosperous pepper merchant, Jevick's relatively normal upbringing takes an odd turn when his father returns from one of his trading expeditions with an Olondrian tutor, Lunre, who teaches Jevick not only the Olondrian language, but also how to read, an unknown skill in the Tea Islands, and introduces him to the culture's great epics.  When Jevick's father dies unexpectedly, leaving him the heir to his business, the young man leaps at the opportunity to travel to the Olondrian capital, Bain, and see the wonders that he's only read about.  But if A Stranger in Olondria opens with an affirmation of strangeness, within the story, young Jevick is convinced of his belonging in Olondria; in reading about it, he believes, he has become a native.  During the ocean passage, Jevick sneers at what he views as the pretense of the other traders, who think of themselves as men of the world for their familiarity with Olondria and Bain, but who, to him, are just rubes because they don't fully appreciate Olondrian culture: "None of them knew as much as I; none of them spoke Olondrian; their bovine heads were empty of an appreciation of the North."  Later, in the city, he protests when a group of young people he falls in with call him a foreigner, exclaiming that "I've been raised on the northern poets..."  But if Jevick is convinced that having been immersed in Olondrian culture means that he is not, despite the novel's title, a stranger in it, the novel shows us that it has already estranged him from his own culture--before his death, Jevick's father resented his son's fascination with books, and the young man's urgent desire to see the great city and experience its wonders confuses and frightens his servants, who are used to the journey to Bain being treated in a more utilitarian, profit-oriented manner.

An emphasis on rich descriptive language and elaborate worldbuilding creates the expectation of a Tolkien-ishly thorough work of creation--the sort of thing that M. John Harrison has called "the clomping foot of nerdism," which some authors and readers have adopted as a badge of honor.  And indeed, reading A Stranger in Olondria, there can be no doubt that Samatar knows far more about her world than she tells us in this novel--the map at the beginning of the book is much broader than the scope of its events, and throughout his narrative Jevick references literary works and historical events that the reader remains ignorant of, thus adding another wrinkle to the confused meaning of his claim to be a stranger.  (If there were any doubt about the scope of Samatar's worldbuilding, this recent entry on her blog by "guest-blogger" Ethen of Deinivel, who expounds on the Olondrian alphabet, would surely put it to rest.)  But A Stranger in Olondria is a very different book from the kind of Tolkien-esque epic fantasy in which such obsessive construction of secondary worlds is usually found.  Though there can be no doubt of the detail work that has gone into Samatar's worldbuilding, what shows up on the page is more impressionistic.  The references that Jevick makes are rarely explained; later in the novel, when he travels outside of Bain into regions that have been conquered by the Olondrians, he comments darkly about their history as though assuming that his readers will know what he's talking about (which, given what we later learn about the book's intended audience, may not be a reasonable assumption).  His experiences in Bain itself feel almost like a fever dream--certainly when Jevick, ignoring the warnings of the proprietor of his hotel, participates in the city's licentious Feast of Birds.  For all of Samatar's behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, her focus is on how Jevick reacts to the world she's built, on how he's overwhelmed by the richness and strangeness of his new experiences.  It is these feelings, and not a precise description of Olondria and Bain, that she tries to convey.

There was never an end to Bain.  I never felt as though I had touched it, though I loved the book markets under the swinging trees, the vast array of books on tables, in boxes, stacked on the ground, and the grand old villas converted into bookshops.  I loved the Old City also, which is called the "Quarter of Sighs," with its barred windows and brooding fortified towers, and I loved to watch the canal winding below the streets and bridges and the stealthy boats among the shadows of trees.  Laughing, replete, I raised a glass of teiva in a café, surrounded by a bold crowd of temporary companions, a girl at my side, some Ailith or Kerlith whose name I no longer recall, for she was erased like the others by the one who followed.

The effect of this is that the first half of A Stranger in Olondria feels utterly directionless, literally like the travelogue that the book's first chapters seem to be emulating.  Coupled with the rich language and twisty turns of phrase, this can make for some slow reading.  This is especially true in the chapter describing the Feast of Birds, in which Jevick is caught up in the religious ecstasy and debauchery surrounding the celebration of Avalei, the Goddess of Love and Death.  The hallucinatory tone of these scenes--which reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's "Dradin, In Love," the first story in City of Saints of Madmen, in which a missionary returning to the supposed bosom of civilization finds that it conceals madness--brings to a crescendo the impression that A Stranger in Olondria is beautiful but also aimless--only for it, and the novel's lackadaisical progression through its story, to come crashing down in a literal rude awakening, for both Jevick and the readers.  Coming to in a seedy brothel the morning after the festival, Jevick discovers that everything that was beautiful and transcendent the night before is now grimy and mundane.

I woke to glare and silence.  And then, beyond the silence, sound--the sounds from the street which I realized had awakened me, sounds of talk and footsteps, a burst of laughter, the whine of a door, the scrape of a wooden table across the pavement.  My mouth was dry, but I felt no pain until I tried to move, and then I began to ache in every limb, the agony concentrated in my skull, which throbbed rhythmically as if in time to the ringing of my ears.  With the pain came the realization that I was in a strange room, and that the silence of the room was the first thing I had heard, a blankness that made me uneasy because it was not like other silences: it was the dead sound of abandonment and squalor.

What's important is that this is the first time that we, the readers, have seen Bain without the sentimentalizing gloss that Jevick's narration has laid over it.  For the first time in the novel, it feels like an ordinary city--where you might be woken by the scrape of a table across the pavement--not a place of wonders.  But Jevick's disillusionment is far from done.  On his journey to Olondria, Jevick encountered a fellow islander named Jissavet, who was afflicted with a terminal illness and traveling to Olondria to find a cure--which neither she nor Jevick could see much hope for.  On the morning after the Feast of Birds, Jissavet begins to haunt Jevick, causing him to lapse into fits of terror and self-harm.  For Jevick and his servant, his affliction, though tragic, is easily comprehended as part of their cosmology.  Jissavet, they reason, has died and been buried, which has left her soul unable to move on, and she has latched on to Jevick, her countryman, so that he will find her body and release her by disposing of it "properly," in the island way.  But when Jevick tries to explain his situation to the Olondrians, he is seized and imprisoned.  For all his knowledge of Olondrian history and literature, Jevick is ignorant of its politics and religion.  He doesn't know that in Olondria, people who see ghosts (or rather, "angels") are revered as saints by the cult of Avalei, and that this cult has been deposed and hounded by the ruling religion, the worshipers of the Stone.  When Jevick is brought before the Priest of the Stone, his affliction is folded into the dominant worldview, which sees saints as charlatans, and Jevick in particular as a representative of an attempted power grab.

"our own people, as you may know, have a terrible passion for angels.  At one time, one could scarcely dream of one's dead grandfather without being dragged to the temple.  Those who claimed they could speak with the dead were revered, and people came to them with all sorts of questions, as if they were oracles.  How will the maize crop be, where is the necklace my mother gave me, whom will I marry, who stole my brown horse--all nonsense, chicanery, a farce!  Yes, the love of angels was once a canker of this country, and I am the physician who removed it. ... I will not have my people duped.  I will have them clean, and honest, and able to read the Vanathul.  Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead.  Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear."

In genre fiction in particular, there is a tendency to fetishize books.  Whether it's the act of reading or books as an object, you'll often find authors rhapsodizing about the ability of books to transport readers, or the universality of storytelling.  It's not that I disagree, but the form that these panegyrics take often strikes me as precious and not a little self-aggrandizing (after all, these are writers and readers telling us how special and all-powerful writing and reading is).  In its first half, A Stranger in Olondria often teeters on the brink of that preciousness.  When Jevick first grasps the heretofore unimagined concept of writing, he perceives it as witchcraft ("My back and shoulders were cold, though a hot, heavy air came in from the garden.  I stared at my master, who looked back at me with his wise, crystalline eyes.  'Do not be afraid,' he said"), and as Samatar describes its effect on him, it does have elements of an enchantment: "In my room, in my village, I shone like a moth with its back to a sparkling fire.  Master Lunre had taught me his sorcery: I embraced it and swooned in its arms."  On his first morning in Bain, Jevick has an experience that many avid readers will recognize when he first walks into a bookstore:

There were so many books.  There were more than my master had carried in his sea chest.  The shop seemed impossible, otherworldly, a cave of wonders; yet it was not even a true bookshop like the ones I would discover later, lining both side of the Street of Poplars.  It was one of those little shops, tucked into various corners of Bain, which sell portraits of popular writers and tobacco as well as books, whose main profits come from the newspapers, whose volumes are poorly bound, and which always seem to be failing, yet are as perennial as the flowers.  It is unlikely that anyone before or since has experienced, in that humble establishment, a storm of emotion as powerful as mine.  I collected stack after stack of books, seizing, rejecting, replacing, giddy with that sweet exhalation: the breath of parchments.

Even in these early chapters, however, there's a sinister undertone to Jevick's bibliophilia--as noted, Jevick's knowing how to read drives a wedge between him and his father, and estranges him from his own culture.  When he meets the Priest of the Stone, that undertone blossoms into the novel's core theme, a profound ambivalence about writing and its power.  The acolytes of the Stone worship writing--the Stone itself is, from what we hear about it, similar to the Rosetta Stone, but it is described to Jevick in religious rapture: "The Stone... I wish I could show it to you.  Perhaps then you would understand.  It is black, heavy, miraculous, covered with writing..."  Jevick himself, of course, is closer to their view than to the religion of Avalei, and he anyway views his haunting in a much more materialistic light, and is as put off as the Priest of the Stone by the way that so-called saints like himself are used to take advantage of the bereaved.  But the Stone-worshipers' fanaticism, and the way that it ends up victimizing Jevick--he is imprisoned in a sanatorium, and when he escapes witnesses a brutal massacre of Avalei's followers--can't help but cast a pall on their beliefs.  Jevick himself never loses his love of books and the written word--throughout his ordeal he clings to the few books in his possession, and draws solace from reading and rereading them--but when the priests of Avalei free him and promise to help him find Jissavet's body in exchange for his services as a saint, it's hard for the reader not to take their bibliophobic side.

In the second half of the novel, as Jevick makes his way through the Olondrian countryside, dodging pursuing troops, gingerly trying on the role of holy man, and befriending his rescuers-cum-captors, Samatar further complicates her novel's perspective on reading.  When Jevick witnesses the aforementioned massacre, he describes it to his readers but concludes that no written account could do justice to the horror of what he witnessed, seemingly limning the boundaries of what writing can accomplish: "The history books would tell of the burning of the Night Market of Nuillen, but they would erase the terror, the stench of blood and soot.  And the noise--the noise."  But when Jissavet makes herself known to Jevick, what she wants isn't for her body to be destroyed, but for Jevick to write a book of her life story--to put her in a book, as they both come to think about it.  Jevick's resistance to this request, which he describes repeatedly as madness, seems rooted more in his objection to mixing Olondrian and islander concepts than in any practical difficulties--"Write her a book, set her words down in Olondrian characters!  This ghost, this interloper, speaking only Kideti!"--but when he does finally agree to write down Jissavet's story, doing so forges a bond between them that knowing the actual woman never did.  "Those years, the years she lay in the doorway: every one of them hurts me, and every hour has an individual pain," Jevick laments after finishing Jissavet's story.  "Lost hours, irretrievable, hours that I could have taken up and treasured and which were scattered abroad in the mud."  These chapters--in which the adherents of the Stone are depicted as monstrous and tyrannical--are also the ones in which A Stranger in Olondria finally allows its readers to experience the fiction that has so enraptured Jevick, rather than hearing about it secondhand--we hear folktales, ballads, parables, and life stories. 

For a novel whose setting seems so ripe for a discussion of it (and coming from an author whose previous writing, fiction and non-fiction, has frequently dealt with it) A Stranger in Olondria seems, initially, strangely silent on the subject of class and colonialism.  Even though we know that Olondria is an empire and meet other peoples whom it has conquered, the relationship between it and the Tea Islands--over which it towers technologically and militarily--is strangely equitable.  There is no East India Company here, and Jevick's father can trade with Olondrian merchants as an equal without kowtowing to Olondrian colonial representatives.  It's only subtly that class issues begin creeping into the novel, and they do so first through Jissavet's story.  Born to a family without jut--a fetish which to the islanders represents their soul, and which is possessed only by the rich and influential--Jissavet spent her life envying and resenting people like Jevick.  When that resentment is introduced through her story, we realize that the privilege of our narrator has blinded him, and us, to some of the realities of his world.

And in Samatar's universe, that privilege is inextricably bound up with literacy.  When Jevick first meets Lunre, he assumes that he's about to be taught to keep accounts, a practical skill.  Instead, Jevick's father has brought the tutor as a status symbol, and being taught to do something as useless as reading is an indulgence (one that he ends up resenting his son for).  While the Priest of the Stone treats the criminalization of saint-worship as a liberation of his people, the priests of Avalei treat it as the eradication of a conquered culture: "Our people can no longer bear it.  They cannot bear, anymore, to be kept from all unwritten forms of the spirit."  When they tell Jevick that, following their victory over the followers of the Stone, they will burn down the Olondrian libraries, they treat literacy as a class marker.  "We are not criminals, but the protectors of those without strength," the priest tells Jevick, and when the latter protests that the new prince, who is friendly to the cult of Avalei, will be as monstrous as his father, the priest shrugs that "You may be right.  But he will save a future, a way of life.  For those who cannot read, he will save the world."

But Jissavet herself sees it otherwise.  A book is a jut, she tells Jevick after he's finished writing her story, implying that literacy is an equalizer.  When he returns to the Tea Islands after Avalei's victory, Jevick turns them into a bastion of literacy, but in a way that is uncoupled from the Stone's fanatical worship of lifeless words and from the class divisions that eventually overturned it.  He recasts the Olondrian alphabet to reflect the islander language, and teaches it to its children.  They, in turn, take their newfound ability and use it to create their own stories, an act that Jevick describes as revolutionary.

In the schoolroom they show me the words they have written during my absence, whole stories in Kideti, embryonic poems.  This alphabet was developed in Olondria, I tell them, but it is our own; it was used to pen the first work of written Kideti literature, The Anadnedet, by Jissavet of Kiem.  This is why we call it Jissavet's Alphabet.  At the end of each lesson I read aloud from this seminal work.  And I introduce them to others, books I have translated from Olondrian in the most violent and sacrilegious form of reading.  And I tell them: This is a journey to jepnatow-het, the land of shadows.  Do not mistake it for the country of the real.

By poking at it and questioning it, and by tying it to issues of class that also apply in the real world, A Stranger in Olondria earns its bibliophilia.  It shows us the worst of what books can do to us--how they can flatten the horror of real events, how they erect yet another barrier between the privileged and not-privileged, how reading only one kind of book can blind us to the realities of the world while making us think that we know it, and how one can become fonder of the people one meets in books than of the ones in the real world.  But having done that, it can justify the argument for the wonderful things that books can do--their ability to broaden our point of view, to make us see and understand people who have been denied their voice, and, of course, to take us to far off places.  Many odes to books can feel flat and self-congratulatory, but by tying its meditations on them to the adventures and misadventures of Jevick, and his growth into wisdom and compassion, Samatar cut through my cynicism about such a project.  Near the end of the novel, she delivers the following meditation about the pleasures and griefs of reading.  By that point, she has done so much to cut through the treacle of reflexive bibliophilia, and to make Jevick a real, flawed, but ultimately wise and kind figure, that it not only feels earned (and accurate to how avid readers often see their love of books), but like a description of the book that we are about to finish:

Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning towards the end. ... Then, the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world.  You look up.  It's a room in an old house.  Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriage going by.  Life comes back, the shadows of leaves.  Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on the desk.  It is the sound of the world.  But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.  This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

The Kids Are All Right: Thoughts on Gone Home

I'm pretty far from what you might call an avid gamer (games I've played in the last five years: Portal, Machinarium, Tales of Monkey Island, Botanicula, and, uh, that's it; I still haven't gotten around to Portal 2), but even I couldn't miss the attention paid to The Fullbright Company's Gone Home.  Part of the reason that I ended up playing Gone Home--aside from the fact that it doesn't require shooting anyone or terrific hand-eye coordination--was that it was a game that people seemed to be seriously discussing and debating.  Having played the game myself, however, I found my own eagerness to join the conversation curtailed by this blog's spoiler policy.  Which is: a) that I don't have one, b) that I am sick and tired of the way that the word spoiler has been allowed to control and denature the discussion of pop culture, and c) that any worthwhile piece of fiction is one that can't be "spoiled" by knowing what happens in it.  Gone Home, however, is a work that challenges that last belief.  Its effect is rooted in the expectations it creates in its audience, and a player who goes into it knowing what to expect will probably get much less out of it than someone who goes in completely ignorant.  And, unfortunately, I can't in all good faith urge you to buy the game and play it, since for all that it is interesting and worth playing, Gone Home doesn't really justify its $20 price tag.  I don't doubt that the price reflects the cost of making the game--whose graphics, gameplay and voice work are all top-notch--and I see the value of encouraging independent game developers, but none of that changes the fact that Gone Home takes maybe three hours to get through and has almost no replayability value.  So, I leave it with you: Gone Home is overpriced, extremely interesting and worth playing, and if you read the rest of this post before playing it you probably won't enjoy it as much as I did.  Your call.

Gone Home takes place over a single night in June 1995.  The player character is twenty-year-old Katie Greenbriar, who is returning home after a year backpacking in Europe.  Once she gets into the house, Katie discovers that her family--parents Terry and Janice, and younger sister Sam, who has left Katie a cryptic and urgent note telling her not to worry but also not to look for her--are missing.  The game consists of directing Katie through the house (actually a mansion), and discovering, through documents, letters, and journals entries belonging to the three family members, what has happened to the Greenbriars in the year that Katie's been away, and where they've all gone.  Through these documents, the player discovers that the family has only moved into the house, which originally belonged to Terry's reclusive uncle Oscar, in the last year (adding an extra level of meaning to the wordplay in the game's title, since Katie is returning to a home she's never been to), and that in that time both parents have gone through a crisis.  Terry, a failed science fiction writer who now writes electronics reviews, has started drinking heavily, while Janice has struck up a flirtation with a colleague at her job in the forestry service.  The bulk of the game, however, is taken up with Sam's experiences, which are also related through journal entries directed to Katie and read by actress Sarah Robertson, as she finds herself first the odd man out in her new school, and then befriends an older girl named Lonnie, with whom she shares a love of the punk aesthetic and riot grrl music.  Over the course of the year Sam and Lonnie's friendship deepens and becomes a romance, which is overshadowed by the fact that Lonnie is planning to join the army after graduation.

Much has been written about the way that Gone Home takes advantage of its players' reading protocols to achieve its effect.  This is, after all, a game in which you explore a strange, dark, (apparently) empty mansion whose previous owner died in it, in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm.  Specific moments in the game are clearly designed to create expectations of a horror narrative.  Almost every review of the game, for example, will note the moment in which the player explores one of the mansion's secret passages and picks up a wooden cross, only for the light bulb illuminating the passage to suddenly burn out and leave the player in pitch darkness.  All the reviewers discussing this moment reported scurrying out of the passage as fast as their mouse clicks could carry them (I did the same thing), and this is clearly the response that the game's designers were hoping for.  But the timing of the bulb's explosion turns out to be just a coincidence--one that the player is even prepared for when they find, in Terry's office, an electrician's report explaining that the house's old wiring will result in flickering lights and power surges.

Throughout the game there are similar wrong-footing moments.  When turning on the lights in Sam's bathroom, the player discovers bright red splashes staining the bathtub--and then notices a bottle of hair dye on the floor.  The purpose here, however, isn't simply to scare us.  It's to teach us to expect a certain type of story.  When Katie explores Sam's hiding places, she finds a Ouija board and the following note:

Because we're playing a game--and in particular, a game that is trying to recall other horror games in which creepy crawlies jump out at the player from the shadows (for me, this was The 7th Guest, a game that imprinted on me at a too-young age and which still has the power to send shivers down my spine)--we take this note as an indication of the kind of story we're in.  It's no coincidence that the note is discovered alongside the key to the house's previously locked basement--where lighting is particularly scarce (one room even remains completely dark, forcing the player to either abandon it or flail blindly for something to interact with), and where most of Oscar's belongings are stored.  When we reach the end of the game, however, we realize that we should have looked at the note the way we would in real life, in which messages delivered by Ouija boards are the result of players unconsciously (or deliberately) moving the planchette.  What's more, by the end of the game it's clear that if Sam had known the impression that the note had created in us, she would have been extremely bemused (it seems likely that she kept the note not because of its association with Oscar, but because she was playing with the Ouija board with Lonnie)--that Sam, in fact, had no idea of the impression created by her absence, her frantic notes to Katie, and the empty house.

At the same time that it's using the conventions of games to achieve its effect, however, Gone Home is taking advantage of those same conventions to tell its story.  The fact that Katie is a stranger in the house, for example, dovetails perfectly with the player's unfamiliarity with it.  And being the player character in a game means that it's not at all strange for Katie to tear through her family's most private documents--including reading her mother's letters and rifling through her father's locked drawers.  Though there is one moment in which Katie the character asserts herself over the player--when she finds a diary entry in which Sam describes her first sexual experience with Lonnie, and refuses to read it--for the most part Gone Home doesn't address how traumatic the experience of exposing her parents' faults and foibles would be for Katie (in fact, this is a seam of drama--young girl returns to an empty home, and, suspecting a terrible tragedy, uncovers a host of smaller tragedies that she wasn't ready to face yet--that the game's format isn't capable of exploring).  Being a game, as well, means that Gone Home can expect its players to overlook some of its contrivances--that Janice has left letters in which she discusses a near-affair lying all over the house where her husband and teenage daughter could read them, that Terry hides a sensitive letter under the false bottom of a drawer in his desk in the same room in which he already has a locked file cabinet drawer, that Sam has locked Katie out of a wing of the house that includes the kitchen--which are necessary for the orderly progression of its narrative.

Ultimately, Gone Home isn't a game so much as it is an interactive narrative pretending to be a game, and drawing much of its power from that category confusion.  This goes beyond the genre confusion caused by the game's misleading use of horror tropes.  The fact is, there really isn't any skill involved in playing Gone Home.  Though it has puzzle-like aspects--certain parts of the house are locked and the player needs to find ways to get into them--these are solved not through intelligence or out of the box thinking but through sheer bloody-mindedness--by walking around the house, manipulating objects and reading documents until you find the path to the next part of the story.  The primary skill necessary to play the game successfully is the ability to find the various lamps, string pulls and light switches that make the house navigable.  What's more, there's nothing for the player character to do.  By the time Katie shows up at the house, everything has already happened, and all that's left for her, and us, is to discover it.  This is reflected in Katie's situation in-universe.  Even once she discovers what's happened to her family--that Terry and Janice are on a couples' retreat, and that Sam, having learned that Lonnie got off the bus to basic training because she couldn't bear to be separated from Sam, has stolen some appliances for gas money and driven off to be with her--she's still trapped by a storm, with no car, and no phone numbers to call even if the phones are working. 

So what Gone Home actually is isn't a game, but a story, about how Katie arrived at an empty house, came to some horrifying and slightly ridiculous conclusions about what had happened to her family, and then learned that the truth is more mundane but also more fraught with complications.  If you told this story as a piece of fiction, it would come off as anticlimactic, and maybe a little gimmicky (that's certainly the impression formed when I baldly lay out the game's plot in this post).  But by turning the reader into a character, Gone Home invests its story with an emotional urgency that a straight telling couldn't have.  It's not just that we're scared, worried, and fooled into imagining ridiculous things along with Katie, but that we're forced to participate in the story actively instead of consuming it passively.  We're puzzling out the mystery with her, making choices that affect how she sees it (and overlooking clues and important items that could have changed her understanding of it).  When Katie discovers Sam's diary entry from the day before the game's events, in which she describes her despondence over Lonnie leaving to join the army, saying "I just want to sleep," and her plan to go to her hideout in the attic (the last locked location in the house) "and wait," the expectations aroused--that Sam has committed suicide, or that Oscar's vengeful ghost has had its way with her--are faintly ridiculous even in the moment.  But because it's left to us to find out the truth--because we control whether Katie unlocks the attic, whose key she finds next to Sam's diary entry, and can either delay that choice or rush to it--those ridiculous possibilities are invested with real weight, and the more mundane reality feels equally significant.

Another way that Gone Home uses its game-ishness to breathe new life into a fairly simple story is the way that it uses the found documents format to give each member of the Greenbriar family (living and dead) a voice--and how each of those voices is expressed in a different way.  Sam's voice is, quite literally, the most present in the game, and Robertson invests her diary entries, with their frankly rather by the numbers tale of self-discovery and sexual exploration, with genuine feeling.  Her joy at discovering that she is seen and loved, and frustration at her parents' inability to do the same--when Sam comes out to Terry and Janice, their response is not to hear her, and to insist that she is simply going through "a phase"--are palpable.  Katie, meanwhile, is the only active character in the game, but the one whose voice and personality are completely absent from it--all of her belongings are packed away in boxes (the sole exception, her high school athletic trophies which are on display in the foyer, seem to exist mainly for the contrast between them and the evidence of Sam's hobbies--making zines and recording Lonnie's band--which is hidden away in the house's secret passages), and the only examples of her writing are the vapid postcards she sent from her year away, in which one can sense Katie straining to say something new about some of the most written-about places in the world.

The rest of the family, however, lies in an interesting zone between exposure and opaqueness, one largely determined by how thoroughly the player investigates their (ultimately, ancillary) stories.  Janice, for example, has almost no voice--there are virtually no examples of her writing in the house.  But her story is laid out almost step by step for the player to find--first a ticket stub to a concert, then a letter from her colleague Rick inviting her to use his spare ticket, then a hairdresser's bill for the day before the concert for more than $100, then a letter from Janice's friend Carol assuring her that Rick and his girlfriend can't be serious, then an invitation to Rick's wedding, and then a brochure for a couples' retreat--requiring our active participation in working it out.  Terry, on the other hand, is loquacious--the game is full of his commercial, fictional, and personal writing--but throughout all of his writings he seems to struggling to say something that he can't express, and which he sometimes expresses in the wrong way--a letter from the editor of the technical magazine for which he reviews complains about the personal details that have begun creeping into his reviews.  Oscar, meanwhile, is almost entirely absent, represented--out in the open at least--by newspaper clippings and business documents.  And yet he looms over the game, first through Sam's joking evocation of his ghost, and later through a more tangible haunting of Terry.  The three items that spell out the source of Oscar and Terry's turmoil--a letter from Oscar to Terry's mother, returned to sender, in which he apologizes for a "transgression," Oscar's will in which he leaves all his property to Terry, and a letter from Oscar to Terry congratulating him on his marriage, which Terry tore up and then sellotaped back together--are all hidden behind false panels or combination locks.  It's unlikely that any but the most determined players will find all three in their first run through the game, and so the conclusion that most discussions of Gone Home have reached--that Oscar molested Terry as a child--remains opaque, expressed solely through Terry and Oscar's inability to express it.

The same format that gives Gone Home its power, however, undermines it once the game is over, and our power to determine Katie's emotions and reactions is lost.  The game ends when Katie finds Sam's final letter, explaining that she's gone off to be with Lonnie, and that the sisters will see other again "some day."  Most reviews I've read of Gone Home have found this ending transcendentally happy and hopeful, a refutation of the trope of the miserable lesbian (as you'll recall, the game teases the possibility that Sam has killed herself out of heartbreak), and an affirmation of the ability of outsiders to find their own space and their own community where they can be accepted.  While I can see that this was the game's intention (and agree that it's a laudable one) I'm not convinced that this is the story it's told.  In the game's reality, what's actually happened is that Sam, who hasn't even finished high school, and Lonnie, who has just gone AWOL, are off on their own with only Sam's car and a few stolen VCRs to live off.  It's hard to believe that this is going to end any other way than with Sam marched back home and Lonnie in jail (actually a pretty optimistic scenario in this situation, all things considered).

And yet, precisely at the point where I deviated from how the narrative (and Sam) wanted me to feel, the game's interactivity shut down.  After Katie finds Sam's last journal entry, the game ends with a hopeful reading from Robertson, and then allows the player to return and continue exploring the house (presumably to look for overlooked documents and hotspots).  As noted, there's nothing that Katie can do, even if she feels--as I do--that Sam has behaved recklessly and selfishly.  There's no space in the game for my feeling that Sam and Lonnie's romance, though very sweet, is far from the forever love that might justify their throwing away their lives for each other.  (Not helping matters is the fact that Lonnie is probably the least persuasive character in the game, whose personality and interests seem crafted entirely in order to make her the perfect girlfriend for Sam--cool and edgy, but also completely in love with our heroine.  The game even draws attention to the limits of Lonnie's construction when it has Sam point out her inherent contradictions--a punk lesbian who plans to join the army--but it doesn't resolve them in a way that makes Lonnie seem any less like a means to an end.)  There's certainly no space to react negatively towards Sam for hurting her family--for example, stealing from Terry and Janice, which to me is just gross, and indicative of a child who still hasn't grasped that her parents are human beings deserving of respect, not walking ATMs (I was particularly bothered by the fact that Katie finds Terry and Janice's bedroom ransacked, the drawers pulled out and left hanging from their rails with no more consideration than you'd expect from a burglar).

To be clear, the fact that Sam is self-absorbed and foolish is not a problem in itself.  It's certainly not unearned--Terry and Janice react very badly when Sam comes out to them, and from other documents in the house it's clear that they've been neglectful and caught up in their own issues during what must have been a difficult and stressful year for Sam.  And Sam has enough good qualities that behaving recklessly and thoughtlessly under the stress of almost losing Lonnie is understandable and even sympathetic.  The problem is that Gone Home's format doesn't allow us to come to this nuanced conclusion about her in a way that isn't entirely unsatisfying.  The game's power is rooted in planting the expectation that something horrible has happened to Sam, and then revealing that she is actually all right.  If, like myself, you don't think that Sam (or Lonnie) are really that all right then you'll end the game feeling conflicted.  It's a limitation of the interactive story format that having created this identification between the player and Katie, and encouraged the player's independence in exploring the house, the game then forces the player to feel what its designers think that Katie ought to be feeling--and unlike the game's success at eliciting fear at just the right moment, its attempt to elicit acceptance and happiness, in my case at least, didn't quite work.  Despite this reservation, Gone Home is a very exciting piece of fiction, a fascinating exploration of the potential--and limitations--of interactive storytelling.  If its designers haven't quite managed to get me on the right page, I'm still looking forward to what they do next, and to what other creators inspired by them do with the medium.

This is Not a Romance Novel: Thoughts on Scandal

Up until a few days ago, Shonda Rhimes was someone I admired greatly without really liking anything she did.  One of the few women (and people of color) to gain entry to the small and exclusive group of superstar TV producers, what sets Rhimes's series--juggernaut Grey's Anatomy, its less successful but still long-running spinoff Private Practice, and also-ran Off the Map--apart from the crowd is their being, by and large, the stories of women.  And more importantly, of a broad variety of women, many of whom don't often get their stories told on TV: fortyish and middle-aged women, women of color, gay women, women who don't look like runway models.  Despite that fact, and despite finding Rhimes's shows compelling--when I come across an episode of one while channel-flipping I almost always end up watching it to the end--I've never been fannish, or even particularly interested, in any of her series.  That's less because of their romance slant--though the fact that the serialized aspect of Rhimes's doctor shows is rooted almost entirely in romantic drama does dampen their appeal; I like a good love story as much as the next person, but I find the endless stream of breakups and makeups that comprise a soap opera more than a little depressing--as it is because I never got the sense that Rhimes was trying to do more than make slick, well-constructed, often extremely watchable soap operas.  No small accomplishment, to be sure, but also not something I could sink my teeth into.

At first glance, Rhimes's latest series Scandal, which debuted with a short, seven episode season last spring and returned for a full, triumphant second season in the fall, seems cut from the same cloth, a Grey's Anatomy in the beltway, minus the doctor slant.  High-powered DC fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) is the person you call when you're in the middle of a PR disaster.  Along with her team--smooth-talking lawyer Harrison (Columbus Short), high-strung investigator Abby (Darby Stanchfield), creepy tech guy and leg-breaker Huck (Guillermo Díaz), and new hire Quinn (Katie Lowes)--she massages the truth, spins the message, and keeps dirty little secrets tightly under wraps, employing methods that are just this side of legal--and which sometimes cross that line, to the repeated consternation of her foil in the US Attorney's office, David Rosen (Joshua Malina).  The pilot also sets up the show's requisite central couple.  Before she went into business on her own, we learn, Olivia worked on the campaign, and later in the White House, of the current president, Fitzgerald "Fitz" Grant III (Tony Goldwyn), with whom she had an affair.  She left in order to put a stop to the affair, but when the two are reunited in the pilot--after Olivia is called in to quash rumors that Fitz has been sleeping with a White House aide--it's clear that the spark is still very much there.  As Olivia investigates the aide story over the course of the first season, she and Fitz move back and forth from recrimination to yearning, from "no, we mustn't!" to "yes, we can," in the process running afoul of Fitz's ambitious wife Mellie (Bellamy Young), and his dirty-dealing chief of staff, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry).

The familiar Rhimes tics are all here.  The characters are all the very, very best at what they do and prone to announcing this at the drop of a hat, the emotions are always turned up to 11, epic speeches are delivered with clockwork regularity, and supposedly professional adults behave like high school students in thrall to their raging hormones.  If we've grown accustomed to doctors and lawyers who behave like soap opera characters, however, there's something quite jarring about porting these tropes to the corridors of power, which can make the Scandal pilot rather hard to swallow.  Not that a president would never take a mistress, or that TV isn't prone to taking even the most interesting settings and telling stories in them that revolve largely around who's sleeping with whom.  But what Rhimes has done with Scandal is something much more audacious--she's turned the White House into the setting of a romance novel, and the president into its hero (which is to say, its object).  Like all romance heroes, Fitz is focused, one hundred percent, on his heroine.  He's the sort of character who says things like:

You own me!  You control me.  I belong to you.  You think I don't want to be a better man?  You think that I don't want to dedicate myself to my marriage?  You don't think I want to be honorable, to be the man that you voted for?  I love you.  I'm in love with you.  You're the love of my life.  My every feeling is controlled by look on your face.  I can't breathe without you.  I can't sleep without you.  I wait for you.  I watch for you.  I exist for you.  If I could escape all of this, and run away with you...

That's some serious, Edward Rochester-level shit there, and it is more than a little ridiculous to put it in the mouth of a character who is allegedly the most powerful man in the world.  But Scandal leans into that ridiculousness, doubles down on it when it situates all power in its political system within the bond of marriage.  When Olivia joins Fitz's campaign, her first piece of advice is that he and Mellie seem like a cold couple, and that making their marriage seem viable on screen is crucial to his success.  "[Voters] put George W. in office because he and Laura seemed like a fun couple to have a beer with," she says, in brazen defiance of the fact that no one in the entire history of her political career has ever thought such a thing about Laura Bush.  In reality, what American voters mainly seem to want from their first couples is that they not be the Clintons--that his philandering, and her ambitions, stay on the down low.  It was only once the Obamas reignited the myth of Camelot that presidential marriages became a story again, and Scandal takes that newfound preoccupation and spins it into a political system in which it is the only thing that matters.  Fitz can get things done, as a candidate and later as a president, because he and Mellie seem like a strong couple.  When their bond weakens, so does his power.

The result is a political system that more closely resembles a royal family than a democracy.  Though the show offers comparisons like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings (in one of the few overt acknowledgments of a fact that the characters are clearly always cognizant of, that Olivia is black while Fitz and Mellie are white), its central triangle is actually more reminiscent of Diana, Charles, and Camilla.  The second season even features a presidential pregnancy plot, whose handling feels eerily prescient of the media circus that surrounded the royal baby this summer--the baby is even dubbed "America's Baby" by the voracious media.  At least, that is, until you realize that in the world of Scandal, the political elite, just like the British royal family, are merely another variety of celebrities, engaged in what is essentially a lifelong reality show.  When Mellie hears Olivia's critique of her and Fitz's marriage during the campaign, she stages a "spontaneous" breakdown during a campaign event with Fitz, tearfully telling a crowd of listeners that the reason she's been so distant is that the stress of the campaign caused her to miscarry a pregnancy (a miscarriage that, of course, never happened).  In the real world, no one would believe that such an outburst had really been unrehearsed, and Mellie would be seen as calculating and manipulative.  But in the world of Scandal, the voters are romance readers.  If they believe the performance--if it makes them go "awww" and hope that those crazy kids can make it work--then you'll get their vote.

As different and unusual a choice as this is, what it ultimately comes down to is that Scandal puts all its eggs in the romance genre basket, and if that's not the sort of story that appeals to you--for the most part, it doesn't appeal to me--then the show's first season will quickly rub you the wrong way.  "What kind of a coward was I, to marry her and not wait for you to show up?" Fitz asks Olivia shortly after they meet.  That's a very romance novel thing to say, but to me it just makes Fitz seem either unreal or unappealing.  No matter how utilitarian or unloving, a marriage is still a marriage--a shared life, full of intimate moments and secrets.  A man who can just wish away twenty years of successful, albeit cold, marriage doesn't come off as terribly sympathetic in my book (certainly not when you consider that said marriage has also given him two children; but then, Scandal tends to ignore the older Grant children, who have never even been seen).  But the show clearly intends for me to take this line as deeply romantic (and, to its credit, works hard on both the acting and production levels to sell that viewpoint), and to engage deeply with the Olivia/Fitz romance.  If you're not rooting for them to somehow find a way to be together despite their impossible situation, the first season doesn't leave much space for you.

Which is why Scandal's second season comes as such a shock.  It is essentially Rhimes piling high the tropes and conventions that have made her super-successful, dousing them with gasoline, and lighting a match.  The hints planted in the first season about the real reason Olivia left the White House and the dirty secrets that lie in her own past come to fruition when it's revealed that she was part of a conspiracy to steal the election for Fitz, which was followed by a cover-up in which several people died.  As David Rosen and members of Olivia's own team investigate this cover-up from different directions, and as Olivia and Cyrus Beene, who was also part of the conspiracy, race to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing, Rhimes methodically dismantles the assumptions that lie at the core of all of her work--assumptions about love, about her characters, and about who we're expected to root for.  Rhimes shows are characterized, as I've said, by outsized emotions and big speeches that extoll the characters' virtues.  Scandal is the show that takes those big feelings and bigger words and asks: what if those emotions are twisted and unhealthy?  What if those big words are nothing but spin?  What if the characters who we've been told are heroes are just selfish, clueless cowards?

"That man was born to be a leader.  He was born to do this.  Anything else would diminish him and deprive this country."  Cyrus tells Olivia.  "Some men aren't meant to be happy; they're meant to be great."  But if there's greatness in Fitz, the show is slow to let us see it.  He is, after all, a man who ascends to the highest office in the land and then immediately turns around and complains that it prevents him from being with his girlfriend.  And while marriage, and love, are the source of power in Scandal, that love is more often corrupting than it is nurturing.  Fitz and Olivia's love brings out the worst in them.  It undermines Olivia's judgment, her frequently referenced "gut" which unerringly points her towards the right choice, and causes her to betray herself and her principles when she agrees to steal the election in order to give Fitz what he wants.  It turns Fitz into a whiny brat, who crawls into a bottle when he and Olivia are on the outs--as it turns out, depriving him of happiness is not the way to bring out his greatness.  This is love as an addiction, one that reveals its sufferers' weakness and ugliness; even when they're together, Olivia and Fitz are toxic as often as they are loving--Fitz, for example, has a nasty tendency to treat the word "no" as an invitation.  Cyrus, meanwhile, deeply loves, and is loved by, his journalist husband James (Dan Bucatinsky), but their marriage is rife with lies and manipulations, as the two of them hold James's investigation into the vote-fixing conspiracy, and Cyrus's promise of an adopted baby, over each other's heads.  The only relationship that seems healthy and honest, between David Rosen and Abby, is also the one that is most easily destroyed, when Olivia, deciding that Abby represents a security leak, plays on her friend's history of spousal abuse to sow doubts in her mind about David.

That act of manipulation is one of several that cast a pall on the alleged bond between Olivia and her people.  Among TV writers, Rhimes is far from alone in elevating the team--that found family of people from different and often difficult backgrounds who come together for a common cause--above all other bonds, and in extolling the values of loyalty and friendship that bind it together.  But as the show's second season draws on, it increasingly seems to suggest not only that that loyalty might be misplaced--as in the case of Olivia breaking up David and Abby for her own purposes--but that what the characters think of as loyalty is actually dysfunction and codependency, that Olivia's team are loyal to her not because they've freely chosen to be, but because they desperately need her to define them and give their lives meaning.  The more we learn about the team, the more obviously damaged they seem--Abby's brittle strength conceals a self-loathing bred by years of abuse, Huck is a psychopath with a proclivity for torture and murder who hangs all hope of his salvation on Olivia, Quinn is one of the victims of the vote-fixing scheme who has nothing left in her life but the guilty generosity of the woman who destroyed it, and Harrison, who crows about being a "gladiator in a suit," is driven by the near-crippling fear that, in reality, he's just as powerless as everyone else.  Though the characters all view Olivia as their savior, as the season progresses the show increasingly seems to suggest that far from saving them, Olivia has, however unwittingly, trapped them in bonds of obligation and dependence--as when Abby, despite learning about Olivia's manipulation of her, steals evidence from David because she knows that it could hurt Olivia.

None of this, of course, would work if Scandal were not impeccably well-made and a hell of a lot of fun to watch.  The plot, which rollicks along like the better seasons of 24 (and is often just as absurd), is compelling and beautifully constructed.  The show is stylishly shot and edited, its frequent use of still photographs and split-screens amplifying the tension of its storytelling without ever becoming hectic or confusing.  Though the character work occasionally leaves something to be desired--Quinn, for example, feels more like a plot point than a person; the decision, in the second half of the second season, to make her Huck's enthusiastic wetworks trainee feels like a last-ditch effort to make her interesting, rather than something organic to the character--where it truly matters, Scandal gets the job done.  In particular, the show wouldn't work if Washington and Goldwyn didn't have terrific chemistry, not just as lovers but as partners.  Goldwyn can sell overheated speeches like the one above, as well as the less savory aspects of Fitz's obsession with Olivia.  But the reason that Scandal's handling of their relationship is so deliciously ambiguous is that for every overwrought, dysfunctional scene between them, there's another, quieter exchange in which Fitz and Olivia come off like an old married couple and a great partnership, in which it is easy to imagine what a great First Lady Olivia would make for Fitz.

But if it was perhaps to be expected that Scandal would put the effort into making its central couple appealing to the audience, putting a similar effort into the show's two most marginal, antagonistic characters was less predictable, and ends up paying great dividends.  As David Rosen, Malina plugs into his Sorkin-honed schlubbiness, squawking "I am the law!" at Olivia's casual flouting of it and him, and growing increasingly frustrated as she runs circles around him and his investigation of her.  Another show might have made David into a caricature, but Scandal instead reveals more and more of his dignity even as Olivia chips away at his professional standing, using him to suggest that Olivia and her team's obsession with the appearance of strength misses out on the reality of it.  When a seemingly defeated David uses his facade of weakness to outsmart Olivia at the end of the second season, it's both a triumphant moment and a worrying one, signifying that he may have learned too much from his former enemy.  Even more interesting is Mellie, who is both the castrating, harpy wife that her story casts her as, and so much more than that.  If every other character on the show is spun around by love, Mellie is immune to it.  What she wants--what she had with Fitz before Olivia turned up--is a partnership, two people striving towards a common goal, in this case power, and she is genuinely puzzled and distraught by the way that love seems to destroy Fitz and Olivia.  In her own way, Mellie is the most honest character on the show (for a value of "honest" that takes into account the fact that she habitually lies to three hundred million people when she assumes her doting, devoted First Lady persona), the only one willing to say what she feels and what she wants, who is then frustrated because the more romantic characters on the show dismiss her words as cold and calculating.

Despite all this, what's most intriguing about Scandal's undermining of its own tropes is that I'm still not entirely convinced that it's intentional.  The show plays its tropes with such a straight face that, though it seems impossible that we're not intended to see how toxic they are, there's rarely anything in the show that confirms this interpretation.  The cues that tell us to root for Olivia and Fitz's reunion, for example--the music, the lighting, the dialogue, and of course the actors themselves--are never allowed to let up, even when the things that Olivia and Fitz do to themselves and each other cross the line into abuse.  And when Harrison tries to convince Abby not to leave after she finds out about his and Olivia's interference in her relationship with David, he delivers a classic Rhimes speech:

She had a reason!  I don't know what it is.  I don't need to know.  She asked me to do something; I did it.  You know why I did.  There's a problem, you fix it.  You and David Rosen were a problem.  You know who we are, you know what this is, and don't pretend you don't.  We do what needs to be done and we don't question why.  You put the personal to the left.  It doesn't matter who gets hurt.  It doesn't matter what gets broken.  If it's not the thing that needs fixing, it does.  Not.  Matter.  You want to cry about your feelings, huh?  Really?  Here?  You don't get to have feelings.  That's the job.  Gladiators don't have feelings.  We rush into battle.  We're soldiers.  We get hurt in a fight, we suck it up and we hold it down.  We don't question. 

It seems impossible that we're meant to watch this scene and not think that Harrison is either a blowhard or seriously messed up.  His speech encapsulates how much of Olivia and her team's shtick is empty posturing.  Throughout the series, they swoop onto the site of the latest PR disaster, barking orders, frantically placing calls, and assuring everyone around (including, it often seems, themselves) that they're the only ones who can save the day.  Harrison's speech throws a light on how much of that behavior is simply self-aggrandizement--to which end he's willing to valorize even blind loyalty to people who manipulate and lie to you (or who ask you to hurt your friends).  But the delivery, and Abby's reaction, are completely straight-faced, and in line with a million other speeches in other Rhimes shows (and in other shows in general) which do seriously extoll these virtues.  It still seems possible to me that Scandal wants me to root for Olivia and Fitz to get together, for her team to remain loyal to her, for more and more characters to recognize Olivia's awesomeness and give in to it, even though the show as it is written has in fact convinced me of the opposite.  (In reality, I find Olivia sympathetic enough that I don't want bad things to happen to her, and I want her and Fitz to be together because clearly they're not fit for anyone else's company.  But I also want them to go off where they can't bother or hurt anyone and leave Mellie to be president, and for Abby, Huck, Quinn, and Harrison to disentangle themselves from their boss and find healthier, more rewarding relationships.)  When Cyrus, in the second season finale, lambastes Olivia for her determination to have a future with Fitz (which at that point extends to ignoring credible threats to her life), and insists that "Life is not a romance novel," it's not at all clear to me whether he's delivering the show's mission statement, or protesting too much.

And then there is the simple fact that, even if she is engaged in a wonderfully subversive act of trolling her audience, Rhimes may not be able to keep it, or the show's quality, up for much longer.  Already at the end of the second season there are signs of material fatigue--the overarching plot of the season's second half is weaker and less purposeful than the first, and the constant back and forth between Fitz and Olivia as they veer from vowing to stay together no matter what to breaking up forever has already started to become tedious.  Grey's Anatomy is famous for having two generally beloved seasons and then collapsing into a still-satisfying but increasingly ridiculous mess, and Scandal, which already rates pretty high on the ridiculousness scale, is obviously in danger of falling into that trap.  So it's possible that I'm recommending Scandal just as it's about to go sour, and that in a few months I'll go back to admiring Shonda Rhimes but not liking anything she does.  For the moment, however, Scandal is one of the most intriguing shows on TV.  It's certainly one of the most fun. 

Review: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Helene Wecker's debut The Golem and the Jinni, in which the titular magical creatures meet in early 20th century New York.  Though there are aspects of the novel that I enjoyed, it ended up making me question its very choice of genre, and my review discusses the way in which magic as a metaphor for mundane realities can end up being used as a crutch to shore up a flawed work.

History, Repeated: Two Views on The Wars of the Roses

We all know that history is written by the victors, but the matter doesn't end there.  History is also written by the powerful, the educated, the privileged.  By people who toe--and sometimes the ones who shape--the party line.  People of the wrong gender, race, class, or nationality not only don't get to write history, they often don't even get to appear in it.  It's one of the tasks of historians to address the gaps and deficits in the official record, but this is also where historical fiction can come in, giving a voice to those who were denied it at the time.  In the last few weeks I've consumed two different works that take on the same historical period with this goal in mind, but from two different perspectives.  The BBC's ten-part miniseries The White Queen tells the story of the Wars of the Roses by stressing the role of women within them, highlighting the fact that in a dispute in which marriage and succession played such an important role, women's bodies were often a field, and a weapon, of battle.  Sharon Kay Penman's 1982 novel The Sunne in Splendour, meanwhile, retells the dynastic struggle between York and Lancaster through the lens of the life of Richard III, whom Penman tries to rehabilitate from centuries of Tudor-instigated character assassination (not the least of which, of course, is the Shakespearean play that bears his name).  For two works with such different goals, the miniseries and the novel are surprisingly prone to employing the same devices.  They also end up evincing some of the same prejudices and preconceptions, and undermining themselves and their projects in very similar ways.

Based on the Cousins' War novels by Philipa Gregory (The White Queen, 2009; The Red Queen, 2010; The Kingmaker's Daughter, 2012), and adapted by Emma Frost and Malcolm Campbell, The White Queen focuses its story on three figures: Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson), a commoner whose impolitic marriage to the first Yorkist king, Edward IV (Max Irons), drives a wedge between Edward and his greatest supporter, the Earl of Warwick (James Frain), which fuels the later stages of the wars; Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale), a Lancastrian supporter whose son, Henry Tudor, will take the throne as Henry VII, bringing the wars to an end; and Anne Neville (Faye Marsay), Warwick's younger daughter who is initially a pawn in her father's scheming against Edward, and then marries Edward's younger brother, the future Richard III (Aneurin Barnard).  Other important figures include Elizabeth's mother Jacquetta Woodville (Janet McTeer), who is quick to take advantage of her daughter's meteoric ascent by advancing her family's fortunes through marriage and royal appointments, Isabel Neville (Eleanor Tomlinson), Anne's older sister, who marries Edward and Richard's brother George (David Oakes) in a failed bid by Warwick to secure him the throne, and Marguerite d'Anjou (Veerle Baetens), the French wife of the deposed Lancastrian king Henry VI, who spearheads the fight to restore her husband to the throne and secure her son's inheritance.  Gregory adds her own twist to the story by making the Woodville women witches (as they were accused of being in actual history), who use their powers to advance their goals, thwart their enemies, and divine the future (though not always avoid it).

Equally wide-ranging is The Sunne in Splendour, a 900-page behemoth which follows Richard from early childhood to his death at Bosworth Field.  Though much of the book is written from Richard's perspective, Penman gives nearly every player on both sides of the wars (and some invented, minor figures such as servants and ladies in waiting) a point of view, creating a multifaceted portrait of the dispute and the personal, political, and economic motivations that lay at its heart.  Nevertheless, Penman's ultimate project with the novel is to present a new kind of Richard III, not the usurper of his brother's throne, or the murderer of his nephews, familiar from history.  Her Richard is intelligent, thoughtful, and kind; a fearsome and brave soldier but also an honorable one; a devoted brother, husband, and father whose participation in so much bloody history comes about because of his loyalty to Edward and his belief that he is doing the best for England, rather than personal ambition.  Penman stresses Richard's popularity in the north of England, where he ruled for years on Edward's behalf, suggesting that the hostility that greeted him in London when he took the throne was politically motivated rather than a reflection of his actual performance as a ruler; and she casts Richard and Anne Neville's courtship and marriage as a sweeping love story, in which Richard rescues Anne from the scheming of her father (who marries her off to the son of Marguerite d'Anjou, the Lancastrian heir) and his brother George (who tries to get his hands on Anne's property).

Despite their different goals and apporaches, both miniseries and novel suffer from the same problem, which is endemic to historical fiction (not to mention novel adaptations)--they feel less like a coherent work of fiction, and more like a whole mess of events happening one after another.  The White Queen's project to retell a male-dominated slice of history from the perspective of women is an intriguing one, but beyond achieving it, Gregory and her adapters appear to have had no artistic goal--a fact that seems particularly apparent from The White Queen's ending, in which the story simply stops after Richard's defeat without any attempt to put a cap or any sort of emotional spin on events.  Only a few of the miniseries's characters become interesting as people, rather than as tokens moving the plot along--chiefly, Margaret Beaufort, whom Hale plays with a wounded awkwardness that makes her terrifying, fanatical belief in the divinely ordained triumph of the Lancaster side (and specifically, her son) seem almost endearing.  Though there are a few scenes that try to get at the real, human truth of living through this period--when Warwick's machinations force him to escape to France, his daughter Isabel undergoes a gruesome, bloody childbirth aboard ship, and the series lingers over her and her sister's horror at the visceral, inescapable truth of what it means to be a woman, even a rich and high-born one, in this period--for most of its run The White Queen doesn't seem to be reaching for this kind of humanity.  Its characters act not because it's what the people their authors conceived them as would have done, but because this is what happened at this stage of the story.

The Sunne in Splendour, too, gives the impression of not trying to be a work of art in its own right, but a retelling--with an obvious slant--of a historical story.  This is brought home in particular through Penman's style, which can only be described as artless.  Her characters speak in a cod-medieval argot that consists mainly of using the word "be" instead of any of the verb's conjugations ("There be this I must tell you"; "My lord, the King is here!  They be below in the great hall even now") and a liberal sprinkling of the verb "do" in sentences where it serves no purpose ("In July, he did sign a treaty with Burgundy"; "I'd not be surprised if the deaths do number fully fifteen hundred").  Which may, for all I know, be the way people talked in the fifteenth century, but if so it sits very ill with Penman's liberal use of modern turns of phrase, such as Richard telling George to "stay out of [Anne's] life" or Anne reflecting, of Richard's mother, that "We all have to find our own path and the way she's found be right for her."  The omniscient narrator is similarly confused--some passages are written in modern English, and some replicate the "be" and "do" style.  In some chapters, the narrative voice is contemporary to the characters, sharing their assumptions and worldview, while in others, Penman pauses to explain everything from medieval battle tactics to basic household tasks to her readers. In the book's final chapters, characters repeatedly launch into recitations of the various arguments for why Richard couldn't possibly have murdered his nephews, sounding more like a history lecture than actual human beings--which, among other things, draws an unflattering comparison between The Sunne in Splendour and Josephine Tey's 1951 novel Daughter of Time, which presents the same argument with a great deal more style and wit.

Nevertheless, The Sunne in Splendour is profoundly readable--perhaps more so than The White Queen is watchable.  Artless though her style may be, Penman writes clearly and concisely.  This is particularly noticeable in the novel's battle scenes, in which she effortlessly sets the scene and takes readers through the beats of the battle (these scenes are anyway a point that The Sunne in Splendour has over The White Queen, which has neither the viewpoint nor the budget to stage big battles; one wonders if Elizabeth's magical powers were intended to compensate for this lack of excitement, but if so then either Gregory or her adapters have failed to use them as such).  And, of course, Penman has the benefit of her subject matter--if all she's done with her book is to make a story out of history (no small accomplishment in its own right, it must be said) then that history is fascinating enough to make for an engrossing read.

In fact, both The Sunne in Splendour and The White Queen are at their weakest when their authors step away from the task of storying history and try to inject their own agenda into their rendition.  For Gregory, this is the beatification of Elizabeth Woodville, who is clearly the favored of the miniseries's three heroines.  This is a problem because Elizabeth is, by far, the least interesting character in the miniseries, a fact that has less to do with her role in history, and more with her author's obvious love for her.  Though, as I've noted, very few characters in The White Queen achieve a true complexity, most have some shades of grey--Anne Neville, for example, spends most of the miniseries being frightened yet plucky, but she's surprisingly savvy when she maneuvers her way out of George's control, and later unleashes her inner Lady Macbeth when her husband comes within reach of the throne.

Elizabeth, however, is caught in an epic (albeit, to a modern viewer, not entirely convincing) love story with Edward, which leaves her incapable of developing much of a personality.  Her defining trait is that she loves her husband and children, and she seems to want nothing more than to be with them and to protect them.  Though Gregory allows Elizabeth to occasionally be bitchy to Margaret or Anne, she doesn't allow her to acknowledge the political reality in which she's living--the fact that she is a social climber whose family has benefited enormously from her fortunate marriage.  The White Queen seems to have a horror of making Elizabeth seem in any way mercenary or ambitious, and so it paints an entirely unbelievable portrait of a woman who married, for love, a man who just happened to be the King of England, and who is repeatedly shocked, shocked to discover that this marriage has earned her enemies and puts her and her family in danger.  The result, paradoxically, is to make Elizabeth seem monstrously self-absorbed, so focused on her marriage that she appears genuinely not to have noticed that there's a war going on and that her marriage has intensified it.  In one scene, Elizabeth, who is dealing with a crisis of conscience, pensively asks Margaret Beaufort is she has ever experienced loss--when, after decades of civil war, there surely isn't anyone in Edward's court who hasn't experienced it, as Elizabeth should well know.

Gregory's love for Elizabeth Woodville, however, pales next to Penman's love for Richard III, and as much as The White Queen whitewashes Elizabeth, The Sunne in Splendour vilifies her and her family, the better to clear Richard from the charges that history lays at his feet.  The core of the dispute between the two characters and their partisans is the early death of Edward IV, which leaves a boy on the throne of England.  Richard and the Woodvilles immediately scramble to gain control of the young king, which leads to Richard declaring his brother's children illegitimate and claiming the throne for himself, and the disappearance of both of Elizabeth's royal sons, the famous Princes in the Tower.  If you want to make one of the parties in this final stage of the Wars of the Roses look like the good guy (and, just to be clear, I think that this is a dubious project whose result will be bad history as well as bad fiction), you have to make the other into a villain.

This Penman does, and with gusto.  In the early chapters of The Sunne in Splendour, Penman describes Elizabeth as arrogant and power-hungry, but also extends some sympathy towards her--in one chapter in particular, we see Elizabeth musing about the loneliness of her situation, hated by everyone except for her narcissistic husband.  As the story draws on, however, Elizabeth becomes more and more of a caricature of grasping ambition--her dying regret is that she couldn't convince Edward to kill the priest who proves that their marriage is invalid.  She is frequently castigated for behavior that in other characters would be considered entirely justified.  When Edward tells her that he was already married when he met her, the narrative undermines Elizabeth's entirely justified rage at the damage he's done to her and their children by having Edward comment (and Elizabeth silently confirm) that "We both know I've given you what you did want most, that Queen's coronet you take such pleasure in wearing.  Even had I told you about Nell, you'd still have married me.  To be Queen of England, I don't doubt you'd have willingly bedded a leper."  Later in book, after Richard has seized the throne, Elizabeth joins forces with Lancaster to unseat him, and is criticized by her oldest daughter for being willing to plunge the country into civil war in order to reacquire her lost power.  In a novel that spans a quarter century of dynastic disputes, in which at least seven different characters seek to unseat a reigning monarch, and several battles are fought in which tens of thousands of people die, Elizabeth is the only character who is so rebuked.

If Elizabeth has it bad, her family get it even worse.  Penman not only puts the worst possible spin on the Woodvilles' social climbing, describing them as avaricious and unfit for the posts Elizabeth wins them, but she also paints the family, individually and as a whole, as generally worthless people.  Elizabeth's brother Anthony and her son from her first marriage Thomas Grey are depicted as craven, uncouth, and foolish.  They are frequently the target of Richard's, and often also Edward's, disdain, which they accept because they have no sense of honor and care only about money and power.  Much like Elizabeth, they are called to task for behavior that in other characters is treated as par for the course--when Elizabeth objects to Edward pardoning Warwick, who has killed her father and brother, Edward dismisses her anger; later in the same scene, when Anthony makes a somewhat possessive reference to the deaths of Edward's father and brother in the early stages of the war, Edward explodes at this perceived lack of respect for his grief; the narrative treats Edward's outburst with gravity, and makes no reference to his obvious hypocrisy.  Thomas Grey is described as having "a taste ... for intrigue" for being able to place spies in the houses of the Woodvilles' enemies, a generally useful skill that several other characters in the novel employ with no authorial censure.  He is also described as having "the family flair for hating," and later in the novel he rapes an unconscious woman, one of the most innocent and likeable characters in the novel, just so we're clear who the bad guys are.

That Penman needed to make Elizabeth and the Woodvilles into villains is perhaps understandable--though it must be said that Gregory is much more even-handed with Richard than Penman is with Elizabeth; in her version of the events that follow Edward's death, Elizabeth and Richard both start with equal parts distrust and a desire for compromise, but their paranoia, and some helpful prodding from Margaret Beaufort, tip them into all-out war.  The specific terms chosen by Penman to describe that villainy are less understandable, however, and as one progresses in the novel that choice increasingly seems to have less to do with wanting to rehabilitate Richard, and more with the Woodvilles' class.  You see this, for example, in the contrast Penman draws between Richard's honorable good manners, the seriousness with which he takes his role as feudal lord, and the Woodvilles' bungling crassness.  Or in the way that Penman repeatedly paints the Woodvilles as stupid and unsophisticated, but never explains why, despite their general lack of ability, they continue to flourish and present a meaningful threat to Richard and his supporters.  One almost expects her to refer to their "low cunning." 

What I find most interesting about this is how these two very different approaches to their subject matter on Penman and Gregory's parts end up revealing a similar prejudice in both works.  The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour both seem to have a horror of social climbing.  Penman addresses this issue in the more familiar way, by making her story's social climbers into villains, and attaching to them all the classist stereotypes that such characters are prone to.  Gregory, though she wants Elizabeth to be her heroine, obviously has the same problem with the idea that she might have married primarily, or even just in part, in order advance herself and her family.  And so she pretends otherwise, and makes of Elizabeth a wholly unbelievable, and quite tedious, figure, who somehow manages not to notice that her marriage comes with undreamt-of financial and political perks.

In the documentary produced by the BBC to coincide with The White Queen (which, though interesting, includes too much of the unfounded speculation that eventually crops up in the miniseries), Gregory says that the purpose of the Cousins' War books was to highlight the ways in which, even in a period that accorded them no rights or status, women were actors in their own right, and often the architects of their own, or their families', fate.  For all my problems with The White Queen, it does accomplish this task, not least in the way that it charts the boundaries of that power and the pitfalls of exercising it.  Isabel Neville, for example, does everything that her husband and father tell her to, and ends up as the most tragic figure in the story because of it.  Her death from postpartum infection is an almost too-perfect encapsulation of the inescapable trap of womanhood in the miniseries's period.  Marguerite d'Anjou, on the other hand, repeatedly defies traditional feminine roles.  We're told that she effectively ran the country when her mentally unstable husband wasn't up to the task, and after he's deposed it is Marguerite who leads the Lancaster side, even riding with her son's troops.  For this, she is unsurprisingly reviled.  The Yorkists use Marguerite's influence on Henry VI as their justification for rebelling and eventually claiming the throne in the wars' early stages.  Later on, it is the perception of a similar influence on Elizabeth's part that motivates Warwick to turn on Edward, and which later convinces Richard that she can't be trusted with the young king.

Between these two characters, Gregory perfectly captures the double bind that greets women when they to exercise power in a patriarchal, medieval system.  Women who can't control their destiny end up being used up and spit out like Isabel Neville; women who try to grab as much power as they can, however, end up being branded as Bad Girls, and sometimes, as in Elizabeth Woodville's case, as witches.  The Sunne in Splendour plays into this bind without seeming at all aware of it.  Penman is sympathetic towards both Isabel Neville and Marguerite d'Anjou but doesn't seem to have considered how their fates reflect the system they lived in.  And, as noted, with her version of Elizabeth she is perfectly happy to parrot the view that a woman who is ambitious, who marries for advancement and takes advantage of her position to amass power for herself and her family, is a Bad Girl (though it is interesting to note that she omits the accusations of witchcraft brought against Elizabeth and her mother by, respectively, Richard and Warwick; perhaps she feared that the associations modern readers would draw from a powerful man accusing a troublesome woman of witchcraft would undermine her pro-Richard argument).  But Gregory, who does see this bind, and the system that created it, is nevertheless unable to escape the Bad Girl mentality.  She must strip Elizabeth of her ambition before she can make her into a heroine.

I can't help but be reminded of Anne Boleyn, another English queen who appears quite frequently in historical fiction, and who was also branded--by her contemporaries and, often, by modern authors--as a Bad Girl.  Anne and Elizabeth, in fact, have a great deal in common.  They're both English-born queens of England (Elizabeth was the very first), both women who were expected to settle for being the King's mistress, and instead held out for marriage and crown, and both women who earned themselves a great deal of enmity for doing so.  More importantly, Anne and Elizabeth both amass power in the only way available to women in their period who have no property or connections--by attaching themselves to a powerful man.  Unlike Anne Neville, who is a great heiress even before she marries Richard, or Margaret Beaufort, who is the mother of a Lancastrian claimant to the throne, the only power Anne and Elizabeth have is that there is one man who considers them special, and that he just happens to be the most powerful man around.  (To be clear, this is speaking relatively.  Though Elizabeth is called a commoner, her family were minor aristocracy, and her mother was related to the royal court of Burgundy; the Boleyns, meanwhile, were a branch of the powerful Howard family.  Elizabeth and Anne could both have made very good marriages within their social stratum, but they didn't have the money or connections to aspire to a crown.)

This is, obviously, an incredibly dangerous tactic.  If your man tires of you, as Henry VIII did of Anne, you end up with your head chopped off.  But even if he doesn't, if you're the perfect wife, if you turn a blind eye to his infidelities, if you give him many healthy children, including sons (something that both the novel and the miniseries ignore is how much of the Wars of the Roses are driven by the fact that many of the York and Lancaster claimants didn't have children or outlived them, while the Woodvilles were incredibly fertile; to bring this back to the issue of class, I can't help but think that this is what happens when you don't spend four generations marrying your cousins in an effort to keep your property in the family and the riffraff out)--even then, your position is precarious.  If your only power comes from being special to one man, then all the other men who have power will not only resent you, they will treat you as morally inferior, as a Bad Girl, for using sex to get power, and for wanting power in the first place instead of being born with it. 

In her novel Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel tries to do some of the same things as Gregory and Penman--to rehabilitate a historical figure usually cast as a villain, in her case Thomas Cromwell, and to draw attention to the ways that women used power in periods that officially gave them none, and to the dangers of doing so.  Mantel could have made the choices that Gregory and Penman do.  She could have made Anne Boleyn a blameless woman in love, or Cromwell a saint driven to evil acts by a conniving woman.  Instead, Mantel recognizes what neither of these authors seem to--that to look for good guys and bad guys, and to root for a particular side, in a dispute like the Wars of the Roses is a fool's errand.  Instead, she focuses on her characters' humanity.  Her Anne is not an appealing figure.  There is little romance between her and Henry VIII, and as he grows tired of her and she grows more desperate, she seems to shrivel up until there's nothing left but ambition and arrogance.  Nevertheless, she is still human, and Mantel doesn't judge her for her choices or ambitions.  Her Cromwell, too, is more than a hero or a villain (though in my reviews of Bring Up the Bodies and its prequel Wolf Hall I've taken Mantel to task for going too easy on him and downplaying his less savory actions).  He has many admirable qualities, and though over the course of the book we watch his soul atrophy, and the worst in him emerge as he engineers Anne's death, we never lose sight of the good that is still in him.

It's that humanity that is missing in both The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour.  As you may have noticed, I've said virtually nothing about Penman's Richard, which is because, like Gregory's Elizabeth, he is interesting more for what happens to him than for who he is.  When given the chance to explore Richard's humanity--to imagine, for example, how despite his inherent goodness he could have been spurred to terrible acts after his brother's death, one small step after another--Penman instead chooses to present apologia, to painstakingly detail how none of the terrible things that happened during Richard's reign were his fault.  The result is a character to whom things happen, far from the magnetic figure that Penman obviously wants him to be.  The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour both have their pleasures (if I had to rank them, I would say that The Sunne in Splendour is more enjoyable, but also more aggravatingly overt in its attempts to push its take on history, which ultimately mars the novel beyond recovery), and both work well as an introduction to a fascinating bit of history.  But what they mainly made me wish for was that an author of Hilary Mantel's caliber would take hold of this material, and make some real art out of it.