February 10, 2004

The Amateur Gentleman, Jeffery Farnol

One web-interview says that Jack Vance has cited Farnol as an influence. If Vance got atmosphere and plotting out of this novel, he squeezed the turnip harder than I could. It's an okay tale of an (improbably fortunate) young man making his way into and out of Regency London high society, and he makes friends in all walks of life. The language isn't anything very particular - neither George Meredith nor Georgette Heyer, to bracket it by high taste and low. The heroine speaks in hyphens, and tick-tocks between unthinking hauteur and melting idiocy.

Florence King sums up that particular romance-novel tic in two words I can't remember; "suddenly/swooningly"? Very dull feature of plot, since it happens instead of anything one might call 'character development'. Virginia Woolf somewhere refers to the high song, the high note, something, of the romantic effect of Tennyson's Maud. I think Woolf is thinking of the (subtly done) version of the same game. All that's left for my ear is the high whine of a mosquito.

URI: Gutenberg Ebook #9879

So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.). | TrackBack
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