The Black Moth, Georgette Heyer (365 Books, Day 192)

[rushthatspeaks]

I have read a great deal of Heyer, but hadn't run across this one.

Traditionally I think of Heyer as comedy of manners, with her own peculiar slang, her Regency-that-never-was, witty and charming and mostly spun-sugar but with its occasional darker moments, and the odd thing like The Talisman Ring or The Masqueraders that subscribes to and/or satirizes a different school of fiction entirely. The Black Moth is one of the latter, and more completely the latter, the old-style blood-and-thunder drama: it has a different voice than I've seen Heyer have elsewhere, both more historical about the little insignificant details and more over-the-top about the generalities.

I mean this is a book in which there is an Earl who has taken to being a highwayman because he took the blame for his brother's cheating at cards. And a Duke who abducts a young lady not once but twice. And multiple duels. And scenes in which Honor Does Not Allow Them To Marry, and a night gallop over the countryside to Prevent A Fate Worse Than Death, and oh, you can't even see the top below the plot of this book, I am completely unsurprised to find it is her first novel, and yet--

underneath all that, these people are more real than she usually allows herself. They hurt each other for silly reasons, but they do hurt each other. They are drawn more roundly than I usually expect of Heyer. Her villain here is genuinely a rat bastard, who has made his sister marry someone he does not expect her to love for the sake of money, who as I have mentioned abducts a young lady twice and explicitly intends her violence; but he is not one-dimensional. He eventually realizes that it is not sufficient excuse that he actually believes he loves her. And the one who actually cheated at cards, and his wife, are an impressive portrait of a couple who are managing to make each other totally miserable because they have no idea how to talk to each other, and nearly leave it until too late to learn.

I can't believe a word of the plot, all the chasing about, but she did make me feel for her characters more than I am accustomed.

This is a direction I rather wish she'd continued with. She might have turned into Dorothy Dunnett (who clearly had this book memorized, I recognized some of the blocking). But then we would not have some of the later things-- I don't know, that's the sort of messing about with the timestream I'm not qualified for. At any rate, I very much enjoyed this, because I tend to value the plausibility of characters over the plausibility of events, and because there is nothing like a good blood-and-thunder drama.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I can't believe Dunnett was influenced by this so much as both had a heavy influence of Geoffrey Farnol. Heyer wrote this one as a teenager, and it really, really shows the Farnol influence. My guess is that she rewrote the story (which was a common one) to make it more hers in These Old Shades.

[larryhammer]

These Old Shades is, yes, pretty much a rewrite (with a bit more experience) of The Black Moth.

Her next couple books are more in this mode, and it's only with Powder and Patch that she started to catch, if only intermittently, her later manner.

---L.

[sovay]

I can't believe Dunnett was influenced by this so much as both had a heavy influence of Geoffrey Farnol.

I've never heard of Farnol. When was he?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Farnol (he spelled his first name oddly; I will try to remember to unbox one of his books to check the spelling later) Geoffrey, Jeffry, Jeffery?

Anyway, he was one of many in the long line of Silver Fork novelists who strayed more toward adventure, in the Bulwer-Lytton school. He obviously had a tremendous influence on Heyer, as you see not only plot elements but regional speech patterns in certain kinds of characters, etc, in her earlier work especially. He had a long career, publishing around the turn of the century or World War One, and steadily from there.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

If you'd like to try him, I have Beltane the Smith: A Romance of the Greenwood.

Nine

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The sheer existence of a book with that title makes me very happy.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have never heard of Farnol. Thank you! That is interesting, and I shall look into him.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

I do like the Georgian books, and feel as if she missed them, too: there's a comment one of her elderly characters makes in a later book, about the bloodlessness of the current age, that rings true to me. My favorites among the Regencies are things like A Civil Contract, which are novels before they are romances and the characters are human beings seen through a lens that hasn't been smeared with quite so much Romantic Vaseline as her frothier outings.

Geoffrey Farnol? I shall have to check him out. Because I LOVE melodrama.

[sovay]

He eventually realizes that it is not sufficient excuse that he actually believes he loves her.

Dude. Many contemporary romantic heroes don't get that one.

[qian.livejournal.com]

underneath all that, these people are more real than she usually allows herself.

This is interesting! I feel like that about a couple of P. G. Wodehouse's earlier works -- in some of the boarding school stuff, he comes much closer to writing about the characters as if they are real people with feelings than he does in his later works. And then, I guess, he decided to stick to musical comedies, so you don't get that kind of emotional candour with Wodehouse again, except for that one moment in Blandings where the Earl of Emsworth holds a little girl's hand.