Books 2012: today's instalment features Bad Romance

[hawkwing_lb]

After some days of huddling and messed-up sleep patterns, today I got up before 1000hrs. And then proceeded to wander around Athens from noon until four, walking in the relative cool of thirty degrees centigrade. There was a Syrian solidarity march making its way down to Syntagma Square, bongo drums and call-and-response in Arabic, Syrian flags and scarves and banners featuring Assad with a pig's nose or monkey's face.

I've been reading bad lesbian romance and watching New Tricks and The Bourne Identity and the two sequels - Identity is revolutionary in the genre, of course, but I think many of its later imitators, including its own sequels, don't realise that what made it revolutionary wasn't the lean, visually-arresting realism of the fight scenes, or the subdued hues of its colour palette. What made it revolutionary was the fact that it wasn't an action thriller. It worked primarily as a psychological thriller: the focus is on character, mystery, the danger is intimate and personal - Bourne is himself afraid of what he is - as much as it comes from outside.

And Marie is fucking brilliant. Interesting as Nicolette Parsons becomes in the third film - no. I will never forgive the fridging of Marie.

(What the Bourne franchise did right, in all of its instalments, though? The women are smart, and competent, and save themselves. They're not freaking super-assassins, and when the freaking super-assassin tells them to go - they go. And they damn well stay gone.)

Onto the books. But first, a digression. Many of the books I've been reading in the last three or four days are - to make no bones about it - bad books. Narratively and technically naive, relying on familiarity with tropes to fill in the blanks left through lazy and/or careless writing: like much romance, actually.

But sometimes one needs the entertainingly bad.

Books 2012: 142-155

142-145. R.M. Meluch, The Myriad, Wolf Star, The Sagittarius Command, and Strength and Honor. DAW, 2004-2008.

Interesting space opera by a women writer (this is an insufficiently frequent occurence that I find it noteworthy) but marred, however, by clunky prose, some unpleasant rape culture skeeviness, and the fact that once again, the future is American - except for the parts where it's Roman.

Still, I look forward to getting my hands on the next one. Space opera yay!


146-149. Gun Brooke, Protector of the Realm, Rebel's Quest, Warrior's Valor, and Pirate's Fortune. Bold Strokes Books, 2005-2011.

I'm embarrassed to have read these. Bad skiffy lesbian romance. Entertainingly bad, naively bad... Why did I enjoy reading there again?

Oh, right. Women. Nothing but women.


150-154. Xenia Alexiou and Kim Baldwin, Lethal Affairs, Thief of Always, Missing Lynx, Dying to Live and Demons Are Forever. Bold Strokes Books, 2007-2012.

...Ebooks are bad for instant gratification of the popcorn urge. These? SPIES ROMANCE LESBIANS. It's bad. But like crack. Crack with assassinations.

(No, I do not feel this way about heterosexual romance. It is the mere fact of the women having all the screentime that gets me. Women! Being important to each other! Having friendships! Having... really somewhat tedious sex scenes, but that's romance for you. The sex scenes are almost always tedious and serve no other purpose beyond SEX NOW.)


155. Lee Battersby, The Corpse-Rat King. Angry Robot, 2012.

Reviewed for Tor.com. This book has no plot and feels hectic, yet empty. Do not recommend.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the earlier, Richard Chamberlain version of The Bourne Identity ? I liked it a lot when I saw it though that was some decades ago so the suck fairy may have got to it since; fun though the current series is, I never felt it quite got deep enough into what the amnesia meant in terms of whether Bourne would actually turn out to be a terrorist or a counter-terrorist.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it, no. To the best of my knowledge, it was made sufficiently contemporary to the book's original milieu that it could bring in the stuff about Carlos the Jackal and international assassination without being retro.

The 2002 Identity isn't interested in terrorism vs. counter-terrorism so much as... loss of innocence, I think. In a way it almost doesn't matter how Bourne came to be what he is: the mere fact of being that, discovering what he is and what he's done and what that means for a man of feeling, is where the film's emotional intensity lies. You almost don't want him to learn, once you realise there's no possible happy answer about it: you just want him (and Marie) to get away clean and rediscover some kind of innocence.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the RM Meluch has much dodginess... but it's so very readable!

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Dangerously so!

[between4walls.livejournal.com]

Honestly at some point I started wishing there was at least one female super-assassin in the seemingly endless supply of assassins sent after Bourne. Were they afraid we would be freaked out by Bourne fighting a woman? Also, in the sequels as well as the original, though the women are smart and save themselves, it's repetitively the man who knows about violence and life on the run (ok, this is a given with the protagonist) and the woman who has to put her life in his hands (they could have varied this). The cumulative pattern became irritating. At least there was Pamela Landy.

But Identity is really something special (I sprained my neck from tension the first time I saw it) and I liked that Marie neither goes to pieces completely when confronted with danger nor knows exactly what to do with no training. She reacts very much like I imagine a normal person would be when confronted with unexpected violence and loss of safety, and then she adapts and learns from Bourne without giving up her own opinions. Also the way she goes into shock after the attack on the apartment and Bourne fully expects her to was very well done.

The quality that the sequels don't recapture reminds me of Oedipus: the search for the truth about himself, and the attitude toward that truth: it may not be his fault, since the amnesia effectively makes him a different person, but the mere fact of what he is and what he did has consequences.

After watching the Bourne films, it was interesting to see Damon in The Good Shepherd as a more bureaucratic, high-level CIA type. He was practically unrecognizable.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, it's not a perfect film, and it's not massively feminist in any way. But it fails to be actively misogynistic, and shows the humanity and competence of its women. Which is a damn sight better than most of the other spy thrillers out there.