![]() ![]() Ralph (injured and cynical) and Laurie (shy and self-loathing) both tend to look down on the obviously effeminate guys, and so the reader is invited to do so as well. The book, frustratingly, brings this up early on and then never really addresses it. Of course, he can't vindicate himself because he doesn't have it in him, and that's just good writing: he thinks he's a pervert deep down. He just hangs his head, guilty as charged, and trudges away never to be seen again. Laurie doesn't do what I'd kinda hoped he would do-go and find Andrew and deliver a passionate Wilde-style defense of homosexuality. I wonder how much of the shame Renault herself bought into? F'rexample, the chaste romance between Laurie and Andrew lasts for most of a book, and then when Andrew realizes Laurie is actually willing to have sex with other men, he recoils in disgust from the concept. What are we supposed to think happened between Julian's mum and Julian's real father, when they had their first fight? Did he date rape her? Seduce her with complete willingness on both sides, after which she felt guilty? Put a hand on her knee? Or is this something that even Renault's original readers would just write off as vague?Īs for The Charioteer, oh, God, the self-loathing doesn't crop up a lot, but when it does, it's devastating. I'm out of practice at reading the meaning into ellipses. ![]() Anyhow, I got rather a queasy laugh out of the scene where Julian's mum has obviously come into the room during a phone conversation, and he switches in mid-sentence to talking about sparkplugs and calling Hilary "Tony." But no: Renault doesn't assume that all artists are gay and all gay people are artists. But Julian's a grown man living in a two-person dystopia that he could escape if he tried.) I kept waiting for him to turn out to be gay, and Hilary to be the love affair during which he realized he wasn't into women. ![]() Mainstream heterosexual intercourse, with lovers who still have to skulk and evade and deny. (Shades of 1984, as sovay has pointed out. Julian's relationship with Hilary the OK Woman Character is so shameful and conducted in so much closeted secrecy that it might as well have been a same-sex love affair. Frankly, when we meet his mother, she seems like the type to be disappointed with him, whatever the choice was that took him away from her. Julian in Return to Night is a budding actor, unwilling to take the plunge and go professional because he thinks the disappointment would kill his mother. No one really uses the words, but it's shown rather than told. These two non-classical Renault are absolutely crammed with self-loathing and shame. It all left rather a bad taste in my mouth. The latter is pure evil in all directions and very stupid as well, and the former is apparently made of cast-iron. The only two female characters I can recall are Darius' mum and Roxane. But the last book I read by her was The Persian Boy, which was brilliant and contains lots of loathing of women by the narrator. I certainly also do the thing of writing lots of male characters-in my case, at least, because it's easy and it's freeing and a lifetime of unwitting societal conditioning has taught me that stories are about men. Wow! In Return to Night Renault actually wrote a female protagonist! Who isn't a horrible person! Who is a very well-rounded character, and also believably female! I never thought I'd see the day. I've been meaning to do it since the first and best edition of The Cartoon History of the Universe came out, but never got round to it. I ought to get my act together and read Plato and Socrates already. The places where it's aged well are the human traits that are pretty much universal, no matter whose theory you use to explain them: people are shaped by their early memories and experiences, dreams are important, noble urges fight base urges. Renault does love to shove in all the Freudian theory she can, sometimes with an intrusive authorial voice, sometimes much more smoothly framed in the thoughts of the characters. ![]() I must say she does them well her characters' responses to being controlled or manipulated are 100% realistic. Sometimes she can certainly overdo the introspection, to the point where I howl, "Who cares why he's doing what he's doing? Get on with the story!" But it never interfered with my enjoyment here.īoy, does Renault like evil matriarchs and My Beloved Smother figures. They were sufficiently gripping for me to keep reading in fascination, even though not a lot was happening in the book, by my standards. I've just read two Mary Renault novels in quick succession: Return to Night and The Charioteer. ![]()
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