It’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.
• What did you recently finish reading?
I just finished Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Views The Body, a collection of short stories of Lord Peter Wimsey’s detective adventures. Reading Sayers is like reading exceptionally literately written science fiction about an alien culture. I suffer an occasional outburst of republican annoyance at her class prejudice, for the central conceit of her mysteries is like the central conceit of Amanda Cross’s mystery series about the English professor and her copper boyfriend…that being well-born and well-educated fits one not only to be heroically useful to society, but to a just claim to an almost racial superiority. That’s all right. She does it very well, and it’s not as if the class she writes about has survived to annoy me today.
Every fantasy has two kinds of lies in it: the plot, which is a tapestry of lies, and the theme, which is a deep kind of self-delusion practiced by the author, sometimes consciously. I call this second lie the One True Lie of the Heart’s Desire. For another example, the adventures of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum constitute the level of story lies, while the thematic One True Lie is that the whole world is a small town, and everybody knows everyone else or at least went to summer camp with his adenoidal cousin, and ultimately it is these deep yet ordinary ties that bind heroes and villains together and lead right to triumph against wrong. For a third example, the One True Lie of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War is that the hero-soldiers are so expensive to train, and their experience so precious to the human race, that they are not allowed to retire from the war; whereas the real world truth is that the moment a soldier puts on his uniform he is, essentially, of no further use to society, and unwelcome if he chances to survive the war. And the One True Lie of nearly every fantasy about wizards is that the taller one’s pointy hat and the longer one’s long white beard, the better a wizard one is. If that were true, then tenure would be an infallible indicator of intelligence.
I do like what reading Sayers does to my sentences.
• What are you reading now?
Somebody said that something grows by the meat it feeds on, so naturally I’m reading Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise. There’s a glancing reference to Wimsey paying a visit to the one woman who doesn’t roll over and beg for his attention (my wording), which hints that she may have written this book while planning Strong Poison, the story that introduces Wimsey’s leading lady for the rest of the series. I’m hoping someone will set me straight in the comments to this post.
What fascinates me about Murder Must Advertise is its portrayal of the work life of an advertising agency office. I spent years in the pink collar ghetto in Chicago, so I find the corporate culture of Pym’s Publicity charming, and Wimsey’s incognito invasion of same an instrument to illuminate the differences and similarities between modern office life and that of Sayers’ time and city.
I’ve just come upon the passage in which Wimsey, dressed as Harlequin, crashes a bacchanal at a drug-dealer’s spacious riverside abode, climbs a fountain, and dives faultlessly into the shallow pool at its base. Many years ago now, someone proved by comparing this passage with a similar passage from Dorothy Dunnett, describing the antics of Francis Crawford of Lymond at a similar party, that the indistinguishible voice and manner of the Dorothies and their descriptions of their heroes illustrate that Dunnett slavishly admired Sayers. Or something. Have you heard this theory? I definitely saw Lymond in Wimsey’s Harlequin. And that both Dorothies are in love with their heroes.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
Sayers’ Strong Poison. Then Gaudy Night, unless I decide to take the long way home and read all four titles in between Wimsey’s & Vane’s first meeting and “I will.” (Sayers really dragged out that romance before she brought it to happy conclusion.) As I recall, the annoying class thing happens quite a lot in Gaudy Night. I remember feeling ultimately alienated from Harriet Vane’s feelings, the last time I read it. My soul must bear the indelible stain of the coarse-fibered lower orders. We’ll see how the book affects me next time around.