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sophia_sol) wrote2019-02-25 07:42 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2019-02-25 07:42 pm
A Hope Divided, by Alyssa Cole
This is a romance novel of the civil war in the American South, but focused on all the different kinds of people who opposed Confederation. I think this is my fave so far of the Alyssa Cole books I've read. Still don't love everything about it, and in fact have a significant argument with one thing the book does, but....overall worth the read.
The two main characters: Marlie, a free black woman who left her black mother as a girl to live with the white half of her family in hopes of a better life, and finds herself both sheltered and stifled in her family home; and Ewan, a white Union soldier whose lack of emotional affect has led his superiors to see him as ideal for the role of torturer.
I liked Marlie a lot, and her difficult emotions about her relationship with her mother as well as her white family members, and her commitment to her work as a healer.
I liked Ewan too, but I really didn't like the decision to make him a torturer. Like. He is doing it for the good of the Union, and doesn't enjoy it, but he believes it's worth it in support of the cause, and the narrative clearly thinks his work is useful despite it being awful.
And this just plays into the same old lies that torture works. No. Torture is both ineffective and immoral! So there is never any excuse for it, no matter the situation! I am never going to be a fan of a narrative that upholds these kinds of wrongheaded ideas about torture. (Hello yes I am on this soap box again, as I am every time I read a book involving torture)
Or maybe it's just that the narrative considers Ewan a good man despite this. He is an adult person capable of making his own life choices and his own moral judgements and he is willing to do the torturing, and him experiencing negative feelings as a result of what he agreed to do doesn't actually lessen his culpability.
Almost directly after finishing this book I found myself rereading a novel-length fanfic wherein one of the romantic leads is himself a torturer. And as I was reading it, I realized that I am totally fine with the author's choices in that romance because the narrative acknowledges that the person who chooses to obey orders and use his skills to torture people for the good of his country is, like, not actually an uncomplicatedly good guy! And in A Hope Divided, Ewan.....is. Apparently. Despite the torturing.
Honestly this makes me feel kind of like the author is infantilizing Ewan a bit, as if he's not morally responsible for the choices he made to involve himself in torture, it's the fault of the people above him who told him to. Which is particularly uncomfortable in the context of Ewan being clearly written as autistic, given a general tendency amongst allistic people of discounting the agency of autistic people.
So in my opinion either A Hope Divided should have the whole torture thing removed, or Ewan's entire characterisation would need to change, for me to be wholeheartedly in favour of the book. And I like Ewan, so I'd rather the former!
Sigh. If you ignore everything about Ewan being a torturer I actually really did like this book. And you might too, depending on how easily you can put aside the torturer thing......!
C'MON ALYSSA COLE, I WANT TO LIKE YOUR BOOKS, YOU KEEP COMING SO CLOSE.
(my next Alyssa Cole is gonna be the novella Let It Shine, which I've heard good things about, so maybe that'll be the one. I want to also read Once Ghosted, Twice Shy, but the pricing for that novella ebook is absolutely outrageous if you are Canadian: $8 CAD as compared to $2 USD if you're american -- more than three times the cost, even taking into account exchange rates! -- so probably I'm not going to read that one unless my library gets it. And I've put in a request but the local library has never yet made a purchase I've recommended so I'm not holding my breath.)
The two main characters: Marlie, a free black woman who left her black mother as a girl to live with the white half of her family in hopes of a better life, and finds herself both sheltered and stifled in her family home; and Ewan, a white Union soldier whose lack of emotional affect has led his superiors to see him as ideal for the role of torturer.
I liked Marlie a lot, and her difficult emotions about her relationship with her mother as well as her white family members, and her commitment to her work as a healer.
I liked Ewan too, but I really didn't like the decision to make him a torturer. Like. He is doing it for the good of the Union, and doesn't enjoy it, but he believes it's worth it in support of the cause, and the narrative clearly thinks his work is useful despite it being awful.
And this just plays into the same old lies that torture works. No. Torture is both ineffective and immoral! So there is never any excuse for it, no matter the situation! I am never going to be a fan of a narrative that upholds these kinds of wrongheaded ideas about torture. (Hello yes I am on this soap box again, as I am every time I read a book involving torture)
Or maybe it's just that the narrative considers Ewan a good man despite this. He is an adult person capable of making his own life choices and his own moral judgements and he is willing to do the torturing, and him experiencing negative feelings as a result of what he agreed to do doesn't actually lessen his culpability.
Almost directly after finishing this book I found myself rereading a novel-length fanfic wherein one of the romantic leads is himself a torturer. And as I was reading it, I realized that I am totally fine with the author's choices in that romance because the narrative acknowledges that the person who chooses to obey orders and use his skills to torture people for the good of his country is, like, not actually an uncomplicatedly good guy! And in A Hope Divided, Ewan.....is. Apparently. Despite the torturing.
Honestly this makes me feel kind of like the author is infantilizing Ewan a bit, as if he's not morally responsible for the choices he made to involve himself in torture, it's the fault of the people above him who told him to. Which is particularly uncomfortable in the context of Ewan being clearly written as autistic, given a general tendency amongst allistic people of discounting the agency of autistic people.
So in my opinion either A Hope Divided should have the whole torture thing removed, or Ewan's entire characterisation would need to change, for me to be wholeheartedly in favour of the book. And I like Ewan, so I'd rather the former!
Sigh. If you ignore everything about Ewan being a torturer I actually really did like this book. And you might too, depending on how easily you can put aside the torturer thing......!
C'MON ALYSSA COLE, I WANT TO LIKE YOUR BOOKS, YOU KEEP COMING SO CLOSE.
(my next Alyssa Cole is gonna be the novella Let It Shine, which I've heard good things about, so maybe that'll be the one. I want to also read Once Ghosted, Twice Shy, but the pricing for that novella ebook is absolutely outrageous if you are Canadian: $8 CAD as compared to $2 USD if you're american -- more than three times the cost, even taking into account exchange rates! -- so probably I'm not going to read that one unless my library gets it. And I've put in a request but the local library has never yet made a purchase I've recommended so I'm not holding my breath.)
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Back in the 1990s, I made the mistake of reading Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. Without spoilering it, I can't go into the reasons why it frustrated me, but I can say that I ended up writing an entire series as a responsefic to it.
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I just googled The Shadow of the Torturer out of curiosity and I got as far as "guild of torturers" in the wiki intro paragraph and was like, cool, don't need to read any further than that I guess! Reading that book does indeed sound like a mistake
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(*Hides my series about a dungeon full of torturers.*)
Since you're not planning to read Wolfe's novel (SPOILERS FOR EVERYONE ELSE), I can say that what frustrated me was not the topic but character inconsistency. Here we have a young torturer who, after an agonizing battle with his conscience, helps a prisoner to escape - cool, cool, he's on the road to realizing that torture is always wrong - and then he accepts a job offer to become an executioner and spends the rest of the series killing people.
I would like to think he made a moral distinction between torture and the death penalty and had wrestled with his conscience over the circumstances under which it was permissable for him to create pain - but no. I think there was just some weird anti-hero plotline going on there. One in which the reader was supposed to sympathize with a protagonist who came this close to awakening his conscience, then lapsed back into evil.
I mean, I've written sympathetically about people who are oblivious to evil they are doing. (For all I know, I and everyone else alive falls into this category; it's so much easier to recognize societal evil in retrospect.) But I don't have much patience with characters who are offered a chance to morally redeem themselves, and blithely pass it up.
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For me I think it's less that "guild of torturers" must automatically equal a book I'm not interested in, but that the kind of man who would choose to write a book featuring a guild of torturers is relatively unlikely to approach it from a perspective I would find reasonable so it feels not worth my time to check out when there's so many other books in the world more likely to appeal to me - which does indeed seem borne out by your description of what happens in this book!
Also, for the record, I'm always okay with spoilers even if it's about something I'm planning to read :)
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