Have His Carcase, by Dorothy Sayers

[sophia_sol]

Sigh, I don't know. Like, is Sayers a very good writer? She certainly is. Do Harriet and Peter play beautifully off each other, and is it fun to watch them? Absolutely! But somehow I don't love this as much as I did the first time I read it. I don't know, I just.... there's this moment where for the first time Harriet sees Peter as being masterful and she is very positively struck by this new vision and understanding of him and is clearly Into It, and it just presages all the complexity in Gaudy Night where the point is SUPPOSED to be about them finding a way to be on equal footing with each other but there's still this sort of uneasiness in the end with the idea that she could in fact be the complete equal of the male aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey (I've found aspects of this meta helpful for making clearer the ways this shows up in the book). Plus the scene reminded me of the way Georgette Heyer has an obvious kink for masterful men but she seems to think it's just normal, which is never a comparison you want to end up with, much though I also do enjoy a Heyer now and then.

And the book treats Mrs Weldon as ultimately ridiculous and off-putting, and ditto Paul's previous girl in different ways, and Paul's previous girl's new young man is depicted as basically contemptible, and on and on - and like, they're all just people, whose only real crime is to be of the wrong class, basically, and thus behaving in ways that are judged to be vulgar.

It just doesn't feel good-hearted about the diversity of humanity and the value that all people have in their different ways.

Also the timetables might not be as bad as in Five Red Herrings but there sure are entirely too many pages of code-breaking which you can skip RIGHT over to the end solution without missing a single bit of importance.

So it's a very enjoyable and readable book overall, but I'm not ultimately satisfied with it.

(one other, irrelevant complaint: my second-hand paperback copy from 1987 simply ABOUNDS in errors; seriously, did nobody look at the proofs for this edition??? This is the most errors I have ever seen in a published book in my entire life, by a wide margin.)

Comments

[bobbiewickham]

I really enjoy this book, but you're right about the "masterful" bit, of course. They're still more or less on a footing of equality in HHC, but only because they're not in a romantic relationship yet. The assumption is that romance would mean "surrender" for Harriet: for all that Harriet imagines herself on a much-bigger horse, he nevertheless steps in to protect her. That's the premise of his presence in Wilvercombe and is the precondition of any relationship. I think the point of HHC is to demonstrate how inequities and transactional necessities can corrupt male-female relationships; Gaudy Night, then, is supposed to be the story of Peter and Harriet finding their way to a more honest mode of relating. And it is more honest, but not more equal.

On a plot level, I saw the hemophiliac thing coming a mile away. The plot struck me as both too convoluted and too predictable.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah exactly, Peter shows up in this book specifically to protect Harriet, and there is indeed that assumption that romance would be a surrender! And ooh, I hadn't made that thematic connection about the demonstration about inequities and transaction as a problem in relationships, but you're right, that is what it's doing, and I think one could do some interesting analyses of that.

I actually don't remember how surprising I did or didn't find the hemophilia reveal the first time; it's so long since I first read the book that it's entirely left my memory. But I don't find the plot particularly appealing in this one, it's true.