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01-15-2018, 07:42 PM | #16 |
Snoozing in the sun
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Of course to us it is unnecessary and offensive. But it was true for the time in which the book was written and set. For example, the early books by John Buchan each contained one or more antiSemitic and/or racist comments. His later books did not.
I think you might find the article that astrangerhere discovered an interesting one, Jon. |
01-15-2018, 08:09 PM | #17 | |
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01-15-2018, 08:22 PM | #18 |
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Way back when, there was a Masterpiece Theater production of some of some of the Wimsey stories. I thought the Lord Peter character in the show was annoying rather than charming. That impression kept me from reading Sayers, despite her reputation, all these years.
I had the same reaction to the written version of Lord Peter. The revelation that his behavior might be over-compensation for war-time experiences wasn't enough to make him more sympathetic, at least in this book. I still thought him silly and shallow. But maybe there's some hope that he gains more depth in future volumes. And the murderer spills all ending, sigh, that really ruined what started as a clever but bizarre puzzle. I think the anti-semitism displayed by Freake served to strengthen his motive, but it wasn't at all necessary to have it amplified by other characters. |
01-15-2018, 08:26 PM | #19 | |
cacoethes scribendi
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It seems to me that you are reading some of the comments out of character and context. There is a lot of such phrasing in a great many books that might be classified as unnecessary - even in modern works - but within their context make some sense. However I do understand that such a reaction would have you wanting to stay clear of more books of the same type. I recently commented about "The Mediterranean Caper" by Clive Cussler - that if I'd read that book first I'd never have read any more (most of his books are sexist, but that one was an unnecessary extreme). |
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01-15-2018, 08:44 PM | #20 | |
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01-15-2018, 09:24 PM | #21 |
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It's important to remember that this was written contemporaneosly. These were the attitudes of at least some of the layers of English society. We can bemoan it, but all you have to do is compare with the aforementioned Cussler to see how far we haven't come.
Unlike others, I quite enjoy the upper-class twit character that Lord Peter mimics. He so clearly is not that brainless twit, but does it so delightfully over the top. Bunter was his batman during the war, and Wimsey was severely shell-shocked, and still has episodes, though they're fewer and shorter. |
01-16-2018, 05:57 AM | #22 |
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Thing is, would we have thought "Where are the comments about the Jews?" if they weren't there? I would not have thought that if they were not there.
As for Levy, saying the dead body wasn't circumcised and that Levy was Jewish is not an issue. It doesn't have to be written in a derogatory way for us to get he meaning. There are too many derogatory Jewish comments that are unnecessary. |
01-16-2018, 06:25 AM | #23 | |
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But I think the book itself is a sign of the times, meant to be escapist literature and it was the flashback that was the anomaly rather than the light-hearted tone otherwise throughout. It wouldn't be until late in the decade that the seminal works of Great War literature would start to appeal; I believe the thinking was that the public wasn't ready for them yet. Going back to those "superfluous" women, though, it was extremely odd that Peter, a wealthy young aristocrat in his early 30s, hadn't married. His family makes an issue of it, in fact. I think it's strongly implied that Peter might be gay; his characterization bears the hallmarks of the stereotypically gay man of the 20s and quite flamboyantly at times. I think it's possible to take the references to Jews and, implied, gays as either and both a marker of the times and somewhat subversive. In fact, I think Sayers might just have been striving for the sensational; the whole business was rather over-the-top. |
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01-16-2018, 07:20 AM | #24 |
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I have only read one other Wimsey novel and I do think that Gaudy Night is a considerably better book—though it is perhaps really a Harriet Vane novel.
For an opening attempt at the genre Whose Body is a reasonable effort. It has some humorous moments—particularly the inquest. The relationship between Bunter and Wimsey is seen to have a certain depth deriving from incidents in the Great War. I think the meeting between Wimsey and Sir Julian Freke near the end was competently done. At that stage in the book the drama of the mystery was beginning to wear a bit thin and some type of dramatic confrontation between the two was necessary. The murder itself was certainly ridiculously complex. I suppose one is meant to suspend logic at such times. After all, consider the famous crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest. Who would really try to kill someone with a crop-duster in a cornfield? Likewise, if Freke is really the brilliant murderer he is, surely he could have used a method that was simpler but equally deadly—such as the poison he attempted to inject into Lord Peter. But I suppose that much of the pleasure of such works lies in the fact that the means of choice are outrageous. Anyhow, while I suspect from the comments of,others, that Sayers improved as the series developed, I was mildly entertained by the book despite the limitations which others have rightly noted. Last edited by fantasyfan; 01-16-2018 at 12:23 PM. |
01-16-2018, 07:21 AM | #25 | |
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I do think it is possible to read various possible motives behind what Sayers wrote. The anti-semitic views attributed to Freke fit that character and his motives for murder, but the views expressed by the Dowager Duchess (in particular) seemed over-the-top (but were they really?) and stood out as being out of place (but is that a lack of understanding on my part?). It seemed like Sayers was trying to say something, but the choice of character for those views makes it unclear what was intended. As to it being implied that Lord Peter was gay ... I guess it's possible, but I'm not convinced. There's not really enough in just this one book to work out what Sayers put in place merely for a particular effect, and what was deliberate statement of character or idea. In fact, take away the belated preface and you would be left guessing about a great many things concerning Lord Peter. |
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01-16-2018, 09:46 AM | #26 | |
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Of course Sayers made Lord Peter rampantly hetero in later books and (I know I've said it) I dislike that she felt it necessary to include the belated preface to explain away and retcon aspects of Whose Body? she later regretted, especially at the price of being quite spoilery about subsequent events. |
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01-16-2018, 02:02 PM | #27 |
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I must say I'm pleasantly and gratefully surprised with this (for me) unknown author.
The touch of humour (in almost all over the book) and the descriptions (I particularly enjoyed the inquest) have caught me. The character seems a rare kind of human (perhaps due to the WWI). And indeed, he may finds out a way to be gay or to get married, but it's only the start of the series, the presentation of a character in progress in a real first book. Well, Peter is not Sherlock or Hercule. By Jove! Dorothy is not Agatha, but I think she could be a must in the detective story. You can say it is the criticism of a detective story through a detective story. But please, remember: the key is the case and not the characters, and the characters speak by themselves. I mean the author lives his/her life and his/her characters live into a few letters. Just imagination. No more, nor less. P.D.: I recommend her essay The Lost Tools of Learning. In this essay, she suggests that we teach everything but how to learn, and proposes that we should adopt a kind of the medieval scholastic curriculum for methodological reasons. Spoiler:
The changing world of last 70 years remains unmoved. Good luck. |
01-16-2018, 02:04 PM | #28 |
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As just a detective story, the biggest issue is that there was no way possible to come up with the solution. Yes, it may be difficult in some stories to come up with the answer, but the clues are there. This one the clues where not all there and it's no possible to deduce the solution. So as a mystery, it's a big fail.
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01-16-2018, 04:17 PM | #29 | |||||||||||
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And here we go...I have some catching up to do...
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I can't even tell what that is supposed to be. I think the generic "Amazon Public Domain Cover" would be better, at least then I could include it for "text only" in the bingo challenge. Quote:
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01-16-2018, 07:04 PM | #30 | |
cacoethes scribendi
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I do wonder how things might have read in the 1920s. You suggest that "a 20s reader would have been all over in terms of coded references to homosexuality", but might that not be equally true in reverse? (That the things we are interpreting as signals were, in fact, not signals after all.) It may well be that the "retcon" was made because Sayers found that some people were indeed reading things into her text that she never intended. |
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