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I read Strong Poison for the first time last week, apparently. I'd thought it was a reread, but turns out I never read it, just absorbed enough Harriet Vane osmosis from having read all the other Wimsey-Vane novels to know the basic shape of the plot.
It is not, I think, one of the best Wimsey novels from a pure puzzle dimension. I think that is true of all the Vane novels, though Have His Carcase is a better mystery than Gaudy Night or Strong Poison or Busman's Honeymoon. I don't think Sayers wants to weigh down the romantic narrative with too many narrative sleights of hand. I don't think she wants to distract from the fundamentally difficult emotional positions Peter and Harriet are in with respect to each other.
Where Strong Poison particularly sparkles, though, besides its romantic plotline, is in the depth Sayers devotes to fleshing out her minor characters with personalities. Murchison, Climpson, Parker, Arbuthnot, down the line even into more obscure characters, if they make an appearance, Sayers makes them memorable. Though a little less anti-semitism would have been nice in the Arbuthnot storyline. Just saying.
But yeah... Peter/Harriet is at the heart of the book, and it's such a fascinating and infuriating concept. Peter is just so utterly terrible at considering other peoples' feelings- he's so used to people being considerate of his and subordinating their desires to his, that he's utterly ill equipped to deal with a situation where Harriet's feelings are more important than his, and yet he does make a pretty decent go of it anyway. And that would be fine, and compelling, and difficult, except that Sayers seems unable to avoid giving him cookies for it. Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night do a much better job of balancing the relationship because Sayers has clearly had the time and taken the effort to sort through her own feelings about Peter/Harriet. But in Strong Poison, Peter/Harriet is just so wonderfully, terribly, darkly romantic and powerful and wrong.
I also finished Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear, which was mostly a disaster and a slog. 1200 page to tell a story that I think easily could have been accomplished effectively in 100. So many tedious plot twists, so many unnecessary and irritating cliffhangers, so many plot coupons dangled for a payout not to arrive for hundreds and hundreds of pages, so many pieces of information omitted from the narrative for no other reason than to prolong the reveal.
The last four hundred pages or so consisted of a lot of me shaking my head and saying "Oh, Polly, chaos theory doesn't work that way." I'm actually kind of resentful of how Blackout/All Clear is about what happens when you let a bunch of twenty-something graduate students in history play with high energy physics.
There are only two technically oriented characters in the Oxford part of the book, two technically oriented characters in 1200 pages. One is Badri, the technician who operates the time machine in Oxford. He's fine and all, but he barely has any role in the story and as a technician we'd hardly expect him to have a brilliant knowledge of the physics behind the time machine. The other is Dr. Ishiwaka, a theoretical physicist who believes that the traditional interpretation of how time travel works that has served the Oxford historians for forty years is actually incorrect. We don't meet Dr. Ishiwaka after Blackout's first 100 pages, though there is a lot of anxious worrying from senior historian Professor Dunworthy that Ishiwaka may be right. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that both Dr. Ishiwaka and Professor Dunworthy are wrong. There is no science-oriented character present in the story to actually work out the equations, so it's discovered in a literal drug-induced fever dream by history student Polly Churchill, a discovery process that leaves me overflowing with confidence that her theory is correct, let me tell you. Especially since her theory involves assigning 'the timeline' a consciousness and a survival instinct. Per Polly's theory, 'the timeline' intervened to ensure that Hitler lost the war.
Blackout/All Clear does have its fair share of memorable characters, and it does some nice work with the idea that the war wasn't necessarily won by Patton and Eisenhower and Montgomery so much as it was won by the combined efforts of everyone on the Allied side down to the street urchins. But trying to assign some sort of physical meaning to this idea, some sort of equation that impelled the time travellers to provide material and emotional support to the Allies, is an effort that Willis does not pull off. And it felt like a betrayal to me of everything I loved about the impartial time travel equations that governed Willis's much shorter, more emotionally potent, and more enjoyable The Doomsday Book, which is one of my favorite time travel novels.
In any case, I am thankfully through with it. As of today, I have once again read every single Hugo Award winning novel. Not all of them have been to my taste, and not all of them have been the novel I would have voted for to win the Hugo, but the Hugos have long been an important part of my fannish experience and I hope that they will withstand the Sad Puppy assault and continue to be an important part of my fannish experience.
It is not, I think, one of the best Wimsey novels from a pure puzzle dimension. I think that is true of all the Vane novels, though Have His Carcase is a better mystery than Gaudy Night or Strong Poison or Busman's Honeymoon. I don't think Sayers wants to weigh down the romantic narrative with too many narrative sleights of hand. I don't think she wants to distract from the fundamentally difficult emotional positions Peter and Harriet are in with respect to each other.
Where Strong Poison particularly sparkles, though, besides its romantic plotline, is in the depth Sayers devotes to fleshing out her minor characters with personalities. Murchison, Climpson, Parker, Arbuthnot, down the line even into more obscure characters, if they make an appearance, Sayers makes them memorable. Though a little less anti-semitism would have been nice in the Arbuthnot storyline. Just saying.
But yeah... Peter/Harriet is at the heart of the book, and it's such a fascinating and infuriating concept. Peter is just so utterly terrible at considering other peoples' feelings- he's so used to people being considerate of his and subordinating their desires to his, that he's utterly ill equipped to deal with a situation where Harriet's feelings are more important than his, and yet he does make a pretty decent go of it anyway. And that would be fine, and compelling, and difficult, except that Sayers seems unable to avoid giving him cookies for it. Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night do a much better job of balancing the relationship because Sayers has clearly had the time and taken the effort to sort through her own feelings about Peter/Harriet. But in Strong Poison, Peter/Harriet is just so wonderfully, terribly, darkly romantic and powerful and wrong.
I also finished Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear, which was mostly a disaster and a slog. 1200 page to tell a story that I think easily could have been accomplished effectively in 100. So many tedious plot twists, so many unnecessary and irritating cliffhangers, so many plot coupons dangled for a payout not to arrive for hundreds and hundreds of pages, so many pieces of information omitted from the narrative for no other reason than to prolong the reveal.
The last four hundred pages or so consisted of a lot of me shaking my head and saying "Oh, Polly, chaos theory doesn't work that way." I'm actually kind of resentful of how Blackout/All Clear is about what happens when you let a bunch of twenty-something graduate students in history play with high energy physics.
There are only two technically oriented characters in the Oxford part of the book, two technically oriented characters in 1200 pages. One is Badri, the technician who operates the time machine in Oxford. He's fine and all, but he barely has any role in the story and as a technician we'd hardly expect him to have a brilliant knowledge of the physics behind the time machine. The other is Dr. Ishiwaka, a theoretical physicist who believes that the traditional interpretation of how time travel works that has served the Oxford historians for forty years is actually incorrect. We don't meet Dr. Ishiwaka after Blackout's first 100 pages, though there is a lot of anxious worrying from senior historian Professor Dunworthy that Ishiwaka may be right. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that both Dr. Ishiwaka and Professor Dunworthy are wrong. There is no science-oriented character present in the story to actually work out the equations, so it's discovered in a literal drug-induced fever dream by history student Polly Churchill, a discovery process that leaves me overflowing with confidence that her theory is correct, let me tell you. Especially since her theory involves assigning 'the timeline' a consciousness and a survival instinct. Per Polly's theory, 'the timeline' intervened to ensure that Hitler lost the war.
Blackout/All Clear does have its fair share of memorable characters, and it does some nice work with the idea that the war wasn't necessarily won by Patton and Eisenhower and Montgomery so much as it was won by the combined efforts of everyone on the Allied side down to the street urchins. But trying to assign some sort of physical meaning to this idea, some sort of equation that impelled the time travellers to provide material and emotional support to the Allies, is an effort that Willis does not pull off. And it felt like a betrayal to me of everything I loved about the impartial time travel equations that governed Willis's much shorter, more emotionally potent, and more enjoyable The Doomsday Book, which is one of my favorite time travel novels.
In any case, I am thankfully through with it. As of today, I have once again read every single Hugo Award winning novel. Not all of them have been to my taste, and not all of them have been the novel I would have voted for to win the Hugo, but the Hugos have long been an important part of my fannish experience and I hope that they will withstand the Sad Puppy assault and continue to be an important part of my fannish experience.