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"Thunder on the Right", Mary Stewart
I picked this book up halfway through at random (to be precise, at the scene where Stephen is clawing desperately at the hands of Pierre Bussac, who is trying to strangle him), read from there to the end, and found the novel to be very much better than I had remembered. And Stephen, "clever, sensitive, gentle" -- who rejects the role of storybook hero and ends up ignominiously defeated when forced into the thoroughly unromantic business of real-life combat, then solves the problem with his intelligence -- is precisely the type of protagonist who appeals to me, as does his ability to subjugate his own long-held desires to Jennifer's immediate need for fraternal comfort and support, rather than playing the he-man and insisting on sweeping her off her feet. I liked the shift in perceptions of Bussac a lot, as well, from terrifying menace to the lesser of two evils to brave ally (and like Jennifer I was sorry that he died, although obviously it simplified the outcome of the plot!)
Then I went back to the beginning and read the book all the way through in order as intended, and found myself back at my original impression of this as being one of Mary Stewart's less satisfactory books, which is a very odd outcome! There really isn't anything obviously wrong with the opening that I can see. Doña Francisca is a bit over the top (and she surely cannot hope to become Mother Superior without ever having been professed; it occurs to me that the plot might make more sense if she actually had been a high-status nun who had fallen into the sin of identifying herself too closely with the glory of 'her' institution, and wanting to beautify it and cling on to potential novices at all costs...)
The timeline feels a bit compressed -- there isn't really time for Gillian to have identified herself so completely with the man she believes to be her husband (and to have gained mastery over his dogs). We don't get any sense of Lally Dupré as a character, other than as a series of misdirections that don't really add up for me; the little we hear of her at the convent doesn't match up with the image of a desperate bank robber on the run. Come to that, we get very little sense of the missing Gillian as a person either all the time that Jennifer is worrying about her, beyond the reiterated clue of her colour blindness -- she is basically a McGuffin for most of the plot.
And yet there is a lot of very powerful writing in there.
It's a pity we don't see more of the charmingly down-to-earth Sister Louisa, who basically only gets the one scene...
Then I went back to the beginning and read the book all the way through in order as intended, and found myself back at my original impression of this as being one of Mary Stewart's less satisfactory books, which is a very odd outcome! There really isn't anything obviously wrong with the opening that I can see. Doña Francisca is a bit over the top (and she surely cannot hope to become Mother Superior without ever having been professed; it occurs to me that the plot might make more sense if she actually had been a high-status nun who had fallen into the sin of identifying herself too closely with the glory of 'her' institution, and wanting to beautify it and cling on to potential novices at all costs...)
The timeline feels a bit compressed -- there isn't really time for Gillian to have identified herself so completely with the man she believes to be her husband (and to have gained mastery over his dogs). We don't get any sense of Lally Dupré as a character, other than as a series of misdirections that don't really add up for me; the little we hear of her at the convent doesn't match up with the image of a desperate bank robber on the run. Come to that, we get very little sense of the missing Gillian as a person either all the time that Jennifer is worrying about her, beyond the reiterated clue of her colour blindness -- she is basically a McGuffin for most of the plot.
And yet there is a lot of very powerful writing in there.
...the two shadows flowed together, towered grotesquely. Something glinted, flashed home with a small thickening thud. A curse, a gasp, and the locked shadows fell apart as Pierre Bussac crumpled where he stood, and went down in the firelight to lie at his murderer's feet.
...the impelling storm, thrusting against her as against a sail, drove her like a small scudding ship up the steep way towards the woods. It threw her, half-blinded, almost straight against the column of the first sentinel pine, then she was swallowed by the silence of the wood, which lopped off the roar of the storm behind her as a cliff shuts off the sounds of the sea.
"You cry if you want to," said Sister Louisa. "I'm old and more than a bit silly myself, and I get a bit confused when I think about things that aren't what her ladyship calls 'of the earth', but I know what's a comfort at such times and what isn't, and it's not the least use telling you just yet that your cousin's better off where she's gone to, because you're just not going to listen, and very natural too." She pushed a small plant into place with a decisive gesture. "So you go ahead and cry. When you finish being unhappy for yourself, then's the time you can begin to think about how lucky she is."
"Lucky?"
The old nun's eyes lifted for a moment. "Yes," she said. Then she picked up another plant and began lovingly to straighten out its roots.
It's a pity we don't see more of the charmingly down-to-earth Sister Louisa, who basically only gets the one scene...