Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


All I really remembered about this book was that it made me laugh; what I didn’t remember was it also has teeth.



A peter Wimsey mystery, wherein Peter goes undercover in an ad agency, and then there are a lot of shenanigans, and also bad puns, and a climactic cricket match that made me snigger to myself for ten minutes straight, much to the consternation of my morning train seatmate.



(This is, incidentally, a pretty good place to start with Peter Wimsey. Not the chronological beginning of the series, but it’s one of the best, and it sets you up nicely to read forward or back without ruining your first Wimsey on, say, the one with all the goddamn train schedules.)



Anyway, so it’s thoroughly amusing, and peter capers here and there, declaiming and punning and being horrible and being grand. Also solving a murder, and tripping into a viper’s nest of crime, like he does.



But under that is a tense, frantically unhappy book. About the ad game and the life game – buy this, that’ll solve your problems, now buy that, snort this line of cocaine, try that dangerous stunt, run faster, work harder, more more more – why aren’t you happy yet? What do you mean you came to a bitter end along the way? And if that weren’t enough, also a pointed meditation on a particular stripe of British classism.*



God damn, when she was good, no one could touch Sayers.



*There’s this bit where one character explains to another how there’s a cultural divide in the office between the Oxbridge chaps and the rest of them. How the blokes who went to, like, Manchester, will get all earnest and upset and froth at the mouth about metaphysics, and one of the Oxbridge guys will come along and just make a bad pun at them and ask why they can't take a joke. And I was like, “Ahahaha, Dorothy Sayers! Your Oxbridge chaps are hipsters.”





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Eon by Alison Goodman

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


If I hadn’t been reading this book on a very expensive bit of technology, I would have hurled it against a wall. I believe my exact comment, upon reaching a particular moment of infamy towards the end was, and I quote, “what the fucking fuck was that fuckery?” I have all the feelings about this book. And so I share them. (Which is why you guys like me, don’t even try to lie).



Right, so, this is a fantasy about a girl posing as a boy in not!ancient China, and she impresses bonds with an ancient dragon who hasn’t been seen in 500 years, and there is imperial intrigue and stuff.



I would probably be less furious if this book were incompetent. But the thing is, it’s not. Its treatment of the ‘girl posing as a boy’ fantasy trope is genuinely interesting. This is not one of those books where a girl proves her worth by being able to pass for a boy, that being the important measuring stick, you know. And it has these great moments where our protagonist reflects on what living as male for years actually means, how eventually she’s doing more than just binding her breasts and wearing pants, that – and she doesn’t have the language for this, but it’s what she means – that her gender identity is complicated. And one of her friends in the book is an actual transperson. And the whole thing is done while maintaining the universe-appropriate and really medieval idea of gender, of woman’s place, etc. Hard to do, and parts of it genuinely interested and impressed me.



But then. Oh but then.



I had . . . inklings. The sense of thunder rumbling ominously in the distance. The lurking suspicion that something was going to go very wrong. Yeah, that interesting stuff Goodman did with gender even though she’s working in a constrained medieval framework? When it comes to disability, she just brought the medieval beliefs and called it good. Hint: it’s not.



Let me tell you what I learned from this book – from the protagonist’s culturally embedded narration, and far more damningly from the structure of the narrative and the meta implications. Disability is a curse. It means you are ugly and unlovable, and that no one should touch you. Absolutely no one should desire you. But if you are extra special, and you do everything right, maybe you’ll acquire power. And the way you’ll know you have is your disability will be magically cured! Because that way you’re finally worthy! And you are finally a whole person (being disabled being synonymous with being less than a person), and now you are not untouchable anymore! Disability is also a metaphor for being unwhole and not yourself -- it'll be imposed when you start pretending to be someone else, and then magically taken away again when you stop!



And I haven’t read the sequel, and do not plan to, but I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess it also means you can have a romance now.



And for God’s sake, please don’t anyone try telling me yet again that this sort of thing is okay in fantasy novels, it’s a different world and a different culture, and it makes sense for them to think that way. Yeah, and who designed that world? Who chose which societal biases to import and which to leave behind? Who designed a story that validated and supported every horrible and ablest thing the protagonist thought about herself?



Secondary world fantasy is not an excuse for something this offensive. There aren’t any excuses for something like this.





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