Georgette Heyer - The Toll Gate
22 Feb 2010 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI was thinking I had quite a few more Heyers to collect, but when I ordered this last one and went through the list of reprints on the inside front cover, I discovered that the several rare ones I was thinking of haven't been reprinted, and most of the others are (a) ~historical novelizations~ (like The Royal Escape and Simon the Coldheart) instead of historical romances, (b) largely concerned with the Napoleonic wars, like False Colours An Infamous Army (and there's no way I'm reading that), or (c) about Spanish brides (a subgenre to which I have an incredibly strong aversion so I won't be buying those either). So in fact, the only books remaining to buy are:
I did notice that I failed to post reviews of some of the novels as I read them, though, which caused a lot of trouble for me before Yuletide when I was trying to untangle in my brain which one was which - the result of all this being that it took me about 10 skimming rereads and nearly a week to pick Felix Hethersett from April Lady as the other half of my pairing. My poor memory. :(
Anyway, back to The Toll Gate. The male protagonist, an ex-Army younger son full of heroism, thrill-seeking and whimsy, is the almost-exclusive POV character in a mystery plot that in fact falls short of the rollicking adventure to be found in many of her road trip novels (like Charity Girl or The Foundling). The romance subplot doesn't present much of a conflict, if any, although the emotional reality of the scenes between the hero and heroine is probably the firmest point of the book, and in itself well worth reading.
Captain John Staple is bored now that he's back from the Peninsula. He stops at a toll-gate on the way to a friend's house party near the beginning of the book, seeking shelter from a wicked storm, and finds the gate keeper absent and his son half-frantic with fright. Thus he determines to stay the night. His intentions of leaving quickly get scotched when, the next morning, he falls in love at first sight with an extremely tall young lady driving a gig through the gate - Miss Nell Stornaway, granddaughter of the old Squire, who's suffered a stroke, and thus the acting Squire in these parts. He decides to stick around, and rapidly becomes entangled in the mystery of the missing gate-keeper, the worries of the dirty and horse-mad urchin at the gate, and the sinister goings-on at Kellands, where Nell's cousin the good-for-nothing heir is hosting an even more good-for-nothing cardsharp sort of person, whose evil can be easily determined from his sloppy unwanted advances, which are furthermore advanced in an obnoxiously underbred manner (and you know that in a Heyer novel being underbred is an even stronger signal of unsavoriness than brutishness).
It emerges eventually that Nell's cousin isn't a typical wastrel or scapegrace, but a thoroughly unprincipled, slimy character, and that his buddy is actually evil, and that they have everything to do with the missing gatekeeper and the suspicious character who's been skulking about the neighborhood. A big shipment of new gold coins has gone missing on its way from London, and it happened with a couple of violent murders, and their strange new skulker is a Bow Street Runner, and the cousin's buddy is of course the evil mastermind, and, it emerges when John takes his pet highwayman to investigate some gigantic limestone caverns and they find the gatekeeper's body... murderer!
The murder is the biggest problem with this novel. The tone of the adventure is more or less the light tone of The Foundling or another romance novel, but the stakes are deadly, and not in the duel-of-honour or abducting-a-young-lady-at-pistolpoint way you often see in these novels, where the motivation is quite specific. The villain has no honor, being an utterly ruthless sociopath whose plan to kill the hero, in the dénoument, involves luring him into the caverns, lying in wait and shooting him in the dark. Anticipating this plan, the hero gets around it by maneuvering the heroine's cousin in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Bilbo and Gollum in the cave, and then, in a hand-to-hand struggle in the dark, accidentally-on-purpose breaks the guy's neck right before the Runner and his pet highwayman show up fully armed and capable of taking the guy. Of course, Britain totally had the death penalty at this time so he was just going to be hanged anyway, but the hero's actual reason for breaking his neck - and risking himself considerably to engage the guy close-to before the Runner's armed arrival - was that if captured he would have admitted that the heroine's cousin was his willing henchman, and it doesn't suit the hero to have his wife's family name associated with bank robbery, so he promised her grandfather the Squire to hush it up at any cost. This maneuver is a common plot thread in Heyer novels, and it's probably not a historically inaccurate motivation, but in this case the combination of the hero's flippancy and readiness to risk far more for the sake of committing brutal murder with his bare hands combines to leave a really icky taste in one's mouth.
An even worse one considering that the pet highwayman, not knowing John's plan, has the same idea and solves the problem by shooting the heroine's cousin in the scuffle (they of course pretend it was the evil mastermind who shot him), and first the hero reluctantly thanks him because his life will be much easier that way, and then the heroine cares so little that she barely takes notice of it, being too eager to hear about how it came about that the evil dude was murdered as well. The last line in the book is her lovingly telling the hero she's sorry her grandfather didn't live to hear about him murdering the dude, because he would have been so happy about it.
These issues aside, the book also suffers from some weird pacing in the middle, where the presumed urgency of the mystery plot frequently flags when intercut with the humorous pastoral scenes involving phonetically-spelled lower-class dialect from the gate urchin, the pet highwayman, the heroine's old nurse, the Bow Street Runner, the locals, etc. The elements just don't mix well, and the hero's unmoving presence in the gatehouse creates an impression of inaction that only contributes to the paradoxical sense of un-urgency in the humorous character sketch bits, and undermine the potential thrills of the adventure plot even further.
- Powder and Patch (one of the Georgian ones, which I generally like less, but I will be buying it);
- These Old Shades (I remember it well and don't like it, so I'll be delaying that a bit);
- Pistols for Two (short stories, so I can take it or leave it); and
- The Grand Sophy (I have a very amusing-looking and semi-battered 1984 US edition, but as my wife agrees that its non-matchiness is an eyesore I'll be getting the new one anyway.)
I did notice that I failed to post reviews of some of the novels as I read them, though, which caused a lot of trouble for me before Yuletide when I was trying to untangle in my brain which one was which - the result of all this being that it took me about 10 skimming rereads and nearly a week to pick Felix Hethersett from April Lady as the other half of my pairing. My poor memory. :(
Anyway, back to The Toll Gate. The male protagonist, an ex-Army younger son full of heroism, thrill-seeking and whimsy, is the almost-exclusive POV character in a mystery plot that in fact falls short of the rollicking adventure to be found in many of her road trip novels (like Charity Girl or The Foundling). The romance subplot doesn't present much of a conflict, if any, although the emotional reality of the scenes between the hero and heroine is probably the firmest point of the book, and in itself well worth reading.
Captain John Staple is bored now that he's back from the Peninsula. He stops at a toll-gate on the way to a friend's house party near the beginning of the book, seeking shelter from a wicked storm, and finds the gate keeper absent and his son half-frantic with fright. Thus he determines to stay the night. His intentions of leaving quickly get scotched when, the next morning, he falls in love at first sight with an extremely tall young lady driving a gig through the gate - Miss Nell Stornaway, granddaughter of the old Squire, who's suffered a stroke, and thus the acting Squire in these parts. He decides to stick around, and rapidly becomes entangled in the mystery of the missing gate-keeper, the worries of the dirty and horse-mad urchin at the gate, and the sinister goings-on at Kellands, where Nell's cousin the good-for-nothing heir is hosting an even more good-for-nothing cardsharp sort of person, whose evil can be easily determined from his sloppy unwanted advances, which are furthermore advanced in an obnoxiously underbred manner (and you know that in a Heyer novel being underbred is an even stronger signal of unsavoriness than brutishness).
It emerges eventually that Nell's cousin isn't a typical wastrel or scapegrace, but a thoroughly unprincipled, slimy character, and that his buddy is actually evil, and that they have everything to do with the missing gatekeeper and the suspicious character who's been skulking about the neighborhood. A big shipment of new gold coins has gone missing on its way from London, and it happened with a couple of violent murders, and their strange new skulker is a Bow Street Runner, and the cousin's buddy is of course the evil mastermind, and, it emerges when John takes his pet highwayman to investigate some gigantic limestone caverns and they find the gatekeeper's body... murderer!
The murder is the biggest problem with this novel. The tone of the adventure is more or less the light tone of The Foundling or another romance novel, but the stakes are deadly, and not in the duel-of-honour or abducting-a-young-lady-at-pistolpoint way you often see in these novels, where the motivation is quite specific. The villain has no honor, being an utterly ruthless sociopath whose plan to kill the hero, in the dénoument, involves luring him into the caverns, lying in wait and shooting him in the dark. Anticipating this plan, the hero gets around it by maneuvering the heroine's cousin in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Bilbo and Gollum in the cave, and then, in a hand-to-hand struggle in the dark, accidentally-on-purpose breaks the guy's neck right before the Runner and his pet highwayman show up fully armed and capable of taking the guy. Of course, Britain totally had the death penalty at this time so he was just going to be hanged anyway, but the hero's actual reason for breaking his neck - and risking himself considerably to engage the guy close-to before the Runner's armed arrival - was that if captured he would have admitted that the heroine's cousin was his willing henchman, and it doesn't suit the hero to have his wife's family name associated with bank robbery, so he promised her grandfather the Squire to hush it up at any cost. This maneuver is a common plot thread in Heyer novels, and it's probably not a historically inaccurate motivation, but in this case the combination of the hero's flippancy and readiness to risk far more for the sake of committing brutal murder with his bare hands combines to leave a really icky taste in one's mouth.
An even worse one considering that the pet highwayman, not knowing John's plan, has the same idea and solves the problem by shooting the heroine's cousin in the scuffle (they of course pretend it was the evil mastermind who shot him), and first the hero reluctantly thanks him because his life will be much easier that way, and then the heroine cares so little that she barely takes notice of it, being too eager to hear about how it came about that the evil dude was murdered as well. The last line in the book is her lovingly telling the hero she's sorry her grandfather didn't live to hear about him murdering the dude, because he would have been so happy about it.
These issues aside, the book also suffers from some weird pacing in the middle, where the presumed urgency of the mystery plot frequently flags when intercut with the humorous pastoral scenes involving phonetically-spelled lower-class dialect from the gate urchin, the pet highwayman, the heroine's old nurse, the Bow Street Runner, the locals, etc. The elements just don't mix well, and the hero's unmoving presence in the gatehouse creates an impression of inaction that only contributes to the paradoxical sense of un-urgency in the humorous character sketch bits, and undermine the potential thrills of the adventure plot even further.
(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 05:28 pm (UTC)And, more to your substance: You're so right, The Toll Gate isn't one of the better Heyers. As I remember, it has a very flimsy sort of plot, requiring active stupidity and foolhardy inaction to work, and lacking the hilarity, pacing and interesting characters that makes Unknown Ajax work, or the vague sense of grim doom of A Reluctant Widow.
(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 06:03 pm (UTC)However, I wouldn't describe the secret-passages-and-spies plot in The Reluctant Widow as "grim". I think it's one of her funniest and most light-heartedly engaging novels.
(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 07:38 pm (UTC)Huh. Perhaps I have been permanently scarred by the opening chapter of The Reluctant Widow with its mistaken location, lost job, and the unexpected marriage & widowhood arrangement that all seemed very cold. The whole idea of it seemed so full of horrors around how utterly alone and vulnerable, and lacking in any real power Elinor was, and how Carlyon disingenuously uses the circumstances and the social horrors of the situation to push Elinor into it. I always think of him as a bully, and I just can't enjoy it (but then, I can't bear Regency Buck for not dissimilar reasons, and I know how many people love that, so I'm not exactly surprised to find I may be on my own on this!).
Interesting how differently a book can come across :)
(no subject)
Date: 23 Feb 2010 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 05:38 pm (UTC)Also, False Colours is not, AFAIK, heavily military. This review contains a partial plot synopsis.
(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 05:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 22 Feb 2010 06:16 pm (UTC)