Boo...

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society - Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Why hello historical monograph. I carved out time to do a quick read (not quite a skim, but close) of this very scholarly work over the last few days. It exercised the muscles I developed in grad school the first time around, when I was reading at least 1000 pages weekly of history, philosophy, primary texts, etc. I was so good at reading for content and argument then. But in the intervening years, those skills have waned quite a bit.

But not so much that I couldn't get into the text. Schmitt is exploring the role of ghosts in medieval culture, primarily how they (or rather the way people talked about them) evolved. The church played a primary role, of course, but there was some amount of room for older traditions of the dead. Anyway, there was a lot of souls stuck in purgatory, asking those still living to do something (pray, make financial arrangements) to better their lot in the afterlife. And somehow there was a tie-in to the tradition of charivari, which was more typically related to marriages that threatened society in some way (widowers taking young wives, widows remarrying unexpectedly, cuckolding). But the point is clearly that ghosts exist because of the function they serve for the living.

As a fan of the social construction of pretty much everything, I am down with this. And it's convincing. And yet, as a believer in ghosts - or at my most skeptical, an agnostic - I find myself working facing a bit of a quandary. If ghosts manifest in response to social expectations and constructions, can they still have an objective reality? I vote yes, although I can't imagine Schmitt agrees with me.

Paranormal Romance

Kiss & Hell - Dakota Cassidy (Berkeley Publishing, 2009)

The post title refers to the official genre designation that Penguin gives for this book, according to the back cover. I've been writing a paper on genre classification - and whether libraries should shelve books separately by genre - so this sort of thing is on my mind. For example, paranormal romance is quite possible the right classification for Ms. Sookie, although maybe paranormal suspence w/ lots o' sex is more accurate.

Anyway. Somehow this book made it into my book list. I hate this. Sometimes I remember exactly when I heard about a book and it stuck well enough to make me get out my little notebook and pencil. But sometimes I clearly am acting on whim and titles just seem to appear in there. K&H is chick lit with ghosts. Or demons. Well, both. Delaney is a medium, who has dedicated the last several years to helping the newly departed clear up whatever's going on so that they can go into the light (instead of getting swayed to hell by demons out to collect souls). Except her best friend is a demon. And she doesn't have much of a social life, unless you count her motley crew of dogs.

So when a sexy nerdy demon shows up and tells her he's been assigned to seduce her and take her back to hell, except he's not really going to do that because he ended up in hell by mistake, she proceeds to let him go right ahead with the first part of his plan. Because he's hot. Anyway, the plot twist holding this whole thing together is beyond ridiculous, but the set-up is kinda fantastic. Lots of adorable humor.

Cassidy has a couple stylistic tics that I both like and find utterly frustrating about chick lit. The one that leans more toward the like is her tendency to end sections/chapters with incomplete sentences, usually laced with sarcasm. Like "And that meant hard core" or "End of." This is part of a broader trend toward highly idiosyncratic, contemporary slang. It felt awkward and sloppy rather than natural, and I think that Cassidy fully capable of a more interesting writer. Maybe I'm not representative of her target readers, but I think they could handle some more sophisticated prose.

Totally fun, breezy, and often sexy. It was in my beach bag for a barbecue, and I found myself recommending it to the ladies. How could I resist?

Entanglements

Not many authors could combine a murder mystery, a treatise on the history of science, and a ghost story. Such was the ambition of Rebecca Stott in Ghostwalk. The murders - a spate from the 1660s, plus that of the woman researching them. The history - about Isaac Newton and his flirtation with alchemy, plus what alchemy meant to the scientists of the late 17th century. And the ghosts - well, they are everywhere. The novel is also one of obsession, obsessions that kill, although the word may never be stated.

I don't mind ghosts, but I think they may have been the weakest part of the novel. Because Lydia Brooke, brought in by her former lover to finish the murdered woman's book, is too sensible to believe in such things. And Stott never convinces me why she should. She convinces me why I should, but then I am gullible.

These weaknesses - and it is Stott's first novel, so I can forgive them - fortunately don't diminish too much from what is a lovely and haunting tale. Lydia is intriguing and thoughtful, and the decision to frame the novel as a letter to her lover was a wise one.

Stott's got a lovely voice, and I hope she continues to write fiction. Consider the quiet power of passages like these:

It's called entanglement, Mr. Brydon; the word describes the snares of love as well as a mystery in quantum physics. It's not just particles of light or energy that can become entangled; it's time too. Yes, moments of time can become entangled. The seventeenth century and the present have become entangled; they have become connected across time and space.

and love...

I saw that I no longer knew anything. Anything was possible. If someone had told me that you had issued an order for me to be attacked to frighten me into leaving Cambridge so that I would no longer be your Achilles' heel [Erin's note: and how much did this line make me want to be someone Achilles' heel?], if they had said that you wanted me out of the way at any price, I might have believed them. And then if someone had said that you would protect me above all else, sacrifice everything for me, that you loved me above all else, yes, I would have believed that too.