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azdak at 01:06pm on 18/08/2005
azdak at 01:06pm on 18/08/2005I read The Time Traveller's Wife the other day and it irritated me so much I can't shake the nagging urge to rant about it, in the hope that I'll feel better if I get it all off my chest.
It started off well, with a really intriguing central premise, and then it deteriorated into Clare-and-Henry-their-love-is-so-true-and-no-one-else-in-the-world-matters until I was about ready to puke. Boy, what a deeply selfish couple of characters. It would have been okay if I'd thought they were being deliberately presented as utterly self-centred – you know, to say, for instance, something about how chronic (chronological, ha!) disease makes it hard for those affected to see beyond their own little circle of suffering (like in What Katy Did, only minus Cousin Helen to point it out for us), but I didn't get the impression the author thought they were selfish at all – okay, barring Henry in his younger days, who was selfish because he was a Womanizer and a Bastard and had long hair and was terribly artistic and pale and interesting and got into fist fights (but was also for some reason a librarian, which doesn't sit terribly well with the rest of his character, because we all know that Rupert Giles is the only truly sexy librarian and he was only pretending to be one), until he meets Clare and is mysteriously transformed into boringly domestic monogamous guy and Lover of Clare (that seemed an awful lot more important to his character than, you know, the fact that he was time travelling). On the contrary, we seem to be being told that the characters are Wonderful, because they are so much in love with each other, and deeply unselfish because they give so much up for each other – rich, artistic, beautiful Wonderful Clare lives in a house with a teeny weeny studio which makes her all artistically frustrated because what she really wants to do is make BIIIIG paper cranes, not teeny little ones, but she doesn't complain so as not to upset Henry, because she's just so self-sacrificing; and Wonderful Henry gives up his attempt to be Normal and uses his knowledge of the future to make a fortune in the lottery so as to spare poor Clare the misery of only havinga teeny studio. And we're supposed to think this is so romantic and self-sacrificing, even though Henry doesn't seem to make any other kind of effort to be Normal, and Clare's parents are so disgustingly rich they could have bought her a studio twenty times over without even having to sack one of the maids.
And then there's the business with Henry's doctor's baby – the whole purpose of the poor baby being Down's Syndrome, as far as I can see, is it gives the doctor a reason to hate poor innocent Henry. It's certainly not because we're expected to take an interest in the doctor's private life, or even in how the Down's kid turns out, let alone to wonder about the other couple, the ones whose results got confused with the doctor's. Maybe they aborted a healthy baby on the strength of that mix-up, but it never occurs to the author that this might interest anyone, certainly not Wonderful Clare and Wonderful Henry. And of course their own child is even more Wonderful than they are – stunningly beautiful, infuriatingly precocious, profoundly artistic and intelligent and empathetic and understanding, and in spite of all the scaremongering about the dangers of time travel never in any risk of being abducted by paedophiles or raped by strangers. If Clare and Henry made me want to hurl, Alba induced projectile vomiting (and is it just me, or is Alba a weird sort of name to choose for a baby, considering that the Dule of Alba cut a bloody swathe through the Netherlands, murdering thousands in the name of religion?)
And since the time-travelling isn't presented as a science fiction, world-building issue – genetic impairment, my foot – then I really expect it to serve some kind of metaphorical function beyond being the motor for the plot of a Wuv Story. I mean, it could have said something about the human condition, about how we get stuck in the past, or fail to see the future consequences of our actions, but no, it's just a plot device. It's not even as if Henry's death arises organically out of any of his experiences. It's just his luck running out. Oh poor Wonderful Clare! It's just so tragic! Boo hoo!
Luckily, I got to read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go shortly afterwards. God, that guy can write. He reminds me of Ian McEwan, all deceptively simple prose that slides gently into your brain and sets up house there. Anyway, that was also a story about the hope that Love Can Conquer All, only it had a set-up that's a truly stonking metaphor for the human condition, and it didn't suck at all. So there's hope yet.
It started off well, with a really intriguing central premise, and then it deteriorated into Clare-and-Henry-their-love-is-so-true-and-no-one-else-in-the-world-matters until I was about ready to puke. Boy, what a deeply selfish couple of characters. It would have been okay if I'd thought they were being deliberately presented as utterly self-centred – you know, to say, for instance, something about how chronic (chronological, ha!) disease makes it hard for those affected to see beyond their own little circle of suffering (like in What Katy Did, only minus Cousin Helen to point it out for us), but I didn't get the impression the author thought they were selfish at all – okay, barring Henry in his younger days, who was selfish because he was a Womanizer and a Bastard and had long hair and was terribly artistic and pale and interesting and got into fist fights (but was also for some reason a librarian, which doesn't sit terribly well with the rest of his character, because we all know that Rupert Giles is the only truly sexy librarian and he was only pretending to be one), until he meets Clare and is mysteriously transformed into boringly domestic monogamous guy and Lover of Clare (that seemed an awful lot more important to his character than, you know, the fact that he was time travelling). On the contrary, we seem to be being told that the characters are Wonderful, because they are so much in love with each other, and deeply unselfish because they give so much up for each other – rich, artistic, beautiful Wonderful Clare lives in a house with a teeny weeny studio which makes her all artistically frustrated because what she really wants to do is make BIIIIG paper cranes, not teeny little ones, but she doesn't complain so as not to upset Henry, because she's just so self-sacrificing; and Wonderful Henry gives up his attempt to be Normal and uses his knowledge of the future to make a fortune in the lottery so as to spare poor Clare the misery of only havinga teeny studio. And we're supposed to think this is so romantic and self-sacrificing, even though Henry doesn't seem to make any other kind of effort to be Normal, and Clare's parents are so disgustingly rich they could have bought her a studio twenty times over without even having to sack one of the maids.
And then there's the business with Henry's doctor's baby – the whole purpose of the poor baby being Down's Syndrome, as far as I can see, is it gives the doctor a reason to hate poor innocent Henry. It's certainly not because we're expected to take an interest in the doctor's private life, or even in how the Down's kid turns out, let alone to wonder about the other couple, the ones whose results got confused with the doctor's. Maybe they aborted a healthy baby on the strength of that mix-up, but it never occurs to the author that this might interest anyone, certainly not Wonderful Clare and Wonderful Henry. And of course their own child is even more Wonderful than they are – stunningly beautiful, infuriatingly precocious, profoundly artistic and intelligent and empathetic and understanding, and in spite of all the scaremongering about the dangers of time travel never in any risk of being abducted by paedophiles or raped by strangers. If Clare and Henry made me want to hurl, Alba induced projectile vomiting (and is it just me, or is Alba a weird sort of name to choose for a baby, considering that the Dule of Alba cut a bloody swathe through the Netherlands, murdering thousands in the name of religion?)
And since the time-travelling isn't presented as a science fiction, world-building issue – genetic impairment, my foot – then I really expect it to serve some kind of metaphorical function beyond being the motor for the plot of a Wuv Story. I mean, it could have said something about the human condition, about how we get stuck in the past, or fail to see the future consequences of our actions, but no, it's just a plot device. It's not even as if Henry's death arises organically out of any of his experiences. It's just his luck running out. Oh poor Wonderful Clare! It's just so tragic! Boo hoo!
Luckily, I got to read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go shortly afterwards. God, that guy can write. He reminds me of Ian McEwan, all deceptively simple prose that slides gently into your brain and sets up house there. Anyway, that was also a story about the hope that Love Can Conquer All, only it had a set-up that's a truly stonking metaphor for the human condition, and it didn't suck at all. So there's hope yet.