No Hero by E. W. Hornung
Feb. 27th, 2020 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeIt being a slightly stressful week, I decided I needed something a bit lighter to offset all these dense history books, so I've resumed the Hornung read-through. It was fun to revisit the fin de siècle after spending so long buried in the eighteenth century!
No Hero (1903) is a short and fairly simple story which is an interesting extension of the sort of thing Hornung has done before now. It opens with our narrator Duncan Clephane, a soldier recently returned from the Boer War, visiting an old friend for whom he once had somewhat complicated feelings. She asks for his help on behalf of her young son, who—she has heard—has got himself into a Situation involving an unsuitable woman. Duncan travels to the hotel in the Alps where the son and the unsuitable woman—who it turns out is a divorcee, terribly scandalous for the 1890s—are staying, and events unfold from here.
It's a book with a lot of interesting things to say about gender and attitudes to women. Mrs Lascelles, the unsuitable woman, bitterly resents the world that sees her as 'contaminating' a young man's innocence by her society, simply because she was unlucky in her marriage and did what she had to do to get out. This is a very different sort of strong female character from Hornung's previous spirited young heroines—Mrs Lascelles is not actually all that much older than them, but she's in a very different place in life and is, perhaps inevitably, a very different sort of person. Duncan, meanwhile, starts out more or less accepting, if not actively endorsing, his society's ideas about women like Mrs Lascelles, and as he gets to know her better he finds it increasingly difficult to keep acting as if those ideas are true. This was all very interesting, and I hope Hornung sticks to this theme and does more with it later on.
The book is also really beautifully written. Duncan narrates in first person, and I think Hornung is at his best in a first-person POV—all the lovely little twists of description, elegant and subtle emotional implications and self-deprecating asides that I love so much in the Raffles stories are here too, and the book was a delight to read on the simple sentence level.
No Hero (1903) is a short and fairly simple story which is an interesting extension of the sort of thing Hornung has done before now. It opens with our narrator Duncan Clephane, a soldier recently returned from the Boer War, visiting an old friend for whom he once had somewhat complicated feelings. She asks for his help on behalf of her young son, who—she has heard—has got himself into a Situation involving an unsuitable woman. Duncan travels to the hotel in the Alps where the son and the unsuitable woman—who it turns out is a divorcee, terribly scandalous for the 1890s—are staying, and events unfold from here.
It's a book with a lot of interesting things to say about gender and attitudes to women. Mrs Lascelles, the unsuitable woman, bitterly resents the world that sees her as 'contaminating' a young man's innocence by her society, simply because she was unlucky in her marriage and did what she had to do to get out. This is a very different sort of strong female character from Hornung's previous spirited young heroines—Mrs Lascelles is not actually all that much older than them, but she's in a very different place in life and is, perhaps inevitably, a very different sort of person. Duncan, meanwhile, starts out more or less accepting, if not actively endorsing, his society's ideas about women like Mrs Lascelles, and as he gets to know her better he finds it increasingly difficult to keep acting as if those ideas are true. This was all very interesting, and I hope Hornung sticks to this theme and does more with it later on.
The book is also really beautifully written. Duncan narrates in first person, and I think Hornung is at his best in a first-person POV—all the lovely little twists of description, elegant and subtle emotional implications and self-deprecating asides that I love so much in the Raffles stories are here too, and the book was a delight to read on the simple sentence level.
no subject
Date: Feb. 27th, 2020 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 28th, 2020 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 29th, 2020 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 29th, 2020 06:57 am (UTC)