Oh, boy.
The Wounded Name (1922), D. K. Broster's fifth novel and third solo novel, continues the theme of post-Revolutionary French history begun in the earlier books—we've now made it to the Restoration and the Hundred Days—and also continues some other very distinctive common themes of her writing. Some of these are good.
So, it's 1815. Napoleon has been vanquished and a Bourbon is back on the throne, but, as they used to say on Horrible Histories, not for long. Laurent de Courtomer, a young Frenchman who grew up in England following his family's emigration and has just returned to his ancestral home, goes off to join the forces fighting in the Vendée against Napoleon's comeback. He's captured by the Imperialists and locked up in an appropriated château, where he meets a fellow-prisoner in a far less fortunate state than he—a Breton leader named Aymar de la Rocheterie, alias L'Oiseleur (the Fowler—a reference to a local legend which he's supposedly recapitulating), whom Laurent met in England the year before and immediately fell head over heels for. Laurent happily takes on the duty of tenderly nursing Aymar back to health, but as he does so, he becomes aware that a terrible secret lies behind Aymar's injuries and captivity—everyone is saying he did something horrifyingly dishonourable, something Laurent is sure he would never do. In between a frankly silly amount of indulgent hurt/comfort and fraught questions of honour, all is revealed...
(...also, like, the battle of Waterloo happens, somewhere, and Napoleon is defeated again, I guess? I don't know, it isn't really important when we've got all this homoerotic hurt/comfort and honour-related drama to get through. Truly, D. K. Broster is the anti-Victor Hugo.)
The plot is in three rough sections (although, oddly, this book isn't divided into Parts the way most of Broster's books are—instead it has a smaller number of much longer chapters). The first is the ridiculous hurt/comfort-slashy-honour bit, in which Laurent and Aymar go through various trials and adventures while imprisoned by and escaping from the Imperialists; it ends with Aymar finally revealing what the horrible dishonourable thing everyone keeps saying he's done was, and why he can't deny having done it. Then there's a middle section in which, Aymar being partly recovered and Waterloo making it easier for Royalists to move around in the open, he goes home and some het romance happens, but the vital question of his 'wounded name' is not resolved. Finally, Aymar sets out to restore his reputation and prove that he acted honourably after all, stalwartly defended by Laurent, and we get some great tense courtroom scenes and miraculous plot twists. In some ways the structure felt a bit disjointed, and the POV is very uneven, with the entire first part from Laurent's perspective and Aymar suddenly becoming a POV character later on.
...So, this is a really slashy book. It's a lot more than your typical 'this historical male friendship reads as kind of romantic to a modern audience'. Laurent's feelings for Aymar in the early part of the book are all but textually romantic—from their first meeting Laurent is constantly thinking about how handsome he is, treasuring every time Aymar smiles at him or honours him with a greater confidence than he gives other people, and later on, the way the narrative describes their growing closeness during the hurt/comfort section really doesn't read like the friendship Broster keeps insisting it is. (Is this what they did in the 1920s instead of 'gal pals'???) She even does the 'one character in a chair, the other sitting on the floor with their head against the first character's knee' thing she likes so much with her textual het romances! I didn't strongly ship it the way I do Ewen/Keith (IMO it isn't as interesting a relationship in itself), but it's impossible not to see it that way. To the point that it never rising above subtext felt almost dishonest—like, the relationship obviously ought to go that way, and it's
so obvious that it not doing so is frankly unconvincing and unsatisfying.
( Grumbling about canon het )This book is by far the most similar to
Flight of the Heron of any of Broster's other books so far; it kind of reads like Broster was testing out the ideas that she'd later develop to their full potential in FotH. The first part is basically an extended version of the 'Ewen gives away Lochiel's hiding-place by sleep-talking, and Keith comforts him while he's injured and a prisoner' section from FotH (I was almost afraid that the big reveal was going to be that Aymar gave away the information about his plans by talking in his sleep—there is in fact some sleep-talking involved elsewhere in the plot—but happily it's a bit more involved and ingenious than that!). There's the same emphasis on folkloric fate, although less tightly bound up with the plot and less interestingly written. And Aymar is... not quite the same character as Ewen, but they certainly have an awful lot in common. (Laurent is nothing like Keith, however—he's a much less well-developed character). And, while Broster's love of historical detail is certainly here, the historical setting isn't nearly as detailed or as cleverly woven together with the plot and characters as it is in FotH.
What else is there to say about this book? There are some good side characters—M. Perrelet, the irritable but indulgently good-hearted doctor who cares for Aymar during his captivity and comes to like and admire both him and Laurent (also in FotH links, the way Archibald Cameron is written in that book is much the same character type) is a fave. And Colonel Richard, the Imperialist officer to whom Aymar supposedly betrayed his own side, somewhat surprisingly turns out to be a great 'honourable enemy' character. The trial scenes towards the end of the book are properly gripping, even if the big reveal about a certain character's real identity is a little contrived.
On the whole, I didn't really enjoy this one, partly because I couldn't get over that horrible falsehood about the central relationships and partly because of how much it reads like a less well-executed beta version of my great love
Flight of the Heron. But I think this is an unfair opinion—it's really a pretty good book, and I can recommend it for anyone who wants to see the best, even if amongst other things, of D. K. Broster's writing.
...Anyway, now I'm going to go and write another few hundred words of Ewen/Keith fic!
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