But its that time of year. I have this craving about twice a year to read a romance novel or two-- indulge in the utterly predictable yet delectably delicious story structure that pits maiden against rake and culminates with a love that will last for all time... and some really steamy sex.
Its spring and my head is filled with images of chiseled Dukes in period clothing smiling roguishly at ladies from across a crowded ballroom, setting her virgin cheeks aflame with embarrassment at the shocking power of her deep-down desire.
He'll have sworn a vow never to love, she'll have promised herself never to marry without love-- there will be a hidden danger winding its way insidiously into the fabric of their achingly-slowly budding relationship and in the third act that hidden danger will reveal itself to be someone they trusted all along! Egads and damnation!
He will rescue her -or- in a fun twisty twist she will be the one to rescue him from the clutches of doom and they will realize, in the face of death or permanent separation, that they have been being ridiculous and of course they are madly in love with one another and would move heaven and earth for that sweet sweet lovemaking that they do so well.
Naturally they marry, finally consigned to the fate they had resisted so vehemently before, and live happily ever after... An epilogue throwing us a bone and letting us know how fertile they were with a passel of little beautiful children running around the estate grounds and their love more vibrant than ever before.
And I will smile and then hate myself for smiling at such sub-par reading.
Because I could have written it myself, so foreseeable were the plot developments, so predictable were the 'twists', so familiar were the cast of characters.
They are all the same.
Don't bother arguing. They are all. the same. Some variation of the same exact formula.
If it doesn't follow the above guidelines then you know what? It isn't a romance novel. What you're holding might just be fiction, maybe even some stray piece of literature, but it is not, I repeat not, a romance novel.
I mean, I even read this epic one where she (the heroine) ended up getting kidnapped by pirates right at the point where a normal romance novel would have wrapped up neatly and given me a 'happily ever after'. We'd already overcome obstacles and what- not and the rake realized he loved the virgin and he was actually thrilled to be married and YOINK! Pirates got her, sold her to a Sultan way down in the middle east somewhere and now she's in a Harem!
Interesting right? I thought so. She was prized by the Sultan because she was a ginger, very exotic down there, and he did all kinds of kinky stuff to her, since she was essentially his slave, and then, I think because she was too troublesome or something, too difficult to tame or whatever, he gave her as a gift to this other, neighboring sultan!
WHAAAA? "What" I asked myself, "the hell is going on here?"
So this neighboring sultan fellow is not kinky and depraved like the first one, he actually once had a wife (only the one, despite it being culturally acceptable to have bunches of them), and she died in childbirth and he's been mourning her since.
"Oh" says I, "Ok, this is an archetype I recognize!" You see, you can dress him up in a turban & hammah pants and give him an exotic accent but this is nothing more than the sad, haunted hero who romance novel authors sometimes use in substitution for the womanizer leading man, should the need arise. It all amounts to the same hill o'beans. He's either sad or he's jaded and the cure is: he needs to fall in love to be reborn (and live happily ever... you get the jist!)
So ok. Her guy back in England was the first type of leading man- having threesomes with twins, trysts with married ladies, the cassonova caged by a marriage of convenience who discovers, to his delight and chagrin, that he actually has a heart and it belongs to our heroine.
The First Sultan is the classic villain- he's lascivious, he wants to rape her and possess her- only in regular romance novels he generally doesn't get the chance to do so before she is rescued-- I'll admit this one threw me for a loop! I mean- he put it in her ass folks- yikes (awesome sauce!). I actually think the Author just really wanted to get anal in there somehow and didn't think a proper Elizabethan lady would get that from a man who "loved" her and "cared" about her, so she had the sex-aholic sultan do the dirty deed. If you read romance novels, you know how taboo the ass usually is.
Then we get bonus third guy- The Sad Sultan! Neither of them really want to be in this arrangement (classic), but forced to live together they come to a grudging respect and an unbidden romance springs up between them. She finally resigns herself to the fate of being lost in a foreign land with no hope of rescue and starts to be happy with sad sultan, and he begins to let go of his grief for his dead wife and unborn son and begins to let his heart love again.
When AHA! The first sultan double-crosses the sad sultan, rapes our heroin again, and has his goons KILL sad sultan dead!
W.T.F???!!!!
This is when I check the book cover just to make sure I'm really reading a romance novel and not accidentally reading fiction with sexy bits thrown in.
He's dead? This sad, deep-souled sultan with the heart of gold and the skills in the bedroom? I mean this guy went DOWN TOWN- her English guy thought only whores likes it downtown, but Sad Sultan was like:" I want to worship you", and he went to the delta, and it was good!
Anyways, Down-town-sultan-brown is dead. Not almost dead, not near-death, not miraculously recoverable- he's dead, like his head has been severed from body and I'm thinking "What the hell is going to happen? how can this possibly end??"
Well English husband has been searching for his ginger bride this whole time and in the NICK OF TIME he somehow (i forget the deets) shows up, buys her back from the Sadistic Anal-loving sultan and brings her home to england.
Here's the best part. She's practically catatonic at this point from the shock of seeing her love (the sad sultan) viciously murdered in front of her and also getting raped again by the first sultan, so on the boatride back she's like a sleepwalker- not saying anything, just meekly going with the motions.
So her husband, because he's missed her so much and what not, MAKES LOVE to her even though she's just laying there. He can't help himself it says. Yikes, right? It's pretty much date rape, but oh wells.
Anyway, she slowly starts to recover over the next several weeks, tells her husband all about sad sultan and their love (he is understanding- after all she had no reasonable hope of getting rescued), tells him about the rape-y sultan, and also drops a hint that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to go downtown once in a while.
And guess what? She's totally pregnant! Only, guess! Whose baby is it? Which one of the three knocked her up?
OH MAN!
Delicious.
Since Sad Sultan, Anal Sultan, and Just-can't-wait-till-we're-home-and-you-aren't-so-catatonic-guy all "spilled their seed within her" in the same like 24 hour period, it could be any of the three!
Man. Doesn't get better than that. It was like three romance novels in one. But it was, make no mistake, a romance novel whan all was said and done.
The epilogue, there's always a little epilogue, hinted that the child had dark features and sad, almost violet colored eyes, which basically meant it was sad sultan's daughter, which was nice because then even though he's dead, a part of him gets to live on. Heroine and English husband also had a passel of little english ginger kids too, and I guess Anal Sultan drew the short straw (whew, right- that'd be TOO twisted for a ROMANCE NOVEL, this isn't literature folks, where things get impossibly complex and nuanced), and his dozens of brats back at the harem will have to suffice.
So I just blogged about romance novels for an hour.
The long and the short of it is this: I've seen it all. Mail order brides? read it. Indians in the wild west? yawn. I've seen every possible knight, lord, duke, earl, prince, king story set up imaginable. Widowers, Confirmed Bachelors, Young, old, mischievous and surly- nothing's new.
But dammit, sometimes you just wanna lose yourself in the world of 1800's London with silks and satins and gloves and fans, where men went to their gentlemen clubs and ladies wore ridiculous hats and everyone apparently had dynamite sex.
And doesn't it just feel wrong to be seen reading a book with that crazy cover art??
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1 comment:
i think you should lend me this book. i think i could read it thursday. i order some books from amazon.com but they wont be shipped til the 26th.
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