There wasn't much to this story and it can be summed up thus:
Ellen Price comes to New Orleans with her father and sister for an engagement at a new theatre. Ellen catches the eye of Creole Philip Baudier, eventually marries him, and the marriage is haunted by his past wife and his current mistresses.
Rocks fall; everyone dies.
Well, almost.
WTF, Dan Ross? Where was the bodice ripping? Where was the goffick stuff?
At 448 pages, I was expecting a lot of craziness - or at least quite a bit - to make the plot rocket along at top speed, but it was slow and deathly dull for vast stretches. Dan barely gave me anything to sink my teeth into.
Dan loves having his female characters be actresses, and it gives him lots of opportunity to have the stage & its players occupy the minds and lives of his heroines. I wish he'd do more with it, though. It's never more than superficial, and as the pages dragged on, there's only so many times I can read the same conversation about how talented Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest are and that they're both flawed geniuses.
He did have Forrest be a focal point briefly when he comes to New Orleans, sweeps Ellen's trampy, fickle (and very married) sister off her feet and they run off together. Where he then dumps her tubercular ass somewhere in New York and informs Ellen of it through his manager.
If you're outraged at him being a callous cheater who doesn't get punished, don't worry. His divorce was the most notorious and mucky in 19th century America and he came out on the losing end of it. So, fictional just desserts and all that.
There are a few elements in Ellen's background and the plot that mirror the life of Fanny Kemble, and I think Ross' intent was to fictionalize or at least use it as inspiration for his own plot. At any rate, it seemed to be confining rather than liberating, and the plot grew very stagnant. Ellen doesn't really go anywhere ordo anything. She marries, has a kid, people die, and she gets involved with one man after another, always being disappointed in love. There's no sex, nothing racy, and the plot simply staggers from one little plot development to the next - each one usually concluded by someone dying of yellow fever or another way. (The open sewers of NOLA get discussed a lot when there's a lag in conversation.)
The one gothic element was a ghost that appears with stumps where her hands were supposed to be, and a white sack over her head. She flits in and out and is supposed to be the ghost of a slave woman who was tortured to death by Philip's first wife. Whenever things got quiet, Dan would give her a scene for a few paragraphs and then she'd disappear again. At the end it's revealed that she is actually flesh-and-blood, but her identity makes no sense whatsoever. I don't see how or why she could have made the trip to the house over and over and over. She didn't even live nearby.
Or maybe I missed a detail and I simply don't care.
It was better-written than Beloved Scoundrel and the larger page count gave the story a bit more room to unfold, but it was still far too long for what little there was. I know Ross isn't the best writer ever - or even light-years close - but his pacing sucked in this one. Even before I reached 50%, I was becoming excruciatingly bored.
But ol' Dan wrote hundreds of books and I've had it on good authority some of his rippers are like crack. So I shall hold onto my Ross collection for the nonce.
0 Yorumlar