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lkedzie 's review for:
Black Rabbit Hall
by Eve Chase
Us moderns tend to think 'romance' and associate it with love story, but it routes its way through the Romantic movement, encompassing a variety of artistic forms. The swinging pendulum of aesthetics away from the Enlightenment and rationalism, Romanticism was everything...not that. Its emphasis on sensation, feeling, and mystery is what cements the Gothic and the Gothic novel as we know it today. (Yes, it's more complicated than that, don't at me.)
I kept finding reasons not to like Black Rabbit Hall as I read it. The dialog is unrealistic, always feeling like dialog, and the same can be said to a lesser extent of the characters. The playing around with tense is jarring, and the interweaving the past and present narratives does not work. This is an instance where telling the story in order would have made for a better read. The red herrings are so red that they cease to be herring.
And yet this is an amazing read, because it captures the romantic sensibility. There are no dry sections. Chase fills everything with constant emotion, most notably menace and dread, but really the whole spectrum is here, of love and hate and glee. The house and the grounds feel like another character, and everything is about the intensity of feeling between the characters and how wonderful and disastrous that is. It is intensely sensual, and I don't mean erotic (those scenes are honestly some of the tamer ones in the book on the whole) but full of sensation, again in the traditional use of the word.
But then there's the ending. Bad endings are like unhappy families, in that we think that they are all different, but really they tend to fall into a few categories. Here
So it gives the feeling with a transition this abrupt that the author either got tired, got bored, or hit the requisite page count and closed out. But I feel more like having already hit so much emotional material for the past however many pages, the author thought that they could get away with something more summary. It really does not work, and is, as stated above, probably one of the reasons why a more conventional telling of the story would have worked better, because then the whole modern plot would work as the falling action. As opposed to teasing things that are pretty obvious.
But if this is bad, this is the kind of bad that I want more of, where it is a page burner not because you need to know what happens next, but because of the depth of the emotional investment that the book creates in its people and the sheer highs and lows that it takes you to.
I kept finding reasons not to like Black Rabbit Hall as I read it. The dialog is unrealistic, always feeling like dialog, and the same can be said to a lesser extent of the characters. The playing around with tense is jarring, and the interweaving the past and present narratives does not work. This is an instance where telling the story in order would have made for a better read. The red herrings are so red that they cease to be herring.
And yet this is an amazing read, because it captures the romantic sensibility. There are no dry sections. Chase fills everything with constant emotion, most notably menace and dread, but really the whole spectrum is here, of love and hate and glee. The house and the grounds feel like another character, and everything is about the intensity of feeling between the characters and how wonderful and disastrous that is. It is intensely sensual, and I don't mean erotic (those scenes are honestly some of the tamer ones in the book on the whole) but full of sensation, again in the traditional use of the word.
But then there's the ending. Bad endings are like unhappy families, in that we think that they are all different, but really they tend to fall into a few categories. Here
Spoiler
you have two problems in concert. First, I feel like the author was set on having a happy ending. And it is a little undeserved. But I will buy it. But that turns into a downer with the second problem, which is the lack of denouement. It hits the climax, which feels like it is over the top due to the intense emotional caliber of the whole novel, but has something of a fridge logic effect due to the absence of...well, anything, really. Functionally, you could have cut the last chapter and put in 'and they all lived happily ever after' to a more satisfying effect. The incest plot, for instance, being resolved in under a chapter has got to be one of the more cowardly moves I've seen from an author. And it is all like that.So it gives the feeling with a transition this abrupt that the author either got tired, got bored, or hit the requisite page count and closed out. But I feel more like having already hit so much emotional material for the past however many pages, the author thought that they could get away with something more summary. It really does not work, and is, as stated above, probably one of the reasons why a more conventional telling of the story would have worked better, because then the whole modern plot would work as the falling action. As opposed to teasing things that are pretty obvious.
But if this is bad, this is the kind of bad that I want more of, where it is a page burner not because you need to know what happens next, but because of the depth of the emotional investment that the book creates in its people and the sheer highs and lows that it takes you to.