Chapter 5 – Services
Many turnings of the plot and dynastic fomentation and crude kidnapping etc.
As well as liking the strong sense of geographical place, I also admire the sense of clothes:
If anything, the Duke’s silver studded black leather made him look more the warrior than Sir Dagobert. Each of the women or girls contrasted with my peach-coloured evening gown – Jenna wore scarlet, Heliotrope lilac and Carlotta pale blue. The dowager Duchess was in black, possibly as a mark of respect for her late husband; but her dress was such an extravagance of frills and artificial flowers that she put me more in mind of a funeral cake than a woman. The prince’s garments were also ostentatiously cut with tucks and frills – and were of a satin that matched my dress almost exactly.
Strangely and pleasantly, and in contrast with some of the sexual and grotesque features, the style often reminds me of ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ (1933) by E.M Delafield:
Although she talked a great deal, the dowager Duchess imparted very little information. Her every utterance involved a value judgment, assessing everything as either 'horrid' or 'simply divine'. Each utterance was issued in a booming voice that was very difficult to ignore. While it was hard to imagine that anyone would wish to be aware of her opinions, a few minutes of her company left me able to predict her views on almost any topic.
It is sometimes a relief – when immersed in the otherwise perfect and delicious language of expression in which this novel is written – to find the odd typo:
My impression was that they listening to something.
glancing down, I saw that my manacles had been joined Carlotta’s and Heliotrope’s
And the narrator seems to have become a semi-colon girl at least once:
A pirate passed us leading several ponies; another was loaded with inanimate loot.
A tasty snippet of text as the nazemen attack:
The flunky was coughing foaming gore with two feet of bloody metal spike protruding from his chest. As we watched, his jacket heaved and writhed in the region of his abdomen until the organs of his belly burst through the constraining garment – intestines unravelling like a snake awakening from hibernation. For a moment he stood swaying, and then collapsed: a marionette with severed strings. The slaughterhouse stench was appalling.
I don’t know (because I’ve been sporadically reading this novel in various versions over the years) whether the novel makes it clear enough that initially the narrator is Lady Margaret (later to be Tuerqui from the title page).
CHAPTER COMMENT LINKS: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html
