First Thoughts

Here we are road dawgz, book 3, Enemies of Dorley Hall. There's plenty of Aunt Bea: Origins in this week's chapter, "Everything a Body Needs". I really do think I'll have a little less to say about this chapter; the first chapters in these books have been a bit more straightforward. They set the table for what comes later, they establish a tone, &c.

Bea's escape and Steph's arrival are pretty natural comparisons, and their contrast is instructive.

• Steph knew a ton about the mechanical details of transness. Even the less informed other recruits did for that matter. Bea had none of the terminology.
• The terminology itself differs; presumably stuff like "genetic girl" and "transsexual" are archaic terms in today's context.
• The medical regime changes: I don't know much about it, but Bea's being injected is apparently a novelty in the 1980s, and Teri and Linda give her off-label hormonal birth control to use.
• Steph and Bea both struggle with their voices initially, Bea as a tell and as a sign of exhaustion, Steph as a jarring reminder that she was not yet (living as, becoming, transitioning to be) a woman.

Bea earlier, in Secrets, worried about Steph constituting a deep structural risk to Dorley hall. So in one sense, Steph is an enemy of Dorley.

That's probably not going to be the primary emphasis of the novel, though, because there are more conventional foes:

• Bea is a past foe of Dorley (who was, co-opted as an opposition leader by the interior structures of Dorley, in some sense?)
• Grandmother (ms. Marsden, we learn), is of course still an enemy of the hall's current iteration.
• Valérie is an enemy of the continuation of Old Dorley.

Secrets spent a lot of time illustrating the fragile, limited nature of what a secret can accomplish. What will Enemies think about its namesake?

Recap

1988-09-05

She's almost out of chances.

Bea escapes. That's good; these past-segments are going to be easier if they're not entirely stuck in the torture-dome. I have a slight worry that this will fall down the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo scope expansion trap until Dorley has nukes in a sub-basement or something, but Greaves has had a fairly steady hand so far, so probably that and the explicit theme ("enemies") will keep us on the rails.

2019-12-16

Sometime after seven.

Yes, this is how it starts, Paige. First seven, then six, then maybe you go full sicko-mode and start waking up during the forbidden hours. Anyway, Paige wakes Christine up early so that she can get to class. It barely works in the end, because Christine is a busy person, and being busy is her nature and disposition.

[I]t’s as if the therapeutic effects have travelled back in time[.]

Christine's decision to integrate her past life seems healthy enough from where I'm typing. The metaphor elsewhere with Valerie was something like, "the elephant in the room screaming to be noticed," and it must be, let's say distracting, to suppress that all the time.

All the same, the Brighton trip looms as a potential set piece later:

• Will Dorley demand something of Christine that keeps her from going?
• Will Christine make up a demand of Dorley's on her that does the same?
• Will it be safe there?
• Who will we meet?

Spent a few hours moving tiny 3D fantasy armies around a map.

Equestria at War was initially released in 2017, so I while it's not impossible that Christine's playing Hearts of Iron IV, this is probably some other game. Maybe a fictionalized one, since Greaves usually names referents, and Christine wouldn't have had much time to play the game before getting Dorleyed. I don't think that Total War: Warhammer would have anything describable as a "unicorn army", either. Out of my element here, honestly. Hard to keep up with more than one crippling time-suck of a game and I put too many of my points into HOI4 and Soulsbornes.

After her shower Christine throws on a tank top and shorts.

My whole world view is in tatters now. I thought they were called "vests" in Britain. This is why people made lojban, and I dream of a better world, where the names for things aren't all very slightly different.

tennis shoes

I must be reading some post-localization, English (US) version. I don't really imagine character voices in much detail unless the author mentions them, so it's not as if I've been thinking of Christine wandering around with an accent out of Redwall or anything.

[S]o first up you’ve got to choose your clan, and that’s maybe the most important choice!

Oh, is this Bloodlines?

her fringe tucked under an Alice band

This could be another language to me.

Glad to see Yasmin and Julia come back into the story. Greaves must have put them in here for a purpose, beyond proving or disproving "everyone ends up happy!" I didn't gather that Yasmin was so professional before. That makes some sense though; suits are kind of "protective" in their contemporary affect. They establish a formal distance in a character, &c. And maybe it is more grown up to leave the nest, even if the nest is your forced-transition command center.

It's nice too to see the ripples out from Lorna's conversations with Jodie. Convincing the Sisters that their community has intrinsic worth beyond the shared horror.

Gosh, I continue to be so ambivalent about Indira. I know she's an anchor of the institution, and that a lot of the Sisters feel a warmth and kinship to her. And I think that she's making an important contribution to Dorley by living an integrated life; I don't know if Christine considers a Brighton trip without Indira's example. But she's just way too comfortable with some of their more despicable methods for me to not be a little disaffected by her. And her convincing Yasmin and Julia to, do exactly what Bea wanted them to do in the first place, feels callous and manipulative even if I agree that they're better off keeping some relation to the only other people who went through what they did.

More or less, something being good for someone isn't always a reason to make them do it in my mind.

This all lines up with the planned Brighton visit interestingly. Yasmin describes things very much in terms like Christine; as being different people with a crowbar separation from themselves before Dorley. Christine's been supposing a before and an after, a kind of "present self / past self" as well.

And that all makes sense; people live through traumatic events and then they view themselves not as changed but as new. I can point to a couple of events in my incredibly easy life to date that feel like they happened to different people. For a simple, low stakes, example: we moved right before COVID lock-downs, and by the time we went back to where we'd been living before, I'd been alone so much of the time that I felt pretty alienated from some of the people I used to be with almost constantly. That presumably describes a lot of people's experiences.

I'm not sure if it's precisely true though; it's a long-open question of personhood, near constant in our language about our past selves regardless of gender and transition. Also in the genre I guess, "the boy is the father of the man", or "that's a problem for Future Me."

I'm harping on it mostly because so much of this chapter ended up being about Dorley's historically-divided personality and ethos.

Nagel?!

As a brief detour, I was trying to recall a bit of a theory-of-mind thing about that past vs present self thing, and that led me to Wikipedia naturally, where this stood out:

Thomas Nagel has extensively discussed the question of personal identity and first-person perspectives in The View from Nowhere.

Thomas Nagel (he's the "What is it Like to be a Bat?" guy) is Baader-Meinhof phenomenon-ing through Dorley and I resent his continued relevance. There's probably a lot to be said about The View from Nowhere and Dorley, and I will leave it to somebody else to say it because I do not want to read Nagel ever again.

Steph and Aaron

Adorable. Aaron feels nervous about going "she/her", isn't ready yet for skirts &c. either. At least sounds like he's not gerry-rigging a sports-bra out of a T-shirt?

And he doesn’t think he could stand it if he tried any of it too early, and looked stupid.

Poor thing. Same as his problem when he was trying to be a boy, naturally. At least time there's some supportive people he can rely on to stick around.

I'm glad Aaron is coping and all, and I still find it basically impossible to tease apart what part of his change-of-heart is:

• Steph
• The punitive element of the basement
• The gendered element of the basement

It doesn't really matter; this is happening, and he has accepted it. I'm just, call it idly curious, if the mutilation is inherent to the healing or if it's an artifact from the past regime.

He didn’t get to die because of what he did, so now he’s going to have to live with it, and that’s another thing entirely.

Good-ass phrase. Where's Martin, by the by?

Back to Yasmin, Christine, Paige

I'm glad you're back together. Oh, um yeah. Me too.

Julia and Yasmin do not owe an apology to Lorna, but sure.

God, awkward dialog is also awkward reading. I know everyone's being nice about it but this sucks, on a mundane socialization level. It's like, frosh-who-broke-up-with-her-long-distance-partner-over-christmas levels of awkward.

Another Day in Paradise

So Declan is getting the Old Dorley treatment, but to what end? Presumably as an enemy of (new) Dorley? How will that intersect with Bea's search for Val? With trauma, one must assume. Also, it's worth mentioning that this washout ending up getting Old Dorley'd almost has to have something to say about retribution. The un-penitent getting bent against the reformers who couldn't heal him. Can Val heal him? Anyway, I don't have that much to say about Declan but I'm glad he isn't burger meat; they don't like to waste people after all.

Call me an odd duck, but the extremity of the torture almost becomes slapstick, you know? I think it's just, I read Bloodlands. There's a "worst possible" you can get to before you max out the human suffering credit card, and it's the 1930s in Eastern Europe, more or less.

Better to imagine them as forces of nature to be prepared for, endured, survived, and not as living, breathing people

Oh God. Val's had to eat Br*tish food. For decades. I take it back about the 1930s; this is worse. Yeah, Dorley's a fucking horror novel, that seals it.

I still don't exactly understand why Val couldn't escape if Dorothy did? I know she's locked in, but it's, a big house basically? I trust there's an explanation (even if it's "Val is wrong"), it's just non-obvious to me why the end is "3 weeks of starving" instead of "3 weeks of uninterrupted focus time to escape."

You are the guard and I am the prisoner and unless you plan to change that relationship I suggest you do not try to get on my good side.

I liked you better when you were the quiet one.

Reminds me again of Fatelessness; understanding that the people who did this to her are human makes them intolerable in a way that they are not if they are elements of nature. It strikes me that for a lot of the people in this series, the errors of others are inherent features, not chosen mistakes. That is almost certainly not an accident for a story so much about the primacy of choice.

Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Dorley

Aaron's going through this whole post facto realization that he's a bastard and I still have some questions. Basically, is this a kind of a dark parallel to a real trans experience? Is it a common way of feeling to think that you've erred too much to ever recover, and does it feel like Aaron feels now? I'm certainly not implying that trans people have often done anything on the level of crime that Aaron committed; I'm more wondering if his situation is a heightened version of a common experience.

"Deserving your gender" is a whole other ball of wax that Greaves tackles earlier on. And now we kind of have Aaron going through that same thing (which I guess casts Steph in a very different role than she's been playing even though she herself is new, just like Christine for that matter.) So, I suppose what I'm trying to get at is, is there something about the fact of the major moral failings of the recruits that makes them easier to empathize with because of the fiction of a trans reader's major moral failings? The recruits need to have done something bad enough that it can't be batted away by the reader because people are generally worse at forgiving themselves than each other, I guess I'm claiming.

Also, and repetitively, and more specifically to the novel, how the fuck did he not feel this way when he was doing it? Is that moral separation the thing that Dorley is, underneath it all, fixing?

1988-09-24

This could a spin-off novel in its own right of course. Call it part of the serialized form that it isn't maybe. I'm not calling that a deficit of the form so much as an interesting constraint.

Baptists are different in the UK I guess.

Meets Teri.

Baptists are not different in the UK I guess.

Beatrice names herself to someone outside Dorley and goes to their place to eat stew. Good for her.

2019-12-16

About 2 weeks until Melissa needs to go back to work or stay at Dorley, just to track that clock running.

Mice, running down the most obvious and direct routes in the maze, looking for food.

Recall Lorna from "Like an Angel":

It’s like putting a mouse in a maze and rewarding it with food only when it finally consents to bite the other mice.

I like Edy. She's a real sweetheart.

Aaron's focus on being original reminds me of The Little Prince.

None of these thoughts are developed, all of them are errant, but there we go.

Brexit and Bojo and Europe

Speaking of food (I wasn't, but hey, go with it,) have I mentioned the "Prosecco, but not antipasta" BoJo quote? I heard it via How Not to be a Politician by Rory the Tory (economically he's, incoherent, but his heart seems like it's in the right place [no warrantee offered in that opinion, please tell me if he went off the deep end since]), and also Heroic Failure. I won't get more into the context, but I think it offers plenty of insight into the "new populism of the Right" on its own terms frankly.

Ohmygosh, the sponsors are using the conversation pit! That's great, good one Aaron!

Yes, but they’re being nice to him now. Because he acquiesced. Because he’s agreed to become who they want him to become.

I mean, yeah. Also because he was a sex pest before and now he's their Sister's romantic entanglement. The relationship has changed.

I don't think that "being a man" describes Aaron's original problem. But, ok I used to do stained glass art just a teeny little bit. I'm not trying to claim any stolen valor there; I was not good at it, it's just a thing I tried to learn. And if you tried to cut a groove with the, I wanna call it a spliner but that's wrong, that was too close to an existing edge, it just kind of didn't work. You'd break off a piece of the glass, but you wouldn't cut a new shape like you wanted. That's about what I can grant Dorley today; it's harder to make someone into a new kind of man, at least from Bea's perspective, than it is to make a new woman (entanglements and obligations of Dorley left aside.)

Like a Bomb

Did Christine forget to go to class, or is it still early morning?

Don't you have a lecture?

Jesus, Christine, get it together. Interesting that she thinks she's going to graduate and leave, but her entire life is invested in staying. And Dorley extracts some of her time and rewards her, but some of her over-involvement is purely her decision to prioritize.

Will gives his big speech, Adam is still pissed. Gunpowder boy it is, then.

Sometimes, some years, someone goes into a hole and comes out… different.

Maybe I'm a monster, and I like Maria a lot better than I like Will, but I still don't think he did anything wrong given the circumstances. Will sucks/ed, he'll almost surely be way better off post-Dorley, that's all true. But if you get extra-judicially kidnapped I think all bets of polite society are more or less off?

I also understand why everyone in Dorley feels differently. Maria is a kind person, as is Edy. I suppose it's all of a kind with Valérie's interaction with Callum; Maria was the guard and Will was the prisoner. In their case, Maria does intend to change that role, but the change is subtle, and gradual, and deeply strange.

Either way, Enemies starts off by emphasizing the friction between being a person and playing a role.

Grace

Grace is a precious gift, and it's ours, not God's, to give

Edy is straight up a John Dewey, philosophically speaking. I lack the time to do The Ethics of Democracy justice this week (this year.) But, he's a cool, sometimes frustrating, dude, who explains a fair chunk of why "liberal" means something very different across the Atlantic Ocean.

Edy and Dewey might agree that there's not much difference between community and God if they're capable of granting grace.

Tick-Tock Tick-Tock!

I need timestamps on these * * * section separators, Alyson, I can't take the stress. Christine needs to get to class!

Good morning Aunt Bea. How are you feeling?

Go to class, you vexing woman, you.

Anyway, a moment between Yasmin and Bea. Bea apologizes, Yasmin forgives her, admits that Dorley was perhaps good for her, too.

Steph and Will

Steph's out here ministering to sinners and all that. I look forward to Will not being the most dramatic little shit in history. He needs handcuffs for visitors?

Skill issue, frankly.

1988-09-24

It’s almost as if being captured and castrated has given her trust issues!

This is all an illuminating counterpart to Old Dorley, and maybe where the DNA for New Dorley comes in. The subcultural, free, version.

The comparison is going to be fascinating if there's enough of it; Greaves has a lot of chronological time to cover so we'll see whether Linda and Teri and Ashley's safe place gets much ink. But the resources that come with New Dorley imply the involvement of the Owning/Trout-Fucking classes.

Errant Thoughts

A tuit. A round tuit.

A thing like that.

Anyhow, onward and upward to book 3! I hope we spend some time with Linda and Teri and Ashley &co., I hope that Will isn't Will about everything for the whole book, and I somehow didn't mention Declan really at all. He's, well, it's not great.

Okay, One More Book Suggestion

President Obama is a little bit out of favor with some people (I have my gripes, but he's still a top 1 or 2 POTUS in my lifetime, so, hey,) but I must recommend Grace, by Cody Keenan, a 10-day scoped memoir of the late Obama administration. Good book. Backed hard.