Bapanada

I took last week off basically to clean my house and play Silk Song. This place has never been so clean, nor will it again in all likelihood, and the moment is worth savoring.

So far Enemies devotes a lot of its attention to exhuming the past of Dorley Hall. I'm not opposed to that. It's a good read, for one. A little more legibly a spy novel than the first two books were, for me, any genre at all. structurally so far it resembles Slow Horses (the novel moreso than the television show.)

I guess that's in part because I don't know the genre norms very well for Welcome or Secrets. Or, rather, I didn't give it much thought during Secrets, having given up on reading the genre of Welcome.

In retrospect Secrets has a lot to do with teen farces, structurally? "Everything Must Go" serves, in retrospect, as part 3 of a trilogy of teen-movie-styled chapters? I think? Like, what if Skins didn't have alternate, like a Futurama/MASH robo-doctor, between scoffing disdain and maudlin hand-wringing, speaking of Ho(u)lts.

So, why am I talking about Secrets? This is Enemies. Well if Greaves gets to write about Dorley's past I should at least get to write about Dorley's.

Greaves does genre things. That is not a criticism. I am not claiming genre is bad. I want to be clear about that. It's a fact, though: she does genre stuff.

I think she does so to create an implicit substrate of reader expectations that reinforce or subvert the actual literature that she writes. I'm sure there are other reasons too, like, maybe it's more fun to write "genre" fiction or something.

Anyhow, I think that attending to genre will probably help me pick up on some of what Greaves is doing here. And, this all smells strongly of spy book, which is delightful to my sensibilities as a person who liked A Friend Among Spies.

As I am a friend among Road Bugz, here is a link to "Old Soldiers", this week's chapter. Once again, sorry that it's a week late on account of Silk Song and an amount of household chores that could only be described as "not interesting to read about", but which needed doing at all hours of the day nevertheless.

Recap

It’s not run for anyone. Except maybe Elle fucking Lambert.

That is the question I guess.

I'm going to try something a little different this time, and just chunk the recap into its constituent time periods. The play-by-play recap format I normally do isn't feasible for me this time (I took too long to write this, took too long to read the chapter, got too busy, am currently suffering from hand-foot-and-mouth disease via my plague-daughter's disease-school; take your pick of the reasons but honestly you can just blame Silk Song if you like without loss of generality.)

The Basic Outline

1994-04-08:

Bea goes back home to visit Linda, Teri, and Ashley.
She meets Susan, a 15-year-old trans girl who ran away from home after her father rejected her.
Susan, notably, knew more about hormones than Bea when she first started out. Also notably, seems more comfortable with herself, more precocious.
Teri and Linda found Susan and are now fostering her.
Susan attends school as a boy but lives as a girl at home.
Her shitty dad is in jail for hitting a cop.
Bea stays the night and Linda asks for her current work contact info to pass referrals from Dahlia in Cambridge. More on that later.

Just because I generally choose not to say the words, doesn’t mean I don’t know them.

-- Linda

More evidence that Linda is the template for Aunt Bea, as if we needed it, alongside those mugs. I find it fascinating that so much of Secrets revolves around the question "how do Sisters relate to trans women?", before alighting on "the subset relation is how." And here we see the kind of seeds of that with, a very materteral Linda-Susan relationship.

Ashley

The triple-repitition of "this is not a funeral" didn't lend itself to a very short quote, but I really liked it all the same. It's almost a cliché to have a funeral with a celebratory attitude at this point, but I think the distinction that Ashley draws says a lot about why that trend is frustrating as a mourner.

This is not a funeral because that's the funeral, as a baseline, establishes that there is a venue for grief. It's complicated by the fact that the people grieving Linda here don't have easy access to that official venue.

And that access/lack-of-access dichotomy combines with the mourning/celebrating difference to illuminate a couple of broader points about subculture. First, that subcultures get made of people who are othered. Duh and/or obviously. The trans celebrants aren't invited to the monocultural funeral. Since they're made of people rejected from the monoculture, they're initially defined in opposition. "This is not a funeral because" the monocultural funeral is elsewhere and exclusive, but also for the beautiful affirming sentiments of which Ashley speaks.

Because subculture is defined in opposition, it's forced to be the dual of monoculture, but it's still culture, it still has to do the job of culture. "This is not a funeral because funerals are sober affairs, and I intend to get very, very drunk" is a great fragment because, I don't know about British funerals, but in the vaguely "Irish" (everyone in America thinks they are Irish and middle class. Practically, nobody is either) diaspora of American hill people, funerals are not sober affairs. I also know Ashley is pivoting on the dual meaning of "sober" here, but I think it stands. The not-funeral does double-duty as a funeral.

Because subcultures grow in the shadow of established monocultures, they innovate and fill in the gaps. Then they get co-opted. There are one gazilion examples of this phenomenon. Funerals are fertile ground to grow more. For example, my grandfather worked as a trumpet player before he went to war and then school and then the magistrature. So there was a NOLA-style brass band at his funeral. A celebration! Except, no, actually. it was a funeral with the new adopted form. Like all of those Magnolia-core farmhouses with the wrought-iron "gather" signs. My dad threw a weird tantrum, we spread his ashes across the land he tended in his retirement, the family got maudlin and drunk, it was a funeral.

Anyway, this celebration of Linda serves as a great example of what I like about the 1990s period in this novel so far; illustrating a period of social genesis. For Bea, for Dorley, for the primary audience of Dorley presumably; it captures the warmth Greaves aims for really nicely. It's a good time to spend time.

2002-08-02:

Bea meets Elle Lambert, of the West-Monsterfordshire Lamberts, and heir to their fortune.
Elle reveals she knows Bea's deadname and about (Old) Dorley through her family. At least claims to be appalled by the situation.
Elle's grandmother controls their estate, but Elle plans to take control when she dies.
Kelly was killed for telling Elle what the fuck was up (allegedly, and, allegedly.)
Elle hires Bea to help seize Dorley, first assisting by investigating. Also she hires her for sex reasons.

It's of course very different than what her parents did, but Elle is also enlisting a survivor of Old Dorley to serve her, both conventionally and sexually. There's a kind of a thread to pull there, maybe later in the book, or maybe by someone smarter. But, Elle maybe just presents kind of a sleek new facade on top of a system of aristocratic control.

Or, I'm being deeply uncharitable to someone we know for a fact improved the system materially for dozens (hundreds?) of women to date. Outside my suspicions around her motives, this is a neat setup. Bea in the past as enemy number one of Old Dorley, and presumably Dorothy (plus others?) as the enemy of New Dorley.

2019-12-16

The modern day is more fractured, since there are a dozen perspective characters and the preexisting aftermath of 2 novels' worth of events.

Steph and Will

Will's just a guy

OR IS SHE?!

In any case Jesus Christ he's pretty whiny huh? All this manacled "be more careful" nonsense, the passive-aggressive "Stefan"s, grow up.

Steph and Aaron

This, on the other hand was a little bit adolescent, but genuinely very cute.

She’s in a colossally vulnerable position relative to him, and Steph almost says something before she realises that Pippa almost definitely sat that way deliberately.

Pippa doesn't get a lot of focus, but I know she's supposed to be an important friend to Steph. Her vulnerability here shows that she's not dehumanizing the recruits anymore, more generally speaking, either.

After everything, after what they’re going to do to him, after what they’ve already done, he’s bloody well trying, and whether it’s for his own sake or for her, she’s proud of him.

Oh hell I'm going to talk about poverty-as-unfreedom one day soon. Someone put me out of my misery.

But, in earnest, Aaron's and Pippa's effort is the common thing that distinguishes them from Will's bullshit at this point. I don't have a whole thought about effort as a broader signifier yet. It's subversive to the genre to foreground the need to try, because the recruits still end up having to do it themselves, vs letting the institution take them on a glide path. And, that's about all I've got so far on the subject that holds up typed out. I'll keep mulling it over.

Coccoon

I love you, Steph, he says, because it’s obvious but it still needs to be said because it’s also incredible, it’s ridiculous, it’s revelatory. It’s everything. Yeah, she says. Yeah you fucking do.

Aaron being able to say this at all is wild. He was so irony-poisoned and so fucked up about women before that it would've been impossible. And Steph being able to respond like that is too. She had so much self-loathing and such little capacity for power, I want to say? Such little confidence might be a better way to put it. "Yeah you fucking do," isn't exactly witholding, but it's playful, right? Teasing, a little bit.

Valérie and Declan

You say my name like an Englishman

Valérie prepares Declan for a "family dinner" with Dorothy, dressing him in a schoolgirl fetish-y outfit. She gets into a fight with Callum over, uh, her frustration with Declan for just barely hanging on instead of having the decency to live better or die. I don't think Val is in a position where right and wrong are useful terms, but her frustration is at least understandable here. And, as she's Declan's sponsor, his passivity is making the project basically impossible, for good or ill or neither. Dorothy's dinner: A tense meal where Dorothy tries to humiliate Declan by making him spill food, then becomes increasingly inappropriate with him until Frankie intervenes

Valérie and Frankie

Consciences are for people who’ve done less bad things than I have. This was just… very very practical disgust

After the dinner, Val and Frankie get shithouse wine-drunk and Val learns about New Dorley in broad strokes, one of which includes that Bea lives. Frankie's an odd counterpart to Val. Both have changed one another, it seems like. The "practical disgust" that Frankie feels, the sense of being a "they" with Frankie that Val experiences in the moment when they're laughing together, both are, you know, tiny changes they've applied to eachother. I wonder if the right contrast to focus on is between Frankie and Callum. It's kind of tempting to say, Frankie's the less-posh-sounding captor from Old Dorley right? And to rely on an underlying class solidarity to manifest at this late hour. But, I'm not sure that's what's going on here at all, and it feels like it'd be a little bit thin-spread, honestly.

Melissa and Shahida (and Rachel)

The three women have dinner at Dorley Hall. Rachel notices that the residents are trans and makes several observations about "kidnapping jokes." She also, naturally, has a hard time not asking any questions. The idea is, implausible, simply put. Dorley isn't a place that can actually manage contact with outsiders very well, it leaks like a sieve when it comes down to it. But, sounds like we'll meet Amy at some point as well.

There's a strikingly awkward moment with Abby, and, I can't remember exactly what Shahida knows about her. Like, she's undergone disclosure, but does she know about the immensely fucked power dynamic at play there or no? Does anyone care about that? Do I? Sort of, I have a sour face on typing about Abby that I normally reserve for cleaning the sink, so I feel some way about it.

Anyway, it's good that Secrets is over because there is no way in fuck that the brain trust keep secrets successfully from Rachel. "Grad students"? Tell better lies, Melissa!

Christine and Paige

Christine and Paige get down, say "I love you." That rhyming with Steph and Aaron kind of ties together this generationality theme that Greaves emphasizes in this chapter (this book {these books}) so far. These relationships are sort of the safe places of the books, so undermining them by showing us their antecedents' various fates keeps the stakes high even while we're in a "downtime" part of the chapter.

Genuinely Relevant Thought

Something about having Val and Bea's story underpinning the contemporary events imparts a sense of doom. We have these pairs (Bea/Val, Steph/Aaron, Linda/Teri, Christine/Paige) and a sort of tidy triangle (Mel/Abby/Shahida.) And when we're reading about Steph/Aaron or Christine/Paige, we're thinking about the compressed events we know about Linda and Teri's life together. How it helped their community flourish, and how it ended, and the wake ("This is not a funeral because".) And we're thinking about Bea and Val and how their life together was so curtailed and so violently supressed once they began to emerge. And those two contrasts form the spine of the question posed by the chapter, for me.

Does New Dorley work like Linda and Teri's house, more than it works like Old Dorley?

It's a good frame I think.

Errant Thoughts

Declan and Valerie

A theme I've been really to which I've been attracted lately goes like this: "you cannot steal from someone without suffering the fate of being a thief." Why does Greaves link Declan and Valerie? His suffering is, obviously, the mirror of his crimes. But what about Valerie? She's been, I suppose, complicit in all manner of evils. And there I am of two minds, of course.

Does Declan "deserve" this? Well, not exactly, because I'm not sure this is a thing that can be deserved. Deserving something like a punishment or a reward implies being given that something. And I think at root the moral issue is that nobody can deserve to give Declan what he is being given.

And here Bea's leavened approach, informed by Linda and Teri, makes things far murkier. The crimes are lesser, but the just deserts are less clearly inflicted than given.

So many of the Sisters we see are happier, even Yasmin, even perhaps Julia. And that broad post-hoc acceptance says something, but I'm not sure what honestly.

In a teleological interpretation, it almost says that they needed to go into a chrysalis to become, and that Dorley was a safe place to do so where they were helped along. Would you say that it's wrong to take a caterpillar and put it in a terrarium until it hatches once more? Maybe, probably depends on your success rate and your feelings about insect agency. But, if you don't really believe in the Loom of Fate that way, or you do believe in capabilities and rights, then Dorley only creates new capabilities in its recruits by warping the feasibility constraints of their lives to the extent that they undergo, in some cases, a near-total severance with themselves. "We don't like to waste people," could be taken to mean that fostering those people's recovery is important. It could also be taken to mean that people are an expensive raw material. And, that contrast, between growth-into and restrictions-on, drives an affective unease in the story.

The Gendered Child

Just briefly, the way gender works in Hollow Knight and Silk Song is interesting. Because, them's bugs mostly. But Hornet specifically has a gender whereas The Vessel does not.

And also, Hornet has a verbally defined personality, whereas The Vessel has none. That's partially just a matter of convention convenience -- The Vessel is a silent protagonist because it's a bug-souls. Making Hornet silent would be strange, because she's almost-literally shouting "get good!" at The Vessel towards the end of Hollow Knight. All that structurally-reasoned out, though, come on, they spent 7 years thinking about this stuff, presumably the notion of a gender vs agender has something to do with why Hornet is the way she is and why the Radiance may be contained by The Vessel. My two cents go something like, Hornet has a gender and a firmer identity because she is endowed with a greater motivation and ego than The Vessel. The Vessel can contain The Radiance because it lacks any such identification with its own motive force. Hornet chooses to do things and does them, The Vessel moves and is moved. But other cent would say, that's conflating the distinctions on my part. Like, The Vessel isn't performing a gender because it cannot perform anything, that doesn't imply the inverse. Just, a curious bit o' the ole' gender in my bug videogame. And, you know, it's just Bug Cup Head (Cup Bug?), so it doesn't have to have a broader point about humankind and gender necessarily.

Anyhow, I will be pre-ordering one of those Hornet-plushies to give to my daughter so that I can continue to be the most annoying millenial girl-dad conceivable in all the world between Pharloom and Hollownest.

Uncast Shadow of a Troutfucker's Contractor

Dee's alive?

Once again, I really like that in Dorley, people usually tell eachother useful facts sooner than later. Exceptions exist of course, but there aren't a bunch of CW-ass plotlines soluble by one conversation with defined terms.