First Thoughts

You can't be Frank, you've been down here too long.

I don't want to make too much of Trevor. Or rather, I do, but I also want to show some caution because I haven't seen the full pattern yet and who knows where the book is going.

On one very practical level, Greaves needed another figure in Stenordale Manor to help motivate the plot. Also, how did Declan even get there otherwise? The Old Dorley node needs an edge to the other part of the graph, and the rest are aging or dead.

That said, I think Trevor will serve as a foil to Valérie and Declan; an unwilling person who is at least as violently culpable as Declan (signing up to be a mercenary is inherently violent work, right?) but who comes with the imprimatur of the aristocracy. The quartet of those three and Frankie seem like a pretty volatile combination.

We also get the Brighton trip this time around. Christine is reunited but not with her mother. Is that common, I wonder? Not the specific her-and-not-her family situation, but that feeling of familiar mediation and awkward re-establishment. Like, Christine will have an aunt, and her mother will have a niece, but her mother still "lost a son." Does that spark resentment? Acceptance? What would the ideal really be there? For Helen to believe she had had a duaghter the whole way through? To believe in some continuity? To believe that the distinction is a linguistic artifiact of the English speech, because she has a child? In any case, Bea is swiftly but uncertainly letting more people reintigrate their lives. Earlier I described that as the ideal outcome. Now I'm a little bit less certain. Obviously I support the Sisters having the right to be with their families, but I wonder how actually beneficial it will be for Christine's well-being to have one more person who needs something from her.

I also posit that Bea's slow loosening of the reins on family comes from her own experience with the found family of last chapter. Bea had to rebuild home from scratch, and her institution aims to keep that from happening to other people; they will always have at least one home, and potentially several, depending on what she can manage.

Anyway, welcome back to Dudely House, this time we're talking about "The People we Once Were", a title with some special resonance to Declan (who was once and still is an embittered rapist), Valérie (who was once a child, when you get right down to it), and the formerly-Aaron (who was once Aaron and is now, what, nobody? That's not right, Holt is more of a person now than ever before.)

Recap

2019-11-13 (Trevor)

We witness Declan's re-renditioning from the perspective of Trevor, a PMC soldier.

No-one worth shooting, or at least no-one worth shooting who can’t also afford to hire a PMC of their own to protect them.

The vision of England in Dorley is all very Jacob Rees-Mogg, no? I hadn't heard of Open University but it seems like a perfectly lovely institution, honestly. A little less, you know, "University of Northern New Hampshire, we have 10 random online masters programs and no reputation." On the sort of insane American educational costs scale it's remarkably cheap (read: still tens of thousands of dollars, but over a long time-scale) or else I'm reading the fees page wrong.

It’s benevolent homophobia, he tells himself.

Oh, buddy.

We'll see what this guy ends up being like, but I think the early details are auspicious. Almost all of us have worked a boring job at some point. I used mine to read crumbling paperback sci-fi novels mostly. Maybe you did something productive with yours. Plenty of people just kind of zonk out and do nothing at all, so "get a degree" and "learn a language" are both knocking it out of the park.

The room in which he wakes is pure white and it blinds him.

Ah, so. Nevermind then. Goddammit she'll have to redo her entire degree.

2019-12-16 (Valérie)

Val is having what must be the hangover of a lifetime, much like Trevor.

She, and Frankie, and Declan, and possibly the PMC guards for that matter, are all locked into this compound with Grandmother, and when she dies, so will they.

Well, that's solipsism for you.

She’s done with not caring and she’s done with not hoping

That's got a way about it. Despair does not usually present itself as a luxury belief, but in some ways of course it is. You can't sit around dooming if there's work to be done.

Oh right, Val must have some burning questions for Bea about what the fuck Dorley is still doing being open. On account of, she's still ensconsed in the consequences of the first version.

I'm sort of holding out hope that she doesn't just go with the flow like most of the other people who experience disclosure. It's a little bit of a begged question to see these people with fairly radically different perspectives and lives all see the moral-Gordion-knot-dungeon and essentially just nod and shrug. It's also, you know, not a book that needs to endlessly stick its head so far up its ass that it needs to be fit with a plexiglass bellybutton, so I understand why the characters all end up forgoing the moral exploration. Just, I will be a little let down if Valérie is yet another person down so bad as to ignore the torture-reform-dungeon as a nuanced ethical question.

this Elle woman’s mysterious ‘project’

Moby's "Extreme Ways" plays, cue seizure-warning-worthy title sequence for The Lambert Identity.

Frankie is going to be this book's Aaron, isn't she? What a swamp witch, I kind of love her.

2019-12-05

Trevor

They're doing a Declan to him. We learn that he joined PAPMC straight out of school, and Dorothy's right that it's interesting/unusual. I figured that the pipeline went from official soldierdom to mercenary work. So that the firm can capitalize on the publicly funded training?

I, do not like this part of the book, honestly. That is a visceral reaction not a piece of criticism. I suspect my skin is supposed to be a little bit crawly at this, and it's just doing its job.

I've read enough Dorley to suspect Greaves will get me to care about the Manor and its denizens and to enjoy their scheme to escape, it's just not my favorite setting-stew (prison escapes, medical mutilation.)

2019-12-18

Steph

Don't call me that!

I wonder what Greaves intends by putting this right next to Trevor's vignette. There's the contrast in method, of course, Steph has gone through something like what Aaron goes through now. Then there's the commonality of the dictat. For all the talk about having to choose, neither Trevor nor Aaron can really be said to have had a choice in this matter.

In an abstract sort of way, the transition from Old to New Dorley resembles the move from mercantilism to capitalism, I suppose. The Ancien Régime bestows a role by fiat without the pretext of consent from the subject. And the Nouveau Régime induces one to identify as that role by bestowing a persuasive policy as fiat. The water flows downhill.

A critic of that frame might say that the field was already tilted, and that New Dorley is simply flattening it. It may be impossible to say without Word of God (The collective godhead of the readership? The Author?) but regardless of any frowning on my part it's still undeniably a boon to the Holt Being to not be Aaron any longer.

Maybe any healing would be indistinguishable from manipulation for someone like him who had done what he had.

Time to rewatch Beasts of No Nation, on a tangentially-related note.

Aaron

She’s started treating him like a girl.

[C]runchy and I were talking about, well specifically Will and Martin's abnegation but more generally the ego-absence in the basement, in the context of Hollow Knight and Holt's identificatoin of the phenomenon is sort of revealing.

It seems like moments ago we were reading about Holt's (trying to avoid pronouns at the moment, not sure which are appropriate) enginelessness, and now seeing the others through new eyes indicates a difference born of contrast.

He told her she was behaving like someone who climbed the world’s biggest mountain five years ago, and now she’s sat at its base wearing merch she bought at the summit and drinking from a World’s Best Mountain Climber mug, making snide remarks to the poor chumps strapping on their snowshoes and oxy tanks and who are just now understanding what it is they’ve signed up for. Nine years ago, she corrected him, and that’s not what it says on her mug, but she left him alone; not before ruffling his hair, though.

I wonder if that's an analog to reality. I can't imagine there isn't some amount of self-pressure to mentor, and some reluctance to accept mentorship. And even a filthy casual like me has seen phrases like "baby trans" around that probably have some grounding in reality but also probably butt up against fully fledged forebrains and rent payments?

Treadmill

He’s going to be a girl. He decided! He fucking accepted it! So why is he doing this to himself?

Just a coming of age thing, this must be. I think tihs is solid interior evidence for Lorna's "Sisters are trans" thesis, which has up-until-now been kind of anchored in social roles and relations. Like, Steph went through this too, yeah? All that "I'm a 'he' until I'm not" business?

A few paragraphs ago I wrote a little bit about the soft coercion of the new regime and its impact on Holt. Reading the internal dialog here, I am again left conflicted that:

• I don't really believe that many of Holt's issues had to do with being a man. Most of this baggage feels like, quaternary gender characteristics stuff at most, or something.
• Clearly this had a lot to do with Holt's definition of manhood. And that definition deserves to be taken concretely on some level. Not as some "false consciousness" collective theory, but as the motive force that animated Holt.

So then, Aaron Holt's manhood came with very different comittments than mine did/does. I've, in the past, dismissed him as a defective man. I still think that's true broadly speaking. But I've wanted to locate that defect in his performance against an objective standard. Aaron was a failure at chivalry, sobriety, integrity, stoicism, etc. Maybe rather than simply failing as an embodiment of a masculine ideal, Holt failed to conceive of what that would even look like, because he never should have been implicated in such an ideal? I thought briefly about the "who's talking?" question, on whether or not Aaron was, in fact, a man in the first place. I still don't know. Not anymore.

I am pretty confident that when Aaron said "man" and when I say "man" we are thinking of different things, though, and that some of that must come with age or luck. What does that difference (man per Aaron, man per me, [man per Talia, to consider a much more important matter]) mean about the referents? Is this two people feeling up an elephant, or is it a homonym? Fucking blessedly for the dear reader, I do not currently have access to Tim Crane's Objects of Thought, but hopefully someone who actually understands gender will write or has written such an article and I will get to read it.

Last up, clearly lots of people do think about manhood like Aaron did. The Jesse Watters contingent telling you not to drink from a straw, various manospheric wannabe life-coaches. Raw meat influencers. There's a whole pop-cultural industry around the prescription of caricature. So, Aaron, in the British school context, in the parvenu-riche context, in the elder-zoomer context, had very little chance not to be a spectacular (in Debord's sense) subject.

Now, Holt has to be proactive about identity. Startlingly so, in fact. 'Mere representation" has failed Holt so utterly that names and pronouns have ceased to function without causing pain. Holt must now create an active life. And must endure one that isn't as mediated through symbols and roles.

New Caveats about Debord and Gender

I'll say two things:

• There is some pretty good writing on gender and the spectacular society.
• There is some very bad writing on gender and the spectacular society that I'm not going to link because it would not be kind.

So, hey I wouldn't go digging for it if I were you, but your mileage may vary. Honestly I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend The Society of the Spectacle anymore. I don't think, really, that Situationism implies misogyny, as much as I think being a man who wrote books in the 1960s implies at least the credible threat of misogyny. That strand though, of active choice against the tide of pervasive imagery, means that the jargon of The Spectacle &c. comes to mind easily.

Growing Up

Speaking of:

Men don’t behave that way.

See this is a revealing little critter, and I think one that's mostly for young men and morons. Maybe recently divorced men.

It's like, ok so you can't very well excommunicate men like you can Catholics. The dogma is pretty goddamn flat -- "I am a man" being the sum total in fact. So the self-conscious performance (which exists, I totally get that) part of it is, what, not a relic. A kaleidoscope, maybe.

She’s so gentle and he’s throwing it all back at her and she doesn’t even know.

I gotta level with you, I have basically no idea what Aaron's going through here. The shrieking voice is, presumably the angrily departing spectre of externally-imposed masculinity, but what's he "throwing back"? Is this a Holt shame-brain-worm? Well sketched run of prose in any case, even if I'm just dancing on the surface tension and mouthing "tone poem" vs actually getting it.

2019-12-16 (Trevor)

Ok so Silver River is the PMC that kidnapped Trevor in the troutfucker-war. I have decided that I will take Greaves' depiction of a secret British upper crust entirely seriously and literally. I can see no issues here, as having a literal aristocracy in the Year of our Common Era 2025 is worth infinite spite, even coming from my colonial backwater. And now he is in "Stenordale Manor", which sounds like what your fun friends name their dignified but decaying off-campus appartment sophomore year.

Trevor’s seen the man tenting his fucking trousers when he brings him his food

Eww I need an adult. Anyway, best of luck to Trevor, I hope he straight up murders Jake.

2019-12-18

Christine

Christine's Brighton trip has arrived, and is actually happening! I figured she'd "have to" ditch it to fix a server rack or organize cables or something.

She, Indira, and Paige head to her place of origin in a BMW. I wonder what Christine is listening to (T-Swift, canonically I suppose?)

Fancy some American-style pancakes?

That sent me on a side quest. Did you know that in Britain they have something called "Shrove Tuesday" instead of Mardi Gras? So a British pancake is a thick crêpe, and an American pancake is a big Scotch pancake. That sentence itself could be close-read for a deep exploration of the Union. Truly a/some land/s of contrasts.

Pippa

I’m stuck in a loop of mournful nostalgia and wistful hope

Pippa talks about the "hury up and wait" hell that her father lightly theorized. She's no Adamn, she grew up Church of England (incidentally, what a weird historical artifact the Church of England is; no wonder the Quakers and Methodists spawned there.)

I hadn't given much thought to how it must feel to be a sponsor. Of course there's a pain there; she lived it.

Interesting that she identifies with Will. It must be hard to hide that.

What do you care?

Will really is a bastard though.

How did you do it?

Well of course Aaron would benefit from the fact that Pippa's so close to him in time.

Valérie

It's fucking gay

Ah Declan, you special kind of moron. Weirdly Frankie is one of a few characters I imagine as British consistently. In my mind she has a sort of mezzo nasal voice.

Anyway Val and Frankie are bad-cop/bad-cop-ing Declan and get him to do his own makeup and wardrobe. I like Frankie the same way I liked the Holt Person when (pronoun TBD) was still a little shit. Greaves seems to like writing Renfields for us to root for.

Ah, Val has some difficulty realising that she is, yes, friends with and wearing the cloak of, her oppressors. Lot of that going around lately.

It's not friendship, whatever is develo-

It's friendship Val, sorry.

Ah, and Frankie knows about Trevor, though not by that name and specification.

The Artist Formerly Known as Aaron

Holt meets Yasmin! Glad to see her around again. I guess Greaves also hates to waste people. It is a funny bit of fantasy that everyone in Dorley is or will be hot. I guess part of that is what the money's for.

Pippa was right about you; you're sweet.

My mans has changed, certainly.

Are we all just one big joke to the girls upstairs, is that it?

I mean, also yes. It's life-cyclical or what-have-you, but the recruits are absolutely the butt of the joke, and the capacity to appreciate the joke is part of the hierarchical progress that the Sisters make as they grow in autonomy and organizational capacity.

You and I have a lot in common

That's something of a refrain. Greaves primes the reader to recall Will saying it down in the especially bad torture cells by having Pippa's perspective from earlier, and so here it is again.

Holt's having a difficult time with his sexuality. That must be hard. The closest I can really relate to that is feeling very briefly guilty about having premarital sex as a teen. But Aaron's haunted by being touched "like a woman". And that's such a strange, incoherent sense of shame to feel.

You don’t have much choice down here. That’s the beauty of it

Greaves is just painting the picture frame here and hanging a lampshade on the results, doing her genre reconstruction.

Indira

Back in Brighton, with Christine.

Those were the days I’d skip dinner and I’d just have a sausage in a bun and a Sprite and I’d sit on the railing and watch the sea.

Paige laughs

Paige da best.

Yasmin

This is an impossible chapter to recap well. We're into the kind of vignette rapid-fire of "Everything Must Go" but almost doing an isolationist montage or something. Which, yeah, the Sisters are very online so why be colocated for such a scene?

The caloric manipulation is, of course, another in a long series of horrors. Yes yes I have been informed that managing weight redistribution is Part of It, I don't give a shit this casual detail numbers equally among the more subtly monstrous practices of the institution of Dorley as still constituted.

Ahem. Okay, I have set my street-preacher's fulminating bell aside again.

Growing up the way we did, as a boy who is fucking bad at it, who acts out for approval and for self-esteem, but who never actually gets either so acts out all the harder, is rather mundane. Dorley Hall could take in a hundred guys like us every year and still have spares, and then it’d be even more clear: we’re all fucked up, and we’re all fucked up in rather the same way.

This is going to sound very stupid. There was more of it that sounded stupider. It's still strange to hear that there are people who have a hard time with it that specific way. There are hard things about manhood (ask me about my flaky friends and our standing geoguessr call's attendance rate. Ask me about the sheer magnitude of my incredibly banal daddy issues.) Maybe it's just been a long time since adolescence now.

Or it's a different cultural moment. I don't recall the regard of other boys and men having the kind of hold that Yasmin and Aaron experienced when I was younger.

Aaron and Yasmin have a pretty wide-ranging conversation. They talk about the failure-to-boyhood they both experienced. They talk about happiness, abou the potential for it versus the guarantee.

Yes, but are you happy?

I'm working on it.

Aaron is at the crux.

Christine

She accidentally gets into a stealth encounter with her mom. Indira rolls well on what should be a deception check, but only because she gets to use her proficiency in performance (acting), and honestly I think the DM is being a little bit lenient there but that's up to her discretion not mine.

She cared what people thought of her son. She never seemed interested in what her son thought about himself.

I wonder how true any of this self-perception is in Dorley. We haven't really mucked about in any parents' heads, nor have I mucked about in mine, but they must care, yes? Even if they're bad at parenting? Then again, that's the kind of question that doesn't always end in what I'd think it would.

Christine uncorks and starts giving her fake life's story, an allegory to her real one. Dead mother. Bad father. Feeling of selfishness.

An almost-confession.

Christine's mother comforts her. Apparently for the first time since she became "the second man of the house." A thing like that.

In the end, I'm not much like my father. Taller, leaner, less of a sad-sack but more emotional I'd say. Far less violent but a better fighter I'd hazard a guess. I hope quieter but I'm sure it depends on the room. My mom, when I became a teen and started having more trouble with the old man, began spinning a continuing yarn that I am "a lot more like him than I'd think." Mothers of sons must face some stiff cross-pressures like that, what with sons and fathers not always getting along. All of this "little man" business, the threat of a new potential daughter in law, the self-subordination to an almost-certainly insolent child. I have not been the father of an adolescent daughter yet, assuming I will. Every parallel equivalent that could come to mind is frankly untoward, but in a more obvious regard. None of this "fathers romancing their little princesses" pseudo-incest, please and thank you, I will be a sports-booster dad (or an arts-booster dad, whatever she's into.)

Is that unfair? I don't think so, to be honest. Boomer parenthood overflows with weird psychosexual youth jealousies. Anyway, Christine has tea with her unsuspecting mother (who should have comforted her as a younger person, what the hell?!) and Greaves writes a beautiful little phrase,

[S]he’s helped into the house she grew up in, step by wounded step, by her sister, and her lover, and her mum.

Trevor, Again

Jake shaves Trevor. Yuck gross hate it. Interesting counterpoint to Holt's experience of femininity though. Whereas Holt relates to a woman like a woman and feels both good and uncanny about it, Jake treated Trevor as feminine ("Theresa") while enacting a masculinity on him ("I used to do my dad.") Curious about how Val and Trevor will relate to Stephanie and Holt.

Christine, Again

Tea time with mother.

I've been teaching myself to cook.

It's genuinely strange thing how many people don't know how to cook considering the development pattern we have in the Anglosphere. All of these houses, and yes aparments, with sophisticated kitchens and ingress and egress systems for gases and heat and exhaust, and still a decades-long current of non-cooks. I'm not, like, any great chef or anything but I can follow a recipe and plan a week's groceries to reuse ingredients tidily. And it's no great shame, exactly, not to be able to do that, but it is kind of an incongruity, again, with the character of our homes.

Killed himself. My fault.

Jesus Christ no wonder she's learning to cook.

Indira and Paige and Christine improvise their way into a plausible story of Christine as a blood relative via her real life uncle. Aunt Helen it is, then.

I wonder if Auntie Ashley in the foster system is Bea's Ashley.

Anyway, it sounds like Christine makes it through her Brighton trip. She still layers on another secret, another lie, on an already heavy load. So, color me worried about her, but she's a resilient woman.

Val, Again

Val and Frankie go on an adventure to find Trevor. Curious what Declan's fate was supposed to be. Trevor is a more palatable subject for Valérie, he comes with some experience in violence and some spirit of self-improvement. Now they've met, and we'll see how the prison break goes.

The Holt that was Once Aaron Once More

The Holt got a lot out of talking to Yasmin. And wants to go to the Christmas Eve Party.

Holt sees a self-assuredness in Yasmin that I'm not entirely sure she sees in herself. Thinks that there's a way forward in her footsteps, and maybe that's true. One fairly high contrast being, Yasmin didn't really form a strong support network.

Maybe we'll learn more later about what went so wrong that year (three washouts, or was that a different cohort?)

It's good that former-Aaron wants to do something for others and for the person he will become (which is, squinting at it, herself.) There was a duldrums where they just wanted to disappear, and before that his primary motivation was to Jackson Pollock the cell walls. Not to mention the escalating suxual harrassment before any of this started. So, "going to a Christmas Eve party with your girlfriend" would be basically a 10/10 reform outcome.

The conversation with Yasmin seems to have helped, I'm saying.

Dorothy

The real women, the ones who bleed and birth and bloody well die for this world, not the jumped-up fakes like Vincent Barbier.

Ah yes of course. Can't really call her a TERF given the absent radicalism and feminism I guess. She has a truly disconnected perspective here, given that Valérie, for all intents and purposes, has bloody well died for this world.

The whole circus is becoming far too bloody visible. People are noticing.

Well, that much is true, to give the monster her due. People are noticing.

This Trevor business raises an interesting point. It's not as if they couldn't have rented another building and kept on doing their grim business this whole time, no? I'm sure we'll get into it in later chapters, but I wonder what the interregnum was for, exactly, once Elle took the fuckers' toys away.

Errant Thoughts

The Holt Being

It is difficult to avoid personal pronouns. I recall doing this same little dance with Steph and will presumably come to the same conclusion ("I'm 'he' until I'm not" being the function there.) But still, if Holt doesn't want to be called "Aaron", I'll do my best to respect that. I presumably didn't ace the assignment, but a best effort beats nothing. I'm not going to close-edit myself because I worry the language is barely comprehensible anyway. Anyway, still a fascinating character, but kind of slotted into the groove that Steph carved in some ways now.

That's perhaps why Yasmin is so important. To a reasonable extent, Holt is a foil for Declan otherwise. Maria, like Valérie, doesn't share the motivating factor of sin that Yasmin does. I wonder if that innocent/sinner dynamic propagated from the first cohort of recruits. The innocent survivors/kidnappers feel/felt a sense of superiority to the recruits. The recruits grow into sponsors. They embody the roles they experienced. It takes a lot of work, a lot of help even, not to do cyclical evils.

So, understanding that "was once like me" didn't work out perfectly before, it's a nice tension to wonder about.

Old Dorley Gaol

In every way it's an exaggeration of New Dorley, or a twist on it. Or visa versa, maybe, if Old Dorley is supposed to be The Genre at large. I have a sneaking worry that Neo-Old-Dorley (Stenordale Manor) will occupy more and more of our time. Otherwise, you know, whence the titular enemies? All the same prison-break stories aren't usually my favorite. I trust that this will break the template somewhat given the context, but normally there's this kind of rhythm of frustrated action and failure and futility that doesn't catch for me.

Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System!

Ollie and Raph aren’t even out of the cells yet

Oh hey it's baby Yasmin and Julia.

Close Your Eyes and Think of the Bank of England

It's fascinating to have someone like Trevor in here. Does Trevor deserve to be New-Dorleyed? Good question, probably not. Being a mercenary is preposterous, but in his personal conduct he seems like a nice diligent boy.

So Trevor's an interesting counterpoint. Kind of an illustration of the different ways institutional power can inflict violence I suppose. On the one hand, you have the New Dorley recruits and forcible reform. Any rehabilitation is, by some measure, coercive, and they are no exception. On the other hand, Trevor. Being forcibly extracted.

That he could get his telestudy degree while working but couldn't get into a university does some work here. He's a failure of the systems he inhabits. Caught in the gears like a mouse, more or less.

Trevor never needed to be a soldier, let alone a mercenary, he could have gotten his degree in Whatever Studies and done what-have-you in a country that did, you know, any public investment since 1980. Sorry England, opportunities to dunk on other countries are thin on the ground at the moment (and such a treat), but the most consistent phenomenon in public policy is the UK and their resolute unwillingness to just do Keynesianism. Just one more round of austerity bruv, one more belt-tightening will fix it.

So there's your austerity-watch 2019, I know it's been awhile.

Back to the contrast for just a second. These social systems in Dorley interact with some genuine sophistication.

There's a method of human development in the book's eyes and that method is:

• Accidentally uncovered (by Valérie)
• Originally from horrors (Old Dorley)
• Capable of great harm still (by Dorothy)
• Capable of great aid

Are we sure that this is a book about trans women? I'm pretty sure it's a metaphor for central banking policy.

Fin.

Okay, well I've arrived at metaphors for non-Keynesian economic policy and the problem of monetarism so I think it's time to stop. The danger with these montage-runs, for me, is that they end up leading me basically anywhere at all, so I hope some of it sticks to the wall.