Lost Review: Pit Bank Wench
Mar. 20th, 2023 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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antishurtugal_rebornEmma Price’s lovely face creased into a smile, lighting midsummer blue eyes.
Well, I suppose it was too much to hope that she would be an ordinary-looking person – or more realistic yet, a poor soul who’d lost teeth to scurvy caused by her meager diet, since she lives in extreme poverty. Still, just in case we fail to full appreciate The Glory That Is Emma, the author pounds it in a little later on the same page.
Emma was so beautiful, with hair the color of wheat and a complexion like a lily fresh bathed with the dew of the morning.
Last time I saw a complexion like that, it was on Michael Jackson. How she manages to look so breathtaking when she lives near a mine and probably works all day long is a mystery, but let’s get on with the plot. Emma’s twin qualifications of wheat-colored hair and morning-dew-bathed-lily complexion make Paul Felton, the brother of the colliery owner, propose marriage. However, first he has to convince his brother that the daughter of a coal miner they employ will be an ideal addition to their family. Oddly, the author later goes on to refer to Carver Felton as “his stepbrother”, and reveals that the two were “born of different mothers”. Uh, yes. That would explain the “step” part. See, if they had the same biological parents, they’d be brothers. If they had one biological parent in common, they would be half-brothers. However, they have no biological parents in common, so they must be stepbrothers. Having gotten this complicated bit of backstory out of the way, we soon see that Paul will be playing Cinderella to Carver, who resolutely forbids him to go to the ball… er, I mean, marry Emma. Carver’s reasoning is quite sound, since he points out that Emma is not in their social stratum, and at that period in time – the author gives no date, but it’s obviously in the distant past – social class had to be considered in marriage. However, what Paul and Emma feel is obviously True Love, meaning that neither of them takes such petty considerations into account. Like any Disney fairytale, their love is so pure and romantic that it’s obviously meant to be.
Somewhere among all the saccharine, though, I read something that bothered me. See, Carver is described as “carrying his lithe frame with an almost feline grace” (almost feline, and nearly canine, and halfway lupine, but mostly asinine). Later on, the author refers to his eyes as “black ice”. Paul, however, has brown eyes. Sure, he has “finely arched brows” (thank goodness, you wouldn’t want Emma to be partnered with a unibrow) and a well-shaped nose (as opposed to a shapeless lump of Play-Doh mashed to his face). However, even these attributes do not compensate for the brown eyes. In Romance Novel Land, brown = boring. No woman will ever end up with a brown-eyed man, though he might be a friend on whose shoulder she can cry after the hero treats her like dirt. Anyway, warned by the Eye Color Code, I knew right away that there was trouble ahead for Emma. Emma’s mother Mary also warns her daughter, while simultaneously admiring Emma’s beauty and reflecting on the fact that she loves Emma just that much more than she loves her younger daughter Carrie. I think Carrie will be going postal at some point, and not just because of her name, either. If I had to play second fiddle to this cereal-haired paragon, I’d go nuts too. By the way, tear count of Chapter 1 : Mary cries, Emma cries.
Being kind and selfless as well as gorgeous and adored, Emma takes a basket of food to the needy, much like Little Red Riding Hood. And on the way back, whom does she meet but the big bad wolf, in the persona of Carver Felton. Noting the most important thing about her, i.e. wheat-colored hair, he proceeds to brutally rape her so that Paul will no longer have an interest in the damaged goods. Since he thinks of her as a whore, he sticks a coin into her vagina afterwards and tells her even that was too high a price to pay. In any other novel, this addition of insult to injury would have been the first step in Emma’s long struggle to destroy Carver Felton, and I would have liked reading about it. In this book, I don’t think there would have been repercussions from Emma if he had cranked her leg like a lever, shouted, “Jackpot!” and gotten a lot of coins back. Oh, and tear count of Chapter 2 : Emma cries.
The author describes Carver as “cold and cynical”, just in case we hadn’t realized that yet, and should further proof of his villainy be required, he goes on to fire Emma’s father. Tear count for Chapter 3 : tears gather in Emma’s throat. They are caused partly by Paul’s long absence, though these are due to the evil Carter once again cutting across the path of true love in order to send his brother on business trips. Perhaps Paul has not yet learned to write letters. The hilarious part is that Paul expects his brother – yes, that’s right, the colliery owner who disapproves of Emma – to ride down to the millworkers’ houses to tell her where Paul has gone. I’m sure the author didn’t mean to write Paul as a nitwit, but he comes off as one anyway. Emma takes some sort of abortifacient. Naturally it fails to work, but it does pave the way for sister Carrie’s first and all too typical scene, where she rants about how their holier-than-thou father – a wannabe preacher – gets their mother pregnant when they can’t afford more children. Carrie is apparently terrified of the pain of childbirth, though she’s even more afraid of her father. Gee, I wonder why a young unmarried girl living at home should fear pregnancy, especially when she has a father who reads the bible and sermonises all the time.
One of my pet peeves in (poorly written) fiction is the shortcut of making any evil character a religious fanatic who abuses his or her children. It’s been done so many times, and so unsubtly, that one can usually spot it a mile away – and it’s a yawn-inducing stereotype. There are very religious people who, despite all their failings and irrationalities, would not dream of laying a hand on their children. Then again, there might be insufficient angst if Mr Price was such a three-dimensional character, so let’s get on with the snory. Tear count for Chapter 4 : tears brim in Carrie’s eyes.
Caleb Price comes home to tell his family that he’s been fired. He’s determined to trust in the lord, who will provide, but his wife points out that so far the lord hasn’t exactly been providing them with a whole lot. During the ensuing argument, Mary lets it slip that there’s been premarital sex in the vicinity, which is about as farfetched as possible, but it does result in Emma’s confession that she’s been raped, which of course Caleb doesn’t believe. He hits her, which is the catalyst for Carrie’s even greater revelation. Unfortunately, in this book she has no psychokinetic powers, so a kitchen knife will have to do. Thus armed, she lets the family know that her father has been sexually abusing her, and with her sole plot function fulfilled, she buries the knife in her chest. Oddly enough, no one cries in this chapter. There was enough melodrama already, I suppose. Emma goes running for a doctor, while Mary faces Caleb over Carrie’s corpse and vows to expose his crime; with his role in the story over, he promptly hangs himself. It’s like a bizarre parody of And Then There Were None, with each character trying to get out of the novel by any means necessary, and Mary soon follows suit, by setting the house on fire. Tear count for Chapter 6 : Emma swallows a sob.
Carver Felton dallies with his avaricious mistress, Cara Holgate, but to his surprise, he fantasizes about Emma. The coin-insertion doesn’t feature in the fantasy, unfortunately; it would have been original, albeit even more bizarre, if he got a kick out of using Emma as his piggy bank. Tear counts of Chapters 7 and 8: Emma cries in both. Since Carver’s villainy knows no bounds, he goes on to evict all the families living in the pit bank, since he wants to build a canal there. Then he whips one of the evictees. Then he eats a puppy for dinner. Emma leaves, holding back a sob. Carver meets Melissa Gilbert, his mistress’s cousin; in keeping with the style, the first thing he notices is that she has “hair the color of ripe chestnuts”. Edible, yes, but he seems to be more into grains. Cara seems less than delighted by his interest in the fetching Melissa, which naturally makes Carver all the more interested in her. Any illusions that non-rapist Paul might be the hero of this novel should be gone by this time, since Carver and his various schemes for screwing women and men alike take center stage.
En route to the nearest city, Emma stays in a barn, thanks to the “Christian charity” of the barn’s owner, so right away you know that the man has designs on her. After crying, Emma settles down to sleep, but is woken by the man’s advances; she is saved by a deus ex machina called Daisy, who was apparently hanging around outside in order to save young girls from the lecher, and who cries in the next chapter while recounting the story of her own rape. Carver thinks of Melissa Gilbert, but again visions of Emma’s “harvest moonlight” hair intrude. At this point, you know that he will be satisfied only with Emma or with Clairol in that exact shade. Meanwhile, Emma and Daisy have been sleeping in the open, which causes Daisy to choke on a sob in Chapter 11. Finally they meet someone helpful, a butcher who gives them cheap sausages, though that doesn’t stop Daisy from fulfilling Chapter 12’s tear requirement with “stifled sobs”, while Emma wallows in self-denigration and breast-beating.
What did she deserve, a girl who never saw the torment that drove her sister and her mother to suicide? Never recognised the evil that lay behind her father’s preaching. She deserved only what she had: a life on the road and a bastard child in her womb.
In this case at least, you get what you deserve. Emma makes no attempt to think her way out of their predicament; her little mental energy is usually focused on Carver Felton, which in Chapter 13 is cause enough for another bout of bravely-held-back tears. Rather than filling her with revulsion or anger, however, thoughts of him seem to revolve around his emotional state. “Did he ever think of what he had done to her, ever feel remorse?” Emma asks herself. Not unless he misses the money he, er, inserted. “To him she had been a woman of no account…” And of course, Paul won’t want her now. Emma’s pity party is interrupted by an attack on Daisy, which causes them to shed fresh tears as they run away, eventually deciding to stay in the workhouse rather than wandering the streets and being mistaken for prostitutes. It’s good to see that between the two of them, there’s a functional brain cell. Of course, they’re rescued in the nick of time by the kind butcher, Mr Hollington, who takes them into his house, though Emma thinks Mr and Mrs Hollington are too good for a fallen woman like her and makes plans to leave. Daisy cries at the prospect. By now I was thinking of these two protagonists as faucets with legs. It was almost a relief to switch to the still-scheming Cara and Melissa, though I could have done without the scene where Melissa undresses in front of Cara.
Emma is called upon by Mr. Hollington to help him with the butcher’s stall in the market, which naturally causes her to cry. Once again Carver imagines Emma’s hair, though this time he does note that beneath the hair is a “lovely young face… eyes wide and terrified as they stared back at him”. This causes his heart to lurch. He seems to be the typical rapist, aroused by the power he has over an unwilling victim, but we should not forget that he has “a strong jaw” and “hair black as a crow…its darkness relieved by two narrow swathes of silver”. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be raped by a man like this? Emma tells the story of the rape to Mr. and Mrs. Hollington, reason enough to have another cry over it as she thinks of her evil father’s reaction. That’s one dead horse which went to the glue factory a long time ago. At this point I realized that Emma wasn’t exactly going to try to improve her lot in life, but luckily for her she doesn’t have to. She meets a young Irishman called Liam Brogan, who evinces an interest in her, but he turns out to be one of the laborers on the new canal, which causes Emma to have another brood about Carver. “Just how many more people would he hurt?” she wonders. “I can do nothing but sit here like a stuffed hamster and bewail his perfidy.” OK, I added that last sentence, but it’s quite accurate. Daisy tells Emma, “You have such lovely hair, it shines like wheat when the moon be on it. I wish I had hair like yours.” That makes Emma think of her dead sister, which makes her sob, thereby fulfilling the tear quota for Chapter 18. Liam Brogan takes them to see the canal, but the evil Cara and Melissa are there, hatching plans to marry Carver Felton and talking so loudly about their nefarious schemes that Emma hears them. Naturally she misunderstands, believing that they have designs on Paul. She falls to the ground, squeezing fresh tears into the second-last paragraph of Chapter 19.
Since Emma is now Mr. Hollington’s assistant at the butcher stall, he cuts off his hand with a cleaver and makes a thankful exit from the novel. Tear count for Chapter 21 : Daisy cries. Carver finds Cara and Melissa in bed together, which puts a bit of a crimp in the wedding preparations, though once again he sees “vivid blue eyes staring at him pleadingly”. We soon find that Emma shares his obsession, since she sees his face haunting her every night. You’d think that this would be the time for her to make a success of the butcher’s stand, perhaps use her wits and courage to parlay it into a larger shop, but she does nothing of the kind. Instead, she’s mugged and the cash box is stolen; when she’s accused of stealing it, she and Daisy flee, crying Chapter 22’s tears. Emma goes into labor, so Daisy considerately leaves her on the workhouse steps to have the baby.
Emma gives birth to a boy, naming him Paul, and Liam Brogan poses as her husband so that he can get her out of the workhouse. She moves in with him, though she still sees Carver’s face at night. About as often, she spouts an exclamation-point-enhanced vow that she will get revenge on Carver Felton! Yes, she will, indeedy! She doesn’t know how or when or where but she will make him pay for what he done! Liam has developed an interest in her, for some obscure reason, but since he’s a kind and considerate man, you can tell he’ll never be the hero of the novel. Neither will Paul, because although he finally finds Emma, he sees her holding the baby and realizes that it’s the spitting image of his brother. The Secret Child always resembles its father. Paul rides sadly away, only to die of typhoid fever three sentences later. Carver is not so fortunate, since he recovers from the typhoid. However, the author seems to have realized at this point that nothing very bad had happened to Carver as a result of the rape, so he suffers from the unusual complication of sterility, something he has in common with the novel’s style. That is reason enough for him to sit and brood over a convenient revelation.
He too loved the woman his brother loved, that reason and no other had been the ultimate cause of his denying them marriage.
I’m confused as to whether he he fell in love with her during or after the coin-insertion, since we are told he had not seen her before that incident. Still, looking for logic in this maudlin mess is a waste of time. Emma’s baby turns out to be blind, giving her one more reason (not that she needs it) to cry and blame herself for everything wrong in the world. The blindness was obviously caused by the abortifacient she took - further proof, if any was necessary, that a woman should never try to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. “Her senses screamed their pain.” I know what you mean; if my senses weren’t numbed into an anaesthetic stupor by this book, they’d be screaming their pain too. “It was her fault her child was blind!” You know, Emma, there’s a nice deep canal nearby…
Two years pass, and Liam asks Emma to marry him, but of course she can’t do that, because Carver’s face is permanently tattooed on the insides of her eyelids. Meanwhile, Carver is next in the crying line, sobbing over his fate in Chapter 24, but an overheard remark makes him aware that the object of his affection is living quite nearby. This book’s plot runs on… no, limps on overheard remarks; perish the thought that people should do anything besides blotting their eyes and waiting for their cues. Naturally, the moment he sees Emma, he recognizes his zebra-haired son, since Emma has never heard of such a thing as hair dye and would probably eat it were she to find it. The confrontation that ensues is one of the more ludicrous scenes in the book.
“He is my child, why was I not told?”
Firstly, comma splice. Secondly, does the author realize just how obtuse this kind of comment makes Carver appear? Had I been writing this story, I would have had Emma reply that she didn’t inform him of his paternity because she didn’t want any coins being inserted into her child, thank you very much, but Emma is as easily manipulated as a piece of plasticine. Carver insists that his Mini-Me is suffering without a father. I would have had Emma say, “Well, when you find him one, you let me know”, but instead he threatens that he will have his son, one way or another, and she sits there like a petrified rabbit. She does manage to fit her chapterly burst of crying into the second-from-last paragraph again, though. She’s getting good at this. Must be all the practice.
Proving your love to a woman sometimes involves more than simply raping her, firing her father, evicting her neighbors and threatening to abduct her son, so Carver gives Emma an early Christmas present of actually kidnapping her son and then disappearing to parts unknown with the boy. I just hope he didn’t take any small change with him. Tear count for Chapter 26 : Paul’s babysitter cries, and Emma weeps twice. After a month of “shuddering sobs… sobs causing her voice to break”, there’s still no attempts on her part to improve her situation or find her child. I would have written her burning down Carver’s unattended family home at the very least, but this supposed heroine is too busy with tearful rhetorical questions.
How had she lived? How had she survived this heartbreak? And how much longer could she go on?
Go on wallowing in self-pity? Until the end of the book, I presume. Emma II, otherwise known as Daisy, cries in the second-from-last paragraph of Chapter 27; it’s a sure sign of a poor novel when different talking heads have to borrow each other’s character traits. Fortunately, Carver returns at about that time, informing his puppet that she may visit his offspring. After Emma hotfoots it to his house, her voice breaks on a sob again (it really sounds as though she’s going through male puberty at this point) when she sees her son. He has absolutely no ill-effects from their long separation, which is understandable; it was probably the first time the child was exposed to people with spines. Godlike Carver explains the naturally benevolent reasons behind his apparent sadism. You see, the child’s blindness was caused by glaucoma, and an operation has restored his sight completely. Medicine in this alternate universe succeeds brilliantly above the waist, but not so well below. Tears blur Emma’s vision (hey, Emma, maybe you need eye surgery too? At least for those constantly functioning lachrymal glands?). Naturally, she doesn’t say a word to Carver about the past month, during which she had no idea if her child was being treated like a coin-operated pony at the supermarket. Instead, folding like a cold cooked noodle, she gives permission for Carver to see the child periodically. Later, though, she wonders if she was wrong. Maybe, she thinks, it would be best if her son lived with her rapist full-time. Daisy persuades her to marry Liam Brogan instead, and swaying with each current that drifts her way, Emma agrees. When she meets Carver to let him know that she will marry Liam and move to Ireland, she gets her grand revenge by throwing the coin in his face – yes, the very same coin. Somehow, the magnificent moment fell flat, since it was such a pitiful little gesture compared to everything Carver had done to her. And the author was either unable or unwilling to describe how Carver felt about the reappearance of the coin, though I’m willing to bet that it involved a good long cry.
Since a great and heroic gesture is now necessary for Carver to redeem himself and thereby tilt Emma’s emotional see-saw, he gets it when their son runs straight into the local mill-stream (and yes, this is after his eyesight is completely restored). One can hardly blame the child, though; he’s only trying to escape from the novel. Carver saves him, but falls into the water, under the mill-wheel; Emma can’t even fulfil her usual role as commentator on the action because she’s lying in a dead faint. And finally I have something good to say about the author’s ability; at least one of her protagonists is consistent in character up to the end. Most authors would have had their heroines trying to be brave (or at least trying to be conscious), but Ms. Hutchinson recognizes Emma’s limitations and writes accordingly. A few days later, Daisy and Liam engage in an ambiguous little chat about Emma’s future, deliberately avoiding any reference to Carver’s fate.
“Emma will be well cared for,” he repeated softly (in this book, you have to repeat things very often for the women to understand them -- QoS).
“Being cared for is all well and good, but on its own it’s not enough. People need to be loved, Liam. Emma needs love.”
Anyone reading this might think the small child in the story was Emma. Liam assures Daisy that Emma will indeed get the wuv, hugs and diaper changes she needs so desperately, though of course he doesn’t tell her which man will be providing Emma with these essentials. See, this is so that when Carver makes his grand return (they know he’s not dead, but Emma doesn’t), we’ll be properly stunned at this twist in the tale. Then we’ll re-read the conversation and realize whom they were actually talking about. At least, that’s what would happen if none of us ever read a book before picking this one up. Instead, the last feeble wriggle in the plot was spotted from a long distance, so I just noted that Emma sobbed once in the station while waiting for the train, then sobbed again when she saw Carver and finally collapsed in joyful hysterics when she realized he was alive. Perhaps she thought he was a zombie when she first saw him, though no zombie would have any interest in her. After all, they’re usually looking for brains. Carver explains that he loves her, and that whether she knows it or not, she loves him, which means he will never let her go.
“If taking Paul is the only way I can keep you then that is what I will do.”
“No…”
Liam, being the stereotypical nice guy who is used and abused by the heroine, realizes that he cannot stand in the way of True Love. This is another of my pet peeves in fiction, the decent and honorable man who realizes how very wrong he is for the woman and therefore fades out of the picture. Still, in this case he’s extremely lucky not to have this emotional leech suckling on him for the rest of his life. Sensing his previous tactics aren’t having the desired effect, Carver tells Emma that his repeated threat to abduct her child was an empty one, made out of selfishness, and he’s not going to pressure her any more (aww! The poor, noble, self-sacrificing guy!). A wimp to the end, Emma gives in to this master of manipulation and agrees to marry him.
With a cry that was almost a sob, he turned to her. “Emma! Oh, Emma, my love… my love!”
…Her eyes starry with tears of happiness, Emma lifted her mouth to his.
I guess it’s true what they say about women marrying men like their fathers. Oh, just in case you were wondering about where little Paul was during this touching scene between his chromosome contributors, he was asleep on the bench beside Emma. Even Carver’s “cry that was almost a sob” failed to wake him; my guess is that he was lulled into a coma by the soporific narrative. Well, at least he’ll be an only child; that’s the only thing happy about the ending.
In conclusion, Pit Bank Wench is an odd throwback to the romances of the early 1980s, where real men were unapologetic rapists and good women were shrinking virgins. Add to that a style that makes Danielle Steel appear literate and you’ve got something that could be a parody of a female empowerment story if it wasn’t so repetitive and mawkish. Probably the only original thing about it was the coin-insertion, though unlike Carver Felton, people who paid for this nonsensical novel won’t be so lucky as to get their money back.
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Date: 2023-03-20 11:21 pm (UTC)Where does she find these books?
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Date: 2023-03-21 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-23 01:05 am (UTC)Makes sense. I thought she was just really unlucky.