Sophie Gee: The Scandal of the Season. New York: Scribner, 2007. 350 pp. Pbk.
For readers interested in 18th-century London, a novel that features Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele should be a real treat. I started reading The Scandal of the Season expecting to enjoy it, especially given all the favorable attention it has received (three pages of blurbs!), but came away disappointed. First, Swift, Steele and even Pope are hardly the main characters. Rather, the ones featured are the decidedly less interesting – at least to me – Arabella Fermor and Robert, Lord Petre.
A second problem, no less important in my view, has to do with style. While the dialogues ring true, the descriptions for the most part seem more modern, sometimes trying to sound 18th century, oftentimes not. Words like “idealism” and “realized” are used in their current sense. In short, the conversation sparkles, while the narration explains. As Gee says in the appended interview, “One of the challenges that I particularly enjoyed was making the dialogue as historically correct as possible – a lot of what Pope and others says is improvised from moments in letters, diaries, and poems that specialists in the period will remember.” Note that what she says applies only to the dialogue. Personally, I find this mixture of two distinct styles jarring and disconcerting.
Speaking of explanation, Gee has a rather didactic habit of telling us what a character is really thinking (it comes as no surprise that the Scribner edition comes with about three pages of questions for discussion at the end). It would have been better if she had left it up to the reader to figure out the tone in which some things are said, much less the precise reason why a character says them. The result is that she informs us of matters we are quite capable of deducing ourselves. Exasperating.
Is it too much to expect that an audience can figure out for itself a character’s emotions these days? Evidently so. Every time someone smiles, we are informed of this. Since the various characters frequently express witty thoughts or otherwise seem pleased with themselves and the world, they often have occasion to do so. In Chapter Four we read that a character “shook his head with a smile,” then later on the same page “answered with a smile.” (pg. 58) In Chapter Seven another character appears “smiling as usual” at the top of the page, before “breaking instantly into a smile” again on the bottom; with all this smiling going on, it is little wonder that Pope “smiled back at him.” (pp. 108-109) The list could easily be extended. Evidently London of that day was quite an agreeable place.
One of the characters’ chief preoccupations seems to be whether or not they should dare to express their true feelings towards those whom they would love, if only their financial circumstances would permit. A worthy, if much-explored subject. I plowed ahead, only laying the book aside when Gee saw fit to liven things up by the insertion of a sex-scene of the bodice-ripping genre: “ ‘You see; I am wet and ready for you.’ ” (pg. 105) This brief encounter – which mercifully does not include Alexander Pope – occurs with virtually no preparation, though I suppose I should have been forewarned by the cover illustration, which shows a partial rear view of a woman wearing a laced-up corset made of red satin. “Cheesy” is the apt word used by another reviewer (“The Boleyn Girl” at Amazon, Oct. 11, 2009).
“It’s true that a writer can make marionettes out of eighteenth-century men and women, adroitly or clumsily, bringing the readers in on the trick and providing entertainment. But this has nothing to do with ‘writing history.’ ” (Arlette Farge: The Allure of the Archives, 76) Nor, I would add, does marionette-making reliably provide the formula for a successful novel.
Was the author afraid that a story mostly consisting of witty dialogue (and a political-religious murder in the opening pages) would not suffice to hold the interest of a 21st century audience? Perhaps I should have been warned by the blurb contributed by Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, another work often showered with undeserved praise in my estimation. If you liked Georgiana, you’ll probably love Scandal. If not, not. Most reviewers at Amazon agree with me in awarding it just three stars.
Update
In 2017, the editor of the Literary Review, which hands out the annual Bad Sex Award, observed, “definitely literary fiction’s changing and the ‘Oh sod it, I’ll put in a sex scene’ attitude that prompted the creation of the award has pretty much fallen by the wayside. Maybe publishers aren’t pushing for it in the way that ‘sex sells’ was used as a prompt 15 years ago, either. All to the good.”
Scandal came out in 2007, so it fits quite nicely into the time line.
(c) Hamilton Beck
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