quietprofanity (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quietprofanity) wrote2008-03-22 12:48 pm
quietprofanity) wrote2008-03-22 12:48 pm
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I guess this is like a joke, like, you expect Biblical fiction to be good ...
But since it is about Purim, the topsy-turvy day, The Gilded Chamber is absolutely ungood.
Now, I like Biblical fiction. In theory. Like any type of professional fanfic, when it's good, it's orgasmically good (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier) and when it's bad, it's like a migraine in print form (The Wind Done Gone). It doesn't help that I'm incredibly picky. I thought the book that I'm going to constantly compare The Gilded Chamber to, The Red Tent, was not without its problems (after the Biblical story ends the tension pretty much abandons the tale). But I still like the concept enough to recommend it, and really do like hearing the spins people put on Bible stories so ... when its good, Bible fiction is A-OK in my book.
The Gilded Chamber is based off the The Book of Esther and a crass capitalization of a trend started by The Red Tent. I felt that way when I first set eyes on it and actually reading it has only proved my suspicions. "Look!" says the book. "I'm about a woman! A woman who is in the Bible! Aren't I just like The Red Tent?"
Well, no. I thought making a novel-length story about Queen Esther was a mistake from the start for a few reasons. First of all, I don't think the story of Esther needs exegesis. The plot of the original Bible story is pretty straight-forward. Jewish woman picked out to be King's new wife. Her relative gets himself in trouble and screws the Jews. Jewish woman saves the day. It's even feminist, or at least feminist-safe. The Red Tent was intriguing because its outright goal (stated in the slightly cheesy but still somehow compelling opening) was to bring "the hidden side" to the story of Jacob's wives and the rape of Dinah, which is one of the parts of the Bible where the women do not come out looking well.
But that might be a little unfair to make that decree. One of my favorite pieces of Bible fiction, heck, one of my favorite movies of all time is The Prince of Egypt. And that's the story of Moses, the most important human being in the Bible (second most if you're a Christian ... or maybe first again, Jesus is a god, after all ...). But I love it because its basic story is about the brotherly conflict between Moses and Rameses, i.e. it brings humanity emotion to the Biblical story, particularly in the scenes of slaughter of the Jews and then the Egyptians. So I do think it's important that if you do a well-known story in the Bible (and I do think the story of Esther counts, even though the condescending Q&A readers guide in the back didn't. I mean the Jews have a fucking HOLIDAY based on this story. It's not like we're talking the prophet Amos here), you at least bring something new to the table.
However, writer Rebecca Kohn (GAH! That's my name! You ruin it!) decided human conflict wasn't what the Book of Esther needed. What the Book of Esther actually needed was super-long descriptions of Persian palace. That's like reading the Book of Kings and bypassing all of the power dynamics, the miracles and the moral lessons and saying, "You know what would make a great novel? If we adapted that multi-chapter description of the Temple!"
Well, maybe that's unfair (again). Kohn tries to bring human emotion into the story. She just has an absolute, complete incompetence in knowing how to do it. Some examples.
1.) The big plot point Kohn brought to the table was that now Mordechai and Esther have been engaged since birth, and Esther is in love with Mordechai but unfortunately has to marry the King. Now, if Kohn were a competent writer, that could be good drama. Unfortunately, I never believed Esther was in love with Mordechai. They never interacted. She never said why he was so great. And also, Mordechai usually spends most of the book off-screen, when he is on-screen he's not very affectionate to her and is portrayed as an asexual. So the book led me to believe that Esther wasn't REALLY in love with Mordechai. She was in love with the IDEA of Mordechai, and only did so because her mother and aunt hyped him up so much in her early life.
In the Q&A Kohn kind of defends this by saying that she wanted to make Esther a product of the time. OK, fine. But I honestly can't respect a main character who spends most of the book pining away on a futile and shallow dream unless she's like Scarlett O'Hara and the audience is thus allowed to recognize the main character is a dumbass. Unfortunately, Esther is portrayed as a reliable narrator. FAIL.
2.) Esther resents her position but has the hots for King Xeres (Ahasuerus in the Bible). I never believed this. Kohn never put the passion across and all of the sex scenes are really clumsy, unsexy fade-outs. FAIL.
3.) Esther states that another Jewish girl in the harem, Freni/Sarah, will have her heart and innocence broken by her harsh life. So we, the audience, look forward to seeing how her heart will be broken. She ends her life happily, thus totally botching the author's foreshadowing. FAIL.
4.) Going against Jewish tradition, Queen Vashti remains alive. At the very end of the story, after the death of the King, she comes to reclaim the Kingdom and place her son on the throne. All throughout the book, Esther feels the conflict with Vashti. She lives in her old place, she sees Vashti's writing on the wall, Vashti haunts her dreams.
So do they ever get a face-to-face conflict? I bet you can guess. FAIL!
5.) By the way, Queen Vashti is portrayed in this book as mean. Like, supervillainess mean. Honest to God, Haman is like Peter Pettigrew to Queen Vashti's Lord Voldemort in this book. Everyone talks about what an awful, wicked queen she is and what a wonderful, beautiful queen Esther is (and yes, that's my next criticism) except they WILL NOT SPEAK the Queen's name.
Think I'm overreacting? In Queen Vashti's one on-camera scene, she meets up with a eunuch, makes a threat against Esther and for no reason, claws up his face with her bare nails. LIKE SHE'S FUCKING CATWOMAN! WHAT THE FUCK?
And no, I don't buy it as a metatextual feminist "women are the real power behind the throne" bullshit. There are better ways to do that by having the only female characters with agency in a book being one really, really evil female character and one really, really good female character (who exemplifies all traditional female qualities, no less). -- Laurell K. Hamilton, are you listening?
Actually, all shows of villainy are really overdone in this book. It's not enough Haman wants to commit genocide over a slight by one person. He also beats his wife and won't let her wear nice clothes while his sons get to eat well. (But she kind of deserves it anyway, because she tries to abort Esther's baby. That's another thing: anybody whose innocent Esther gets to save, anybody who might have made a bad mistake deserves the bad things that happens to them. Like, one of her harem friends gets to leave, the other harem friend gets to keep her baby even though it's not allowed, but the last harem friend who wants to be a lesbian with the favorite concubine has to be a dancing girl and get fucked by a bunch of guys first before she gets her lesbian happily-ever-after.) It's not enough that the couple who bring the newly-orphaned Esther from her old home to her new home with Mordechai are kind of pricks, they also have to steal her mother's shawl off her back when they don't get the money they want. Good God. Why didn't they just kick a newborn litter of puppies on their way out?
6.) And finally, the Mary Sue-ism is thick enough to cut with a knife. But I think the above shows we were all leading up to this.
The sad part is Kohn seems to think this is WHAT YOU DO. The overdone persecution, the worship of her by secondary characters (one servant thinks of her as a second daughter! One eunuch thinks her coming to the harem was prophesied by Ishtar!), her beauty and talent (To Kohn: saying "she's realistic because she doesn't want to read" is not really much of a point when you make her a genius musician) is written in such a perfunctory matter. I don't think Kohn doesn't care about her work, given how much historical research and her slaving over details.
But honestly, someone never seemed to tell her that in the end, people are going to remember the characters, NOT what color dress Esther was wearing when she went to confront the King. In fact, what I liked best about The Red Tent was that it gave distinct personalities to all of the matriarchs. It's been years since I read the book, but I can still see them in my mind. I'm not going to remember much from The Gilded Chamber a year from now.
And speaking of that classic scene in the Bible when Esther confronts the King, people who read the Book of Esther know what happens. So breaking off that scene for a chapter break right before the king puts out his scepter is stupid. WE KNOW HE WILL RECEIVE HER. That's like doing a Jesus story and expecting your audience to go, "Maybe they won't crucify him!"
You want to know how you do drama and tension in Bible fiction? Look right here. This scene works because if we've read the story we KNOW the Pharaoh's son is screwed but the movie manipulates us so that we don't want it to happen and it makes it more powerful when it does.
So, in conclusion. This book is shit. And it's a waste of paper. 350 pages double spaced and fast-moving is super lame. Go watch Prince of Egypt or read The Red Tent instead.
By the way, people in the Bible who deserve their own, good Biblical Fiction.
1.) Elijah - He's a total badass. Remember the stuff Jesus did? Elijah does stuff like that except he can also kill people with his brain. Someone needs to dramatize this.
2.) Jezebel - Okay, so it's the same book as Elijah, but I think it would make a great Shakespearean tragedy.
3.) Ambilech - a.k.a. the evil guy in the book of Judges. I'm tempted to say Deborah, but somehow I think a guy who rises to power only to be felled by a woman who throws a rock out a window and conks him on the head (although he wusses out and gets a guy to kill him before he loses consciousness because he's a weenis) is great stuff.
4.) Tamar - Because she deserves a voice almost as much, if not more, than Dinah. Plus, it would be cool to see David's story in Samuel from one of his kids' eyes.
5.) Jonathan (Saul's son) - Because I'm not above Bible!slash when I can see it.
I have a thing for the Nevi'im I guess. The Torah's kind of been done to death though, hasn't it?
Now, I like Biblical fiction. In theory. Like any type of professional fanfic, when it's good, it's orgasmically good (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier) and when it's bad, it's like a migraine in print form (The Wind Done Gone). It doesn't help that I'm incredibly picky. I thought the book that I'm going to constantly compare The Gilded Chamber to, The Red Tent, was not without its problems (after the Biblical story ends the tension pretty much abandons the tale). But I still like the concept enough to recommend it, and really do like hearing the spins people put on Bible stories so ... when its good, Bible fiction is A-OK in my book.
The Gilded Chamber is based off the The Book of Esther and a crass capitalization of a trend started by The Red Tent. I felt that way when I first set eyes on it and actually reading it has only proved my suspicions. "Look!" says the book. "I'm about a woman! A woman who is in the Bible! Aren't I just like The Red Tent?"
Well, no. I thought making a novel-length story about Queen Esther was a mistake from the start for a few reasons. First of all, I don't think the story of Esther needs exegesis. The plot of the original Bible story is pretty straight-forward. Jewish woman picked out to be King's new wife. Her relative gets himself in trouble and screws the Jews. Jewish woman saves the day. It's even feminist, or at least feminist-safe. The Red Tent was intriguing because its outright goal (stated in the slightly cheesy but still somehow compelling opening) was to bring "the hidden side" to the story of Jacob's wives and the rape of Dinah, which is one of the parts of the Bible where the women do not come out looking well.
But that might be a little unfair to make that decree. One of my favorite pieces of Bible fiction, heck, one of my favorite movies of all time is The Prince of Egypt. And that's the story of Moses, the most important human being in the Bible (second most if you're a Christian ... or maybe first again, Jesus is a god, after all ...). But I love it because its basic story is about the brotherly conflict between Moses and Rameses, i.e. it brings humanity emotion to the Biblical story, particularly in the scenes of slaughter of the Jews and then the Egyptians. So I do think it's important that if you do a well-known story in the Bible (and I do think the story of Esther counts, even though the condescending Q&A readers guide in the back didn't. I mean the Jews have a fucking HOLIDAY based on this story. It's not like we're talking the prophet Amos here), you at least bring something new to the table.
However, writer Rebecca Kohn (GAH! That's my name! You ruin it!) decided human conflict wasn't what the Book of Esther needed. What the Book of Esther actually needed was super-long descriptions of Persian palace. That's like reading the Book of Kings and bypassing all of the power dynamics, the miracles and the moral lessons and saying, "You know what would make a great novel? If we adapted that multi-chapter description of the Temple!"
Well, maybe that's unfair (again). Kohn tries to bring human emotion into the story. She just has an absolute, complete incompetence in knowing how to do it. Some examples.
1.) The big plot point Kohn brought to the table was that now Mordechai and Esther have been engaged since birth, and Esther is in love with Mordechai but unfortunately has to marry the King. Now, if Kohn were a competent writer, that could be good drama. Unfortunately, I never believed Esther was in love with Mordechai. They never interacted. She never said why he was so great. And also, Mordechai usually spends most of the book off-screen, when he is on-screen he's not very affectionate to her and is portrayed as an asexual. So the book led me to believe that Esther wasn't REALLY in love with Mordechai. She was in love with the IDEA of Mordechai, and only did so because her mother and aunt hyped him up so much in her early life.
In the Q&A Kohn kind of defends this by saying that she wanted to make Esther a product of the time. OK, fine. But I honestly can't respect a main character who spends most of the book pining away on a futile and shallow dream unless she's like Scarlett O'Hara and the audience is thus allowed to recognize the main character is a dumbass. Unfortunately, Esther is portrayed as a reliable narrator. FAIL.
2.) Esther resents her position but has the hots for King Xeres (Ahasuerus in the Bible). I never believed this. Kohn never put the passion across and all of the sex scenes are really clumsy, unsexy fade-outs. FAIL.
3.) Esther states that another Jewish girl in the harem, Freni/Sarah, will have her heart and innocence broken by her harsh life. So we, the audience, look forward to seeing how her heart will be broken. She ends her life happily, thus totally botching the author's foreshadowing. FAIL.
4.) Going against Jewish tradition, Queen Vashti remains alive. At the very end of the story, after the death of the King, she comes to reclaim the Kingdom and place her son on the throne. All throughout the book, Esther feels the conflict with Vashti. She lives in her old place, she sees Vashti's writing on the wall, Vashti haunts her dreams.
So do they ever get a face-to-face conflict? I bet you can guess. FAIL!
5.) By the way, Queen Vashti is portrayed in this book as mean. Like, supervillainess mean. Honest to God, Haman is like Peter Pettigrew to Queen Vashti's Lord Voldemort in this book. Everyone talks about what an awful, wicked queen she is and what a wonderful, beautiful queen Esther is (and yes, that's my next criticism) except they WILL NOT SPEAK the Queen's name.
Think I'm overreacting? In Queen Vashti's one on-camera scene, she meets up with a eunuch, makes a threat against Esther and for no reason, claws up his face with her bare nails. LIKE SHE'S FUCKING CATWOMAN! WHAT THE FUCK?
And no, I don't buy it as a metatextual feminist "women are the real power behind the throne" bullshit. There are better ways to do that by having the only female characters with agency in a book being one really, really evil female character and one really, really good female character (who exemplifies all traditional female qualities, no less). -- Laurell K. Hamilton, are you listening?
Actually, all shows of villainy are really overdone in this book. It's not enough Haman wants to commit genocide over a slight by one person. He also beats his wife and won't let her wear nice clothes while his sons get to eat well. (But she kind of deserves it anyway, because she tries to abort Esther's baby. That's another thing: anybody whose innocent Esther gets to save, anybody who might have made a bad mistake deserves the bad things that happens to them. Like, one of her harem friends gets to leave, the other harem friend gets to keep her baby even though it's not allowed, but the last harem friend who wants to be a lesbian with the favorite concubine has to be a dancing girl and get fucked by a bunch of guys first before she gets her lesbian happily-ever-after.) It's not enough that the couple who bring the newly-orphaned Esther from her old home to her new home with Mordechai are kind of pricks, they also have to steal her mother's shawl off her back when they don't get the money they want. Good God. Why didn't they just kick a newborn litter of puppies on their way out?
6.) And finally, the Mary Sue-ism is thick enough to cut with a knife. But I think the above shows we were all leading up to this.
The sad part is Kohn seems to think this is WHAT YOU DO. The overdone persecution, the worship of her by secondary characters (one servant thinks of her as a second daughter! One eunuch thinks her coming to the harem was prophesied by Ishtar!), her beauty and talent (To Kohn: saying "she's realistic because she doesn't want to read" is not really much of a point when you make her a genius musician) is written in such a perfunctory matter. I don't think Kohn doesn't care about her work, given how much historical research and her slaving over details.
But honestly, someone never seemed to tell her that in the end, people are going to remember the characters, NOT what color dress Esther was wearing when she went to confront the King. In fact, what I liked best about The Red Tent was that it gave distinct personalities to all of the matriarchs. It's been years since I read the book, but I can still see them in my mind. I'm not going to remember much from The Gilded Chamber a year from now.
And speaking of that classic scene in the Bible when Esther confronts the King, people who read the Book of Esther know what happens. So breaking off that scene for a chapter break right before the king puts out his scepter is stupid. WE KNOW HE WILL RECEIVE HER. That's like doing a Jesus story and expecting your audience to go, "Maybe they won't crucify him!"
You want to know how you do drama and tension in Bible fiction? Look right here. This scene works because if we've read the story we KNOW the Pharaoh's son is screwed but the movie manipulates us so that we don't want it to happen and it makes it more powerful when it does.
So, in conclusion. This book is shit. And it's a waste of paper. 350 pages double spaced and fast-moving is super lame. Go watch Prince of Egypt or read The Red Tent instead.
By the way, people in the Bible who deserve their own, good Biblical Fiction.
1.) Elijah - He's a total badass. Remember the stuff Jesus did? Elijah does stuff like that except he can also kill people with his brain. Someone needs to dramatize this.
2.) Jezebel - Okay, so it's the same book as Elijah, but I think it would make a great Shakespearean tragedy.
3.) Ambilech - a.k.a. the evil guy in the book of Judges. I'm tempted to say Deborah, but somehow I think a guy who rises to power only to be felled by a woman who throws a rock out a window and conks him on the head (although he wusses out and gets a guy to kill him before he loses consciousness because he's a weenis) is great stuff.
4.) Tamar - Because she deserves a voice almost as much, if not more, than Dinah. Plus, it would be cool to see David's story in Samuel from one of his kids' eyes.
5.) Jonathan (Saul's son) - Because I'm not above Bible!slash when I can see it.
I have a thing for the Nevi'im I guess. The Torah's kind of been done to death though, hasn't it?