There’s much to admire in Blue, L.N. Bey’s
promising debut novel that draws its inspiration from some of the great classic
BDSM narratives while remaining uniquely true to itself. An ambitious effort,
the story is believably scaled, avoiding the credulity-straining grandiosity of
so-much half-baked escapism, or the pretentious plot convolutions of would-be
epics, which tend to collapse under the sprawling weight of their own inanity. Not
that there isn’t a great deal of very imaginative, even fantastical
storytelling here—this isn’t some drab novel of manners or cloyingly pointless
foray into domestic realism—but everything here is decidedly to a purpose, and
almost always to the point. The novelist seems to have learned the lesson some
of her characters struggle with throughout the story: sometimes the greatest
expressive freedom lies within a narrow set of well-defined limitations.
In essence, Blue is a novel about the
pursuit of artistic vision, about the struggle to express one’s genuine self—or,
perhaps more accurately, the search for a medium through which one may express
that vision—be it film, photography, performance art, or, possibly. something a
good deal more personal, subtly sensual and secret. The main characters, each
in their own way, are driven by an ideal, and must find their own way ultimately
to achieve that ideal.
Young—thirtysomething—attractive, recently
divorced, Janet has always been drawn to the stylized BDSM of ‘trashy’ erotic
novels, though she remains hopelessly naïve about what goes on in real life,
her experience of sex disappointingly vanilla and reflexively hetero-normative. Her first introduction to the Lifestyle is not
promising, and, yet, she is spurred on by curiosity, a disquieting realization
that somewhere deep down, she got off on it, was powerfully turned on in spite of the
humiliation, aroused by the pain, but even more profoundly moved by a sense of
belonging and at long last drawing near to knowing her place in the scheme of
things.
In some ways, it’s possible to see Blue as a
sort of sunny, secular reimagining of Pauline Réage’s The Story of O—one of Bey’s cited
inspirations. Where O’s introduction to bondage has the feel of a
quasi-religious experience, a kind of mystagogic initiation into some ancient,
esoteric mystery cult, Janet’s experience seems practically prosaic, almost
commonplace in a world where very little remains to shock or scandalize. The
action is transposed to the suburban American Midwest—the place feels very much
like Kansas City, in fact—and there is an unassuming ordinariness about the
characters and their settings. Yet, like O, Janet ultimately finds herself transformed
to the very essence of her being, approaching an understanding of herself more
complex and affirmative than even her most famously self-martyred predecessor.
None of this is to depreciate the novel as a work
of erotic entertainment—far from it! When Janet meets Dmitri, an auteur of
singular and disturbing vision, the results are nothing short of seismically arousing.
(I do wish the author could have done more with these characters’ personal
sexual relationship.) Some effort has
been made to add variety to the predictable patterns of power-exchange, which
is not always an easy thing. Bey very skillfully explores the erotic possibilities
of everyday activities, as when two men watching a basketball game, give a
penitent slave a lash for each point scored—brilliant!—or a scene of abject
humiliation beneath the gaze of security cameras in a liquor store. And so much more!
The author avoids most of the pitfalls commonly
besetting the frosh novelist, those tangent superfluities and preachy, self-indulgent
digressions that are more about showing off one’s own cleverness than telling a
great story. There is still a tendency towards excessive repetition, rehashing
the same already-established plot points via the heroine’s seemingly endless
fugue of self-doubt—a device right at home in a romance novel, but a tad
tiresome here—and a few of the scenes feel like pale carbon-copies of each
other—like déjà vu for the terminally incurious—although, this could be
the author’s way of imbuing the narrative with a cyclic quality, rounding
things off and tying it all together. I would have preferred more subtle
recapitulations, and a good deal more variation throughout. Some of the chapters were overlong and would probably
benefit from being broken into two (or even three) shorter, more manageable
units.
Still, not bad on balance. Not bad at all for a
first try. The writing is assured, but never cocksure, the author’s vision
broad but not overreaching. The story is sufficiently interesting to inspire
curiosity about what happens next, the rising action is skillfully controlled
with a clear sense of dramatic momentum, and the whole thing draws to a
logically satisfactory, un-open-ended conclusion, without the pretentious
promise (or would it be threat?) of an unnecessary sequel.
With a first novel like this, one can clearly look
forward to great things in L.N. Bey’s future. In the meantime, Blue is
recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment