REVIEW: Impulse & Initiative by Abigail Reynolds
Review by Allison T.
What if….Ah, the charm of the what-if story! What if Captain Ahab had said, “Screw it, I’m tired of chasing this hemm’d great fish—I’m going back to graduate school to get a degree in social work so that I can ameliorate the lives of Queequeg and his people”? What if Hamlet and Ophelia had scored some Prozac, hired a family counselor, sorted the Danish royal family, and gotten married to live happily ever after? What if Jane Eyre, upon hearing of the mad wife in the attic, had said, “Oh, hell, Edward, let’s chuck Victorian morality and Evangelical Christianity and go live in sin in southern France!”? What if Darcy refused to take Elizabeth’s “No” at Rosings, followed her back to Longbourne within a month or two of her initial refusal, and, by dint of snogging her (as our friends across The Pond so undeliciously put it) at every opportunity—snogging in the shrubbery, snogging in the wilderness, snogging in the churchyard—causes Elizabeth to sleep with him before marriage while staying at Pemberley with her aunt and uncle Gardiner, and otherwise changes the story that Austen gave us? For such is the plot of Abigail Reynold’s Impulse & Initiative; A Pride & Prejudice Variation—“What if Mr. Darcy didn’t take ‘No’ for an answer?”
“We are never told of what would have happened,” Aslan the Great Lion of Narnia assures us (and he should know, because he’s a Higher Power.) Mostly, we think this is true. What-if stories can be good if they are funny, but we don’t believe we’ve read a serious what-if story that moved us as much as the original. Impulse & Initiative is called a “variation,” and it is indeed that: not a sequel, nor a prequel, nor a retelling of the story from a different point of view, but a rewriting of the basic story.
Let’s start with some positives: Abigail Reynolds is coming into her own as a writer. Her sentences flow easily, there is some humor, only one anachronism, other than the complete rewriting of the characters’ motives and actions—(there are no “vanity tables” in the Regency era)—and Reynolds’ Lizzie is actually fresh, sparkling and charming, unlike the dull and/or angelic Lizzies of many other sequels. There are two serious flaws in this book, however: one that purists will rally around, but one that affects Reynolds’ writing of the romance novel in general. We will address these issues presently.
Back to Impulse & Initiative: Worried about “consequences’’—the poor fellow apparently never heard of a French letter—after recklessly seducing Elizabeth in the library at Pemberley, Darcy pushes for marriage to occur within three days after this event: other than the Gardiners, none of Elizabeth’s family attends. It is only after they are married that Lydia elopes….but then, really, what is now the point of this particular plot element at this point in this much-changed story? Let us pause here for a Moment of Useful Reflection.
Our Courteous and Genial Editrix has frequently posed the question: What is it about Mr. Darcy that is so generally compelling?
Here’s the answer: because he’s every girl’s High School Romance. Young ladies (even older ones) do not lie in bed at night fantasizing about snogging their older sister’s husband’s much older brother, the guy who’s been criticizing their hair-do and their reading list since they were a toddler. They don’t sigh over a sort of brother-ish dweeb who doesn’t admire their artistic and cultural talents, nor over a dull stick of a fellow who falls for the first pretty girl to arrive in the neighborhood. They don’t want to realize the sad truth that their transparent admiration of a cute guy who finds them naïve and silly will win the day. And if they are young ladies, they can’t imagine being a dried up old prune of a twenty-seven-year-old who sees her former beau courting not one but two other girls. (Older ladies might find this fantasy a little more appealing, which is why Persuasion is the second most romantic book in the canon, IMHO.)
No, in their imaginations they are like, way totally pretty and vivacious and when the cute new guy enters the high school gym at the big prom and then disses them, their Ultimate Fantasy is to drive him mad with longing and despair until he lays Heart, Hand and Fortune at their feet. Yes, Virginia, it is true that Mr. Darcy thus scores a perfect 100 on the Romant-O-Meter™ with Captain Wentworth well ahead of the rest of the field with a respectable score of 94. (Mr. Rochester also does fairly well, with a score of 87 (he’s something of a bully, but fortunately Jane can stand up for herself), leaving Heathcliff—really! his idea of romance is to lie down on your cold cold grave!—far behind at 25.)
Impulse & Initiative is thus a MarySue fantasy of Really Good Sex with the Ultimate Romance Hero. Some readers will be happy with this and will look no further. But two things make the story flat for me. The first is that it lacks, as Pamela Regis told us at the Chicago AGM and in her book A Natural History of the Romance Novel, the crucial moment of “ritual death,” in which the heroine feels herself to be forever separated from the hero—that all is lost. In Austen’s P&P this moment occurs after Lydia’s elopement, when Elizabeth finally realizes both that Mr. Darcy is her soul mate and that he is now, through these unfortunate circumstances, lost to her forever. There is no such moment of crisis in Impulse & Initiative. Reader, she marries him; it was clear from the beginning, even before the elopement or other crises. Even the childbirth that Darcy fears (but does nothing to prevent) does not represent a major emotional milestone in this book. There is no intensity of love, loss and longing in this tale equal to the crises and catharsis of the original story.
The second criticism is, as you will have guessed, this reader’s inability to understand why the story was written in the first place. Austen tells us that, while Elizabeth’s opinion of Mr. Darcy changed after reading his letter, it was only later, during the tour to the north, that she began to feel that he was the man for her. It is hard for me to understand Lizzie’s change of mind just because Mr. Darcy makes out with her for a few weeks prior to her trip to Pemberley.
Abigail Reynolds is finding her voice as a writer; Impulse & Initiative is faster-paced and more confidently written than the one earlier work of hers that I have read. Here is an author who, if she would stop obsessing over Mr. Darcy and find her own characters and plots, could be a contender in the competitive field of romance writing.
But two last quibbles, if you can stand to read more: first, in Austen’s double-barreled titles, P&P and S&S, the reader is invited to ponder over which principal character represents which attribute—or perhaps whether each character has elements of both attributes, and, if so, in what degree. It is difficult to see the parallel in Impulse & Initiative: yeah, Darcy impulsively seduces Elizabeth, but then what? He takes the initiative to marry her? It doesn’t make much sense.
Second quibble: a real eeuw-yuck. After a night of passionate love-making, Darcy comes down to breakfast with a spring in his step and Mr. Bingley comments on his good mood. Says Darcy, “Bingley, I am married to the most astonishing woman in the world, and if her sister is anything like her, you will be a very happy man indeed.”—nudge nudge wink wink. Bleagh. In my book—and I sure hope I’m not wrong!—a Gentleman Kisses But Does Not Tell. Thus I am reminded that, when visiting a gallery in London, the real Jane Austen spotted a portrait that she laughingly said was very like Mrs. Bingley—but that she did not see Mrs. Darcy: her husband, she wrote to Cassandra, apparently had too much sensibility to put a portrait of his wife on public display. Perhaps Austen’s character is a bit uptight and reserved by comparison with Reynolds’ Darcy, as the former wouldn’t dream of discussing with his future brother-in-law what a good lay their respective wives are. It might be this Austen’s hero’s pride in his charming wife that makes him prejudiced against exposing her to public view, but his reserve, candor and probity is a major part of what makes him my real Mr. Darcy.
Comments are closed.
I read this book and really, really enjoyed it.
One of the reasons I avoid Austen paralit is that I keep running into Randy Darcy, Fitz’s evil twin. That should be Rule One when writing about Mr. D – keep the man classy, because that is who he is.
Thank you for the review, Allison. I think I’ll skip this paralit.
P.S. Your quoting Aslan the Great Lion made this Narnia fan grin with delight.
What a nice bit of writing that was! I thought you expressed yourself quite well, and consequently enjoyed reading your review of “Impulse & Initiative” very much!
That said, I doubt I’d be able to praise the novel itself, despite hearing how well it was written technically speaking. For while I’ve a weakness for certain “what if stories” this doesn’t sound like one of them; I need things to make sense emotionally, so that the reasoning behind doing this or that resonates as a truth, albeit within the context of fiction. Otherwise, I get distracted by too many unanswered questions for the writer failing to fully account for a character’s motivation.
I mean, how absurd to have Darcy seduce Elizabeth, only to then suddenly display the very qualities so sadly lacking in the first place? Ie: despite knowing better, he’s still selfish enough to seduce a virgin and then suddenly moral enough to want to marry her. HUH? At least when I do the math, I get: lust + sex = guilt. True; I haven’t read this novel and ergo judge it blindly, but I can see enough of what it contains through your review to know it’s not my cup of tea. I’ve never been interested in “randy Darcy” or any variation thereof.
Far more interesting, was mention of “What is it about Mr. Darcy that is so generally compelling?”
As I think Darcy is somewhat akin to a blank cipher ie: it’s not so much what’s actually there which attracts, but rather what the reader is able to project onto him for want of greater character exposition. Mr. Darcy is attractive because of what you, the reader, can make of him; he’s like a raw diamond, uncut.
And so if you’re attracted to an intellectual battle of the sexes against the backdrop of Regency England as a pretext for planting the seeds of a classical romance, there ya go. Or maybe it’s more about taking “tall, dark, rich & handsome” down a peg or two – albeit for his own good, and while owning just enough faults of your own so as to mitigate the likelihood of someone else doing that to you in turn, for having beat them to it; smile. Or maybe you just like a Cinderella story in general. Either way, Darcy fits the bill.
Me? I like Darcy for a variety of reasons – for starters, he’s his own man and that’s a rare thing, but most of all, because he’s fun to spar with without being “too” smart for his own good. For the only thing more offensive to me than willful ignorance is intentional cruelty in the guise of wit; feeling it amounts to stepping on another to make yourself feel taller. Which isn’t the same thing as scoring a point fairly. Moreover Darcy can take an arrow, not just shoot one.
I like Mr. Rochester for the same reason actually, now that I think of it. You don’t have to pretend to be less of a human being so they can feel more like a man, you know? And while I’m hardly a card-carrying member of the Feminist movement, as an artist I’m very much in touch with my sensibilities about certain things, and unless a romance takes place between equals, it doesn’t really interest me.
Clearly however, enough dream of “their” Mr. Darcy to inspire all these recent adaptations we’ve been seeing, along with variations and what have you. Whether that owes to an undying love for the material, or it being discovered every decade by a new crop of young women, or Studios wanting to hedge their bets and go with what sells… your guess is as good as mine; chuckle!
Thank you for your lengthy & thoughtful review of Abigail’s book. I have to point out some disagreement with your comments on condoms & contraception especially since it’s a major part of your critique. I offer two quotes from A.D. Harvey’s very enjoyable book, “Sex in Georgian England” for your review.
On condoms: “Condoms (usually made from sheep’s intestines) were regarded as a means of preventing venereal infection by the better off males who consorted with streetwalkers in London and other large cities but they were not widely available and were not perceived as a practical means of avoiding pregnancy.”
On contraception: “Other contraceptive techniques, such as the rhythm method, coitus interruptus or saline douches, were known but were disapproved of.”
If you want to find out more, I have an entire Family Planning category on my website, http://www.reg-ency.com UserID: AustenBlog, Password: LumpofSnark
Sue
Hey Sue! In Allison’s defense, I think the French letter comment was just a joke (I laughed).
However, I would think the second part would refer more to married couples. Why wouldn’t an unmarried couple wish to prevent conception?
My apologies to Allison for not getting the joke on the first read – lol, I’m reading too many ponderous history books!
As to the second point, we’re delving into people’s psyches which I’ll leave to the more creative minds of the authors & those who critique them. After all, in our more enlightened & educated times people still have unprotected sex & do nothing to prevent conception.
This is an interesting subject to discuss but I don’t want to hijack the thread away from the topic of Abigail’s book.
Sue
Hi Allison, thanks for the thoughtful review. You obviously spent quite a bit of time analysing the novel. I read this novel also and had many of the same reactions. I must agree that it is a challenge to accept Austen’s well known characters acting in a manner that does not constitute their happiness or ours. The Darcy that Austen created would never seduce Elizabeth, let alone brag about it.
Reynolds is a very talented writer. This storyline would have been acceptable if the characters had been her own creation and not a variation. Your observations could stand as advice for success to any sequel writer of any classic author. Thanks.
Cheers, LA
Sue–what I said wasn’t quite what I meant, I think. In these days, conception outside marriage is not as big a deal as it was in those days, so I would think in those days an unmarried couple would be more willing to take some pains to avoid it than a married couple. But of course in the story under discussion I understand the participants were Swept Away By Passion
so it doesn’t apply.
I will add that what I really like about this review is that it not only addresses the fact that a good story doesn’t necessarily make for good Austen paraliterature, it also addresses that different readers have different expectations. “…Really Good Sex with the Ultimate Romance Hero. Some readers will be happy with this and will look no further.” That’s very, very true, and no one would really wish to suspend any pleasure of these readers. But some of us look for something else out of a Jane Austen paraliterature title. So you’ll have people who love a title and those who don’t–which is why I kind of cringe when someone asks me to recommend such a book. Some people don’t like the ones that I like, and there seems to be a lot of disagreement about what is “good,” just like with the films. Some readers want a great deal of Incident in their stories, whereas I don’t particularly need it–Jane Austen’s own stories don’t have a great deal of Incident in them. (By Incident, in title case, I jokingly mean “melodrama.”) But to get back to the review, I think it explains very well why some readers will be more critical of something that others like just fine. But I still wonder why the Jane Austen fandom hasn’t come up with a Wide Sargasso Sea-type of book: something literary.
I read some pages and liked the story – though I didn’t recognize anything of the characters I’ve learnt to love so dearly. Darcy would be incapable of seduce Elizabeth in any given circunstances, let alone with their wedding date already settled! Why not wait a little longer?
Mags,
I have not made any comment on the merits of Allison’s literary critique, each reader will agree or disagree with her based on their own personal feelings. My only point was to point out that one element of that criticism wasn’t historically accurate for the time period Abigail sets her story. I get that some of the remarks were put forward in a jocular manner & totally accept it. Thanks for the lengthy explanations but I have nothing further publicly to add to this discussion. If you wish to continue discussing, please feel free to contact me.
Sue
Oops–that part of my comment wasn’t directed towards you!
I was just speaking generally.
The great thing about bad books is that other people slog though them and then write clever, funny reviews for me to enjoy!
And then still more people make witty remarks like “Randy Darcy, Fitz’s evil twin.” Life is good.