REVIEW : The Harlequin by Laurell K. Hamilton (2007)

Let me begin this review by making my position clear.  Before receiving this book in the post I had only had the slightest of contacts with the work of Laurell K. Hamilton.  I have not read the fourteen novels that precede The Harlequin in the Anita Blake series, nor have I read any other of Ms. Hamilton’s works.  Having said that, I am not coming to this book completely devoid of impressions.  As a member of the online SFF community, I am aware both of the perception that Ms. Hamilton’s more recent books contain more sex than plot and Ms. Hamilton’s response to these “negative readers” on her blog.  I state my starting position purely for the sake of transparency.

My goal with this piece is to engage as fully with this book in as open and honest a way as possible.  I have no interest in being “even handed” or expressing the ultimate objective truth about this book.  I feel the need to express this caveat as past encounters with populist fantasy have made it clear to me that some SF readers want nothing more from a review than a plot summary and a charitable thumbs-up or thumbs-down evaluation.  I have no intention of conforming to that format.  I intend to misbehave.

Anita Blake is a federal marshal in charge of protecting the city of St. Louis from Rogue Vampires.  She is also a necromancer.  And a non-transformed shape-shifter.  And the bound lover of the Vampire master of the city, which gives her even more powers.  And she’s possessed with something called the Ardeur, which forces her to feed magically on lust by sleeping with people (a plot device as subtle as Deep Throat saddling Linda Lovelace with a clitoris at the back of her throat).  She spends her time enforcing the peace on the supernatural inhabitants of Saint Louis and having relationships with six different men.  Suddenly, this calm is perturbed when Blake receives a white mask.  This turns out to be the first sign that she is being observed by the Harlequin, a group of secretive vampires who enforce the laws of vampiric society.  This leads Blake to believe that she is safe as the Harlequins are forced to signal their intent to move against the target by giving them a red mask.  However, Blake is soon under attack as the Harlequins use their ability to amplify doubts and fears to sow confusion amongst Anita’s vampire and shape-shifting allies.  Eventually the Harlequin try to enslave half the vampire population of the city, forcing Anita to battle them to the death.

What should be obvious from this synopsis is that the main plot is very thin.  Some vampires turn up, mess with Blake, she kills them, the end.  However, this insubstantiality is clearly intentional as the bulk of book is given over to the ongoing soap opera that is Anita Blake’s private life.  Indeed, this book is not really about The Harlequin, they are mere catalysts for upsetting the complex web of relationships that make up the book’s setting and characters, forcing Blake to make some tough decisions about her friends and lovers.  However, it is interesting to note that despite the book being all about the relationships between the characters, this is not a character centric novel.

Blake herself is a classic Mary Sue.  She is beautiful, capable, sexually liberated, progressive and has pretty much all the powers it is possible to have in Hamilton’s world with none of the downsides.  Even the Ardeur, a power that forces her to feed on lust, only pushes her to have sex with loads of men... something she tends to do anyway.  What is also interesting about Blake is that she exists in an entirely masculine world.  Aside from a were-tiger, the queen of all vampires and a few minor characters, she exists at the centre of a huge web of masculine attention composed entirely of Vampires that make money as strippers and shape-shifters who are all, apparently, massively hung.  To say that Anita Blake constitutes some kind of avenue of wish fulfilment for Laurell K. Hamilton would be to state the obvious, particularly when she has spoken openly about the death of her mother and growing up without any male role-models.  However, aside from Blake’s catalogue of powers, there’s another more interesting sense in which the character is a Mary Sue.

My favourite example of a character-driven piece is HBO’s now sadly defunct western series Deadwood.  Deadwood steered clear of traditional episodic TV narratives as well as Buffy or X-Files-style plot-arcs.  Instead the series worked by creating well defined characters and simply letting them loose in the town.  Sooner or later the characters would enter into conflict and the show’s narrative would emerge from this structure rather than from the more traditional introduction of plot devices.  Despite The Harlequin being all about the relationships between Hamilton’s characters, the book does not share Deadwood’s textbook character-centric structure.  Indeed, the various male characters that make up Blake’s life seem to have no real existence beyond their relationship with Blake.  They are like Bishop Berkley’s material objects that pop out of existence the second they are not perceived.  This is because the male characters exist solely as embodiments of issues that Blake has to deal with. 

The obvious examples of this conceit are the four main male characters in the book; Nathaniel is a young shape-shifter who is in love with Blake but is also frustrated because he is a masochist and Blake refuses to play the role of the sadist by inflicting pain on him, he therefore embodies boyfriends with sexual needs that a woman might be uncomfortable in satisfying.  Richard is the king of the werewolves and is the most unhappy with Blake’s “polygamous” lifestyle, thereby making him the partner who wants to get married/settle down/become exclusive... the partner as theft of liberty.  Micah is king of the were-hyenas and has been the subject of a spin-off novel.  He is also, evidently, the male with the largest penis, therefore suggesting he embodies chemistry and passion and lust in a way that the more cerebral relationship-partners cannot.  The final key character in The Harlequin is Edward.  A nearly psychopathically detached vampire hunter, Edward appears once Blake’s other relationships stop aiding her and start hindering her as a result of the Harlequins’ manipulations.  Edward clearly represents the desire for solitude and a person’s ability to be selfish and uncluttered by emotion in order to make a tough decision, be it dealing with vampires as in the plot of the novel, or ending a dysfunctional relationship as in the book’s subtext.  there are other characters such as Jean-Claude who loom large in the life of Blake but as they don’t feature much in the book, it is not obvious what purpose they serve.  However, I’m sure habitués of the series will see in them  the embodiment of some other aspect of a normal relationship.

Of course, this literary device is not new.  Anyone who is familiar with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Emily Bronte’s Wuthering heights will see similar techniques.  Indeed, Austen’s character Elizabeth Bennett has to choose between Darcy and Wickham and the choice is between inward and outward virtue for while Darcy is aloof and arrogant, he is a good man, while Wickham is personable and handsome but ultimately something of a villain.  Similarly, Bronte’s Catherine Earnshaw has to choose between the wild, passionate, shirtless Heathcliff and the aloof but stable Edgar Linton.  However, the difference between Hamilton’s male characters and those of Austen and Bronte is that Hamilton’s men are nothing but aspects of a relationship.

Combine this approach to characterisation with the fact that Blake is clearly a means for Hamilton to work out her  Daddy-issues and sexual fantasies and you have a book that is solipsistic to the point of narcissism.  The Harlequin combines the endless self-indulgent obsession with relationships of chick-lit with delusions of grandeur and fantasies of literary transgression.  Lest we forget, Ms. Hamilton dismissed those “negative readers” who might prefer “books that don’t make you think that hard”.  These claims are also ironic as there is little that is honestly transgressive about the book, the three or four sex scenes are dull, poorly written and about as erotically charged as a driving lesson.  Compared to the vast amounts of written erotica available for free online from places such as the Alt.Sex.Stories archive or Nifty, Hamilton’s sex is decidedly sub-par.  This is largely due to Hamilton’s stylistic quirks.

The book is incredibly dialogue heavy.  By this I do not mean that there’s a lot of talking, I mean that there’s far more dialogue than there is descriptive prose.  Anything that occurs in the book is not described to the reader, instead the reader is allowed to sit in as characters appear and reveal nuggets of information for the main characters to discuss at great length.  This gives the book a glacial and cosily conversational pace as the thin plot is stretched out over hundreds of pages of discussion and analysis and endless positioning as Blake adjusts her social standing and relationships in light of the new events.  This problem is compounded by the fact that Hamilton shows a remarkable lack of finesse when it comes to writing dialogue :

“So you aren’t going to tell me anything about what’s happening?”
“I cannot. ma petite.”
“Well, that is just frustrating as hell.”
“You have no idea how frustrating, ma petite.”
(page 16)

Even when Hamilton reaches for profundity, the results are awkward and simple-minded :

 

“Only love of a good woman will make a man question every choice, every action.  Only love makes a warrior hesitate for fear that his lady will find him cruel.  Only love makes a man the best he will ever be , and the weakest.  Sometimes all in the same moment.” (page 337)

 

Hamilton’s world is also a curiously empty one as little of the book’s sparse descriptive prose is wasted on talking about the places that Blake visits.  Instead Hamilton returns again and again to a fetishistic obsession with what the various characters are wearing :

 

“Nathaniel wore a leather trench coat and a matching fedora.  The hat and coat hid most of him, and still managed to emphasize the body underneath” ... “I started moving, dressed in my own black leather trench coat, but no hat” … “My trench coat was unbuttoned from the waist up, only belted in place.” (page 23)

 

However, the sophomoric obscenity, the hideous prose and the laughable characterisation would all be bearable if The Harlequin were actually an interesting story.  It isn’t.

The Harlequin falls squarely between all available stools.  Its transparent solipsism and lack of psychological depth or dramatic edge fail to make it work as a character study or drama but its tissue-thin plot and glacial pacing make it unworkable as a standard fantasy or thriller novel.  Indeed, having established the threat of the Harlequins, Hamilton lacks the energy to come up with an interesting way of dealing with them so she has them effectively kidnap a load of people for no apparent reason and then fight a magical duel.  The magical duel is an interesting literary device as Terry Pratchett also uses it in Lords and Ladies and Thud!.  In effect the idea is that the character enters into some kind of magical trance and somehow everything turns out okay in the end.  Magic is always used in fantasy as a means of freeing the story from the limits imposed by our laws of nature but it is a sign of weak writing when the writer uses magic as a means of escaping the logic of narrative and story-telling.  Pratchett frequently makes this mistake and Hamilton makes it in The Harlequin.  Not only is this lazy writing as it’s little more than waving a magic wand and making all outstanding plot points disappear, it also robs the story of its emotional climax by effectively depriving the reader of the sight of the protagonists winning. 

Simply stated, The Harlequin is as bad a novel as I’ve ever read.  Its flaws speak not just of a writer having an off day but of a systematic and catastrophic failure of the entire process of book creation from initial idea to writing to editing all the way down to the doubtless thousands of people who will scoop this book up when it is deposited in shops.  Ms. Hamilton’s success is such that all of her books are effectively critic proof but upon reading this book I felt compelled to reach out to those people who have read the first fourteen of her novels.

All I can say is that they should listen to the song “Stand by your man” and replace the word “Man” with “book” as being fifteen books into a series that is capable of producing a work such as The Harlequin is comparable to living with an abusive partner.  Believe me, you CAN stop reading these books!  You aren’t alone!  Other people have escaped and are now reading The Lies of Locke Lamora or Blindsight or The Stars My Destination.  Please, fans of Laurell K. Hamilton... stop inflicting these things on yourselves.  Just say No!

NB : It has been pointed out to me that Micah is in fact not the head of the Hyena people but the king of the were-leopards.  Sloppy copy editing on my part, apologies.

Comments

[A.R.Yngve]

[Sings]
Stand by your book
and give it all your lovin'
even when it gives nothin' back...
Stand by your book
and every lousy sequel
it's the equivalent of craaack...
Stand byyy... your book!

;-)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hehe.

"I can quite any time I want"

[Rain]

Brilliant. It IS possible to stop reading her books. I made it through to Incubus Dreams and haven't touched one since. Sticky thing, that was. *shudder*

Too bad people keep buying them and supporting the fantasy she has that she's a good writer.

[Xanthe]

As one of the so-called "negative readers", all I can say is thank you very much for looking at the series with a set of fresh eyes, and independently validating our criticism of the recent books in the series.

[Avy]

It's worth breaking away! She needs a reality check, and a much reduced readership is really the only way to do it. Anyone with a vamp lit addiction should try Robin McKinley's Sunshine instead, most of the 'negative' (read:discerning,) readers I know have adored it.

[marty myers]

hard to believe this drivel has made it so far as a series, I shudder to admit a originally liked the begining books in the series, but the charm and simplicity and action have all bogged down into this turgid steaming pile of shite we have today, great review btw.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Thanks for the warm comments guys. I got a huge kick out of discovering the existence of the LKH_Lashouts community. You're like the Resistance! I didn't know that the "negative readers" had actually organised.

As far as I'm concerned we have a limited amount of time before we inevitably get swept away by some vulgar little tumor. Life's too short for such terrible books.

Viva la Resistance!

[jen]

I absolutely loved the Anita Blake books, up through Obsidian Butterfly.

After that...I just couldn't wrap my head around all the BAD that is present in the books. And for her to say that they are "too hard" for us mortals to comprehend is ridiculous. And calling them "erotica" is just plain wrong. I like erotica. I do not like bad porn. If I want bad porn, I'll watch Showtime at two in the morning. Please to be not putting it into what was once a very good series. Thanks.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

The sex is interesting as despite being quite graphic it isn't in the least bit erotic. I think of the kinky sex that appears in Charlie Stross' Accelerando or in Mary Gentle's 1610 and both of those books have sex scenes that are genuinely erotic and, in Gentle's case, quite transgressive.

Hamilton not only does bad sex but the book is so full of sex and talking about sex and relationships that none of the scenes have any spice to them... it's just more of the same.

[Flo]

I like to think of Hamilton's characters as all being affected by the talkeur.

Lovely review. Interesting that someone who has NOT been following from the get go can point out lack of plot. Or rather paper thin plot.

If anyone is keen on picking up a new twist on paranormal urban fantasy try "Magic Bites" by Ilona Andrews. Ignore the badly photoshopped cover and the hokey name and you can get into the really intriguing magical set up Andrews put together.

[AJ]

Great review!!

Just one thing though... Micah is the "king" of the leopards not the hyenas. Unless for some crazy batshit reason that changes in this book. I wouldn't put it past LKH.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

thanks AJ.

However, if you take a look at the bottom of the review you'll see that I did make a modification once I realised that I'd made a mistake about what type of shapeshifter Micah was.

[Marylee]

Thank you for the great review.

Your review of LKH's most recent book is not only well articulated but also comprehensively illuminated what has made her writing of late so incredibly painful to read. I'm guessing that for many of us who enjoyed her early books, it's been hard to not be hopeful that her next one will actually be good again, have a plot, and not be about her ego; and thus we jump off the cliff with our fellow lemmings, while giving status and wealth to someone who is really undeserving.

As a disappointed but once avid Anita Blake fan, I was perseverating whether I should buy/read the Harlequin. After reading your review, I now feel I can just say "no." Thank you for the epiphany and for permission to lose this bad habit. Life is too short to waste on a bad book and author.

[Marylee]

I hope you post this review on Amazon and save many a hapless person such as myself. =)

[Veronica]

Honest to pete, the first nine books of the series were pretty good. They included character development AND plot (and if you don't already know, Blake actually started off a celibate - not a virgin, but someone who had made the choice not to easily have sex unless she found a relationship she really wanted) AND scary SF things. The ninth book was possibly the best - "Obsidian Butterfly." NONE of Anita's sexual toys were in it - it was her, Edward, and a frighteningly nasty case to be solved in New Mexico. After that is where the series really went to hell, and I stopped with book 11 or 12, when I realized it wasn't going to improve again.

[Serdar]

I can only pray and hope that nothing I write ever sinks to this level.

I've just finished and self-released a book, mostly as a way to get it into a few people's hands while I look for an agent or publisher. Whenever I read reviews like this I get more than a little horrified that somehow, somewhere, I've managed to commit many of the same cardinal sins without knowing it and without being able to stop myself. I know I'm probably wrong -- the people who have read it have told me I'm nowhere nearly this awful -- but maybe it's healthy to worry a little.

As far as LH's book itself goes -- I'm not sure a review like this will warn them off from it. It IS critic-proof: they read it for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the book itself, reasons that are as far removed from literary quality or insight or simple adventure as LH's motives for writing it in the first place. Maybe there's no easy way to get their attention away from that sort of thing and towards other, better books. But I can absolutely understand wanting to go on the record about this one.

[Serdar]

Oh, and the review itself was great, BTW. Marvelous job of dissecting the franchise's inherent and largely uncommented-upon self-indulgence, which I always felt stemmed from something genuinely repulsive...

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Serdar,

I'm sure your book is nowhere near as bad as this was :-)

If you look through my site you'll see that it's comparatively rare that I completely slate a book. This is because I rarely finish books that don't interest me, simply because life is too short. So unless I've been commissioned to review something that turns out to be terrible then I won't do a proper a hatchet job.

The Harlequin though was special as its failures were in and of themselves really quite interesting. I mean the fact that the whole book is like a psychological playground for the author is fascinating, as is the fact that despite the book being anchored so firmly to the author's psychology, it has nothing of interest to say about relationships at all. I'm pretty sure that if the Harlequin had been Hamilton's first book then there's no way she would have been published but, like Ann Rice, she's now in the kind of sales territory where she really can write any old shit and people will buy it.

There are few authors who have such power over their own words (I'm sure she is no longer edited at all) and combine that power with the kind of psychological and creative issues that Hamilton clearly has.

So I'd be honestly surprised if your book was anything like this.

[Serdar]

Jonathan, thanks, and I do see what you mean about this being way out of gamut. The whole LH phenom is fairly rare, come to think of it -- but is it me, or are we seeing more and more best-selling authors who are ending up like Junior with Daddy's credit card and running wild with no supervision? Or has that always been the case? (In other countries -- Japan, for instance -- the vast majority of literary authors are not edited except in the most mechanical way, and up until recently the main function of assigning an editor to a given writer was to decipher their handwriting, since most manuscripts there were submitted in longhand on gridded paper and the rule rather than the exception was that it would be an indecipherable scrawl.)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

The book industry's not in a good way. It's a great time for authors because more books are being published and sold thasn in the past but less so for publishing companies.

If you look at the acknowledgements of a lot of books you'll see authors that thank their editors for emotional and creative support... suggesting that aside from proof reading, an editor would also guide a writer and get them through creative problems and generally be a dispassionate ear.

I think that the squeezing of the publishing houses is resulting in publishers being more willing to not spend the time and money on editing a book they know will sell and staff churn and bigger work loads mean that those editors that DO get to edit have less time to work up the kind of relationship with an author that would mean that they could tell them when they've stepped off the deep end.

I think Ann Rice is a good example of someone in the same field who has also shrugged off editorial supervision. Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin too quite possibly.

[Marylee]

I would also add Clancy and Goodkind to that list!

[Marylee]

Serdar, I still think a review like this would have influence on those not yet introduced to the series, who care at least minimally about the quality of their entertainment. They need to be warned.

Yes, you're right that many will buy it for the reasons you state and Ms. Hamilton is probably somewhat critic-proof. But I also feel there is a burgeoning group of her earlier fans (such as myself) who are undecided about what to do, eternally hopeful that Ms. Hamilton will actually put effort into writing and storytelling more along the lines of earlier works.

P.S. Good luck on your book!

[Andy]

I think your critique is accurate but...

I love these books. Not because the writing is great, it isnt, but I started reading it at the beginning with the hopes that LKH would grow into being a better writer. Never happened. But you really have to get to know Anita to0 appreciate anything in this book. Belive it or not, TH is the best books she has come out with for some time.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Marylee -- I've never read and Goodkind so I couldn't comment but Clancy and also Harrison are good example of writers who have slipped the editorial leash.

I don't think that my review or reviews of its kind will put a dent in her sales. There's a whole other blog post in this topic but I think that populist fantasy operates a lot like popular music... people buy the latest LKH book because they know the name and because they honestly don't know what else to buy.

Some people get fed up with this situation and go out and try and find good stuff to read and then they're into the world of reviews and are likely to be influenced by people like me but that isn't the bulk of fantasy readers, just as in the same way all the negative reviews in the world of a Coldplay album would not dent its sales.

Ultimately people's desire to be conservative and go with a name they know outweighs the voice of one or many critics.

This is why I likened being an LKH fan to being in an abusive relationship. People only have so much money and so much time and while I understand that many people have a relationship with LKH they don't have with other readers it really isn't a god relationship to have as there are writers out there FAR more deserving of people's time and money than Laurell K. Hamilton.

People just need to go to the trouble of looking.

[Serdar]

"People just need to go to the trouble of looking" - which is what one of the functions of a critic is: to guide people to the things that are most worth seeking out so they don't have to do that work themselves.