The Lantern group read, week 3

Hello, group readers and friends! Yes, I missed the week 2 roundup. There's this thing called Life that got in the way of a lot of extracurricular activities this week. (The good parts? Teaching my first class and passing my PhD upgrade. Woo-hoo! The bad parts? Succumbing to that coldish flu I was staving off while I was too busy being stressed about the former two parts.) My apologies for being a slacker group reader though, and here I am for the final week.

This group read is hosted by Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings as a part of the RIP VI Challenge. Head over to this post to see other entries for this week in The Lantern. Just a note to say thanks to everyone for having me be a part of this; thanks to Carl for hosting and to Kailana and Heather for providing such thought- and discussion-provoking questions. (Heather...I'm not sure which one is your blog! Let me know and I'll insert the link!)

Please note that for anyone who hasn't read The Lantern, this is as stated the last week of the group read, and this post will contain spoilers. And oddly, there's a spoiler for Rebecca in here too. You have been warned.

I think I have to start by saying outright that overall, I didn't like The Lantern. I also think I may be a minority of one on this for this group [edited to add: I lie! Daphne and Caroline seem equally disappointed and/or disgruntled], so hopefully you can hear me out. It's been interesting reading everyone else's answers for the read along and seeing people loving parts that I don't, and nice to see the opinions that are variant with mine. So please don't hold this against me...but I didn't care for this novel at all.

1. Now that it's all said and done; what did you think of the book? Did you see the ending coming?

Both yes and no. The sections with "Eve" and Dom so closely paralleled what I remember about du Maurier that there were no surprises there for me even if they were a bit opposite each other: Rebecca ends in suicide-by-murder, while The Lantern ends in murder-by-suicide...perhaps. In any case I've spent the entire book feeling like the parallels to Rebecca were too strong for Dom to be a serial killer, murderer of wives, or a plain old bad guy. I wasn't exactly certain how their story would end, but I've never particularly thought that Dom was guilty of anything except being a terrible communicator with a temper problem and a bit of a prat, to be honest.

The section with Benedicte, Pierre, and Marthe did leave me somewhat guessing till the end. But I found it enormously annoying that Benedicte's experiences were more or less explained away by a medical condition, though. It threw me for a loop, but it was not the loop I was looking for.

I felt as manipulated as that stormtrooper.

Of anyone, Benedicte should have been haunted, and I couldn't stand the fact that science steps in to explain away everything that Benedicte experienced. Now, do I believe that Benedicte believes that her impending blindness was the reason for her hauntings? No. But the very concreteness of a medical condition as an offering to explain everything that we've just read, everything that Benedicte experienced, is something that's too solid and too practical for the tone of the novel that we've just read. It's an out, and to me it feels like a convenient one. Especially since it comes so far out of right field. Yes, Marthe was blind so there's family history, but the sudden inclusion of research scientists, doctors, a university, and narrative tapes just felt too incredibly intrusive, too cold and antiseptic, to have any place here. (But someone participating, and I can't remember who, thought that there might be a medical condition involved, so my "coming out of left field" is obviously someone else's reasonable suspicion. Well spotted to whoever it was! What made you suspect this as a possibility?)

I did like that Benedicte herself was a ghost. That doesn't make up for solving her entire plot line with a medical condition, but it was a very nice addition. And in thinking about last week's questions, it gives me a much better understanding of the hauntings that "Eve" experienced, particularly with the lantern.

2. What do you think of the characters? Lawrenson took us on a twisty little ride there, I had trouble deciding who was good and who wasn't for a while there! What do you think of Dom? Of Sabine? Rachel?

This is the point at which I should say that my feeling that The Lantern too closely paralleled Rebecca completely coloured everything that I have to say about this novel. So...know ye now...

So Dom? Knew he wasn't a murderer. Rachel? Figured she was somehow a manipulative wife and somehow I even guessed that she had cancer (probably vestiges of Rebecca in my brain?) Sabine? Well, I don't have anything there but I didn't really read her as a character so much as a catalyst. If not for Sabine, "Eve" probably wouldn't have known as much or be so compelled to try to find so much out. She meant to be a Mrs Danvers, right? And as for "Eve," I do think that the author was trying to go for that freshness and naivety that you find with the narrator of Rebecca, but honestly that naivety didn't read well for me. I'm going to be harsh, but in the romance genre there's a common tag of tstl - too stupid to live - and hey, it's in the Urban Dictionary! - which is found for your basic idiot heroine who makes bad decisions and doesn't seem to be able to manage her own life. Unfortunately at some point about halfway through The Lantern, the idea of tstl got in my head for "Eve," and I never bounced back from that. Particularly in her clinging to a relationship that she outright suspects is with a dangerous man. Property or no, pregnancy or no, if you think your lover has killed his previous wife and possibly others, you get the hell out of there. It's not a matter of saving face, it's a matter of saving your life. As Liz Lemon would say, it's a deal-breaker.

3. Pierre was such a conflicted character. In the end, do you think he killed Marthe and Annette, or did the fall to their deaths because of their blindness?

Oh, he killed them. I've got nothing to show for it, but I've got no reason to doubt it. Particularly if Marthe and Annette knew well enough that they would be vulnerable trying to remove themselves from their hiding place. Plus Pierre tortured kittens as a child, and we know what that means.

4. The book is being compared to Rebecca and Daphne du Maurier's writing. Do you think the book lives up to that description?

See question 2. I really had a problem with this, actually, and was at best pretty disappointed with the book because of that. It's been years since I've read Rebecca (before blogging by quite a spell), and it's been awhile since I've read any du Maurier. I enjoy her books, but there is a certain gothic antiquity to its tone that doesn't always translate well into the modern. I don't think that Lawrenson tried to emulate du Maurier's writing exactly, but I do feel like the plot was pretty well transferred from Book A to Book B which meant that by the time I was about half-way through, I both was no longer interested in "Eve" and Dom's story since I could roughly guess how it would play out. However, I hadn't been engaged well enough with Benedicte to be committed to her story either, and as that was the more original storytelling portion of the book, it turned out to be a disappointment. So in short yes, I think it's perfectly fair to call this a retelling of Rebecca, but no, it didn't live up to the original for me.

5. Did you have any problems with the book? Narration? Plot? The back and forth between two different characters and times?

Um, see questions 1, 2, and 4!

6. Do you think Lawrenson tied both stories together well in the end? Is there anything she could/should have done differently?

It's been a couple of weeks since I finished the novel, but I don't feel like the two stories narratively tied together. I did very much like the attempt to make that tie the place, the geographic location of both stories, but I didn't feel the connection strongly enough to imagine these two stories anything but the most tenuously connected. However I'm quite keen on the tie being the place more than any characters, and would look for that to be strengthened to improve the read for me.

7. One problem I had with the novel is the reliability of the narrators. Do you think any of them were telling the truth? Which ones?

Honestly, I didn't necessarily find anyone particularly unreliable, but more that they told the truth as they knew it or saw it or hid details in order to protect others. But to be fair I'm also rereading The Haunting of Hill House, and if ever you want a truly unreliable narrator, Eleanor is pretty much my gold standard so it could simply be that my expectations of an unreliable narrator are a little different.

----------

Overall I think you can kind of tell my opinion on The Lantern. (Plus, you know, I told you at the start that I didn't enjoy it.) What it boils down to for me was not so much that this was a bad read, but that it was terribly disappointing. I have no problems with retellings or stories inspired by and the like, but it's a tricky road to walk and I don't feel like The Lantern was successful at that. I thought that the modern story of "Eve" and Dom was just derivative, not a re-imagining, and that annoyed me and wore me out till the very end as I was waiting for the plot to run away from du Maurier's - which it never particularly did. The characters even being aware that their story was like Rebecca - and I can't find the exact moment but I know that "Eve" references it at least once - wasn't enough to save it into something slightly more clever and postmodern. The film "Scream" is a better example of a postmodern self-awareness of characters. That self-awareness pervades every frame, whereas in The Lantern a few throwaway references didn't make me feel the characters were self-aware but in fact reminded me that I would probably be better off rereading the original.

Conversely, the story that Benedicte told went from being a "mysterious" yawner to something a lot more interesting, but by the point that her plot picked up, I had already disassociated myself from her story due to the combination of the dueling narrative and the problem I had latching on to Benedicte's story from the very start. It seems like there simply wasn't enough there: there wasn't enough story to Benedicte's story to make it into a fuller plot, and that combined with the predictable first plot didn't make either story particularly compelling to me.

And that's really a shame. There was so much potential to this book, and although I wouldn't necessarily line up for the author's next book I didn't particularly dislike the writing on this one (other than the aforementioned saturation of This-Is-How-Provence-Smells descriptions) and so I wound up feeling like there was an opportunity lost here. There was so much in this novel that could have been done differently. The primary plot with "Eve" and Dom could have thrown a better loop; the secondary plot with Benedicte could have engaged quicker; the two plots could have intertwined both earlier and better for a better investment in both. I was frustrated by the time that I finished The Lantern and left the novel feeling like I'd just ingested a bucket of candy: to start it's nice, then you start being aware that it's not that good for you but you just keep eating, ultimately leaving you unsatisfied, filled with empty calories, and maybe just a little sick to your stomach too. For me, this is no classic. In a couple of months' time all I'm going to remember is that it was too much like Rebecca to be anything other than a book that wanted to be Rebecca. And that's a really too bad, because the potential was there for something much more fulfilling.