Recent Reading, October 22 - Not convinced

[davidgillon]

I've got a bunch of new reads to discuss at some point - everything since August if not June, but I've been doing a lot of re-reading, including all of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels and novellas.

And mostly I've been thinking about Lesley May.

 

Constable Lesley May is series protagonist Constable Peter Grant's best mate, with them going through police college together. In the first book, Rivers of London, she's very seriously injured with her face being essentially destroyed from nose down to jaw when she's possessed by the revenant spirit of Mr Punch. The best plastic surgery really isn't up to the job of rebuilding her a face, but when she develops the same capability for magic that Peter has (at the end of Moon Over Soho), she's allowed back on the job hiding her disfigurement/protecting her face behind a plastic mask. A lot is made of Lesley having the promise to be the best copper of her generation, and unlike Peter she's a copper's copper (ie a little bit to the right of Genghis Khan in her views on law and order - picture Jack Nicholson doing his "You want the truth? You aren't ready for the truth!" speech from A Few Good Men).

Things progress well enough through a couple of books, but at the end of Broken Homes Lesley tasers Peter to allow series big-bad the Faceless Man* to escape, then disappears to become his minion.

Or iow facial disfiguration makes you evil.

This is obviously a problematic trope, and it's one that keeps turning up, to the point the BFI had to announce it would refuse to fund films that feature it. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/29/bfi-to-refuse-funding-for-films-with-facially-scarred-villains

Everyone's working theory is that the Faceless Man suborned Lesley by promising to use magic to rebuild her face, and that does turn out to be the case as she soon pops up with her old face back, or indeed the face of anyone she wants.

Now it's surprising to see Aaronovitch using this trope because he's more at home with subverting tropes, and diversity is a big thing in Rivers of London, with Peter being mixed race and a great deal of care taken to ensure that white characters are described in exactly the same way as non-white.

The Faceless Man is finally brought down by Peter in Lies Sleeping, where it's revealed that Lesley really went over to the dark side because she forced the Faceless Man to promise he would kill Mr Punch.

I'm not convinced.

Peter left Mr Punch pinned to the first London Bridge, in Roman Londinium, by a spear through his chest. That's arguably worse than killing him. If Lesley disagreed, she never mentioned it to Peter, her best mate, whose policing decisions she is merciless in criticising.

In a couple of monologues to Peter, Martin Chorley, the Faceless Man, reveals that he wants a spiritual rebirth of the country in his own ideal of Britain. He doesn't say white, but it's pretty much implied. Think Nigel Farage with superpowers and even fewer morals. And Lesley has clearly bought into his fascist Daily Mail idyll and is working to make it happen. Which isn't too strange, it's clear she's socially very conservative, believing people should consent to be policed and let the police get on with it (cf "You want the truth? You're not ready for the truth!").

And then there's the circumstances in which she's turned, probably during the early part of Broken Homes (as she's clearly working for Chorley during the mid-book confrontation with Varvara Sidorovna, when she repeately tells Varvara to call her boss (Chorley) rather than go ahead with her plan of killing Peter and Lesley. By that point she knows that Chorley has almost certainly been experimenting on, and then murdering women to work out the logistics of rebuilding her face. It's pretty much implicit in the evidence they have, and it has to have been an explicit part of his approach to her. And Lesley, this paragon of policing, the hope of a generation, doesn't have a problem with that.

Lesley doesn't go over to the dark side because she wanted revenge above all else. It isn't that she wanted Britain reborn as a fascist Daily Mail state, and it isn't that she wanted her face rebuilt. It's clearly all of the above.

And that's a problem.

Even if it wasn't a problem we're left with the impression that it's the desire to have her face rebuilt that drew her to the dark side for four books (Broken Homes, Foxglove Summer, The Hanging Tree, Lies Sleeping). And that's a problem in its own right.

In unrelated Rivers of London thoughts, I'm betting on the foxes being designed as a WWII stay-behind unit, sort of a furrier Auxiliary Force. And the Society of the Rose may know something about that.

And some of Aaronovitch's hidden puns are truly terrible - for example the master of the Sons of Wayland is Grace Yutani.

* The Faceless Man actually looks perfectly normal, he just has a spell that makes it difficult to recall what he looks like.

 

 

Comments

[skygiants]

I read the first few books and wrote a glowing post in which I enthused about how rare it was for a character like Leslie May to get a major facial disfiguration and not have it completely define her character, and then I read Broken Homes and was so annoyed about the switch on this front that I have not read another one since. Eventually I'll get over it but it did feel like a personal affront after I'd been telling everyone how excited I was about that element in particular!

[hilarita]

This is doing nothing to make me want to read any more of the series. I read one, was 'meh'.

[lokifan]

Yeeeeah ouch. Not great. And as you say, especially surprising from him. (I've only read the first one and they're not for me, but clearly effort was being made re: diversity!)

Also not great to have it specifically be a woman whose driving passion is to have her face non-disfigured, imo - like much as I'd assume there's a lot of physical pain/difficulty involved, and it's a legit thing to want for purely aesthetic reasons, female villains being driven by vanity is its own thing.