A Strange Excursion into Reader-Response Theory

For once, I haven’t doubled up any of books at the Lifeline Bookfest, not even The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as I initially feared.

And, as I alluded in my earlier post, buying Phineas Redux did complete my collection of the Pallister series; I’ve now found the other five—which were, naturally enough, stored far apart from one another, on completely different bookcases, and, in fact, in completely different rooms—so I can assert its completion confidently now.

Of course, they’re largely different editions, which is annoying in a series of books: half of them are Oxford paperbacks, but in two different versions, and another two are inexpensive Wordsworth reprints.

But the one I’m thinking of replacing is the Panther edition—a television tie-in edition from 1975—of the first novel, Can You Forgive Her?

But not because it’s a television tie-in; I don’t particularly like that, but it’s not sufficient cause to replace the book.

No, it’s because of the introduction by Simon Raven, who had a hand in the adaptation of the series for television.

More specifically, it’s because of this quote about Alice Vavasour, called in the blurb “one of the most striking heroines in Victorian fiction”:

Alice, though keen on sexy men, is terrified about what is going to happen on her wedding night, and keeps shuttling from George to Grey and back, not so much because one cheats and the other is a bore, but because she funks consummation with either. How the matter is resolved, I leave you to read for yourself; with this caveat, however, that while you will be interested you will not be wholly convinced, and that well before the end you will long for Alice to be hit on the head with a mallet and then raped (which is not, I hardly need to add, what happens). (xix)

Well, that should certainly cure the poor girl’s wedding-night jitters! So that’s a relief.

I suppose you do have to admire the confidence with which he inscribes that horrific desire to the entirety of his readership—and to think I wasted all that time pondering the complexities of various reader-response theories.

I have never read any of Simon Raven’s novels—although I understand, and the quote can be found here on the Wikipedia page, that his Shadows in the Grass was called “the filthiest cricket book ever written,” which, frankly, is quite an achievement.

In fact, the quotes on the Wikipedia page make both broad and specific use of the word “cad” in a density I haven’t seen since I last read T. H. White, while even his obituary claimed that his characters are “guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all.”

Whether the quote about Alice is meant to be taken literally or ironically, I think the same can be said of Simon Raven as of his characters.