Overseas

[ivyfic]

I am halfway through reading a romance novel where I had a sneaking suspicion that the main character was based on Wilfred Owen. Then about two hundred pages in--oh, yeah, it's Wilfred Owen, only my favorite poet of all time. One slight difference though--Wilfred Owen was gay. So probably would not be madly in love with the naive 25-year-old Mary Sue..

I want so much to like it, but it's having a bit of first book-itis--plots disappearing for hundreds of pages while the characters say gooey things to each other. And there's the small problem of there being a few references to a scene that isn't there. It must have been excised from an earlier draft--probably in first pass, or I'd hope either the copyeditor or proofreader would have caught it.

I will keep going because it is fluffy and entertaining, but this could have been a book that just hit all my buttons and it's...not.

Comments

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Oh, blimey. That's all. Owen did like women, and enjoyed their friendships, but I'm not sure any love letters have survived like the letter he wrote to Sassoon, and if they existed, his brother would have made sure they were published.

Sorry, digressed there...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The character in this book is not Owen, but it's clearly based on Owen. To the point where another character mentions writing an essay comparing the fictional character to Owen (it's a time travel romance). It's just--yeah. Doesn't really ring true.

[charliecochrane.livejournal.com]

Now I'm intrigued, of course. Do you think it was deliberately written from an "I love Wilfred and want to write him loving me" POV? Or any hint of "I think Wilfred was straight and that's what I'm trying to prove"?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think the former. I mean, really, a great percentage of the book is declarations of love. I was hoping for a bit more grittiness, you know, what with him being a WWI soldier dropped into modern times. But apparently the author has decided to not really deal with the horror of that war as expressed in Owen's poems and decided to write for him a happy ending where he gets to be a billionaire and live forever with the (Mary Sue) love of his life, and chuckle at schoolchildren reading his poem.

I mean, I've still got half the book to go, but I'm not really expecting it to pull out of this.

[charliecochrane.livejournal.com]

I've been looking at the goodreads reviews and I suspect you either love it or hate it.

I can understand entirely the bit about not wanting to get down to the real grittiness of war but isn't that exactly why Owen and Sassoon and the like wrote their poems? Isn't it unfair not to recognise that?

Excuse me if I;ve asked this before, but have you read Dominic Hibberd's biography of Owen?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

No I haven't. I just have a book of his poems. I'd read "Dulce et Decorum Est" in school, of course. But then I sang Britten's "War Requiem," which is one of my all-time favorite choral works (that and Rachmaninoff's Vespers) and one of those few transcendant performance experiences of my singing career, and that is all Owen's poetry. There's nothing quite like hearing "Strange Meeting" performed at the end of that work.

This is going to sound very odd, but I didn't study history in school at all. As an adult, I've been working my way through history (yes, all of it), with the ultimate goal of getting to World War I with a real understanding of why it happened. At the moment I'm wallowing around in the Enlightenment, so I haven't quite gotten to the Edwardian era yet. (My dad's already given me a reading list for when I do.)

[charliecochrane.livejournal.com]

Same here. Dropped history as soon as I could (although we did 'do' the war poets for English Lit.)

This is great: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/owen although you need to search the whole collection sometimes to find gems like Who is the God of Canongate. http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/5189?REC=2 I suspect the autor of your book wouldn't have liked him writing about rent boys.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I've never quite managed to understand how your high school gave you such a crappy grounding. Not that I think mine was perfect, but two years of American history and one of world civilizations at a high school level at least gave me more grounding to work stuff out later.

You're making up for it in spades, though.

I do wish I'd been able to take some history in college, but the 400 page readings a week just wasn't happening with a five-course load of engineering stuff...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, I did take American and European history in high school (well enough to get 4s on the AP exam). Only American was mandatory, though. As previously noted, we stopped before the World Wars. And neither course went before the Renaissance. So I got no classical or medieval history at all. I mean, I was supposed to have some of that in middle school, but a) the USSR fell so we spent most of our time on that and b) the teacher who was supposed to teach us classical history was so awful that I'd do my homework in class, in front of her when it was due and she never noticed. And the teacher who taught us Canadian and Mexican history thought that Quebec would secede and BC would defect to the US, and we'd take over the rest of Canada piece by piece, so I'm not really trusting anything he said. (Though I can still name all the provinces and territories.) And none of the Mexican history stuck, though I'm not surprised. It's so dang complicated.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

...well there's an interesting bias.