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The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Oct. 23rd, 2009 07:49 pmAbout 30 pages into this (page 32, to be specific) I realized that this was That Book. I figure everyone has That Book. The book that they read and loved at some point, but later they wanted to read it again and couldn’t find it, remember what it was called, or even who wrote it. For me That Book was one of the few fantasy novels my high school library had (the rest, as I recall, were J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Piers Anthony, and Charles de Lint) and one I likely read somewhere between 5 and 10 times. In it, a young woman was sent under house arrest to a castle in the country where everyone acted strangely and fearful, and the lord’s dashing and angsty brother was blamed for the death of the lord’s child. The heroine wasn’t overly impressed by the angstmuffin and they became friends even as she began to uncover the mythic truth of what happened to the child, and then got caught up in the aftermath of it. It was, inevitably, a book in which the heroine saved the hero.
And then a year or two into college, I desperately wanted to read it again and trolled all the bookstores, but couldn’t find it. It didn’t help that, in between, I somehow came to think that it was a book by Charles de Lint.
So, The Perilous Gard. Near the end of the reign of Mary Tudor, Kate Sutton and her sister, Alicia, are among the ladies who serve the imprisoned Lady Elizabeth. When Alicia, who is the definition of “fluffheaded,” writes Queen Mary a letter regarding her treatment of Elizabeth, the queen decides that Kate must have put her up to it, and exiles Kate to Perilous Gard, a castle in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully, Kate’s guardian, Sir Geoffrey, is kind and the people in the household, though wary, aren’t awful to her. The mystery is why the nearby villagers are scared of her, and seem to think she’ll steal their children, and why Geoffrey’s younger brother, Christopher, is hated by everyone, lives in a leper’s hut, and seems to think all the world’s ills are his fault.
Reading it ten years after I last read it, I can see now that this shaped (or at least helped shape) a lot of my fictional preferences. Particularly mythic narratives (the plot is highly derivative of “Tam Lin,” which is referenced many times in the book, and focuses on the older, darker versions of the fae, as well as the idea of lost cultures and religion), practical, unromantic heroines, and romantic relationships, where the relationship isn’t important because it’s romantic, and it may not even be explicitly romantic until the end. It’s also probably why I prefer dashing and angsty men to come with women (or narratives) who aren’t impressed by their being dashing and angsty, and tend to poke holes in it. I mean, I like Christopher quite a bit (though I suspect I found him much more romantic as a teen) but he’d be rather annoying, I think, without Kate there to go “uhm, yes, let’s be productive instead of elaborating on our woes.”
And then a year or two into college, I desperately wanted to read it again and trolled all the bookstores, but couldn’t find it. It didn’t help that, in between, I somehow came to think that it was a book by Charles de Lint.
So, The Perilous Gard. Near the end of the reign of Mary Tudor, Kate Sutton and her sister, Alicia, are among the ladies who serve the imprisoned Lady Elizabeth. When Alicia, who is the definition of “fluffheaded,” writes Queen Mary a letter regarding her treatment of Elizabeth, the queen decides that Kate must have put her up to it, and exiles Kate to Perilous Gard, a castle in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully, Kate’s guardian, Sir Geoffrey, is kind and the people in the household, though wary, aren’t awful to her. The mystery is why the nearby villagers are scared of her, and seem to think she’ll steal their children, and why Geoffrey’s younger brother, Christopher, is hated by everyone, lives in a leper’s hut, and seems to think all the world’s ills are his fault.
Reading it ten years after I last read it, I can see now that this shaped (or at least helped shape) a lot of my fictional preferences. Particularly mythic narratives (the plot is highly derivative of “Tam Lin,” which is referenced many times in the book, and focuses on the older, darker versions of the fae, as well as the idea of lost cultures and religion), practical, unromantic heroines, and romantic relationships, where the relationship isn’t important because it’s romantic, and it may not even be explicitly romantic until the end. It’s also probably why I prefer dashing and angsty men to come with women (or narratives) who aren’t impressed by their being dashing and angsty, and tend to poke holes in it. I mean, I like Christopher quite a bit (though I suspect I found him much more romantic as a teen) but he’d be rather annoying, I think, without Kate there to go “uhm, yes, let’s be productive instead of elaborating on our woes.”