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I read the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body?, and I'm not sure what to think about it. I realize that at the time it was written, it was groundbreaking stuff, but ninety-five years on, it feels like empty froth. The dialogue is dimestore-novel posh and pip-pip-cheerio, and Lord Peter strikes me as an ass. A benign ass with a good heart under his frivolous indolence, but an ass, nonetheless, and there's little of him that interests me. Poor little rich man who wants for nothing and whines about how hard his hobby is, oh, woe is him.
Parker and Bunter are sympathetic figures for putting up with Wimsey's pampered idiosyncrasies, but there's not enough to them beyond their utility to plot advancement and their inexplicable devotion to the self-involved Wimsey to make me want to keep reading never-ending pages of exposition. Maybe future volumes flesh them out, but can they carry this series for thirty-nine more installments if you're irritated by the nominal hero of the piece?
The conclusion was one huge dollop of lazy infodump. Sayers might as well have written, HERE's WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE I'M TOO TIRED TO FINISH THIS in fifty-point font for all the spark it held, and frankly, it would've been less insulting.
And wow at the casual bigotry and racism that comes spilling out amidst the deluge of what is supposed to be droll and witty repartee. "I think there's a Tarbaby in the family tree," says the man whom I'm supposed to find so virtuous and good. No, thank you, and he can stuff the casual anti-Semitism, too. Different time and different context and blah, blah, blah, but it's not something to which I want to devote my time.
Word count: 1,002
Parker and Bunter are sympathetic figures for putting up with Wimsey's pampered idiosyncrasies, but there's not enough to them beyond their utility to plot advancement and their inexplicable devotion to the self-involved Wimsey to make me want to keep reading never-ending pages of exposition. Maybe future volumes flesh them out, but can they carry this series for thirty-nine more installments if you're irritated by the nominal hero of the piece?
The conclusion was one huge dollop of lazy infodump. Sayers might as well have written, HERE's WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE I'M TOO TIRED TO FINISH THIS in fifty-point font for all the spark it held, and frankly, it would've been less insulting.
And wow at the casual bigotry and racism that comes spilling out amidst the deluge of what is supposed to be droll and witty repartee. "I think there's a Tarbaby in the family tree," says the man whom I'm supposed to find so virtuous and good. No, thank you, and he can stuff the casual anti-Semitism, too. Different time and different context and blah, blah, blah, but it's not something to which I want to devote my time.
Word count: 1,002
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