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Oh, Maester Luwin, no! There's one fewer person with sanity and scruples in the amoral, atavistic cesspool that is Westeros.
Ditto for poor, honorable Ser Rodrik Cassel. At this point, I wouldn't mind terribly if Westeros was obliterated by an asteroid strike. There's scarcely a decent person among them.
I'm still slogging doggedly through Rebecca. The prose is so beautiful, but it's utterly wasted on this tedious story and its insipid, idiotic protagonist. Unreliable narrators can be fantastic, but in order for them to work for me, there must be an underlying initial conviction. For example, I think Harry Potter from POA onward is a spoiled, pig-headed, self-righteous twit, and his incessant flailing and foaming at the mouth about the nefarious evil of Professor Snape turned out to be wrong, but by God, he was wrong with conviction. He picked a viewpoint and bulldogged it until presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. He did wrong with a perverse integrity.
The nimrod in Rebecca can't even find convictions to be flouted. She vacillates wildly between one "belief" and another. In the space of a scene, she goes from being intimidated by her companion to thinking him wonderful to thinking him a duplicitous liar to thinking herself superior to such dull, petty little men, never mind that she herself is dull as old dishwater and only half so appealing. She's flighty and stupid and boorish and inept and childish and so incapable of handling her own affairs that she breaks a knick knack in the morning room, hides the evidence because OMG, what if Mrs. Danvers sees?, and then begs her husband to tell Mrs. Danvers the truth for her when the latter comes to Mr. de Winter with the erroneous suspicion that it was stolen by a fellow servant. This is the hero, the weight upon which the story rests? You've got to be kidding me. Harry Potter might have been an obnoxious teenager, but the boy was willing to take ALL THE LUMPS, including ones not meant for him. He did this at eleven. Eleven. And I'm supposed to feel sorry for a woman in her twenties who's afraid that the servants in her sprawling mansion will think poorly of her and snicker at her tatty, cheap underwear? There are so many books I could be reading. Like the Joe Hill book that came the day before yesterday. Only two hundred turgid, deathless pages left.~sobs~
In happier news, part XXII of Sprache is almost done, and then it's back to the saga of Haldir and the machinations of Galadriel and Mithrandir to reunite him with his wayward love.
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