A tale of Victorian lesbianism. Nan a girl from a seaside town falls for a Kitty a male impersenator from a Variety show visiting the town. After a wirlwind romance she follows Kitty to London, where she discovers a new exciting world.

nadia:

Overall I enjoyed it. Not especially inspired but readable. I was impressed with the first section. Good use of the iconography of lesbianism (throwing the flower to her; very reminiscent of marlena in Morocco), and the sense of excitement and wonder mixed with innocence as the narrator's sexual identity unfolds was well evoked. I also liked the detail painted in to the world of the stage - another rich setting in queer terms.

But I was disappointed. It didn't live up to it's early promise. The narrator is irritatingly passive and the pacing is all over the place. I was particularly irritated by the 'evil rich lesbian' section. Not irritated that there was an evil lesbian, I'm fine with that. Although I think she could have done it a bit more cleverly. There is a long history of 'evil lesbian' figures to draw on, both in literature and film but particularly in pulp fiction of the fifties (we have a great picture of an old pulp paperback cover all in reds with the slogan 'satan is a lesbian') it would have been nice to have seen some of that in there. No, what irritated me was the clumsy referancing. I found the name dropping painfully obvious. Slap me if I start to do that.

Interesting for the essay that is going to be on the codifying of lesbianism in early 20th centuary fiction) There were moments where it was done well. The evil lesbian gives violets to the narrator and one of the flowers falls off and gets stepped on. If you don't know the rich symbolism that surrounds violets for a lesbian reader the significance of that would probably pass you by. The nice thing about that was that it didn't call attention to itself. Nice if you get it but if you don't you wouldn't even notice, so it doesn't skew the narrative.

Then there's the sex. And again I approve of lesbian sex being depicted, it's all to often glossed over and that makes it easier for the image of lesbians as non sexual to proliferate. But did she have to do it so badly. Since sex was such a big element I was expecting more of an arc. But there was almost no development in either awareness or technique. The descriptions were repetative and the huge range of discussions of lesbian sexual politics (particularly the lesbian sex wars) was almost completely lacking. Not that I'd want it to be overtly present but that is exactly the sort of thing that could have usefully inflected the narrative.

The book has done something good though. It's been a sucess. A mainstream sucess at that. And that is a big problem. How do we write novels that speak to and of lesbian lives but that don't alienate a wider non lesbian audience. The alternative has been faux lesbianism, dressed down with all the authenticity taken out so as not to scare the hets away. I know that to an intelligent reader of any sexual persuasion it wouldn't matter. It doesn't have to be a barrier to reading, enjoying and understanding a novel (and why should it be? I can identify with het characters dammit why shouldn't het readers find something of themselves in queer characters). But it's surely not just for those that we write. It almost seems as though if we write from a position of difference, any difference, we must effectively write two books at once. That is why I'm looking so hard at codification because I'm sure that's the way to do it and I want to do it well. So the rich layer of subtext, allusion and referance is there and accesible if you have the tools for it. The important part is to make it invisible to those who don't have access to that range of experience and education that would let them recognise it. If it's not invisible it disrupts the text and the uninformed reader will feel left out, frustrated by the shadows half glimpsed at the corners of the page. I think Tipping the Velvet made that mistake and it didn't solve the problem, it's too obvious in its referances and I think there's too much of it that panders to the het reader and not enough of the subtlety that will speak to the queer reader. But at least it tried and it was a sucess, at least commercially. That's important if for no other reason than that it chips away at the idea that fiction about queers is only for queers.