Hazard of Hearts
Barbara Cartland
I had read only 5% of Barbara Cartland's Hazard of Hearts when I was moved to speak. Alexa, play "Hit me with your best shot"!
You're a real tough cookie
With a long history
Of breaking little hearts like the one in me
That's okay, lets see how you do it
Put up your dukes, let's get down to it
This is the tough cookie in question, Justin Lord Vulcan
He has money, position and women, all the women he wants, including, although I should not mention this to you, that fabulously beautiful bit of muslin, La Flamme. But there have always been women at Vulcan’s heels. It’s rumoured that he treats them badly, but no one knows for sure as most of them are so blindly in love with him that they will not hear a word spoken against the cursed fellow.
Here is the owner of the "little heart" in play, Serena Staverley, arrayed for battle
She wore a simple gown of white muslin, her arms were bare and there were no jewels or ornaments around her neck. Utterly lovely in her simplicity and in complete silence she descended the stairs into the hall.
Oh my God! The dreaded simple muslin frock! How can Justin possibly prevail?
Well, of course he doesn't. And of course he has a heart of gold. You knew that already.
A few days ago I had never read a book by Barbara Cartland. I like to think of myself as widely read -- I needed to remedy this hole in my education. The problem, of course, with reading a book by Cartland, is "Which one?" She wrote 723, including 644 romances. I searched Amazon for the Cartland romance that had the most reviews and found this one. That's probably because a somewhat successful movie was based on it. Do I question Helena Bonham Carter's judgment? Hell, no!
This is not a good novel. The first thing (and I mean the very first paragraph) that struck me was the style. I don't usually consciously notice an author's style, unless it's very good, or very bad. This was the second case. The novel is full of florid, verbose descriptions. Most of them are there to say one thing, "These people are obscenely rich."
And then the plot -- it's a weird combination of complete predictability and random implausible nonsense. So, for instance, I've told you that at 5% I had already foreseen the shape of the overall romance plot. (You would, too.) I did not foresee the specific events. For instance the cocaine-snorting marchioness was a surprise, as was the spinster who explains that she wants to find a husband who will beat her. Let's start with the one you already know about if you've read the blurb. The story begins with Sir Giles Staverley wagering the hand of his daughter in a card game with our hero, Justin Vulcan. Sir Giles loses and then commits suicide by duel.
OK, Sir Giles is a compulsive gambler -- we know that addicts in search of a fix can be irrational. But why did Lord Vulcan take this bet? He knew nothing of Serena when he did it, except that she was to receive £80,000 on her marriage. Vulcan doesn't need or care about the money. If he's the intelligent forward-thinking guy he ought to be, he had to realize that winning this bet would place him in an extremely awkward position. He later explains his thought processes on accepting the bet, and they are, frankly, infantile.
So, we begin the story with a profoundly irrational act that fatally undermines the reader's confidence in our hero's probity. And it doesn't get better. No one in this book has the sense God gave a head of lettuce.
And yet, somehow, it's all fun. The story hangs together, in the sense that exciting stuff happens, and one event leads to another in a way that makes sense, as long as you're under no illusion that the characters are capable of rational decision-making.
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