Cliched Romantic Claptrap: A Matter of Grave Concern

 

A Matter of Grave Concern by Brenda Novak

Montlake Romance

Pp.325

Brenda Novak has written over 50 novels and is a New York Times Bestselling Author, so she clearly has a following, although if trying to place her genre it would be somewhere on the misogynistic side of historical romance. This novel begins with an interesting premise about Abigail Hale, a woman who buys corpses to supply the medical school, run by her father, with cadavers. These corpses are often found illegally by grave robbers or, worse, people who kill in order to have a fresh stock of bodies. 

Resurrectionists by phiz

One of the grave robbers in The London Supply Company, Max Wilder, is actually a nobleman in disguise, trying to find out what happened to his step-sister who has disappeared and he fears she has been murdered. This scenario is interesting, but it all goes rapidly downhill when Abby goes to the home of the leader of the gang, Big Jack, to recover the money they took from her. She is captured and she falls in love with Max, who supposedly protects her, but also initiates her sexually while holding her captive; it’s all very distasteful and the sexual fantasy element seems misguided.

Abby dreams of being a surgeon, although women are forbidden from practicing medicine. Supposedly she has some feminist leanings, but she still likes to be dominated and falls for her captor. She refers often to the plight of women in the late Regency period, “Because she refused to adopt the role society tried to press upon her, she had always fought to fit in, even at the college. Lecturers and students alike couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be content to sit in the corner and darn socks.” Women have few options, apart from to go to the alms-houses, which “provided such a cruel and meagre existence that no one wanted to end up there”, and of course, there is prostitution.

There are offerings of historical information which do not blend with the plot, and land with a clang, such as the mention of “Sir Robert Peel’s new police force” or “the notorious gentleman’s guide to the current brothels and prostitutes in London – Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies.” It is as though Novak wants to educate as well as titivate, and she is far from subtle with the introduction of knowledge, but she also writes of England for an American market, as evidenced by her slips of language. Although Max is a high class noble (Lucien Cavendish, the Duke of Rowenberry), he tells Abby to, ‘Quit being so smug”, which is not an English expression of any era.

Interior with a Sleeping Man and a Woman Darning Socks by Wybrand Hendricks

Max is supposedly heroic and appealing in the way he cares for Abby, and she is drawn to his male magnetism and controlling aspect. “Max Wilder couldn’t be classified as a saint. There was something dangerous about him, something bordering on the uncivilized. From what she had seen so far, he dared more than a man should. He flouted whatever rule he chose to flout, and seemed to have no compunction about asserting his will in any given situation, regardless of how it affected others.” The novel constantly switches viewpoint, and we are meant to believe that a man so used to getting his own way is attracted to someone who might question his authority.

Abby admits her love for Max only to discover he is betrothed to another woman through an old alliance between families; of course it wouldn’t do for him to have any romantic attachment to anyone but her. Although she is now pregnant with his child (and we have been told about the consequences of unwed motherhood), she does the ‘decent thing’ by not telling him. “If she loved him, she would support him in what would make him the happiest, and she knew what that was.” This is patently ridiculous and a romance novel trope; one of many. There are long scenes of what Max and Abby feel for each other, but the actual plot hurries towards the end. In the last few chapters there are stabbings, abduction, hangings, and circumnavigations of the globe which appear to take weeks rather than months.

The sexual politics are at best uncomfortable and at worse downright offensive. As for the narrative, all of the potential interest in a story about grave robbers, medical science, and a young woman trying to negotiate a life in a man’s world is swept away on a torrent of clichéd romantic claptrap.