#diana telling stephen he should have married sophie…

[anthonybrxdgerton]

Shadow of Night reread

A few days ago I re-read Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness. It took me very little time to do it (which was surprising, considering the fact that i re-read the first book for almost 2 months). I will be doing my reactions about episodes as well (as soon as I re-watch them) and comparing the show to the first book.

My reactions, notes and everything under the cut. There are some trivia I forgot about, things i hope to see in season 2 of A Discovery of Witches, some stuff referencing the next & previous books and what not.

BEWARE OF SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS. IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOKS, DON’T READ THIS POST. Enjoy!

[ a discovery of witches | shadow of night | the book of life | time’s convert ]

the book takes place in 1590 & 1591 (matthew & diana scenes) and 2009 & 2010 (present day scenes) in the span of 7 months

diana's hair change colors when she timewalked into 1590 - they're long, red and curly, and they change - not exactly back - when they return to the present - they're straight, silky strands that were brighter redish gold - just like my mother's hair. it does't say anything about the length though (probably in the next book);

2 of my favorite quotes describing Matthew in this book: The man was as tall as a giraffe. | Bloodred stockings would do more than capture a wandering eye, given that the man who proposed to wear them was a six-foot-three vampire, and most of his height was leg..

“Surely you’ll let me kill him now, de Clermont. I’ve wanted to do so for ages,” Hancock said, cracking his knuckles”. “No. You can’t kill him.” Matthew rubbed a hand over his tired face. “There would be too many questions, and I don’t have the patience to come up with convincing answers at present. - Hancock never liked Kit, I also love Matthew's reasoning lol 

- AT THE SIGHT OF PHILIPPE'S LETTER MATTHEW CRIED VAMPIRE TEARS ESPECIALLY THAT THE LAST TIME MATTHEW SAW PHILIPPE HE COULD BARELY HOLD A PEN IN HIS HANDS AND PHILIPPE LOVED WRITING I AM NOT OKAY 

“Then who . . . ?” I trailed off. “Ysabeau? Baldwin? Surely not Marcus!” I couldn’t believe that Matthew’s mother, his brother, or his son could be involved [in the Congregation] without someone letting it slip. - oh, diana... Question: did Deb knew it was Baldwin when she was writing it? In A Discovery of Witches Matthew acted like he didn't know who was on the Congregation "And Marcus? Find out who besides Peter Knox and Domenico Michele are members of the Congregation."

- Until I have made peace with the past, I will not set foot in France. - we know Gallowglass showed up in Sept-Tours in 1945 when Philippe was dying. Did he go there before too? 

“Explain yourself.” The words were quiet, but they didn't conceal Philippe's fury. - he is nor just mad because Matthew has a wife now. He is furious because he can sense that BOTH Diana and Matthew are from the future - this is what Philippe wants Matthew to explain.

Also, interestingly, reading A Discovery of Witches I've noticed that Baldwin called Philippe "dad" while Matthew calls him "father". Coincidence? But then in the Book of Life Baldwin calls Philippe “father” so... Idk anymore. That being said, verin calls him “Atta”;

“The twelfth century was not good for you, and we allowed you to read entirely too much poetry." - I need to know more now! What exactly did Matthew read in 12th century?

"It is regrettable that you are not going to Florence, then. But it will be a long time before you will be welcomed back to that city, after your latest escapades there." - Matthew, what the heck did you do there? Please tell me you were NOT behind the siege of Florence, i beg you... But then again, Ysabeau did say that Matthew caused wars in Italy when he was bored...

Tamen mea lingua graeca est peior.” “Then we shall not converse in that language either,” murmured Philippe in a pained tone. - HE JUST WANTS TO SPEAK IN GREEK, THAT'S HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE, WHY DOES NOBODY BUT YSABEAU SPEAK IT. BUT that explains why he made sure greeg was still taught in schools later - he wasn’t only looking for Diana, he wanted people to speak his native language too

“Philippe doesn’t seem to think so.” “Then bed him. - lol, if only

"He is my son. I will not fail him.” Philippe’s mouth tightened." PHILIPPE I LOVE YOU NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAYS

“For someone wedded to a witch you are quick to judge the passions of others, Matthaios. Louis is your brother.” Goddess bless us, another brother. - Diana is not happy having huge family lol

I had been wrong. Philippe had not been trying to break Matthew, but only his guilt. Philippe had not failed his son after all. - MY FEELS

“I forgive you,” his father repeated, throwing his arms around his son in a fierce embrace. “I forgive you.” - IT KILLS ME EVERY TIME, THEY BETTER KEEP THIS IN THE SHOW

i love how Philippe just makes Diana his blood daughter without a second thought lol

“Think—and stay alive.” Philippe clapped his hands. - one of my favorite quotes 

Alcides Leontothymos beseeches you to hold this child Diana in your hand. - i am right to  think Philippe is in fact Heracles, right?

Philippe trying his hand at engineering and failing every time will always make me laugh. You may be thousands years old vampire, but some things you will never learn 

Philippe, Diana and Matthew's goodbye always kills me SEASON 2 BETTER DO IT JUSTICE

“Anomalies,” Ysabeau murmured. “Philippe was always looking for anomalies in the world. It is why I still read all the newspapers. It became our habit to look through them each morning.” - Phiippe knew he would not be alive by the time Matthew and Diana were together, but he was always hoping he could see her again. he hoped that Diana would be at least born while he was still alive and he always knew that when Diana and Matthew came back to their times, there would be anomalies throughout history. That's why he told Gallowglass and Verin to search for them too, to keep Diana safe.;

“That’s what Philippe says about Granny,” Gallowglass muttered under his breath. “Just before all hell breaks loose.” Give me more Ysabeau and Philippe you cowards; 

“Matthew knows the book, for his brother gave it to me.- So Mary Sydney knows Godfrey too. Does she know the rest of his siblings?;

[Marcus] made a muffled oath. “Tell your intuition to take a break, for God’s sake.” I need to see Marcus and Ysabeau interacting in season 2, their banter will be amazing

Every time I read Marcus seeing miniatures for the first time and missing Matthew so much kills me too - the show did them dirty, i need more of them together too; 

I forgot how much I ship Marcus & Phoebe;

I wish we could see the requests for magic Diana has received in season 2 and her not being able to do anything about that, i need this conflict SO MUCH. Does she help? What is she doesn’t and her neighbors will out her as a witch? This could be SO GOOD please show, deliver;

Diana’s symbol is rowan tree;

“Baldwin’s never lost a million of anything in his life.” - just throwing this out there because I love Baldwin with all my heart; 

917 is the Knight's of Lazarus telephone number. it belonged to Philippe, then to Matthew and now to Marcus. Philippe chose it to honor Ysabeu's birthday (September 17th). What i wanna know - is it her birthday or re-birth. ALTHOUGH it should be 179 - In Europe (and Philippe was Greek after all) we, unlike Americans, write the day first and the month later;

When Gallowglass learned that Baldwin had been called to Sept-Tours at Ysabeau’s behest for some unspecified emergency involving Matthew, the Gael knew it was only a matter of time before the historical anomalies appeared. i think it was when Diana was kidnapped by Satu, right? Just want to be sure;

Gallowglass is smoking, i completely forgot about it;

Rudolph is flirting with Diana so much (ughhhh) because his source in Congregation told him that Matthew only married her to save her life a.k.a. charges of witchcraft;

Matthew helping Jack with his nightmares is the sweetest thing he's done so far;

One of Philippe's names is Ariel, what are the others?;

 Abraham (Jewish weaver in Prague) comes from Chełm. Is this why Benjamin moved there?;

I need to KNOW the story about Baldwin and Dracula, Deb. Come on.;

“He did. I swear it. Baldwin ordered him to leave or face the same fate as the Impaler. You should have seen Baldwin’s face. The devil himself wouldn’t have disobeyed your brother.” i want to see it too lol;

apparently, Gerbert told Ysabeau about the prophecy about a witch with the blood of the lion and the wolf. I wonder if this was one more reason she was anti-Diana at the beginning or did she dismiss it as something not important;

And speaking of colleagues: How, after years of buying you Harvard bibs and mittens, did I end up with a daughter who teaches at Yale?” good question lol I WANNA KNOW TOO;

Bennu, Stephen's familiar, is a bird.;

#saveEm2k19;

Matthew nearly had a heart attack when he discovered that his beloved Range Rover was not waiting for him in the underground garage. Instead we found a navy sports car with a soft top. hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha it always cracks me up; 

Edward Kelley sent the first page to Rabbi Loew, the second to Hubbard. Who gt the third and who sent it to Diana’s parents?; 

Annie stayed with Shakespeare after Matthew and Diana left and Jack was with Hubbard.;

Also, Matthew made Diana a diplomatic passport for easier traveling;

Overall, I loved this book. There were some boring moment that didn’t move the plot forward at all (like most of Prague, especially the hunting or the play, making the philosopher’s stone with Mary Sydney) that I hope the show will cut it out completely or shorten it. Hopefully, they give us at least 2 episodes of Philippe at Sept-Tours - now that they got 10 episodes, they have a chance to do it properly. I also love the magic lessons from Goody Alsop and other witches, though I suspect, season 2 will only give us 1 witch (but I hope we will see Sophie’s ancestor too. My favorite characters are Philippe, Pierre and Jack and I hope we will get plenty of them (please include Pierre, show!)

#all souls #shadow of night #deborah harkness #ysabeau de clermont

[marginalgloss]

every rope an end

‘The wake stretched away, as true as a taut line now, and after a while he said, ‘He longed for a daughter, I know, and it is very well that he should have one; but I wish she may not prove a platypus to him,’ and he might have added some considerations on marriage and the relations, so often unsatisfactory, between men and women, parents and children, had not Davidge’s voice called out, ‘Every rope an-end,’ cutting the thread of his thought.’

It’s hard to put my finger on a single thing which, for me, makes Clarissa Oakes the weakest instalment so far in Patrick O’Brian’s series of historical novels. It is in many ways the most typical one yet: the one which bears most boldly every trace of his style. But it’s also where all his deficiencies become most apparent. 

As usual, the story picks up almost exactly where the last book left off: with Maturin getting stung by a duck-billed platypus, and Jack Aubrey sailing away from the grim confines of New South Wales towards South America. Their long-postponed mission to Peru is about to be put off once again, first by a twist of fate and then by a new task. Firstly, Jack discovers that a woman has stowed away aboard the surprise: she is Clarissa Harvill, a fugitive from the colonies in a relationship with one of his officers, Oakes. And then he is given a new task: to visit Moahu, a tiny island not far from what is now known as Hawaii, and to settle a dispute between local rulers in favour of the British. 

For a long time the novel is most notable for its total lack of explicit drama. Jack’s annoyance at the presence of a woman on board is emphasised constantly, but it is never really permitted to boil over. All we get is pages of pettiness: smirks and sniggering behind his back, and once or twice punishments that are modest by the standards of the navy. Even the question of what should be done with Clarissa is somewhat sidestepped. There’s a great sequence where Aubrey makes a sort of show out of pretending to sail up to a deserted island to drop her and Oakes off there; how convenient that their boats cannot find a safe space to land. 

Part of this deception is because he understands that he has to be seen by the crew to be doing something, but to punish them too hard would be regarded as insufferable hypocrisy. As Stephen points out: ‘…the service is a sounding-box in which tales echo for ever, and it is perfectly well known throughout the ship that when you were about Oakes’ age you were disrated and turned before the mast for hiding a girl in that very part of the ship.’ And so he takes the only other honourable option open to him: he marries the couple on board.

Except that this is not the end of the deceit. After many pages of slow and sometimes interminable travel, it becomes increasingly apparent that Clarissa has been sleeping around below decks. The reader is never permitted to see any of this directly. As so often in O’Brian, much of the real action happens off stage. We only hear about it in drips of information — first through Maturin’s suspicions about the strange behaviour of the crew, and eventually through his confidential (but chaste) exchanges with Clarissa. It is not long before a sort of tribalism emerges amongst the officers and seamen; every myth about women acting as a disruptive influence on an all-male crew is proved to be worthwhile.

Clarissa herself is sometimes intriguing but ultimately insubstantial. For too long we know nothing about her, except that she is good looking enough to turn heads. And when she does tell her story, it is tragic, but tragic is all it is: it’s a grim retread of every story of every fallen woman from that era. (That she shares the name with the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth century novel is almost certainly not a coincidence.) She has a certain endearing independence, but none of the stage presence of Diana Viliers or Sophie. For most of the book she is simply a cipher for femininity.  

And I was troubled by the novel’s diagnosis that the root of Clarissa’s promiscuity is in her abusive childhood, where she was so often the victim of rape that sex ceased to have any meaning for her. Here she is describing her later life, working in a brothel: 

‘…it has a certain likeness to being at sea: you live a particular life, with your own community, but it is not the life of the world in general and you tend to lose touch with the world in general’s ideas and language – all sorts of things like that, so that when you go out you are as much a stranger as a sailor is on shore. Not that I had much notion of the world in general anyhow, the ordinary normal adult world, never having really seen it. I tried to make it out by novels and plays, but that was not much use: they all went on to such an extent about physical love, as though everything revolved about it, whereas for me it was not much more important than blowing my nose – chastity or unchastity neither here nor there – absurd to make fidelity a matter of private parts: grotesque.’

Parts of this bring to mind the old idiom that everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. This notion of ‘the world in general’ strikes me as oddly anachronistic for the early nineteenth century: such was the diversity of standards of living at that time that I doubt Stephen would have recognised any such thing. And there’s something dismissive of the actuality of sex about this, I think: the author is not especially interested in what happened to Clarissa, more in looking at her as another example of an alienated soul, living out of time, at large in the world. 

Except in her case it is a dismissiveness that’s consistent with the vague sense of contempt so often evident in O’Brian’s work for the sexual impulse in general. So often in this books there is the sense of passion as something dangerous, even monstrous, in human nature; something that must be controlled at all costs. Maturin is the exemplar of this, whereas Jack is the exception that proves the rule — in moral terms, O’Brian allows him certain urges, even to sleep around on his voyages, so long as it occurs in the wider context of maintaining his life as an officer and a married father. In a certain light he has something of the bearing of a prize steer.

There is still a great deal to enjoy in Clarissa Oakes. The dialogue is frequently delightful — some of the author’s best — and as always, there’s a plethora of interest to be found in the minor details of the text. I especially enjoy the dark joke hidden in the novel’s alternate American title of The Truelove; this is a book entirely without romance, and the ship of that name is only a beat-up old whaler of negligible interest. Yet most of this is incidental. This is the first book in this series where I was expecting something more which never came. 

#books #patrick o'brian #clarissa oakes