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lesbiassparrow ([personal profile] lesbiassparrow) wrote2008-08-23 09:35 pm
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Have you ever read or watched something with a section that made you go 'What? WHAT???? I can't believe they are saying/doing/advocating that!' And then you trundle off to look at what people said in their reviews but can't find a single person mentioning it at all. And you wonder why they wouldn't mention because surely it can't just be you alone who had this reaction.

Something someone said recently about P.D. James made me remember that this was my experience reading Original Sin. I like P.D, James and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is one of my favourite detective novels, but this book, well, it was just bizarre. There's a part of the story that revolves around a disgraced Anglican priest who was disgraced for interfering with young boys. It's not rape, but there seems to have certainly been touching and inappropriate behaviour. However, the story and the characters within it see it as a shocking and dreadful thing that he should have lost his parish because some lower class boys were encouraged to beef up their stories by well-meaning and obtrusive people when everyone knows those sort of boys would say anything and nothing too terrible happened. No, honestly, that was pretty much the gist of it, especially the bit about the lower class boys. I read that bit several times because I thought I must have been misreading it. But when I went to look not a single reviewer even mentioned that bit; the closest I came was a comment in The Guardian about James' tory (small t) politics and view of England.

[identity profile] lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com 2008-08-24 01:32 am (UTC)(link)
I didn't manage to finish it - I kept reading on thinking that she had to double back and contradict that part, but no...

The truly amazing thing to me was (as I said) that Not. One. Single. Reviewer. Mentioned. This. Bit. How do you miss that? How do you not mention it, especially given all the past and current scandals?