Wednesday Reading

[melannen]

Hi Dreamwidth!

I am back in the place where I am reading ALL THE NOVELS because being continuously reminded of reality makes me too nauseous to eat so I am avoiding pretty much all social media and am 8 books ahead on my Goodreads challenge for the year. How are you?

Also is there anyone else who has read all the way to the end of Nemesis in the Marcus Didius Falco mysteries and can explain to me WTF WAS THAT ENDING???

I mean admittedly I was blackrom shipping them pretty hard* all along but I don't think it warped my perceptions that much? How was that supposed to suddenly be justifiable?




*These books did make it clear that if you need to flesh out the personal life of a series protagonist without turning it into a soap opera, just filling all four troll romance quadrants ASAP really does make a great shortcut.

Comments

[sgac]

I too felt that the [spoiler] at the end of Nemesis came rather out of left field. I guess you can argue that what spoiler was doing in that book was worse than anything before, or that it was a last straw situation. And it's true that 2000 years ago that sort of thing was more of an option than it is today. But from a 21st century perspective, having spoiler do THAT is a big deal. And it kind of ruins the reader's relationship with spoiler. I'm glad she doesn't seem to be interested in writing any more Marcus Didius Falco books, because I'm not sure I'm interested in reading them.

I did really enjoy the first part of the book though - painful, but good.

[melannen]

Yeah, I had the first Flavia Alba book ready to move on to and then I was like, actually, at this point I kind of want to believe for her sake that she changed her name and went back to Britannia and never interacted with them again. :/

***spoilers***

The only way it makes sense is if they decided that what he was doing was worse? But I didn't really see any evidence of that. The new things we learned about him, afaict, were a) his family is horrible, b) the only really unforgivable things he'd done previously outside of the job (like trashing Maia's house) were done by his family in his name, very likely without his full knowledge, and c) he is capable of outmaneuvering Falco and Petro if he's sufficiently motivated.

I mean, he spent the whole book secretly on their side! I came out of it with a *better* impression of him. Meanwhile Falco and Petro secretly kidnapped and tortured a dude and sent him to a painful protracted death in slavery without any actual evidence of wrongdoing.

If a) and c) were supposed to be sufficient justification, I really don't like what that says about the morality of the series.

I can maybe see the evidence of how he'd bungled dealing with his murderous family being enough to convince Falco that he can't be allowed to stay in a position of power, especially with the possible threats to their families, but at that point Falco surely has enough evidence on him, and enough connections and pull, to get him quietly out of his position and out of Rome without needing to resort to secret murder? Like, the Lepcis Magna thing never even gets mentioned and it was supposed to be the nuclear option! She could probably have sold me on that ending but I feel like there was nothing at all there to support it. Especially with that little monologue about how it makes him a hero.

IDK, she does have a history of really abrupt endings, and IIRC her husband died while she was writing it, so I suspect she'd had that ending in mind from early on and when she got to it, she was too sick of the whole thing to bother leading up to it properly.

I think I am choosing to believe that what really happened in that alley is that Falco said either you fake your death and go into exile or I tell them all and he picked exile and Falco kept up the deception in his memoirs. That seems like a more proportionate response.