TBR Wednesday: Rangoon by Christine Monson

Rangoon Christine Monson Romance novel    1985 Rating: C

Rangoon is a book I jotted down as hating, really hating, in my excel spreadsheet.  But when I ran across it at a library book sale awhile back I could not remember even one detail about it.  Usually with F-rated books, the memories are vivid, so this made me curious. I bought it and picked it out for this month's TBR Wednesday.  Then I started reading it.  I swear I've never touched this book before.  Either that or I've got early onset Alzheimer's.  

Lysistrata Herriott - a terribly gimicky name, but I suppose truly appropriate to the character here - is a social exile in Boston where she was wooed and dumped by a cousin of hers.  In the aftermath of the Civil War, which claimed much of her family, Lysistrata and her father attempt to start over in the most unlikely place: Burma.  He is a doctor and she has nursing experience, so the two of them travel around the world to serve as medics to the English colonists living there.  Unfortunately the same social walls Lysistrata kicked against in Boston are present in Burma.  Nursing is a frowned upon profession for genteel young ladies.  Lysistrata is expected to keep house instead, a task that is both overwhelming and necessary in a climate that breeds everything all the time.  Any extra time she will be allowed to flirt and try to catch a husband out of one of the many, many young eligibles seeking their fortune in this part of the East.

She can choose anyone, except for Richard Harley.  Richard is the result child of the pairing of an English lord and an Indian princess.  So he is both, and neither.  The Indians think him half-caste and socially beneath them.  The English allow him their company only because he is useful in his connections.  Richard heads a thriving trade industry and can get things no one else can and will sell them reasonably in the right circumstances.  Lysistrata is drawn to his dark good looks and to his mystery, but Richard knows they can never be together.  For her to choose him would be ruinous.   

Both a strength and weakness of this novel is the setting.   Burma - when was the last time you read a book set in 19th century Burma?  Never probably.   What an interesting setting choice for a book.  And Monson does it credit.  There are myriad details of the city of Rangoon, the cultures (both home-grown and imported), the food, the religious beliefs, the weather, the flora, the fauna.  I always enjoy a good cultures-colliding story, and this one definitely is that.  Lysistrata, however, is no ugly American.  She embraces this different life and tries to learn as much of it as she can.   Monson also includes a great deal about how the British behaved during their occupation and planned advancement, socially if not militarily.  One thing this book is not is a wallpaper historical.  The reader gets a real sense for time and place.  

However all this detail frequently impedes the progress of the storyline.  While it is interesting to watch as Lysistrata befriends her household staff and butts heads with the British hospital administrator over the hospital's racist policies, it would be more interesting to see how Lysistrata and Richard Harley interact together.  Instead he comes and goes in the story as she battles cholera and prejudice, occasionally championing her, sometimes just humiliating her.  

Lysistrata is a bit hard to like for a heroine.  She very independent.  She's very educated.  She's quite PC for her day and age and doesn't hesitate to mouth off to various and sundry about any notion that takes root in her consciousness.  While she is well meaning and brave, fanatics are always a little tiresome, aren't they?  All that passion and no graciousness at all.  And they just won't listen.

Richard isn't any more accessible.  He's angry about what the British are doing and want to do to Burma and resentful of the real estate his half-Indian heritage allots to him: no place he doesn't carve out himself.  But he's patient and opaque about all of it.  He sleeps with married British ladies.  He seduces the local girls.   He sleeps with his harem girls at his mountain hideaway.  (That's right - he's has at least 3 other lovers during the course of the novel.) He quietly scuttles British plans.  He thrusts Lysistrata away from himself.  Over and over again.

The two of them either fight or make out.  She hates him.  She loves him.  He wants to take her.  He wants to leave her.  He wants to humiliate her.  He must protect her. 

So I'm thinking, "Get it on, already, and be done with it.  All this angst, it's a bit fatiguing."  But then they do get it on, and there's more angst.  More.  For then we learn that his family is a nest of psychopathic vipers and his business associates are all murderers as well.  Mountain hideaway politics get brutal, and copious amounts of blood flow.  The novel turns brutal, and I'm wondering if any one of this cast of thousands is a nice guy.  The competition for Redeeming Secondary Character is not stiff.  Then add to this mix a mess of British politics, a frame job, and an unpleasant incarceration and you have it: Rangoon. 

Still, this is not the worst novel I've ever read and the hero while a bit grim and pessimistic is not a beast.    Big points must be given for the Burma setting.  But ultimately there's as much good as bad here, so the final grade has to be a C.

tags: books  romance novels  tbr wednesday