1. The Duke and I (aka Bridgerton)

By Julia Quinn

Since my final book for 2021 was the ultra-masculine Razorblade Tears, I might as well kick off 2022 with ultra-feminine The Duke and I (better known as Bridgerton). 

Truth be known, I had already watched the popular Netflix series not long after it debuted in December 2020.  Yet I couldn’t bring myself to post the actual Bridgerton cover featuring the two main stars of the show.  That version was lent to me by a friend who enjoys mainstream fiction because I told her I had watched Bridgerton.  So let this be known that I did not voluntarily seek out a Julia Quinn novel!

If Razorblade Tears was the equivalent of having a bloody rare steak at a roadside diner, The Duke & I was like eating cotton candy at the fair - delightful at first, but you soon tire of its cloying sweetness and end up throwing the rest away.  I’m perfectly fine with reading a romance that's insubstantial as spun sugar, but what galled me was that Jill Barnett blurb on the cover hailing Julia Quinn as “truly our contemporary Jane Austen”.  Jesus bloody Christ on a cross.  If Quinn is truly today’s Jane Austen, the future of fiction is in serious trouble indeed.

But that’s not all.  Towards the end of The Duke and I, Quinn had the nerve to regurgitate the famous Austen quote:  "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Ugh, the hubris!  Not only did Quinn not write nearly as well as Austen, she lacked any keen observation into the fictional world she had created, if you could even call it a creation. That’s what made Austen so appealing to generations of readers, both male and female – it wasn’t just the charming romance or courtship that was enjoyable, but Austen’s ability to find humour in the ritual of finding a suitable marriage partner and the reality of a woman’s place in Napoleonic England. 

Even in Pride and Prejudice, the interactions between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy were quite limited, as much of the novel was devoted to exploring the society they inhabited and the people they interacted with. 

So I was quite disappointed to see the relationship between Simon and Daphne as not only the main plot line, but the only plot line in the entire book.  Since I had watched the Bridgerton series before reading the book, imagine my complete surprise when I made the realization that the Netflix series actually added additional side characters and subplots that were not found in the source material!  So we shouldn’t be comparing The Duke and I to an Austen novel, but to The King and I, the musical.  The writing contained very little exposition - it was pretty much all dialogue.  Quite stagey and hammy dialogue too, like an American attempting to sound like a witty aristocratic English person, but coming off as something straight out of a Harlequin romance.  Wait a minute... this was exactly like a Harlequin romance!   

Usually, a film or TV adaptation had to simplify or streamline key elements of the source novel, but in the case of The Duke and I, the roles were reversed.  Quinn’s narrative was so shallow and the characters so two-dimensional, the Bridgerton writers took liberties by creating a color blind society and adding more supporting characters with their respective arcs and subplots.   Who can blame them?  In Quinn’s novel, there was no attempt to describe the socio-economic aspects of the ton.  Quinn is an American who graduated from Harvard, so it wouldn’t have been very hard for her to create a world that was a little more than bland 18th century pseudo-British society.  I think that was one reason why the Bridgerton writers wanted to create a diverse cast, to help make the world of Bridgerton more appealing and universal, because they realized there wasn’t much that would distinguish it from the more quality stuff coming out of the BBC.

At the end of the book, Quinn writes about growing up on a steady diet of the Sweet Dreams series, which was the teen division of Harlequin. Quinn herself admitted that her dream was to write adult romances in the vein of Harlequin romances, so her work should be appraised in that context.  The Duke and I was pure escapism and a guilty pleasure, and should be enjoyed as such (if you can get over the awfully corny parts) – just don’t make any aspirations to being anything close to a Jane Austen novel!

As a romance, it was decent enough, if very vanilla.  Unsurprisingly, much time was spent making Simon the Duke dark, brooding, well-educated, well-travelled and sophisticated.  He was handsome and arrogant and like Mr Darcy, his arrogance masked a secret, yada yada.  Daphne on the other hand, was the typical heroine.  Functioning as a mere cipher for the reader, she was thus totally BORING.  Even though she had four brothers, she could pack a punch and ride a horse well, she had no interest in math or science.  As a young woman of her time, Daphne was very naïve and simple.  All she wanted in life was to be happily married with many children.  At some point, when she had married the Duke, she committed a morally questionable act on her half-drunk husband.  Great!  Finally, some real conflict!  The heroine should be allowed to make grievous mistakes, yet the disappointing thing was she never really owned up to her actions and nothing was ever seriously at stake.   It was thus all about having earth-shattering marital sex with a hot Duke domesticating the Duke and having him come around to the idea of having lots of kids.

Olman asked me how The Duke and I compared to a Georgette Heyer book.  Based on what I know of Heyer from Olman’s reviews, her books are much more substantial.  So Olman thinks I’d really like Heyer.  After all, he has likened her books to a “delicious box of chocolates”.  

I think I will have to give Georgette Heyer a try.  Or better yet, read more Jane Austen.  I have only read two.  And I have at least two more on my on-deck shelf that I have yet to read.