This is a book I borrowed on DC’s recommendation, although not for its literary merit; rather, the opposite. Apparently she found it lying around her family’s hunting cabin up north, and picked it up for a lack of anything better to do at the time. It’s truly awful; a trashy romance novel with ambitions of historical merit...I’d best liken it to Gone With The Wind’s bastard cousin. She lent it to me in the hopes of getting a good, juicy rant out of it, and with the promise of reading the aforementioned novel in exchange. She’s getting the better deal; I finished it not ten minutes ago, and am still scratching my head over the dubious plot.
For instance, it’s not enough that the book (written in 1982 by one Saliee O’Brien, whom I shall return to later) is just mind-bogglingly racist: The main plot hinges on the mixed blood shared by two different families, each obsessed with their dirty little secret. The Leblancs (c’mon, could you make it more obvious?) pride themselves on their plantations and genteel heritage, and are very careful to sweep any mention of their African descent under the metaphorical carpet. In contrast, the Rivands--namely, Riel Rivand, the obsessive patriarch of his clan--actively advertise said descent. Never mind that the actual content of “Negro” (as the author so sensitively puts it) blood is something like one-thirtieth percent and nearly all of the characters involved could (and do) pass for white...this is a serious matter that brings shame on the whole family, dammit!
Also, for a genteel 19th-century Southern clan steeped in tradition, these people do an awful lot of cheating on each other. Illegitimate children are as common as ragweed pollen, and premarital sex is taken as a matter of course. In the family tree provided on the first page (of which half the characters aren’t even mentioned during the action of the book, but whatever), there are no less than five dalliances recorded that resulted in children. Bear in mind only affairs resulting in offspring are recorded for posterity; even more inter-incestuous occurences than that take place in Cajun, but since no kiddies popped up, they’re small potatoes.
Oh, and I mean literally incestuous: At one point, the aforementioned Riel has an illicit encounter with an attractive girl that he later discovers is his half-niece. Of course the entire thing is hushed up, and of course this becomes a Dark Anguished Secret upon which practically the entire plot is hinged.
What little of the plot that does not revolve around the various hook-ups and romantic scheming of the two families, involves an emerald dagger of some importance, that for the life of me I couldn’t understand why the hell they were going on about this stupid knife and why it was so important. Turns out that the person who started all this shit, an attractive redhead named Carita Leblanc, killed her husband and self-aborted to keep the rest of the family from finding out their mixed blood. As for what this dagger means in this sordid state of affairs, your guess is as good as mine. She also destroyed a bunch of journals that detailed the origins of this mixed blood, whereinafter she went crazy and has since spent the remainder of her very very long life (by my count, she lives to see something like five more generations, and is still alive at book’s end) with her servant Consuela, who by the way is her half-sister by Carita’s father and a slave. Phew! Still with us? The book continues in that fashion, only the author also treats us to a phoneticization of Southern accents, which is damned near impossible to read. If I have to see the word “daggah” written one more time, I will have blood.
I was about thiiis close to liking Carita Leblanc, if only because she was one of the few truly interesting, seemingly multi-dimensional characters in the book; plus I’m a bit of a sucker for mental disorders and other signs of Malkavian tendencies. However, aside from her early scene in the bayou and a later, similar scene in which she runs off screaming into the night during a severe storm, she really doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot. Her main contribution to the plotline is being locked up in a spare bedroom, occasionally appearing to rant at length about knives and journals to what seems like ever single other character. She’s the bogeyman of the book, a symbol and a warning to the family of their “horrible secrets”.
The author’s disclaimer boasts that Ms. O’Brien has written a veritable slew of articles, with Cajun being her tenth novel, and also that started her published career at the tender age of fourteen. While this in itself is mildly impressive, I’d like to know who she bought off, because her writing is just bad, bad, bad. We’re talking deep violet prose here; sentences choked with adjectives, and adverbs piled densely on top of each other. Icy looks stab with their intensity...hearts tangle in throats...shuddering cries split the very air. On several occasions I laughed out loud during death scenes. The only time the author abandons her flowery style is during a rather terse and oddly place trial scene, consisting merely of dialogue traded back and forth.
Hardly any of the characters are likeable, or even distinguishable. The only one that I actually liked, and grew semi-fond of, was the briefly mentioned (and quickly killed off) Felix, the son conceived from Riel’s illicit union with his half-niece. Felix has a weak heart--the result of inbreeding, see--and is kind of quiet and pale and skinny, with a talent at the piano. He gets his fifteen pages of fame, then glamourously dies along with his (naturally illegitimate) infant son, the result of a spontaneous affair with a beautiful girl with whom he instantly falls in love.
That’s another thing: Nearly EVERY SINGLE one of the nearly-endless romances in the book is of the instant-true-love sort, where the parties in question glance from across a crowded room and know that theirs is a timeless undying match made by the Fates, and the man frequently proposes marriage on the spot. What the fuh? I mean, yes, I know that this does happen in real life. However, it doesn’t happen that frequently, it shouldn’t happen so consistently in a single family, and couldn’t he at least wait a few weeks before picking out wedding bands? Honestly!
At one point during Cajun, a fistfight breaks out for no discernible reason besides the author wanted to add tension and threw in a random element for suspense.
What gets me is Riel’s reaction to his mother Olive’s announcement of his “mixed” heritage. Instead of going out to crusade for racial equality and equal rights and suchlike, he just sits down and accepts that well, from now on he and all his people will be second-class citizens and they’ll just have to learn tolerance of others’ mistreatment. Huh? He doesn’t even try to upgrade their respectability in the slightest. While it’s dubiously positive that he learns to embrace that particular part of himself (teeny as it may be; c’mon, he’s one-sixteenth black, nobody gives a flying flaming rat’s ass about that kind of shit--or at least they wouldn’t if he didn’t go around announcing it to all and sundry, even publishing it in a local newspaper), the extremes he takes it to are kind of, well, extreme. Breeding chickens to study genetics? Actually, this part was kind of funny, and a nice way of showing his obsessive, gradual slide into madness.
I hated the sudden tablecloth-jerk ending. Riel kills Olive? And then dies himself? Actually, it’s never even specified what he dies of--there’s just a sudden announcement of “last words”, with no apparent cause of death. Granted, he’s a grandfather by that point, so it may have just been of old age (or barring that, overexhertion), but come on...if Carita can survive five or six generations, he can live to see three or four of his own.
A big nitpick I had with this book was the pacing. It was just too damn fast. At about 300 pages long, we get through five generations of the families, with each romance (because of course the characters must all be defined by their relationships and various romantic schemings! Heaven forbid they should simply develop individuality through the sheer force of their personalities!) taking up about ten or fifteen pages apiece. That’s not enough time to develop a vested interest in the characters. Half of the time I was too troubled in telling them apart to pay attention to the plot. “Who’s this? What’s going on now? Wait, why are they here? Who’s the new person?” and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. It’s hard to get absorbed in the mechanics of the plot when you’re simply trying to keep track of who’s sleeping around with whom, let alone why they’re doing this.