Merline Lovelace
Lady of the Upper Kingdom
Harlequin Historical #320, c1996
genre Romance
 

I must confess at the outset to a certain bias against genre romance, particularly genre historical romance which is often simply a costume drama with historical inaccuracies right and left and modern people (with modern attitudes) transposed into the past.

In that respect, this offering is better than most.  Ms. Lovelace knows that there's a difference between Macedonians and Greeks, though she has her Egyptian characters dismiss that point as unimportant (no doubt meant to reflect an assumed disconcern on the part of her readers).  She gets a number of other historical details correct, as well.  It's far better than Noel Gerson's earlier romance offering, The Golden Lyre.  Her background as an air force colonel also helps her on the (too few) forays into military matters.  In fact, it's unfortunate that she exploited her military experience so little, but then, battles and marches and logistics are not what romance readers are interested in.

One must understand that this is full-blown formulaic romance, with all the attendant genre constraints and expectations.  We have a brave-but-unpolished hero, a feisty heroine, and a story which focuses almost exclusively on their love affair, from their initial meeting to their permanent commitment to live happily ever after.  In between comes the usual stock of situational factors and bad guys set on separating them.  We also have the romance genre point-of-view ping-pong between hero and heroine that becomes downright difficult to follow, as well as the requisite heaving breasts, fainting spells, straining manhoods, and other assorted naughty bits clothed in romance cliches.  I don't much care for these.  Other readers may be unphased.

If one can put up with the above conventions, the writing style is not impossible, as I've found in other genre romances, point-of-view problems aside.  Alexander even makes the occasional appearance -- although he is off-stage for most of the book.  As noted above, even the history is better than what one usually finds in genre historical romance, although the characters are -- true to type -- mostly twentieth-century persons with occasional references to funny aspects of ancient attitudes thrown in for good measure.  Lovelace does not, at the heart of it, really understand those attitudes.  Or if she does, she chooses to ignore them in favor of romance expectations.  After all, her heroine is named "Farah."  Well, actually, she's named Farahapsut but that is just a bastardized Egyptian form of a modern name she apparently wants to employ.  Lovelace refers to the character as Farah for most of the narrative -- which dredges up unfortunate connections to Charlie's middle angel in any (US) reader old enough to have been alive and aware during the 1970s.

But the real problem with this book is that the basic plot reads very much the same as Judith Tarr's Lord of the Two Lands.  Tarr's book had more to it than a romance while Lovelace's book is, of course, genre romance (so romance constitutes the majority of the plot).  But the romance plot in both books is quite similar.  If imitation is, indeed, the highest form of flattery, then Lovelace has flattered Tarr enormously.  Sometimes, on reading a book, one may suspect that the author was influenced by a scene or aspect from another author's work.  Rarely is the similarity so obvious.  Now, to be perfectly fair, Ms. Lovelace has contacted me and had this to say:

"I submitted the proposal for my book and it was accepted by my editor in Jan 1994. I didn't even know about Lord of The Two Lands until I 'met' Judith during on-line chats about Egyptian history. At the time, I was well into the process of writing my novel and thoroughly enjoyed exchanging points of view with her about the land that fascinated us both so much. In fact, I even sent her portions of my manuscript to review."

"In retrospect, I agree I should have acknowledged the conversations I had with Judy on-line.  She's so knowledgeable and so interesting and she certainly pointed me in the direction of some super research material."