Choderos de Laclos -- Les Liaisons Dangereuses

I totally told you I'd finish it this time around, and I absolutely did. The ending was worth it, but I won't give it away.

The thing about this novel is, of course, that the main characters are all completely evil. I gather there was a lot of freaking out when it was published, and people thought that Laclos was glamorizing an immoral lifestyle, and things like that. I can definitely see their point -- the evil characters end unhappily, and get punished for their misdeeds, but so do most of the good characters, so you can't really go by that. And it is true that these horrible evil people live very glamorous lives and are easily the most intelligent and witty people in the novel.

But I think Laclos actually does a pretty good job with them, in that their actions never seem anything but evil, and depraved, and not justified. So their lifestyles might seem glamorous, and they get away with much much more than they should, but I would argue that they're never presented as good people, or as people you would want to emulate or become close to. The people who do emulate them end badly, for one thing, and they emulate them only because they don't know any better. As readers, we are given all the tools to know better. It's subtle, but I don't think the author was trying to tell us either to be like these people or not to be.

In hindsight, I think that's probably what people objected to the most strongly; aside from the ending (which I need to just stop mentioning), there isn't a moral judgment on these people. They really do work the system to their own advantage, they manipulate people, they ruin people, they totally screw people over, and for a very long time there are no consequences to them. And that can be kind of scary to read about, because, to quote Oscar Wilde, "The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." It's sort of difficult to take three hundred and fifty pages of these horrible evil people just getting away with everything and being well liked and respected and evil.

Laclos does a really wonderful job with that, actually, both making the characters walk the line between believable and over the top. They're completely consistent; they each have a distinct writing style; they very believably interact with one another; they believably grow and develop throughout the book. Which I imagine is another thing that made people in the 1780s kind of uncomfortable, you really don't like feeling like you know them personally.

Anyway. That, I think, is the book's strongest point. Telling a story in letters and papers looks kind of dated, now, although I know it was a big thing from like, 1770 until 1810. (Of course, it was in vogue in my preteen years to tell every teen story through diary entries, and that got a little old, too, not least because I know of no one ever in the world who records long conversations of dialogue into their journal verbatim.) It feels a little odd, not quite linear. But Laclos really makes it work for him, because he can give everyone their own writing style, and use it to make the book feel more intimate, rather than less. Which I think is a huge accomplishment, and something other writers could learn from (in my brain I am staring very hard at Bram Stoker, hoping he will get the hint despite being dead).

The other thing that Laclos really makes work for him rather than against him is the non-linear nature of the device. I got a little frustrated seeing a letter and not getting the reply to it for several pages (several sometimes means fifteen) but it was no worse than Tolkien, or anybody else who tells a story through diary entries or whatever.

The book does suffer from the major problem of letter writing books, which is that the author has to put something in about how all of this really happened, dammit, and he found these papers under a floorboard in his garret half mouse eaten but still perfectly readable. Okay, he doesn't say that. But he does have to explain how all of these letters came into the publishers possession, and where you can find the "real" copies, and so forth. And I wish he wouldn't. That kind of stuff drives me crazy. On the one hand, he gets all that out of the way much more quickly than Stoker does in Dracula; Stoker actually stops the plot moving forward for a good twenty pages in the middle so each of the six main characters can explain that they have all read each others' accounts, and made copies, and put them in order, and put them in a strong box, and they're going to recopy everything else that happens to them and put that in a strongbox too, etc., etc., etc. To his credit, Laclos gets this whole thing out of the way in about three pages. On the other hand, Stoker's characters wanting to make a record of these events and save them is understandable, assuming the events happened. All of the letters in Laclos's novel being found is completely unbelievable, since even if most of them were saved for sentimental reasons or future blackmail opportunities, all of them being given together into one collection strains credibility. As a reader, the device feels completely unnecessary -- I'd much rather choose to believe that I am magically getting to read the correspondence as it's happening.

The novel is really the story of the friendship between Merteuil and Valmont, and their letters to one another are the most interesting part of it. The letters to and from the other characters are good, and make the book feel much more intimate and detailed, but most of the good ones are between those two. If I were turning it into a play, the clicker, the turning point, would have nothing to do with the two women they set out to ruin, neither Tourvel nor Cecile is very interesting on their own. But the ups and downs of that relationship, and how it really was necessary to both of them, although they didn't want to acknowledge that, is what makes the book so readable.

In the end, the best part of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the worst part are the same; the intimacy one feels with the characters. Achieving that sort of intimacy through their correspondence -- and therefore necesarily at a distance, since the characters think and plan before they write anything down -- is amazing (and I bet the French is even better). But it also makes the book difficult to read, and a little difficult to enjoy, because you don't want to be intimate with these people, and you feel dirty, and writhe, after reading it, and not in a comfortably delighted way. It took me a long time to read (a couple of weeks) because I could only get through a few pages at a sitting.