Veils of Silk cover, Veils of Silk

Veils of Silk

Mary Jo Putney

This is another of those beautiful metallic covers my scanner failed to do justice to. I thought the color scheme---a bronzy gold background to give what otherwise would have been a hopelessly insipid color scheme was a clever way to be both eye catching but still preserve the pastels associated with femininity and romance. And the roses and tiger actually make sense, too. However, my spouse, though he liked the story, hated the cover.

Putney makes something of a specialty of the subgenre my friends in the sf---especially the fanfic communities---call hurt/comfort, and Major Ian Cameron, retired and recently returned to India where he principly carried out his duties, has suffered some serious hurts---mental and physical---and is in intense need of some comfort. Among the last of his duties he must discharge is to deliver the bible, also a journal, of his fellow prisoner, now dead, to the man's young niece, Laura.

When he finally catches up with her she has just lost her stepfather to cholera and is shooting wildly into the night to fend off a man-eating tiger. The niece Lara Alexandrovna, now become Laura Stephensen, presents Ian with some interesting dichotomies--- the foreign child he expected grown up into an Englishwoman with slanted Mongol eyes, afraid of intimacy, yet hinting of Russian passions. Ian, feeling his past has rendered him an unsuitable husband for most women, sees in her a comrade also wounded in soul.

Ian, I liked. The rage, bitterness, and ultimately shame that defines his character at the beginning of the book all have their basis in his experiences, and the slow revelations that peel those layers reveal the character without the sort of easy manipulation to which this sort of story is often prey to. However, the problems of Putney's female characters tend not to come across as believably, and Laura struck me as an especially weak example.

Compared with the grace (if often coupled with depression) with which Ian brings to his situation, Laura, by contrast, sometimes struck me as petulant, and her problems, (relatively speaking) petty. That they have the potential to be just as affecting as his I don't deny, but they didn't come across that way. It didn't help that she resolved her intimacy issues with the same plot device I'd encountered in Barbara Cartland years ago. I thought that resolution was sort of silly then, and I'm still not thrilled with it.

The other difficulty, aside from Laura's problems, was with the depiction of India. Attempting to portray a land so utterly different from western experience, and so wide ranging, is a task to daunt anyone, and I thought, on the whole, that Putney did a reasonably good job, though I sometimes could not avoid the sense of blank spots in the setting. However, it was the names of the fictional cities bothered me most---Cambay was too close to Bombay, and Baipur happens to rhyme with Jaipur, something I wouldn't've known just reading the book, since the province isn't mentioned; however, as it happens, I worked for two Indians for some years, and one of them, as well as their product, gemstone beads, happen to come from Jaipur. These difficulties, possibly unacceptable in a historical, are perhaps less so in a romance.

The white tiger gracing the cover---along with some panda bears---which belong to one of the minor character's menagerie, have definitely confirmed my suspicion of Putney's interest in black and white animals. I thought the reference to penguins in The Rake rather odd, because I wouldn't've thought that much about them was known back then (though this is likely an unreasonable assumption since it was the age of Natural History, after all), and when the penguins, along with a stated interest in zebras (one of my favorites---horese and patterns) showed up in Thunder and Roses that I had identified an ``Author Interest''. Such detections always fascinate me, and fans of this pastime may enjoy looking for the references.

Entertaining, especially for the ``tortured hero'' set. Two and a half stars.

Husband review: It's okay. It has that useless chapter (epilog) at the end to tie up every last detail, even though the story's over. Setting and action were more interesting than the romance, unfortunately. The beginning part is interesting when the protagonists haven't figured out intimacy, but they solve that fairly early, and then there doesn't seem to be anything else (romance wise) that they need to do. Two stars

Sylvus Tarn

Last modified: Wed Sep 16 12:49:36 EDT 1998

Sylvus Tarn