The Shape of Water, Ivanhoe

With one thing and another, I had a fair amount of time for reading over the New Year break. I've decided to split my posting into a few parts, because otherwise it will become one long tl;dr.

It took longer than I thought to finish Ivanhoe, since I didn't have much time for listening, but I finished it yesterday morning, and I thought it ended quite well. The ending has come in for some criticism for being pretty unromantic, with Ivanhoe marrying Lady Rowena and Rebecca going off to Spain, but I'm not sure that's true or even much of a criticism.

We've seen since the beginning that Ivanhoe is in love with Rowena and that the feeling is mutual. The idea that he would instead marry Rebecca only comes about, I think, because Rebecca ends up being such a stronger character than the relatively colorless Rowena -- Scott doesn't devote much time to Rowena, because we already know that Ivanhoe will marry her if he can, whereas it almost feels like he (Scott) became more attached to Rebecca as the story continues.

One other thing that struck me was Scott's portrayal of Richard. He comes across as a hail-fellow-well-met, and I was grousing a bit, because of course Richard was actually a terrible king, but then Scott threw in little gibes about how it was Richard's love of riding around like a knight errant and other sorts of romantic chivalry that made his rule such a mess -- he'd rather do those things than spend time building up institutions and the life of the people -- and I thought it was a good way to make Richard heroic in the story while acknowledging his less than stellar kingship.

I also started a new detective series by Andrea Camilleri, this one set in Sicily. The Shape of Water was a wonderful novel in every way except for the actual detective parts. The characters all seemed to jump off the page, the story was humorous in the right places, Montalban, the lead character, is very appealing, and so on. The only problem is that all his detecting doesn't actually lead anywhere; everything proceeds pretty much as if he weren't there. The victim's nephew exacts revenge on the murderer, then commits suicide, end of story. There's never a role for Montalban to do anything.

Still, the characters and setting were so interesting I'm looking forward to trying to next one in the series, hoping that Camilleri's plotting has improved.