Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase - The Combo Plate Approach

Two days ago I finished a very unlikely romance novel--Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase. Now, I do have a short list of go-to romance authors, and Loretta Chase is not on that list (it's a very short list), but the setting caught my attention, and it was on sale for $1.99. Since I'm waiting anxiously on the edge of my seat for the release of a non-romance novel (The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik), this seemed like a good one to pass the time.

I have read novels by Loretta Chase before--her "Dressmakers Series." Though they were completely implausible and sort of absurd, I read all four. If memory serves, the characters were interesting and they were suitably steamy, plus the sewing motif was compelling to me.

This book proved to be similar, if a bit less absurd: good characters, steamy enough, and an interesting premise. But it was also truly weird in some ways.

The book was published in 2005 by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin. The Dressmakers Series is Avon, and seems to have been published later. Had Mr. Impossible been published later, I would certainly have suspected the influence of the Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger, a fantastic paranormal romance-adventure novel of manners, the fifth book of which takes place in Egypt.

Mr. Impossible does take place, impossibly enough, in Nineteenth-century Egypt. The (English) heroine is a scholar (gasp!) and a widow who hides behind her brother's convenient masculinity in order to pursue her primary linguistic aspiration, deciphering hieroglyphic writing with the help of the Rosetta Stone (or a rubbing). She is also trying to lay low and avoid (male) attention, given the "unnatural" and "unladylike" urges that her late husband tried condescendingly to condition out of her.

Tropes: the unladylike scholar; the intellectual woman; the repressed widow; the sensual woman who believes her sexuality to be bad; the bad marriage

But wait! There is a complication! The heroine Daphne, or Mrs. Pembroke, becomes entangled in a weird competition for antiquities. There are two major factions at war to see who can gain personal fame, fortune, and power and bring glory to their countries by acquiring the most Egyptian treasure. On the one hand, you have a Frenchman, Duval. On the other, an Englishman, The Golden Devil. This unfolds because our heroine's brother, the poser, who recently acquired a really stunning papyrus rumored to be a map to buried tomb-treasure, has been kidnapped! (gasp!) And the papyrus... stolen! (even louder gasp!)

Enter our hero. Mr. Impossible (also English, and the son of a lord) is a happy-go-lucky defender of the underdog who has found himself in a corrupt top-down society, sent by his father because he just couldn't be tamed in England. He is big and brawny, predictably handsome and toned, though we really don't get a "look" at his body the way some other books "show" rather than "telling." That's fine by me; I'm not interested in his body, and all heroes are built the same anyway. Hard stomachs and narrow waists and whatnot. Shoulders. Pieces and parts. Shrug. Insert [stock description] here. What's cool about this hero is that he likes the heroine for her temper and her scholarly interest. Not that he's interested in antiquities--that's for the bad guys. But he loves the passionate way she talks about languages. And even though he is literally always thinking about taking her clothes off, that really is the draw--he loves her passion. He is content to be thought a "big, dumb ox" and go along with her on her adventure with good humor--his sense of humor is also an appeal. He recognizes Daphne's fears and her strengths and helps her engage the latter to overcome the former. Good stuff. 

Weirdness

Now, the weirdness comes in with the kidnapping/antiquities theft/power struggle--as you might have suspected. It's just too convoluted. And you get these little inset glimpses of the workings of one or another of these power-players throughout, which is very decidedly not a convention of the romance novel. I do not expect romance novels to conform to the conventions, but in some ways this novel really really wants to be very conventional, but we have these sinister figures leering throughout--peppered about rather like bad garnish. They do provide some tension. They provide the opportunity for the hero and heroine to show their strengths, work together, and get closer to (and worried about!) one another. But otherwise... who wants the papyrus and why, which set of goons are we following now, etc.... These things are both convoluted and boring. They extend the novel without being as engaging as a reader might hope. Here, Gail Carriger's Timeless provides a good contrast. Though the hero and heroine are already married by this time, the adventure-romp through Egypt with its assorted supernatural intrigue really is, well, intriguing. And there is relationship development in Carriger's book, even though it is not the beginning of the relationship. In Mr. Impossible, something is off with either the balance or the integration of the two plots. But the book overall is still entertaining. 

What readers will not be expecting is the rate at which murders happen, the level of violence, and the off-hand, casual attitude toward the violence. The narrative shifts to encompass the perspective of the villainous characters, so the casual attitude is appropriate, but reading "He garroted him" or something similar, possibly as the last sentence of a chapter, is still quite unexpected, and feels unnecessary. Anyone concerned with negative representation of Middle-Eastern peoples will not appreciate this book, as it asks the reader to accept that common Egyptians run away from a fight (possibly because they don't want to risk death over foreigners, which is fair), unless they are inspired by loyalty to the benevolent "Master" who doesn't throw them to the crocodiles. And the rest of the Arabs (sic) are bloodthirsty brutes who relish the nature of their mercenary employment.

Also... sex in a tomb. Seriously.

Unbelievability

All of that weirdness notwithstanding, it is very difficult to believe either the heroine's insecurities or how she gets over them. I really think the wrong trope was used here, and that that there should have been some other hang-up preventing the heroine from hopping on the hero at the first available moment--a different kind of bad marriage. Maybe just that the dead husband disrespected her intelligence and condescended to her. Wanting only her body when it was clear she had a brilliant mind and marrying her in order to repress that mind seems like enough; he didn't have to shame her sexually, only use her indifferently. The narrative can't quite bear the weight of all that it's trying to work through, and the interior struggle of the heroine is just... meh.

The Heroine's Journey

To mention Gail Carriger again, her recent theoretical work The Heroine's Journey provides another way of talking about this novel. The heroine starts out fairly isolated--just her and her brother and her intellectual pursuits. As she progresses through her adventure, she gathers a host of different characters around her by virtue of her and the hero's magnetism. They rescue some, inspire others. There's even a mongoose. This becomes a kind of surrogate family, with the hero (who we understand to be irresponsible) assuming responsibility. He even concludes, having been called the father by one of the young men (boys?), that he is the father (figure). They do not, as in Carriger's works, retain this little hodge-podge of a family. The book ends with their arrival back in England, and we do not know if they will return. And not a lot is made of this potential of the heroine to gather a family together. Missed opportunity. But interesting that the seeds are here.

The Verdict

This was an entertaining read, but I don't know that it will merit a reread. The adventure parts wound up being slow. So, for that matter, was the romance, separated by the adventure and hampered by the heroine's hang-ups. I'm also not really interested in reading the rest of the series, though I would gladly follow the adventures of Daphne and... was his name really Rupert? Oh my.