Jacky Faber Twelve, or, It's Over At Last
Nov. 26th, 2014 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraActually it's titled Wild Rover No More: Being the last Recorded Account of the Life and Times of Jacky Faber, and to say more will be spoilers.
The author may be dead but in this case the author is actually literally dead, and it's impossible for me to consider the book outside of that fact. I didn't know, when I read book 11, that Meyer had been ill with treatment-resistant Hodgkin's lymphoma, but some time while looking up information about when to expect book 12 I found out he'd died in July. If this was not a posthumous book, a series concluder written by a dying man to wrap things up without needing to call in Brandon Sanderson, I imagine I might have a different set of things to say about it. (Like, "really? we were waiting all this time for *that*?")
Or maybe I wouldn't, because honestly, it more or less did more or less exactly what I expected it to do - a couple of filler episodes of final Wacky Adventures, a ludicrously under-written reconciliation with Jaimy consisting more or less of them finally being in a room together, and finally, the hanging that's been on the wall since book one, faked, of course. (As soon as they mentioned the hunchback I was like, christ, another hunchback? didn't we do this in the previous book?) At no point did Jacky and Jaimy actually have a serious conversation about their past conflicts, or their hopes in life, or how they thought their marriage would work - in fact they don't even talk about getting married at all, they kiss and discuss their hopes that Jaimy can clear Jacky of some spurious treason charges, and then in the next chapter Jacky is telling Amy that they've worked out their differences and plan to be married, and I was like, whaaaa? and went back and reread to see if I had missed something. I hadn't. Either Meyer took the Jacky/Jaimy ship as so completely airtight that it couldn't possibly need any textual justification at this point, or he was aware on some level that it was actually so fucked up that any actual discussion thereof would just undermine it, or he meant to go back later and put in more relationship stuff but was too sick to do it. Who can say.
The Wacky Adventures were fun enough (Jacky is a governess, Jacky is a circus performer) although both had a rather distinct lack of nautical action and I don't think it's a coincidence that the three really good Bloody Jack books (1, 4, and 7) all took place on boats. They were breezy, easy and fun to read at least though which is a lot more than I've been able to say for some of the landlocked adventures. (Although, yikes, was it really necessary to get a pregnant lady hooked on opium? Couldn't that have been left out? I thought Jacky had finally repented of drugging people without their knowledge?)
The hanging... man, the hanging. I'm sorry to keep harping on about death but here we have a dying author "killing" his series with the death of his beloved main character. Only of course she's faking, she's cheating death, she gets the escape that Meyer cannot have. And then she gets a sort of heaven on top of it, the reunion of every named character who can possibly be contrived to be in the geographic area for her wedding, and *finally* she's gonna fuck Jaimy (which they've been Not Doing for the past 12 books/six years of in-universe time). And then the series gets a sort of afterlife of its own with a little author's note encouraging the reader to think of Jacky having more adventures.
But let's talk about this wedding. Jacky is weirdly absent as a driving force from the end of her own series - her climactic escape comes about entirely by the cleverness and love of her friends, and Jacky's only role is to be completely passive (which she finds difficult). The wedding is also planned by Amy without Jacky's knowledge or input, Amy who by a literary conceit somewhere around book four becomes the retroactive in-universe author of the in-universe Jacky Faber books which are understood to be very much like our actual Jacky Faber books. (So Amy is an explicit author avatar.) Amy is also the one main character who *isn't* in on the deception by which the hanging is faked (and so she is of course the POV for it, to try to fake out the reader as long as possible, although this reader was not for one moment faked), and *tries to kill herself on top of Jacky's body* when she believes she's dead. But the conspirators have unloaded her gun. (Then she faints when she finds out Jacky's alive, and when next we see her she's "fuming" and "pouting", which are not so much the emotions I might ascribe to someone who in all seriousness just tried to commit suicide.) So it's not just Jacky but also Amy-the-authorial-stand-in who gets a reprieve from death, who gets rescued by the love that others have for her. As the authorial stand-in, it's only fitting that she give Jacky her happy ending, and then her very last act is to wrap up her own loose thread and decide to marry Ezra-her-dangling-love-interest. But we don't actually see these weddings, because, after all, Heaven would not be plausible in the first person, we just get an assurance that they are impending, and then a little frame-story note claiming that Amy's journal is a real artifact in our present day (in the hands of a direct descendent of Amy's, no less), giving Jacky and Amy, creation and author, as much immortality in our world (remembrance and descendents) as any real person can hope for.
Yeah, this is unavoidably a death book.
The author may be dead but in this case the author is actually literally dead, and it's impossible for me to consider the book outside of that fact. I didn't know, when I read book 11, that Meyer had been ill with treatment-resistant Hodgkin's lymphoma, but some time while looking up information about when to expect book 12 I found out he'd died in July. If this was not a posthumous book, a series concluder written by a dying man to wrap things up without needing to call in Brandon Sanderson, I imagine I might have a different set of things to say about it. (Like, "really? we were waiting all this time for *that*?")
Or maybe I wouldn't, because honestly, it more or less did more or less exactly what I expected it to do - a couple of filler episodes of final Wacky Adventures, a ludicrously under-written reconciliation with Jaimy consisting more or less of them finally being in a room together, and finally, the hanging that's been on the wall since book one, faked, of course. (As soon as they mentioned the hunchback I was like, christ, another hunchback? didn't we do this in the previous book?) At no point did Jacky and Jaimy actually have a serious conversation about their past conflicts, or their hopes in life, or how they thought their marriage would work - in fact they don't even talk about getting married at all, they kiss and discuss their hopes that Jaimy can clear Jacky of some spurious treason charges, and then in the next chapter Jacky is telling Amy that they've worked out their differences and plan to be married, and I was like, whaaaa? and went back and reread to see if I had missed something. I hadn't. Either Meyer took the Jacky/Jaimy ship as so completely airtight that it couldn't possibly need any textual justification at this point, or he was aware on some level that it was actually so fucked up that any actual discussion thereof would just undermine it, or he meant to go back later and put in more relationship stuff but was too sick to do it. Who can say.
The Wacky Adventures were fun enough (Jacky is a governess, Jacky is a circus performer) although both had a rather distinct lack of nautical action and I don't think it's a coincidence that the three really good Bloody Jack books (1, 4, and 7) all took place on boats. They were breezy, easy and fun to read at least though which is a lot more than I've been able to say for some of the landlocked adventures. (Although, yikes, was it really necessary to get a pregnant lady hooked on opium? Couldn't that have been left out? I thought Jacky had finally repented of drugging people without their knowledge?)
The hanging... man, the hanging. I'm sorry to keep harping on about death but here we have a dying author "killing" his series with the death of his beloved main character. Only of course she's faking, she's cheating death, she gets the escape that Meyer cannot have. And then she gets a sort of heaven on top of it, the reunion of every named character who can possibly be contrived to be in the geographic area for her wedding, and *finally* she's gonna fuck Jaimy (which they've been Not Doing for the past 12 books/six years of in-universe time). And then the series gets a sort of afterlife of its own with a little author's note encouraging the reader to think of Jacky having more adventures.
But let's talk about this wedding. Jacky is weirdly absent as a driving force from the end of her own series - her climactic escape comes about entirely by the cleverness and love of her friends, and Jacky's only role is to be completely passive (which she finds difficult). The wedding is also planned by Amy without Jacky's knowledge or input, Amy who by a literary conceit somewhere around book four becomes the retroactive in-universe author of the in-universe Jacky Faber books which are understood to be very much like our actual Jacky Faber books. (So Amy is an explicit author avatar.) Amy is also the one main character who *isn't* in on the deception by which the hanging is faked (and so she is of course the POV for it, to try to fake out the reader as long as possible, although this reader was not for one moment faked), and *tries to kill herself on top of Jacky's body* when she believes she's dead. But the conspirators have unloaded her gun. (Then she faints when she finds out Jacky's alive, and when next we see her she's "fuming" and "pouting", which are not so much the emotions I might ascribe to someone who in all seriousness just tried to commit suicide.) So it's not just Jacky but also Amy-the-authorial-stand-in who gets a reprieve from death, who gets rescued by the love that others have for her. As the authorial stand-in, it's only fitting that she give Jacky her happy ending, and then her very last act is to wrap up her own loose thread and decide to marry Ezra-her-dangling-love-interest. But we don't actually see these weddings, because, after all, Heaven would not be plausible in the first person, we just get an assurance that they are impending, and then a little frame-story note claiming that Amy's journal is a real artifact in our present day (in the hands of a direct descendent of Amy's, no less), giving Jacky and Amy, creation and author, as much immortality in our world (remembrance and descendents) as any real person can hope for.
Yeah, this is unavoidably a death book.
