Black Silk

Someone somewhere on the Internet listed Judith Ivory’s Black Silk as one of their personal Best Books Evar! So I decided to give it a shot, even though it doesn’t have Navy SEALs…

Yes. This is one of the best romance novels I have ever read.

Everything you expect from a romance novel is turned on it’s head; everything you think is necessary in a hero/heroine is missing. Familiar characters - the rake, the widow, the scheming bastard son, are all rounded and fleshed out beyond expectations. Actions unfold slowly and with great care. Ivory pays an exquisite amount of attention to language, description, characterization.. even at the expense of plot and likability.

Graham, were he transported to the 21st century, would basically be show more a “Bro” in an Apatow knockoff. Rich, smart, and utterly wasting his life in the pursuit of idleness. A fuck-up. In fact, an ugly fuck-up, for being so blithe about it. Ivory manages to make the reader see what a “rake” truly is— the waste of potential, and yet also the joy in being eternally adolescent and carefree.

And the widow? Her name is Submit, which really made me doubt I could get two pages into the book… And then? AND THEN? She is everything unexpected - a child bride who actually truly loved her old, rich husband; a unique character who is not swept away by Graham but instead recognizes him for all of his failings.

Their romance is stuttered, cut short, or delayed for most of the book. They misunderstand each other, ignore each other, and fight each other. However, unlike many other books, I was not exhausted by this. Instead, I was invested and cared. These weren’t “Too Stupid To Live” moments where basic logic/self-awareness is sacrificed for dramatic tension. Both of these characters had to be redeemed, both of them have to change before they could reach any kind of happy ending.

I really enjoyed, most of all, Ivory’s prose. She is lyrical without that sense of grasping at straws I sometimes feel from other, less skilled authors. She also is not afraid to write intelligently, with nice, big multi-syllabic words I don’t often see in genre fiction (“inchoate” and “sybarite” were my favs).

I would give it five stars except that there were a few sacrifices to the plot that I did not like. Characters that show up to ratchet up the tension and then nicely dissipate when not needed are wasted characters to me. Four of five stars show less

November 2024 read: I have 40 pages of hand-written notes and I would like to someday share these coherently

April 2024 read: I am not who I once was. I feel as though a wave crashed over me; as though I was dissolved into molecules, my essence taken apart and reassembled into who I am now. This is all very dramatic but it is also true: I am made whole by the existence of this work of art.

September 2023 read: I started browsing, just looking for some quotes and ended up reading it all again. It's just so good I could cry about it.

July 2023 read: "Just two messy, stupid human beings."

April 2023, second read: fuck this book is amazing. I was more tuned into Submit during this read. I loved her immediately when I first read Black Silk, but show more this time I felt like I saw her from the POV of other characters who also love her. People kind of just fall under her thrall and I GET IT. Also, Graham Wessit, in frustration, telling Submit she fucks people with her mind is the hottest (possibly unintended) compliment I have ever read in my life.

March 2023 read:
Do I have thoughts that are clearer now that the book has been within me for a short while? No. I do not. I am in a haze; uncoordinated. I made over 200 highlights and countless notes and my heart expands with the fullness of this book. I cannot stop thinking about this passage late in the book - about a woman Graham once knew - and it feels apt to share and revisit:

[
. “ . . . the small vase with its Etruscan lines. Simple, but pure and beautiful at heart. As an odd postscript, the same little vase had recently made its way back into Graham’s possession. Jim had given over the lot of Margaret’s things to the local church when she’d died (of unknown causes, in her sleep) just the previous year. The vase had been among these articles when the church had had its annual fair. Graham had purchased it for a third its value. He was rather touched to find it was among her “personal things.” Her husband Jim did not remember where it had come from. . .

People missed things. People didn’t notice; people didn’t care. People’s own misperceptions made black into white, made grey into whatever they wanted it to be. Graham began to think it was all fiction. Life was much less fixed than people imagined it to be. Then the thought of Margaret brought him back. She was a fixed point, someone he felt he had known, though briefly, truly well.”
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for me and my life, Black Silk has become a demarcation and I am living in the after of this book.
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Initial response: I have been flattened, bowed by the excellence of this book. It was a surrender I did not anticipate enjoying so thoroughly. I may have more thoughts later although what even are thoughts at this point? I experienced.
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Many CWs, please take care before reading: death by suicide (MMC's father dies by suicide after killing the MMC's mother - this happens off page but is referred to a few times and another character dies by suicide), infant death, young child death, miscarriage, death during pregnancy, infant illness, frequent alcohol consumption, on-page sex, arranged marriage between 16 year old and 59 year old, revenge porn, infidelity, absentee father show less

The hero: an earl with a reputation so terrible that it obscures the real man and builds on itself independently of his actions. The heroine: the widow of the hero's ex-guardian, a man 43 years older than herself. The dead ex-guardian has disinherited his illegitimate son in favour of his young wife. The illegitimate son sues to overturn the will. The hero is madly attracted to the heroine, who resists. Will they end up together?

Everyone is a mixture of good and bad. Motives are mixed, murky, and sometimes invisible to the characters. As the story proceeds the earl starts to distance himself from his reputation, while the widow begins to question the values of her dead husband.

I quite liked this once I accepted the fogginess of it all. show more The hero behaves badly, so does the heroine and as for the guardian/dead husband! show less

It's hard to review this book. I know it's amazing, but I'm at a loss to explain why I know that.

I guess it's because of the characters. The plot is kinda humdrum - Submit Channing-Downes's husband just died and his will tasks her with delivering a small black box to his wayward cousin, the notorious earl of Netham, Graham Wessit. Her husband's will is also being contested by a vindictive illegitimate son who resents how little he was left, leaving her penniless and homeless. Submit and Graham then run into each other, first to deliver the box, then at the inn she stays at and finally at a house party at Graham's country estate.

The two form a tenuous friendship and romance eventually follows, completely unbidden. After all, Submit is show more recently widowed from a husband she loved dearly and Graham is currently involved with a married American woman.

But it's getting to know the characters that makes the book worthwhile. Both are rich, flawed, seemingly real people. I enjoyed seeing how Graham both was and wasn't the degenerate rake everyone assumes he is. Yes, he's done all manner of risque things - posed for x-rated illustrations, kept an upstairs maid as a mistress, is involved with a married woman - but we spend the entire book seeing more and more of the whole picture, until his decisions begin to look entirely rational. He wasn't just a stock Earl of Slut, indiscriminately screwing his way through society, nor was he at all a good boy. He was just a lonely, unhappy man trying to do what was fun.

As for Submit, she initially comes off as a bit of a stuffy bluestocking. And, well, she is. But she's also irreverent, honest and passionate. She's a worthy adversary and companion for the undisciplined Graham. Where he indulges too much, she reins him in, and vice versa. While nearly opposite, they seem to realize they crave what it is that the other has in abundance. Watching them dance around each other, and grow as people while doing it, was just fascinating.

This is my first Judith Ivory book, and it's definitely not going to be my last. show less

Judith Ivory offers here what seem to me a pair of very original characters that allow her to deftly play with many of the conventions of genre and romance, unraveling fictions within fictions that are interesting to tease out. It is mostly for this reason that I liked the book. Such metatextual convolutions come about partly through the heroine, Submit's own foray into authorship, and the hero Graham's grappling with invented identities in his search for something genuinely himself - he's a celebrity in this Victorian society, a renowned "rake" plagued by the stereotype and his wild past. He's been brought into the public eye through, among other venues, the stage, the law courts, and the pages of magazine serials. Submit, though show more practically Graham's opposite in her absence from society, is also something of a creation herself, having been married at a young and malleable age to a much older man, an academian who was as much mentor as husband. She's widowed at the outset of the book, and her husband remains a shadowy, ambiguous figure forever a forceful, sometimes disturbing presence in the narrative, haunting both hero and heroine in their numerous, sparring encounters.

Graham is also involved with his mistress at the outset - a colorful character who's so much more than "the other woman." I thought she was one of the most interesting, sympathetic aspects of the book, and really got the short end of the stick. I couldn't help thinking, a bit uncharitably, that Graham wasn't good enough for her anyway.

As for the main characters themselves, they are human in the fullest sense of the word - flaws and all. I didn't necessarily *like* either of them, but for the purposes of enjoying the story, I don't think that really mattered, as strange as it sounds. They are both drawn with such depth that their developments and struggles are fascinating to follow (though Graham and his personal growth is more the focus than Submit's.) I was kind of angry at one plot contrivance at the end - it made me almost hate Submit and question whether either of them had really worked free of the forces shaping and manipulating them in their search for self-determination, with love as the reward. (But then again, maybe Ivory wanted to eschew such a pat ending?) Despite this qualm, I'd say Black Silk is a very well written romance. Judith Ivory has delivered another complex, compelling story that leaves me thinking long after I've read it. It's a different kind of romance, but don't let this deviation from formula deter you. This was a very rewarding read, and I only wish the ending had been a little different. show less

An interesting study in identity and reputation. However, I was irritated by the relationship between the hero and his married mistress. Moral considerations aside, I couldn't really see why they stayed together as long as they did.

There were a lot of interesting aspects to this book, especially the (attempted) rich characterizations of the main characters, but somehow they never really cohered for me, and the story as a whole seemed unnecessarily protracted. Also, of many not-quite-making-it phrases in a generally literate book, "firm, green coitus" seemed particularly unfortunate to me.