The trouble with rakes in romances is that the author is constantly telling us that they are ever so bad and ever so nototrious and oh so dangerous but then they don't actually do anything rakish except throw out a few sexual innuendoes and maybe get the heroine to try oral sex.
The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London's Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!
Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was. I liked it. It wasn't a stand out in my brain but that's not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn't do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.
This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch's lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn't do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.
First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let's take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione's SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).
The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character's throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot. World views need to be presented. Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality. An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.
The second problem is that I don't believe that anyone actually knows what a rake is, because we don't have them anymore. They are extinct.
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