skygiants | (no subject)

Touch Not the Cat is one of the few Mary Stewart Gothics I read as a teen and it left a fairly strong but conflicted impression on me, so when

genarti reread it recently I decided the time had come to re-experience it.

The premise: Our Heroine Bryony has a PSYCHIC ROMANTIC LINK WITH .... some cousin! A cousin who refuses to reveal his identity! (But he knows who she is, because she's the only girl cousin. The injustice of this completely poisoned me against the Hypothetical Cousin Love Interest as a teenager and still fills me with irritation today; I would be happier with the book as a whole if Bryony started out as irritated about this as I was.)

Unfortunately, all of Bryony's cousins are definitely Problematic Cousins, so while in theory she's excited to discover the identity of her true love and fall into his arms for a happily-ever-after, in practice she keeps meeting up with her cousins and going "....hm. Um. :/"

The Situation Gets Worse when Bryony returns to her Ancestral Home and discovers that it's quite possible one, both, or all cousins were involved in the tragic and untimely death of her beloved father! This immediately plunges Bryony into a round of What Do We Owe TO Our Psychic Soulmates, What Do We Owe To Ourselves, which admittedly is a game I always enjoy.

Fortunately, it turns out that in fact NO terrible cousin is Bryony's secret soulmate, she's actually spend the past twenty years in a deep mental love affair with the gardener! Who is still some kind of long-long-lost-illegitimate cousin, but it's all MUCH less incesty, and also, he's significantly less of a dick. Bryony breathes a sigh of relief, along with all the rest of us.

(Class issues do provide at least a fig leaf of excuse for the fact that he's kept his identity secret while knowing hers perfectly well. It still irritates me, but .... once they get together they are legitimately cute. Zero to old married couple in the space of three pages!)

Overall a reasonably strong Stewart, and now I gotta reread The Ivy Tree, which is the other one that I half-remember from fifteen years ago.

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From:

sovay

(Class issues do provide at least a fig leaf of excuse for the fact that he's kept his identity secret while knowing hers perfectly well. It still irritates me, but .... once they get together they are legitimately cute. Zero to old married couple in the space of three pages!)

I have not read this one in a number of years due to my mother's hardcover disappearing (I look for a replacement whenever I am in qualified bookstores), but I remember really enjoying it and I am glad to hear it holds up!

From:

skygiants

I did spend the first chapter -- the one where he's like "your dad's dying! also I still can't tell you my identity SORRY THANKS BYE HONEY" - in a profound and visceral state of annoyance, but everything went upwards from there! (The library hardcover I got was quite a nice copy.)

From:

melannen

This is the one I have read!

I remember suspecting the whole way through the book that he was a Secret Illegitimate Cousin, thus explaining the secrecy and the obvious unsuitability of the other cousins, and being slightly disappointed that he was a distant illegitimate cousin instead of a close-in family scandal (partly because that was much less excuse for all the secrecy really, partly because I was waiting for the Dramatic Scandal to come out.)

Also I read it when I was reading a webcomic about a family with the slogan Touch Not The Cat who were all secretly werecats and was deeply disappointed that this did not happen in the book.

From:

genarti

I half-suspected he was some kind of illegitimate cousin and The Soulmate, but he had the whole "Oh, I have a fiancée now, mm; more sausages?" bit at the beginning that successfully threw me off. (I don't remember the explanation for that; I think it's either a dropped hint Bryony misses or an "uh I panicked" moment?) It is a hilariously far back family scandal, though!

However it would have been amazing if they'd all been secretly werecats. I think the one time I tried to read it as a preteen I got disappointed by how the cat on the cover of my grandmother's old copy was apparently NOT indicative of psychic cats as I wanted it to be, so I flounced off to reread Nine Coaches Waiting again. (Which also lacks psychic cats, but has neither psychic humans nor a cat on the cover and in the title.)

From:

skygiants

Yeah, rereading it with full knowledge of the secret, I'm pretty sure it's a dropped smug hint - "I'm going to marry a local girl any day now! It's basically settled! wink wink nudge nudge," which: I still wish she'd spend some more time dragging him at the end of the book for ..... all that.

From:

melannen

There is definitely not enough cat all around for a book with that title and cover.

From:

genarti

Indeed!

To be fair, around the same age I also found This Rough Magic distinctly unsatisfying because it neither contained actual magic NOR any psychic communion with the dolphin on the cover. So I think it just took me a while to wrap my youthful head around Mary Stewart writing in the genres she actually wrote in instead of the ones Anne McCaffrey et al did.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, honestly, the book's greatest flaw is that she never went full werecat. If Dorothy Sayers of all people could do it, Mary Stewart has no excuse!

From:

melannen

Wait, when did Sayers go full werecat? Did I miss it somehow??

From:

osprey_archer

I am reading through some of your old entries that were linked in your book post and - Dorothy Sayers has a werecat story? WHAT. I need the deets!

From:

katherine

I like this novel a lot!

From:

skygiants

It's very enjoyable! Would make a great kdrama. :D

From:

osprey_archer

MARY STEWART. ANY DAY IS A GOOD DAY FOR MARY STEWART.

This is actually not one of my favorites, I think because I read it when I was already in my twenties. As a young teen I would have been all over the psychic soulmate thing.

From:

skygiants

EXTREMELY TRUE.

Psychic soulmate is not one of my bulletproof tropes by any means but I DO like interrogation of the psychic soulmate trope -- 'what if we're psychically linked but also you're an asshole?' Which this book avoids, in the end, and reasonably satisfyingly, but I like that the question comes up, and she makes the decision to turn the person she thinks is her soulmate in anyway!

From:

genarti

:D :D :D

I agree about all of this! I also love the Wandering Poet Cousin Nearly Not Appearing In This Book, who spends ages being a red herring and then shows up to pinch the bridge of his nose over his Problematic Brothers' Life Choices. He doesn't get enough personality for me to know if I enjoy him for himself, but I enjoy his role in the narrative!

What did you think of the italicized sections from the past? I thought they were kind of unnecessary, personally, but opinions may vary.

From:

skygiants

POOR FRANCIS. He gets the house in the end, right? I hope it makes him happy!

I also thought they were so unnecessary I couldn't even figure out how to work them into my review. >.> OK, so Nick was in love with a village girl! They were very star-crossed! We get it!

From:

genarti

He does! And he does spend a lot of time wandering the Cotswolds (is it the Cotswolds?) thinking poetic thoughts and being perhaps pointedly incommunicado to his family, so... I hope he has a certain amount of emotional armor built up with which to deal with the house and all the Ashley Everything.

hahaha RIGHT. They added literally nothing that was not already dealt with in the archival revelations! Except I guess a certain gothic touch, but there was already plenty of that...

From:

antisoppist

Touch not the Cat was my favourite childhood Stewart. I think I felt if you had to have a bloke, you'd want one who was a longstanding friend (and could read your mind), and cooked his own breakfast and was practically useful with hammers and things, not one of those brooding Byronic obnoxious ones.

Growing up in an ancestral home (farm), the idea that at the end you could just go "nah, I'm going to chuck the whole thing and start a new life the other side of the planet" was quite liberating too.

I could have done without all the dodgy poetry and historical romance though, but Rob seemed to have a similar view of "what them again?" every time Bryony brings them up so that made it better. And they are there to explain the inherited telepathy so there is kind of a point to them.

From:

skygiants

Yes, I did love the personality he turned out to have! Very pragmatic, useful around the house, comfortable person to hang out and have picnics with, absolute minimum of drama that's not externally sourced.

The backstory did feel awfully unnecessary, but I did like that Mary Stewart dodged her way out of the common trap of internal poetry by making very sure we all understood upfront that the internal poetry was terrible.

From:

toujours_nigel

I only recently read Touch not the Cat and all its many many shenanigans, with the Twins standing in for each other and the rich kleptomaniac girlfriend and just it's all SO MUCH.
I did very much like Bob. If I was part of that deeply Symbolic family, I'd deny it too, much as the puzzles appealed to me.

From:

skygiants

The poor rich kleptomaniac girlfriend! I liked that she and the heroine ended up friends, I was a bit mad at Bryony for accidentally ditching her goodbye party after she made ALL THAT EFFORT to get her there! They were going to put her up in a hotel! I bet the family was on the hook for a deposit!

From:

cinaed

Okay, my very silly and earnest question is if the title is "Touch Not the Cat" and yet there was no mention of a cat in your review, is there actually no cat in the book?

From:

katherine

There is cat symbolism!

From:

skygiants

Alas, only symbolic cats! The family crest is a cat and the rich kleptomaniac girlfriend mentioned in a comment above is nicknamed Cat, but tragically neither of these things has a ton to do with the actual story.

From:

oracne

This was my first of her novels aside from the Merlin books, which are different. I, too, was disappointed in the Lack of [actual] Cat.

From:

skygiants

I tried and failed to read the Merlin books many times as a kid; I couldn't successfully make it through the dense thicket of nature imagery until I was in college, and even then they didn't particularly do it for me. So I was surprised and pleased to discover the degree to which I enjoyed her Gothics, which have enough absurdity to carry me through!

From:

percysowner

Oh Yay, someone else who couldn't make it through the Merlin saga. They got such great reviews and I just never quite clicked into them. I love her Gothics like mad.

Touch Not The Cat hit right in my "psychic soulmate" period, so I love it. I will say that my favorite was the first Mary Stewart that I read, The Ivy Tree.