Transgressions

I've always enjoyed Erastes work, especially Mere Mortals, which was the last of her works I read. Unfortunately, Transgressions failed to capture my imagination. There's nothing I can put my finger on as to why the book didn't do it for me, and it's probably not any one thing. This is a much longer work than most of Erastes' books, and it does move along rather slowly in the beginning, as her books do.

All of the things you'd expect from Erastes are in Transgressions: fully formed three dimensional characters set against a meticulously researched historical background. The background for Transgressions is the English civil war; a rather dark and depressing period that the book describes in vivid detail.

Erastes' protagonists are always flawed, and Transgressions' David and Jonathan definitely have their less-than-desirable qualities. I know from her reviews of other books that Erastes has a great dislike for love-at-first-sight, or "insta-love" as she often puts it. In trying to pair up the feckless David with the puritan Jonathan, she certainly sets herself a challenge. Of course, getting the two into bed together is just the beginning. Events conspire to separate the two young men and send them on journeys through the civil war.

It's Jonathan's journey which is the most trying, and difficult to believe. The major turning point in the rather unlikeable Jonathan's story is his trial by torture at the hands of the sadistic psychopath Michael. The torture scene is very difficult to read, and at the end of it we're led to believe that Jon is a broken man with a Stockholm syndrome-like dependence on his torturer Michael. Not only is this whole sequence difficult to read, but it left me thinking "How could David and Jonathan ever get back together now? Jonathan can never be the same man he was before."

For the next several chapters, Jonathan is completely under Michael's thumb, fearful of every mood swing of the witch hunter. Then, one day, he's 'cured'. Now, Erastes does lay some groundwork for this, planting a few seeds of doubt in Jonathan about Michael, and she works hard to set up Jonathan's epiphany, but I was still left feeling it was a bit too much of an "insta-cure", perhaps more so because Jonathan stays with the witch hunters and works his way up to general.

On the whole, given the trials both men go through, I almost feel like it would have been more 'true' to avoid the happily-ever-after ending (although I know that would have made it almost unpublishable). After the long slow build-up, the reunion and reconnection of the two men seems almost hasty in it's tidy arrangement.

I have to say though, that the issues above are very minor, and very subjective as well. This is a very finely crafted book. I can admire the craftsmanship even though I didn't get into the story. In the end, I don't think it's necessarily the author's fault if a book doesn't grab me. It just wasn't the right story for me.