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crack_van2006-11-29 12:54 am
nos4a2no9.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2006-11-29 12:54 am
Roots Rain by Kat Allison (PG-13)
Roots Rain by Kat Allison (PG-13)
Fandom: DUE SOUTH
Pairing: Fraser/Kowalski (sorta)
Author's Website: Kat Allison's Fiction
Why this must be read:
This will probably be my last rec for the month, so I thought I'd end with a pimp for my very favorite first-person Fraser-voice fic. Fraser's got a tricky narrative POV to pin down. If you break out the thesaurus and go to town the result is pretty much a syntactical and grammatical train wreck, but if you don't nail those unique Fraser-isms (multi-syllabic words, references to literature and mythology, jokes about the RCMP Regulations Manual) well, then you're not reading a story about Our Favorite Mountie, you're reading about some guy who uses million-dollar words but doesn't have the heart to match. For me, no one handles Fraser better than Kat in this short story about a case gone wrong and how Fraser (and Ray) deal with the inevitable fallout.
The story relies on that old hallmark of crime fiction: someone is murdering prostitutes. In the midst of the resultign jurisdictional turf war between the Feds and the cops of the 2-7th Fraser is shuffled back to Canada (err, the Consulate) and cut out of the investigation. The case isn't solved so much as derailed and results in a particularily distasteful judicial compromise. Fraser, naturally, doesn't take kindly to this extreme miscarriage of justice, and I think this has to be one of the very few stories in the fandom to tackle the question of how Fraser copes when the real world robs him of the ability to make it right. After all, one of the many personality quirks that makes this character so compelling (and so difficult to write) is the conflict between Fraser's man-out-of-time sense of duty and honor and his occupation as a modern-day police officer. Kat writes Fraser as a person well aware of the shortcomings and compromises that inform so much of police work; she also reminds us that Fraser is the sort of person to expect more from himself and his fellow police. There is a heartbreaking confrontation between Ray and Fraser at the 2-7; Ray is torn up over the way the case was closed without the perpetrator being brought to justice and his bitter argument with Fraser ("You're a cop, right? Same as me. So where do you get off, where the hell do you get off, being so--so fucking innocent?") crystallizes the incompatibility of Fraser-the-cop and Fraser-the-man. It also illustrates something fundamental about the Fraser/Ray dynamic: Fraser is, or at least he's perceived as, superhuman in many ways. He's always the best cop, the best man, and the most noble soul in the room. Ray finds that standard as difficult to live up to as Fraser himself does, and the fight between them in the story has the feeling of a conflict long brewing. It's what I would have wanted to see in the episode "Mountie on the Bounty," although I doubt the conflict between Ray and Fraser would have been as complexly rendered even in the show as it is in Kat's story.
Oh, and the English grad student in me loved Fraser's stream-of-consciousness exploration of Gerard Manly Hopkins (author of "Victoria's poem" The Windhover) and the comparisons that can be drawn between Fraser's life and Hopkins'. I'm always a little nervous when an author attempts to include wank in their fanfics; usually it comes off as pretentious or awkward. But Kat does amazing things with Hopkins, poetry and Fraser, so much so that I can't even think of a published author who has done half as well with the same kind of material. So, this is all interesting stuff, and a refreshing change of pace from the plethora of romance/comedy fics that populate this fandom. Those stories are all terrific (and I love NC-17 dS stories as much as the next gal) but give this one a try. It'll make you see Fraser in a new light, and it's also educational! I mean...who doesn't want to know just a little bit more about late-Victorian poetry?
Some memories I'll never be sure of, and others I can't seem to lose. Thinking of Hopkins, I find myself, against my will, recalling the class in English poetry I took in that mutinous year before I'd entered cadet training, when I still thought a different path was possible for me, that I could force my life into some direction other than the one that seemed preordained for it. The professor had been a disappointment--an aging Anglophile with a pretentious mid-Atlantic accent, who clearly was embittered at ending his career in St. George, BC, and who curried cheap favor with his students by regaling them with racy gossip about the intimate details of the poets' lives, rather than discussing their work.
On the day we were to finish up the Victorians, he had arrived late, and then spent much of the session on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's relationship with her father and the ins and outs of the Swinburne-Rossetti circle. Hopkins was last on the syllabus, and as the minutes ticked on I'd grown more and more apprehensive, feeling oddly as if a friend were waiting for a public humiliation.
With five minutes left to the bell, when my classmates were beginning to fold up their notebooks, he had intoned, "And last we come ... to the eccentric and unfortunate Gerard Manley Hopkins." I'd folded my hands on the desk, staring down at them. "A most peculiar poet, unpublished during his lifetime, little read for years after that, and even now admired from a distance more often than truly understood." He blew his nose, cleared his throat, glanced at the clock and went on.
"God knows what he might have written if the Jesuits hadn't gotten their claws into him at Oxford--but he became, not just a priest, but a parish priest." The honking voice insinuated an amused contempt. "Subsequently exiled to various low and brutish urban slums, where he suffered under the belief that the wretched lives and miserable deaths of his drunken, impoverished, illiterate parishioners were somehow of greater moment than his poetry. Why, he even believed that he had some obligation, and even a capacity, to be of help to them, when apparently they mostly found him, though oddly endearing, to also be more than slightly bizarre, unnerving in his zealotry, and in many respects an alien and inhuman presence."
Another glance at the clock; four minutes left. "The poems themselves--" a dismissive waggle of the fingers-- "though usually religious in theme, are notably sensual, in language and imagery. Likely they were the poor chap's only sensual outlet, deeply repressed as he was, and when they dried up, under the onslaught of his trivial clerical duties... well, one can only hope that his parishioners' squalid sins gave him some sort of vicarious thrill; although it's clear he harbored--unnatural inclinations--" A suggestive twitch of the eyebrows, and much snickering from the louts in the back row-- "it also seems evident that he died ... at the age of 44 ... a virgin." That had sent the back row into spasms of guffawing, while I sat with my eyes locked on my balled fists, certain that my own shameful secrets were blazing over my head like hellfire.
Right, so I hope all of that has convinced you of the greatness of this story. Thanks for indulging me and my rambling pontifications on dS fic for the past month; it's been fun, and I can't wait to see what the next driver has in store for us in January. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season, and that we all come back to loads of new fanfic.
Roots Rain
Fandom: DUE SOUTH
Pairing: Fraser/Kowalski (sorta)
Author's Website: Kat Allison's Fiction
Why this must be read:
This will probably be my last rec for the month, so I thought I'd end with a pimp for my very favorite first-person Fraser-voice fic. Fraser's got a tricky narrative POV to pin down. If you break out the thesaurus and go to town the result is pretty much a syntactical and grammatical train wreck, but if you don't nail those unique Fraser-isms (multi-syllabic words, references to literature and mythology, jokes about the RCMP Regulations Manual) well, then you're not reading a story about Our Favorite Mountie, you're reading about some guy who uses million-dollar words but doesn't have the heart to match. For me, no one handles Fraser better than Kat in this short story about a case gone wrong and how Fraser (and Ray) deal with the inevitable fallout.
The story relies on that old hallmark of crime fiction: someone is murdering prostitutes. In the midst of the resultign jurisdictional turf war between the Feds and the cops of the 2-7th Fraser is shuffled back to Canada (err, the Consulate) and cut out of the investigation. The case isn't solved so much as derailed and results in a particularily distasteful judicial compromise. Fraser, naturally, doesn't take kindly to this extreme miscarriage of justice, and I think this has to be one of the very few stories in the fandom to tackle the question of how Fraser copes when the real world robs him of the ability to make it right. After all, one of the many personality quirks that makes this character so compelling (and so difficult to write) is the conflict between Fraser's man-out-of-time sense of duty and honor and his occupation as a modern-day police officer. Kat writes Fraser as a person well aware of the shortcomings and compromises that inform so much of police work; she also reminds us that Fraser is the sort of person to expect more from himself and his fellow police. There is a heartbreaking confrontation between Ray and Fraser at the 2-7; Ray is torn up over the way the case was closed without the perpetrator being brought to justice and his bitter argument with Fraser ("You're a cop, right? Same as me. So where do you get off, where the hell do you get off, being so--so fucking innocent?") crystallizes the incompatibility of Fraser-the-cop and Fraser-the-man. It also illustrates something fundamental about the Fraser/Ray dynamic: Fraser is, or at least he's perceived as, superhuman in many ways. He's always the best cop, the best man, and the most noble soul in the room. Ray finds that standard as difficult to live up to as Fraser himself does, and the fight between them in the story has the feeling of a conflict long brewing. It's what I would have wanted to see in the episode "Mountie on the Bounty," although I doubt the conflict between Ray and Fraser would have been as complexly rendered even in the show as it is in Kat's story.
Oh, and the English grad student in me loved Fraser's stream-of-consciousness exploration of Gerard Manly Hopkins (author of "Victoria's poem" The Windhover) and the comparisons that can be drawn between Fraser's life and Hopkins'. I'm always a little nervous when an author attempts to include wank in their fanfics; usually it comes off as pretentious or awkward. But Kat does amazing things with Hopkins, poetry and Fraser, so much so that I can't even think of a published author who has done half as well with the same kind of material. So, this is all interesting stuff, and a refreshing change of pace from the plethora of romance/comedy fics that populate this fandom. Those stories are all terrific (and I love NC-17 dS stories as much as the next gal) but give this one a try. It'll make you see Fraser in a new light, and it's also educational! I mean...who doesn't want to know just a little bit more about late-Victorian poetry?
Some memories I'll never be sure of, and others I can't seem to lose. Thinking of Hopkins, I find myself, against my will, recalling the class in English poetry I took in that mutinous year before I'd entered cadet training, when I still thought a different path was possible for me, that I could force my life into some direction other than the one that seemed preordained for it. The professor had been a disappointment--an aging Anglophile with a pretentious mid-Atlantic accent, who clearly was embittered at ending his career in St. George, BC, and who curried cheap favor with his students by regaling them with racy gossip about the intimate details of the poets' lives, rather than discussing their work.
On the day we were to finish up the Victorians, he had arrived late, and then spent much of the session on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's relationship with her father and the ins and outs of the Swinburne-Rossetti circle. Hopkins was last on the syllabus, and as the minutes ticked on I'd grown more and more apprehensive, feeling oddly as if a friend were waiting for a public humiliation.
With five minutes left to the bell, when my classmates were beginning to fold up their notebooks, he had intoned, "And last we come ... to the eccentric and unfortunate Gerard Manley Hopkins." I'd folded my hands on the desk, staring down at them. "A most peculiar poet, unpublished during his lifetime, little read for years after that, and even now admired from a distance more often than truly understood." He blew his nose, cleared his throat, glanced at the clock and went on.
"God knows what he might have written if the Jesuits hadn't gotten their claws into him at Oxford--but he became, not just a priest, but a parish priest." The honking voice insinuated an amused contempt. "Subsequently exiled to various low and brutish urban slums, where he suffered under the belief that the wretched lives and miserable deaths of his drunken, impoverished, illiterate parishioners were somehow of greater moment than his poetry. Why, he even believed that he had some obligation, and even a capacity, to be of help to them, when apparently they mostly found him, though oddly endearing, to also be more than slightly bizarre, unnerving in his zealotry, and in many respects an alien and inhuman presence."
Another glance at the clock; four minutes left. "The poems themselves--" a dismissive waggle of the fingers-- "though usually religious in theme, are notably sensual, in language and imagery. Likely they were the poor chap's only sensual outlet, deeply repressed as he was, and when they dried up, under the onslaught of his trivial clerical duties... well, one can only hope that his parishioners' squalid sins gave him some sort of vicarious thrill; although it's clear he harbored--unnatural inclinations--" A suggestive twitch of the eyebrows, and much snickering from the louts in the back row-- "it also seems evident that he died ... at the age of 44 ... a virgin." That had sent the back row into spasms of guffawing, while I sat with my eyes locked on my balled fists, certain that my own shameful secrets were blazing over my head like hellfire.
Right, so I hope all of that has convinced you of the greatness of this story. Thanks for indulging me and my rambling pontifications on dS fic for the past month; it's been fun, and I can't wait to see what the next driver has in store for us in January. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season, and that we all come back to loads of new fanfic.
Roots Rain