THE CHATELAINE by M. B. Gilbride

M. B. Gilbride’s latest offering takes us back to the Arthurian Age we all know and love. So far as I am aware, it is the first time he has set a story in that period, despite all the many reviews he has written for MedievalMysteries.com and the promise of a book set in the Constantinople of the Empress Theodora, who must have been the more or less exact contemporary of Queen Guenevere and Princess Morgana.

Now I come to think about it, Theodora had a lot in common with them, too: a reputation for being a beautiful harlot married to a great king who doted on her that only perhaps Guenevere in all history could compete with; and a reputation as an evil, scheming, witch that only Morgana could compete with.

But we’ll come back to Theodora when that other book is finally published. For now, our concerns are with the women in King Arthur’s life.

It being Gilbride, we would expect a very idiosyncratic view of the period, and he does not disappoint. The so-called Dark Ages here are alight and alive and brimming with vitality. And brimming, too, with sex.

But you could hardly have the adventures and misadventures of such as Gilbride’s girl-boy Fleur, his all-woman Guenevere, and his all-man Sir Hugue de Beau-Regard, taking place behind closed doors. Not to mention Morgan le Fay (Princess Morgana), whose magical seduction of her half-brother King Arthur is recounted in intimate and graphic detail – as are some of the irresistible Guenevere’s hilarious sexual adventures. (Definitely not for the narrow-minded, those who refuse to believe Guenevere was unfaithful to Arthur and think that if she was she should be subjected to the Taliban approach to “justice”. Oh, there are puritans cropping up in this society – representatives of an intolerant and repressive Church now invading and attempting to take over the magic realm – but they are the bad guys.)

Morgan’s seduction of Arthur results, as she intended, in the birth of Modred, Arthur’s heir and nemesis, and her continuous scheming to get rid of Arthur and install her son on the throne forms one of the major sub-plots of the novel.

It is a novel of sub-plots, so much so that it is difficult to say which of the three or four major sub-plots is the actual plot. But the sub-plots all intertwine and form a kind of plot among themselves – rather as things happen in real life.

You’ll just have to read it and enjoy it and see for yourself.

This is not only one of the funniest, and in places most moving, stories I have read for a long, long time, but for me now this will always be the Arthur and above all the Guenevere I remember to the exclusion of all other versions, no matter how pseudo-poetic on the one hand or pseudo-historical on the other. This is how I would love to believe it really was.

 

CARNIVAL by M.B.Gilbride

At first glance this novel set in Cartagena, a port in the south-east of Spain (an alternative Spain, not quite the one you and I know and love) seems to be just another “sissy story”.

It is not, believe me.

All right, we have the feminisation of a submissive male at the hands of assorted women – and men – many, though not all, of them taking overt sadistic pleasure in what the poor thing bears (and bares); so I suppose if we must categorise, then it does belong basically to the TG/sissy genre. At the same time though, it is one of the most cross-genre/multi-genre books I have ever read – perhaps because Martin is one of the most complex characters I have ever come across in a work of fiction (or in real life!).

In fact, he is a mass of contradictions.

• He is good, but definitely not virtuous. Good-natured, I suppose I mean. Wanting to help, wanting to please.
• He is tame, but at the same time wild in a way few of us ever are.
• He is timid – yes, a sissy – but with far more courage than anyone else in the book; a “man” who would lay down his life not just for a friend – he has no friends – but for a complete stranger he happens to bump into, literally, while they are both hiding from different pursuers during the Carnival Parade.
• He is a much-abused household skivvy who is also a very professional yoga and aqua-yoga instructor.
• He is as humble as a whipped dog, but with something of the super-hero deep down inside him, and he knows it.

And unlike the poor wimp Pablo (the one he bumps into when they are both hiding in terror during the Carnival procession) Martin has a dream.

This novel was apparently first published under the title Sea Change, which was appropriate (though I prefer Carnival) because Martin’s own dream is to be a mermaid.

I am not going to tell you whether his dream comes true, but I will tell you that this is a world in which mermaids exist. All right, some are girls wearing plastic tails. (I want to try that some time!) But others are girls who have been operated on, turned into mermaids. (This is a theme Gilbride seems to have a bit of a fixation with – it comes up even more dramatically in his story The Rose of Harlow.) And then there are real mermaids – yes, real mermaids. (The result of genetic engineering? Or imports from an alien aquatic world? The story does turn into something distinctly SF at certain points – which Gilbride would interpret as Speculative Fantasy. Well, I did tell you it is cross-genre.)

Another thing: I have referred to Martin here in this review always as “he”, but only because it is difficult to contrive the switch from “he” to “she” in the course of a brief review. Anyone reading the book, however, will definitely be thinking of the protagonist as feminine, as the heroine of the story, long before the author in fact makes the switch from “he” to “she” and “him” to “her”.

One for adults then, but if you are an Adult, don’t miss it!

SEARCHING FOR JIM by Carmenica Diaz

Carmenica Diaz is known for her hard stories of feminine domination, books peopled by broken men and whip-wielding women, but she also writes “straight” TG novels which hardly even classify as Erotica. I had read one of these, Elizabeth Grey, and enjoyed it, had found myself for the first time actually identifying with “a man” who becomes “a woman”.

But it is not until after the change, the cross-over, that I really click in and begin to empathise with (as opposed to sympathising with) this victim of everyone else’s prejudices. So when I came across this book, Searching for Jim, which opens with a woman in a hospital bed in Manchester emerging from a coma only to be told, to her horror, that she used to be a man, I grabbed it.

I mean imagine waking up one morning, finding yourself in a hospital, and being told that!

She has no memories of being a man. Are they telling her the truth, these doctors? Or is this some fiendish psychological experiment, or … or … Or what? She cannot believe it, and yet as soon as she is well enough she sets out in search of Jim, the man they say she used to be. Her search takes her to Australia and – no, I mustn’t spoil it. But it is all utterly sweet and nice, a love story, a dream come true. Erotica at its softest and, yes, sweetest.

The image shows the back cover because I prefer it – this is the person I identify with.