Wow, I’m finding this one a bit hard going.
I don’t know what it is, because Violet Winspear is usually good for some
enjoyable, if sometimes overdramatic, reading. This book, however, feels like
it is missing a plot and is thus entirely stretched-out banter with nothing underneath
it. The banter itself is occasionally entertaining, but without something moving
it forward…
Anyway, here’s the conclusion of Rapture of
the Desert:
Chrys spends the night at the Russian
grandmother’s castle and wakes well-rested. Anton talks her into going to the
beach with him. As he puts it: “I must bathe in English waters before I make my
return to the desert” (87). Chrys talks to Anton as if she really hates him and
has proof that he kills babies or something. And then Anton overbearingly doesn’t
pay any attention to what she actually wants to do. It’s intended to be a Taming of the Shrew dynamic, I suppose, but things seem a bit mismatched to
me. She accuses him of having a harem, he says, of course I don’t, but why are
you so afraid of love. And then they swim in the ocean and have a picnic.
After the swim, Prince Anton gives her one searing
kiss: a “shock of pleasure, contracting all the many tiny, sentiently placed
nerves in her slim, cloistered body” (102). Basically, they should just have
sex and I think both of them need a therapist. One kiss, and then Chrys heads
back to her life and Prince Anton to his.
We fade back in after Chrys’ sister’s
wedding. Chrys has taken that job as a companion . She’s
accompanying Maud Christie, an adventurous widow, on a dig in Egypt. Maud’s now
deceased husband was an archaeologist and Maud got the travelling bug from him.
Maud and Chrys arrive in to Port Said and Chrys is quite taken by the city: “the
gleaming minarets and domes of an oriental city, floating on the horizon, and making
her heart beat so much faster than the admiration of any man” (109). The last
third of the book is set ‘in the desert’ and is mostly about how Chrys falls in
love with ‘the East’. She really really likes the desert. She even suggests
that her training as a ballerina has prepared her for desert life, not a particularly common suggestion in sheik romances.
As we might expect, Prince Anton shows up
again in Egypt. First, he’s in ‘disguise’ as a mysterious Arab who appears wherever Maud and Chrys are travelling. He’s got a thin mustache, so
Chrys doesn’t initially recognize him. He watches her get her pocket picked and
then sends her a beautiful Hand of Fatima to make up for it.
Maud and Chrys meet up with a young Dutch archaeologist
who worked with Maud’s husband and will be on the dig with them. As they head
out into the desert, Maud worries about Chrys’ safety (around the native men,
naturally) – she’s obviously read a lot of orientalist fiction. Fortunately (or unfortunately)
there are no abductions in the book. Instead, as they are riding towards the
desert camp, Maud’s horse is startled and runs away with her and Prince Anton
somehow happens to be there to rescue her. He takes Maud and Chrys to his house
(called Belle Tigresse) to recover.
It’s a beautiful house, of course; it also
has an excessive number of fur throws. Like a Siberian tiger skin which matches
the colour of Chrys’ hair. Anton and Chrys spar and then he strong-arms her
into a kiss, quotes Oscar Wilde at her and proposes. She accepts, despite
the fact that she won’t be able to be a top ballerina if she marries him (he
has no interest in facilitating that). No one has changed their behavior and nothing
is really resolved. It’s an abrupt ending. The novel didn't follow the typical structure of a sheik romance, which could have worked in its favour, but for all that it just ended up feeling aimless, to me. A lesson in the effect of genre structure on genre readers?
Well, that was Rapture of the Desert. It
started off so well, with the Russian prince named Casenove and the passionate ballerina (!), but maybe the next one will be better. Next up, twenties film magazine fun!
