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shroud-of-empire · 2 months

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Review: So Speaks the Heart by Joyce Carlow

I had low expectations going in, and yet this was still somehow worse than I anticipated!

So Speaks the Heart—published in 1997, and currently available for free through the Internet Archive—was brought to my attention by @suburbanbeatnik last week, and the cover looked so absurd that I immediately knew I had to read it. And I tried. I really tried. But I ultimately ended up DNF'ing it around the halfway mark when the lead characters abruptly died, then reincarnated centuries later as different people in sixteenth-century France.

It technically makes more sense in context, but, like, barely.

The premise

So: The plot of this book revolves around "immortals"—vaguely supernatural beings who reincarnate every few centuries to steer historically important figures towards their destinies. Aside from possessing the ability to reincarnate, immortals are also beautiful, intelligent, infallible, and psychic, frequently receiving premonitions from the future, as well as insights into other people's minds. In some ways, they're like an unholy hybrid of stereotypical romance vampires and high-fantasy elves—their powers are as unclear as they are expansive, and their inherent beauty and goodness means that they can do no wrong. Our protagonists, a physician named Leandra and a charioteer named Alexander, are a pair of Immortals who were born in the sixth-century Byzantine Empire to steer Justinian and Theodora towards their fates as Emperor and Empress of Rome.

I'll admit at this point that I disliked this premise from the start. It's very Great Man History™, except the "great men" are random nobodies with vague, unattainable powers, pushing people around like chess pieces for reasons that are unclear to everyone involved. The magically-perfect, always-right nature of the Immortals also makes them dull characters to read, and blaming every historical event on Immortal meddling only serves to reduce the agency of the few humans in the story—the end result is a book where everyone is underdeveloped and boring. The Immortals don't need character development, because they were born perfect, and the humans don't get character development, because the Immortals do everything for them. I do think the concept of star-crossed lovers dying over and over again only to find each other in new lifetimes could have been done well, but it was wasted here, shackled to all of this weird baggage.

The characters

Leandra and Alexander obviously compose the "main" couple, but Justinian and Theodora also soak up a lot of page time, serving as the secondary, human protagonists to their perfect, Immortal friends. Leandra is the Immortal "assigned" to Theodora, like the most irritating kind of guardian angel, and Alexander is similarly "assigned" to Justinian, so all four of them come as a set. Every single one of these characters is terrible.

Leandra gets the most focus out of anyone, and consequentially, she is the absolute worst. She's the type of protagonist who can be generously described as an "escapist character"—again, because of her Immortal status, she's automatically right about everything, she receives special insights that nobody else understands, and she's beautiful beyond words (and way prettier than Theodora, obviously). She's also a virgin, which makes her even more special; while every other woman in the Hippodrome sells her body for fun, Leandra never gives into the temptation. (For what it's worth, the author doesn't harp on this as much as I expected, but it does come up more than once, and it's used as yet another metric by which to compare Leandra and Theodora—Leandra being superior, naturally.) Leandra also has medical training, by which I mean that she magically understands complex microbiological concepts that were not discovered until the Scientific Revolution. Not only does she believe in germ theory, she also understands what bacteria are, and how antibiotics work. How does she know these things? Because she's special. It's beyond aggravating—especially because the author has an incomplete understanding of what penicillin does, and as a result, Leandra does, too. Leandra spends half of the story spouting total nonsense, but the narrative treats it as correct, and any character who questions her is depicted as an idiot.

Outside of her interest in medicine, Leandra really has no personality. Her only goal in life is to get Theodora where she needs to be, so she spends most of the story just kind of orbiting Theodora like a satellite. This isn't even a conscious goal, though—Leandra has no idea what she's actually steering Theodora towards. Most of the time, her suggestions to Theodora are based on vague feelings and indecipherable prophecy dreams. It's the blind leading the blind—Leandra gives Theodora advice based on nothing, and Theodora follows that advice based on nothing, and they're both headed towards an end goal that neither of them understand. Everything they do is guided by feelings and instincts that they have zero control over. It's boring to read, and Leandra's sheer perfection, combined with her lack of agency, made me want to tear my hair out.

The male lead, Alexander, is not much better—his main character traits are “liking Leandra” and “being handsome,” and that’s about it. He actually begins the story as a nervous virgin, but then he buys a night with Theodora and, apparently, a personality transplant, and he’s a completely different person by the time he and Leandra actually get together. (Specifically, he transforms into a generic, stereotypical, pushy “bodice ripper” love interest, but the “bodice ripper” elements feel halfhearted, probably because he was nothing like that for the entire first half of the book). Theoretically, Alexander is meant to guide Justinian the way Leandra guides Theodora, but he doesn't seem to share Leandra's medical knowledge or psychic dreams, so it's unclear what Justinian is actually getting out of their friendship. Actually, it's unclear why any of these characters like each other at all, because, again, their friendships and romances are entirely determined by "fate." Why does Justinian hang out with Alexander? Fate. Why do Alexander and Leandra fall in love? You guessed it: because it's meant to be. Everything is insta-love or insta-friendship, with no relationship-building at all.

Aside from the two leads, Justinian and Theodora are the only other characters of note, and they're both... well, kind of stupid. Again, because their decisions are largely driven by Immortal meddling, they don’t get to make many choices of their own, and whatever choices they do make independently of the Immortals are shown to be incorrect. (For example, Theodora leaves with Hecebolus despite Leandra’s protests, which results in both Theodora and Leandra nearly dying.) Theodora at least gets a couple of cool scenes—she wins the Blues’ favor by somehow taming a snake (?!), and she does get (a truncated version of) her Nika speech. Justinian, though, barely does anything. Their romance, which serves as the B-plot to Leandra’s A-plot, is hardly even a romance—like every other relationship in this book, it’s underdeveloped insta-love driven by “fate.”

Oh, and finally, something else I felt the need to mention: Justinian and Theodora seem to have no friends or advisors outside of Alexander and Leandra. Belisarius, Antonina, Narses, Theodora’s Monophysite allies, Justinian’s sister and cousins and nephews, etc, are all totally absent from the story. Theodora’s sisters do appear once, but they vanish after their introductory chapter and are never seen again. I understand sidelining less important characters for the sake of keeping things concise, but it struck me as strange that so many people were casually cut from the narrative. I guess the author figured Justinian and Theodora would never talk to Alexander or Leandra if they had literally any other options.

The sex scenes

There are a lot of sex scenes in this book, which isn't necessarily problematic—I'm not a puritan. Unfortunately, the sex scenes are weird as hell. They're all cloaked in bizarre, convoluted metaphors, which is to be expected, but they're also odd in other ways:

The phrase "moist depths" is used more than once.

There's a lot of "moistness" and "dampness" at pretty much every turn, actually, and it gives off real un-sexy bog energy.

The word "pleasure" appears 8 times in rapid succession in the same sex scene. Other words that appear too often: "undulating," "pulsating," "throbbing," and "nipples." (Do I understand why these are used in sex scenes? Yes. Is it a lot of repetition that could have been worded differently? Also yes.)

Justinian and Theodora love each other so much that a "miracle" occurs when they have sex: Theodora is "incarnated anew," becoming "like a virgin again."

Leandra's guardian is a fellow Immortal who once had sex with Zenobia, and he fantasizes about having sex with her again as he lays dying, which makes for some weird tonal dissonance.

An evil Immortal named Cyril is depicted as an agent of the Empress Euphemia, and they are obviously having an affair with each other, and you can tell it's an evil affair because they do weird shit in bed.

Alexander calls Leandra "my little virgin" as a nickname.

Alexander verbally calls Leandra's breasts "pink-tipped mounds." Like, it's not a metaphor that the narrator uses; he says this out loud to her. It's not even part of a longer sentence. He's trying to seduce her, and the only thing that comes out of his mouth is fucking "pink tipped mounds" and that's it.

"He sucked strongly, like a hungry child" <- NOT A METAPHOR YOU SHOULD USE DURING A SEX SCENE.

"She excreted warm, wet moisteners to ease his passage" <- ALSO BAD, FOR DIFFERENT REASONS. "EXCRETED" IS THE WRONG WORD TO USE HERE.

The plague

About 90% of the plot of this story revolves around the plague, and plague is my specialty, so I'm about to go off here. (Feel free to skip this if you do not care about plague.)

So, Leandra is a physician. She receives medical training at some Byzantine school early on in the story—women, obviously, did not get to become physicians very often in the Byzantine Empire, but again, Leandra is special—and she is then appointed as Justinian and Theodora's Official Royal Court Doctor. Because Leandra is Immortal and Not Like The Other Scientists, she immediately figures out germ theory, basic immunology, antibiotics, and a host of other extremely complicated concepts. How does she figure this stuff out? Not from experimentation using the scientific method, or anything else that follows any kind of logic. Instead, she just gets flashes of insight, which she assumes are true, and then everybody operates as if her unproven theories are obviously correct. Why does she believe that disease is caused by microorganisms invading human tissue? Because She Just Does. Why does she know that inflammation is an immune response to injury or infection? Because She Just Does. Nobody questions her beliefs at all, even though they completely contradict the theories of seminal figures like Hippocrates and Galen, and they're based on such little evidence that nobody has any reason to trust her. She's not seeing microorganisms under microscopes—she doesn't know what a microscope is. She's just saying random shit that happens to be true for reasons nobody in the setting understands.

It's difficult to put into words why I find this so irritating, but I think a huge part of it is that it plays into an idea I really hate—namely, that the people of the past were stupid and unobservant, and that science is easy enough that they could've solved all of their problems with a few basic thought experiments. Leandra criticizes the people around her for having dumb, incorrect theories about medicine—but these people have no reason to think that their theories are wrong. Miasmic theory is a perfectly rational thing to believe in if you don't have microscopes, and you've never heard of a bacterium, but you have noticed that people who live in smelly, unsanitary conditions seem to get sick and die more often. Blaming "bad air" isn't stupid if that's all you have to go on! Germ theory isn't obvious if you can't see the germs! But Leandra knows better, because She Just Does, so everyone who disagrees with her is evil or stupid, and all of the good guys think she's the best doctor on Earth. It's infuriating, partially because it plays into the popular image of early medieval people being dumb and zealous (Leandra claims that Roman medicine was superior to Christian medicine, as if Roman medicine gels with modern germ theory at all?), partially because it makes Leandra all the more obnoxious, and partially because it misrepresents the history of microbiology and epidemiology in a way that I do not like.

Because Leandra discovering germ theory hundreds of years too early isn't special enough, she also goes on to discover penicillin (not named as such, but obviously penicillin), and I also hated this subplot. It plays out exactly like Alexander Fleming's 1928 experiments—Leandra leaves a bunch of cultures out on a lab bench, and finds them contaminated by mold when she returns, then she notices that the mold has seemingly prevented the growth of the infectious bacteria. She then puts this mold to use, and everyone acts like she invented a miracle cure. There are about eleven billion problems with this, but this review is long enough, so I'll just list a couple of them:

The most obvious issue here is that penicillin is fucking hard to isolate and use as a medication. Fleming did his first experiments with penicillium molds in the late 1920s, but pencillin wasn't deployed as a drug until the 1940s because it was so difficult to extract. Seriously, read the Wikipedia page on the isolation of penicillin. It took over a decade and cost a shitload of money, and that was with the technology of the early 20th century. You cannot take raw penicillium mold and cram it into people's wounds and expect it to cure them of plague. That is not how this works. (In fact, various ancient cultures were aware that certain fungi could prevent infections from worsening, but they couldn't identify or isolate the actual antibiotic compounds, which limited their use.)

Leandra somehow understands that she shouldn't feed her patients liquid penicillin, because their stomach acid might degrade the drug and prevent it from working, so she decides she needs to introduce penicillin into their bloodstreams. How does she accomplish this? By cutting people's buboes open and cramming them full of mold! And this is portrayed as the correct course of action, and a reliable way of getting medications into the blood.

Leandra's mold-shoved-into-buboes treatment has a 100% cure rate, and all of her patients survive. For reference, plague has a 13% fatality rate today if treated with IV antibiotics. It is an extremely dangerous disease. So either the author dramatically underestimated how lethal plague actually is, or we are meant to believe that Leandra's cure is more effective than modern medicine.

The author completely ignores pneumatic and septicemic plague—everyone who gets sick gets bubonic plague, period. I get that buboes and fleas are the first things that come to mind for most people when they think of plague, but if you're going to build your entire plot around your protagonist's inexplicable knowledge of Yersinia pestis, maybe consider its other presentations?

Relatedly, the author also ignores that plague can be spread from person-to-person, as well as through other means. Leandra seems to believe that flea bites are the only route of plague transmission, and this is presented as right. Leandra spends a lot of time handling infected tissues in her laboratory, getting up close and personal with infected patients, and having sex with her infected husband, and she never worries about getting sick herself, because plague is transmitted by fleas. She does die young, but only because an evil rival doctor stabs her out of envy—not because she's spent the past six months breathing nothing but aerosolized plague.

Other inaccuracies

Obviously, a lot of the science is wrong, but so is the history. The timeline is all muddled—plague hits Europe and becomes endemic before Justinian even rises to power, and then it spirals into a pandemic at some point before the Nika riots. Theodora is infected with plague (although she's cured by the mold), while Justinian remains healthy. The Hagia Sophia in its current form exists before the Nika riots even happen. Justinain doesn't start work on his law code until after Theodora gets the plague. You get the picture. Everything happens out of order, on a condensed timeline, so that Leandra and Alexander can experience the best Byzantium has to offer before they die young and reincarnate in sixteenth-century France. (I know less about France than I do about Byzantium, but for what it's worth, I suspect the French setting is also filled with research errors.)

The ending

I gave up on this book at some point after Leandra's first death, but I did skim the French part until I got to the ending, and I discovered that the scene on the cover—the picture of Leandra and Alexander riding a pegasus to the sky—does literally happen in the final paragraph. Nostradamus actually witnesses them flying into outer space as he's charting the movement of the stars.

For what it's worth, I think both Leandra and Alexander are anthropomorphic constellations at this point, if that makes it any better.

Final verdict

This book is insane. I've read a fair amount of wacky Byzantine romances, but this one is on another level. The premise alone is bonkers, the characters are all horrible, the sex scenes are absurd, and the science and the history are both so wrong that I don't even understand how we got to this point. I majored in microbiology, and I minored in medical humanities, so I know a fair amount about the history of infectious disease research, and this book feels like it was designed specifically to torment me. When I got to the penicillin subplot, I said "noooooo" to myself, out loud, like some kind of madwoman. This book has driven me to the brink of insanity. There weren't even any fucking birds in it.

10/10, would write a scathing review of again.

#reviews #So Speaks the Heart #Joyce Carlow #romance #Justinian I #Theodora #for what it's worth the book was terrible but I really enjoyed writing this post about it #it hit every single one of my pet peeves which is kind of impressive #bad characters! bad history! BAD MICROBIOLOGY! it was awful and I love complaining about it!#@suburbanbeatnik thank you so much for telling me about this it was very entertaining

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