Unlike a lot of people, apparently, I thought the slavery issue was well-handled. On the one hand, it was definitely sex-fantasy slavery — no STDs, no pregnancies, anal sex with no messy aftermath, and I doubt that slaves in, say, classical Athens ran around naked as much as Tam and Raff do. Nobody seems to be born into slavery, and all the slaves we see are in at least their late teens. Yet despite these blatantly unrealistic qualities, slavery in these stories has emotional weight. Contrary to what somebody said above, Tam definitely doesn’t feel he’s better off as a slave than as a free man. He can’t stop himself from crying his first night with Lucan, when he finds himself feeling “suddenly and unbearably lonely” and longing for another kind of life — an experience he claims to share with every slave he’s talked to about it. He acknowledges that he’s better fed and housed than his not-friend Brion, but he still would prefer to be free. He might prefer to be Lucan’s slave than free, but that, I think, is a measure of his feelings for Lucan rather than his feelings in general about freedom and slavery.

Raff doesn’t have the same issues — I think because from almost the very start of Healing Heart, he belongs to Coryn, and whether it’s love or hero-worship or just that Coryn has black hair and blue eyes, he wants to be with Coryn. It’s Coryn that the system claims an emotional toll on. He’s in the process of shedding his father’s values (that his father is so generally awful is a clue, I think, that we’re not meant to take his attitudes about the treatment of slaves uncritically), but he hasn’t completed that process yet. He acknowledges that being enslaved is not a positive thing for Raff or for Tana and Sana. He also thinks that because Raff is his slave, he’ll never really know whether Raff loves him.

So on the whole, I don’t see the stories as saying that slavery is an ideal way for these guys to relate to each other at all; it’s more that their feelings for each other are strong enough to transcend the slavery. And you know, given the legal and social status of women in all those historical romances, is its message really all that different?

I think I’d find that really interesting, but in a non-romance context. Not that romance can’t be do intense and psychological, but when it’s got that level of lack of control/consent it’s an aspect of psychology I’m more comfortable exploring in, say, fantasy or horror.

ETA: I have to hold my hands up and say I’m no social history expert or anything, those were generally my observations as a middle class brit. I was halfway through writing a novel set in 50s Lesotho and realised that I just couldn’t justify the setting to myself, not with two white protagonists and the fact I’ve never even been there.

ETA2: do my comments look like they’re falling off the edge of the box to everyone else, too? What am I doing wrong?

And @leela and @NKKingston, what fascinating comments. What does it say about me, though? I was born in South Africa, moved to the US when I was 14, and my literary specialty is late 18thC/early 19thC British writers. :) I’m a pure mutt–maybe that explains my complete ambivalence about it. I love thinking about cultural memory and what it can do to people without them even knowing that anyone else in another country might think differently about things.

@NKKingston: The slavery is…arbitrary. The main characters who were slaves in both Dark Heart and Healing Heart were arbitrarily forced into slavery, one as punishment for stealing (but not by a judge or any official process), one on the whim of a business rival/father of woman-of-interest. So there doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid slavery, or anyway to know if, when, or how you yourself will become a slave, OR anyway to get out of it once you are. Which is all extremely disturbing, too.

Ann Somerville makes the much more coherent point in her review and other discussion of the book that it’s all about consent. She’s much harsher on this book than I was, and I think I would be too, if I hadn’t read the first one and seen it work. If this were my only exposure to the world, I probably would have been revulsed as she was.

I seem to recall the author is British; I wonder if that lends a slightly different cast to the concept of slavery. IIRC, in the UK, slavery was outlawed in the early 1830s after major political pushes; maybe that means it doesn't leave quite the same conflicted undercurrent as being an American (especially one raised in the Deep South).

As a Brit, I think you’re right. There’s a lot more distance to slavery over here: slavery in England was banned in 1102, in Scotland 1778, on British ships 1807 and across the empire 1833. When it was, the impact on most people actually living in Britain was economic, not social. Slavery already had a slightly dual meaning to a native Briton anyway: slavery was a punishment under the law, which affected predominantly white citizens, but imperialism meant enslaving on a racial basis. Basically, it’s been out-of-sight-out-of-mind in this country for a long time, and it’s always a shock to find a reminded (like bank architecture in Liverpool – nothing says “we got rich from slavery” like putting statues of slaves around your greco-romano columns)

I think what you see in British works is a stronger sense of colonial guilt. It was something we did to people in their own countires, or countries we sent them to, so it was always at a remove from a Brit living in Britain. The difference between 1933 and 1934 was they stopped using the word slave, but you wouldn’t say much else changed. Hence the reason for colonial guilt; it wasn’t slavery in name, just colonialism, but it has the same oppression/racism discomfort as slavery does to an American. Slavery as part of immediate society is at the same remove culturally as America or Rome; I imagine an American writing about an commercial company ruling a country and exploting its resources, including its population, would be have the same intellectual distance. To a Brit, unless it’s deliberate social commentary that’s going to be a very delicate topic.

Something I wasn’t sure about from the review: is it racially based slavery, or something social like crime, war or poverty?

I do have a question – I’ve noticed in the recent m/m reviews that dearauthor has stopped tagging them with “m/m”. Is there a reason for this?

On a more professorial note (because I like the long-winded-ness, durnitall), I seem to recall the author is British; I wonder if that lends a slightly different cast to the concept of slavery. IIRC, in the UK, slavery was outlawed in the early 1830s after major political pushes; maybe that means it doesn’t leave quite the same conflicted undercurrent as being an American (especially one raised in the Deep South). Certainly, the changing law had major impact, but that’s not quite the same as a history in which ‘slavery’ also conjures thoughts of Antietam and Chancellorsville.

Bluntly, I just can’t divorce ‘slavery’ from ‘evil’, except for cases of sexual slavery — that is, consensual on some level. I guess the fact that we fought a horrific war to get rid of that pernicious kind of evil just makes it a lot harder to even remotely equate such a system with anything pleasurable, let alone romance. That leaves me wondering if for non-American authors — raised without a pervasive sense of the US’ darkest days — the terrible reality is more easily distanced and dismissed.

In the first book, I could squint hard and read the text as though both protagonists were consensual within the paradigm; it didn’t hurt that the slave-boy made no bones about the fact that his life had been upgraded, to some degree, thanks to being taken into what seemed essentially like a bordello/hotel of some kind. (In other words, he seemed to have chosen the life, on some level.) The second book, Raff’s life was substantially de-graded by circumstances, and those in turn were so, hrm, arbitrary that it seemed… repugnant, I guess. Disgusting, even. Like hiding in there was the notion that just anyone could up and be branded a slave just because someone else randomly has a bad day.

I was able to finish the book only by thoroughly convincing myself that what I’d read, I hadn’t read, and that instead Raff was sold to pay his family’s debts. At least then it’s indenture or peon-hood, and works on a personal level: if you can’t pay with cash, you pay with time served. I can at least accept that, because it lets me believe there’s an honor to the exchange, an agreement between equals prior, inequals during, and equals again at the end, when debt is paid in full.

The book’s system as presented, though, lends itself too much to an injustice I recall from studying the Antebellum South, where even a free black could be randomly apprehended as an escaped slave and auctioned off, solely on the grounds of the color of his skin. In fact, several times Raff mentions that’s what he’d expect would happen if he were to try and escape.

Then it’s not personal any more, it’s broadly systemic, and he’s not benefiting at all, himself: he’s just a cog, and in someone else’s wheel, at that. Which is part of the problem, as well, because it removes his agency as a person, and thus also as a character. He’s not acting because he chooses to act, so much as acting as he sees another wanting him to choose to act, and by the end, the story felt less like “Coryn and Raff fall in love” and more like “Coryn falls in love with insert-character-here that’s obediently fallen in love with Coryn in return”. Not because Raff can or cannot or does or does not love, but because I-as-the-reader couldn’t get around the fact that slavery equals no freedom, and that includes freedom to love.