I thought I’d wrapped up my Southern Discomfort bibliography but I remembered one more book, Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom.
A major plot point in Southern Discomfort is when Gwalchmai and Olwen agree to settle their blood feud with a chess game; whoever wins, they strike the other’s head off. Maria, hearing this, thinks Olwen’s nuts but the elf replies that she’s been playing for centuries, both the classic game and the new “queen’s chess.”
That throwaway bit was inspired by Yalom’s book. As she details, the king’s companion in the earliest chess sets was the vizier, a piece that moved one square diagonally. When chess reached Europe, the vizier became the queen but still had only one diagonal square per move. Many variant forms of chess sprang up, however, and the one that one out had the queen as the powerful piece she is today; Yalom sees that as tying in to the medieval presence of strong queens such as Eleanor of Aquitane. It’s a good book and added a nice little detail to my novel, showing that Olwen is, from the human POV, really, really old.
JEKYLL (2007) stars Middleman‘s Matt Keeslar as a scientist on the brink of marriage, struggling to balance his research time with his fiancee and her father’s insistent demands he move into more lucrative private practice. Jekyll is obsessed with the idea that if we could tap into our minds, we could unleash an inner healing power (reminiscent of the same “woo” in Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again). After an encounter with a sexy stripper at his bachelor party, what he unleashes with his computer mind-adjuster is, of course, Hyde (due to the videogame being played on the same computer, he dons the requisite Victorian look).
This didn’t quite work for me though I’m not sure why. It may be something as simple as having OD’ed on the story by this point, or that I watched it on the weekend (I’d normally be watching movies for fun). It’s well cast and the character bits are interesting. Jekyll’s fiancee is close to the kind of woman I thought Bess Armstrong would be in Together Again and it’s clear the Carew family dysfunction will mess Jekyll up if he marries her. Utterson is a woman, Jekyll’s BFF, and has some romantic interest in him too. Jekyll and Hyde bleed into each other more than usual: Hyde’s moved when he learns his mistress really cares about him and the feelings Jekyll normally represses start to bubble out even when he’s not Hyde. I’ll see what I think of it when I give it another look. “I think he went home. Normal people do that.”
Image from Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel
