Grasping At Straws

We covered earlier the problematic nature of Oolanga and specifically the questionable horror brought about by the chapter title “Smelling Death”, but the contents of this desultory chapter are not great overall.

Adam sends Davenport back to Liverpool—it’s like 60? 80? miles away?—in order to talk to the guy who knows Oolanga in order to find blackmail on him. He succeeds in this mission, though we don’t know how, and worse, we don’t know why except that Adam wants to use Oolangas super-voodo powers—smelling death—to see if anything fishy is going on at the Grove.

Good lord.

Discovering that Oolanga does smell death at the Grove—a different kind of death than at Mercy Farms—Adam is “serene and settled”. Then we get ANOTHER rehash of Hawk & Pigeon, but this time with the additionally confusing metaphor of Hawk & Snake!

There’s something of interest there. Here’s a really vulgar example of what I mean…

Hawk & Pigeon II (aka “The First Encounter”) has another staring contest, with Edgar, Arabella and Oolanga on one side and Lilla and Mimi on the other. (Adam, once again, is useless.) It ends with the dove invasion which will lead to the kite.

[1] Mimi is the deciding force force in this, but the closest thing we have to a “why” on this topic is that she’s Burmese and knew some snake charmers or snake charming runs her blood or some damn thing.

[2] Arabella is there, though how that came to pass we are given no clues. Since she’s set her cap on Edgar, it would seem to work against her to inflame his passions, but we can make sense out of it.

[3] Oolanga, being pure evil, is a really poor vehicle for making an anti-racism statement.

What do we need here? We need some kind of scene where Lilla and Mimi confab so that Mimi can really contribute. We need a scene (maybe the previous chapter where Adam and Sir Nathaniel are gabbing about stuff we already know) where Adam’s pragmatism undermines his ability to contribute. We need a scene where Arabella goads Edgar into the whole thing.

In our rewrite, Lilla is working on Edgar’s better nature, while Arabella/WW is working on Edgar’s insanity.

Which reminds me, besides making the doves a more gradual thing that come to a head at this point, we need to make the WW’s machinations felt prior to this time. We’ve done a little, but we need to place more clues elsewhere.