The Keeper of the Door

My diary, March 13,  2010

Reading more Ethel Dell.  It's fun to have a really good book and be less than halfway through it, with a bunch more pages left.
It's The Keeper of the Door, and I already care deeply about all the characters.  They are so real, so interesting!  I seriously can't begin to guess what will happen.  What IS Violet's problem???

March 20th

Before we left I SAT on the couch doing nothing else but finish my book.  Mark that one on your calendar.  I wasn't eating or working out or anything else, I was just reading because I had to see what was going to happen.  It's been a long time since I did that. 

Ethel Dell's a plotting genius!  There was that magical element, the one big problem that was enough to keep us reading to the end.  I think this was the most strongly plot-driven romance I've ever read. You know how some stories you just want to say, "okay enough already, forgive each other and get a room"?

Not this one!  This was a HUGE problem of the nearly-insurmountable kind which MUST keep the two lovers apart, and honestly I couldn't imagine how they would solve it.  It was genuinely impossible for the hero to explain himself to her.  So out of gallantry, he has to allow her to assume the worst about him.  They have an absolutely sizzling conversation, in which she appeals to him for the sake of love to let her out of their engagement, and he appeals for the sake of love that she stay in it-- if she really loves him, can't she choose to overlook the evil that she believes about him? 

The book started with Olga being so irritated with Max that she stabs a sewing needle into his hand and breaks off the point.  OUCH!  But we are all paying attention now!  It explains later that Max might not ever have noticed her otherwise.  He's a doctor and very observant and intelligent, and guessed from the needle incident that she has the hots for him and is in denial about it. 

Max is Irish with bright green eyes.  Olga watches a green dragonfly kill a red butterfly, and fancies in horror that the green is Max's eyes, and that he's an evil, manipulative person.  And yes, from the clues that Olga possesses, you don't blame her at all for wondering!

The largeness of the problem was plenty to string us along to the resolution, and yet there were a lot of fascinating subtangles too.  One of them was Olga's nasty old neighbor, who had extracted a promise from her when she was younger, to kiss him sometime in the future as penalty for some minor trespass.  Now that she's of age, he comes around "playfully" thinking he's going to harass her into keeping this promise.  He entices her out on the ocean in his yacht and pulls a Victorian villain stunt, threatening to ruin her reputation unless she agrees to marry him.  Rather than any resolution you'd expect, Olga looks off into the distance and suddenly realizes that she is completely in love with Max, and she's so transported with this truth about herself that she ceases to notice or care about the old lecher, and offhandedly tells him what he can do with his nonsense.  It's a delightful scene!  Delightfully different, too, that the heroine realizes her own starry-eyed-ness first for a change.

I cannot but admire that lady's writing. They said she was a shy girl, well she must have been a born genius, her craft is just amazing!  EVERYTHING happens in Keeper, absolutely everything.  Is there going to be a tiger attack?  You know it.  And who will show up to shoot the tiger?  Oh for heaven's sake NO!!  But yes.  Ethel Dell isn't afraid of implausibility-- she is the master, and it happened this way because she says it did!  The poor heroine, colorless, shy, "not the kind of woman you'd notice right away," and the hero, with his red hair sticking up, his carpet slippers, his hands always in his pockets, how can you NOT just ache for them both??  Max's sweet younger brother Noel whom Olga almost ends up with-- well, we WISH him everything the best in the world, and at the end, it's clear that he's eventually going to get that!  LOVE it, I want another sequel.  This was the sequel to Way of an Eagle.