Boots in the Bedroom: M&B vs. Jane Austen

Let me say from the outset that paperback novels aren't my poison. Mr. Knightly or Mr. Darcy will do me much more long term harm than any Mr. Mills and Boon Hunk ever could, but still, it's far from edifying reading.

At this stage for me, there is a natural limiting factor for M&B. I read one this afternoon and afterwards felt as I would if I'd gobbled a whole packet of banana lollies. One more page and I'd be sick. But as with lollies, if I kept on, my palette would get used to it and soon I'd be able to handle and even want more. I have no natural limit with Jane Austen. I can read the same novel many times over and then another and then another and feel no worse. Meanwhile, my grip on reality may have slipped away...

But Mills and Boon and Jane Austen are not the same. Sorry Ben. They're just not.

Today I bought 3 Mills and Boon romances: Scandals and Secrets, A Man For Mum, and Boots In The Bedroom. My surpassing godliness caused me to avoid buying the books marked 'sexy romances' so this discussion will be limited to the softer M&B novels*. This afternoon I read Boots In The Bedroom because it was the shortest. Let me tell you about it.

Gina is a well off and very attractive 28yo computer programmer from Sydney. She unwillingly travels to a remote property in rural Queensland to install computer equipment and design software. While there, she stays with Ultra Hunk Parish Some-one-or-other. For the first seven chapters they don't get along, but at the same time are drawn to eachother in an inexplicable and uncontrollable physical passion... In chapters eight through to fifteen, they have sex. Over and over again. And again. And again. (It's exhausting.) He loves her but she's not willing to say she loves him, even though he takes her to the highest heaven over and over again, and again and again and ...you get the idea. She gets in a plane to fly home, realises that she loves him after all, gets out of the plane and then they... (you guessed it!). In the epilogue we find that she stays there forever, they have a baby and they go on having fantastic sex.

While they are only physically intimate for the second half of the book the writer goes to lengths to explain the force of their attraction from their first meeting. The first half of the book is largely descriptions of the physical effect they have on eachother. No details are left to the imagination. It's kind of sweet how we have a paragraph from his point of view - what she looks like, what he feels, what he'd like to do to her, followed immediately by a similar paragraph from her point of view.

I was going to give you a few choice quotes, but I won't. I think my blog is already at risk of being flagged by what I've written so far. If you'd like to read Boots, with your spouse's permission I'll send it to you and you can read it for yourself.

At this point I should give a brief summary of a Jane Austen novel. I won't because I can't be bothered. Everyone has read one anyway. Ben, basically the difference between JA and M&B is that well over half a M&B novel is spent describing sex. I don't think the figure's that high in Jane Austen. In M&B the girl and boy characters and threads of plot are just there to provide a framework in which sex can happen. Not so in JA. Is that enough?

Well, that's basically it. I'd like to do a couple more posts on M&B now that I've taken the trouble to read one. Perhaps on why women consume them, why they appeal to so many, and what that tells us about ourselves. Any other ideas?

* given what this novel was like, I shudder to think what would be inside a 'sexy' romance!