Backlight
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Backlight |
| Author(s): | Jeroen Richards |
| Date(s): | 2001 |
| Length: | |
| Genre(s): | slash, Bodie/Doyle |
| Fandom(s): | The Professionals |
| Relationship(s): | Bodie/Doyle |
| External Links: | Backlight |
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Backlight is a Professionals story by Jeroen Richards.
It was published in Priority A-3 #3.
Reactions and Reviews
More a vignette than a story, it records Doyle's captivity and Bodie's search for him. Sentence fragments and the remembering of colour names from his painter's palette are presumably meant to give the sense of Doyle's frayed mental state as he tries to focus on colours to distance himself from the pain. In Bodie's pov section, we learn that it takes three days before Bodie recalls the name of the grass Doyle was going to meet. This delay struck me as a mere narrative device, present only to ensure time for Doyle to suffer sufficient abuse to up the angst quotient. After that, the boy is found and Doyle is found, both without explanation. The reader is required to do too much of the bridging in the story because of severe underwriting.[1]
It's a Doyle captured and hurt story that begins after his capture. Bodie looks for Doyle and challenges Cowley. They find a boy who used to know Doyle and he tells Bodie that he'd sent Ray to this other man, a cop-killer. The young lad still thinks of Ray as a cop. We see Doyle with the man who captured him, who seems to have a need to talk to Ray. Then Bodie arrives and it is all over.I have to confess to being a little puzzled by this story, I found it somewhat too subtle. It is a very well crafted story and very clever and the writer uses very concise, almost pointed language, with colours being an underlying theme. The use of the imagery and the colours is very vivid, and I could clearly see what she was describing, and felt that it was unfolding in front of my eyes.
The tightness of the language, the shortness of the paragraphs and the provocative use of colour made for a very tense, dark story from beginning to end. Although a well-used and simple theme, the use of colour made it a rather different kind of story.
It wasn't my favourite story in the zine, probably because of its darkness and tightness, again though another story I think might grow on one on second reading. The use of colour wasn't arbitrary; it was very cleverly done and fitted extremely well.[2]
In Backlight, Ray's been captured by a bad guy. He's been tied and beaten and is gradually losing hope and his grip on reality; meanwhile, Bodie is searching desperately for him and is close to panic, sensing that Ray's in deep trouble but unable to find him.It's a very short story, and a commonly encountered premise, but I found it unusually powerful and effective, particularly the way Ray, in an effort to keep himself conscious and sane and calm, repeats to himself the colors of the paint on his palette at home: cadmium red, Indian yellow, Prussian blue, etc. The relationship between the two of them, while not explicit, is obvious with careful reading, and that very understatedness is what gives it its power: you sense pretty quickly how much there is to lose, on both sides.
And the ending leaves you with a wonderful sappy feeling, reminiscent of the end of Man Without a Past ("Bodie, you dumb crud"): neither of them says anything, there are no overt displays of affection, but the strength of the bond between them is impossible to miss, and when you read the words you can almost imagine the look in their eyes as they gaze at each other: pure, unconcealable love.[3]
I read Backlight the other day... It didn't have quite enough payoff for the amount of "H" for me. I found your summary more moving than the story itself.[4]
References
- ^ from Nell Howell at The Hatstand and Discovered in a Letterbox #24
- ^ from Nikki Harrington at The Hatstand
- ^ from a 2005 comment at Crack Van
- ^ comments at March 1, 2005