Eternal Return

Zine
Title:	Eternal Return
Publisher:	Kathy Resch
Editor:
Author(s):	Amber Skye
Cover Artist(s):	TACS
Illustrator(s):
Date(s):	May 1998
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	The Professionals
Language:	English
External Links:
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In the zine's dedication, the author thanks TACS for the "portrait which inspired this novel."

Eternal Return is a slash AU novel by Amber Skye. It is 86 pages long and has a cover by TACS. It contains no interior art.

Premise and Inspiration

The premise is based on the "lovers down through time" idea, with William Bodie and Ray Doyle belonging together wherever and whenever they happen to live. In this particular zine, this premise deals with two main lifetimes: late 15th century Ireland, and present-day England. The story bounces back and forth between the two periods, starting out in present-day. There are also flashbacks within each period to fill in background information.

The novel was inspired by the film, Portrait of Jennie .

Summary

From the publisher:

On assignment in Ireland, Bodie spends one night in a bombed-out monastery, where he finds a hidden trove of paintings. Years later, still haunted by the image of a young man in one of those paintings, he returns in hopes of finding the painting. Instead, he finds an art dealer named Raymond Doyle, a man very much of this time and place. And yet Doyle, too, has a connection to that monastery, and to a tale of two lovers from the 15th century. And the reflections and traces of these lovers may well overshadow what lies in the present.

Reactions and Reviews

1998

I loved that one! I may vote for it [for the STIFfie Award].

I'm not very good with synopses. It's a story on two different planes. On "our" plane, Bodie falls in love with the portrait of a young monk, centuries dead. He even meets the ghost of that young man. Then he finds the art dealer who owns the portrait, and who is, of course, Doyle. We go back in time and meet the young monk and a Bodie-like person who loves him, on the other place and time. I believe the title, and the idea for the story, stems from the French movie L'Eternel Retour, a theme which has been often used in literature, fannish or otherwise. What I liked in this story is not so much its originality of plot, which it doesn't have, but the writing, the way the two planes interferes from time to time, the atmosphere of the story. The depiction of the young Bodie, soldier in Ireland, finding and trying to protect the portrait...

K. Resch publishes consistently good stories, and edits them very well, I believe. I did not find any glaring grammatical mistakes either. There's really not much to say except "read it" because a simple summary won't give a good idea of the novel.

I bought "The Eternal Return". It's by Amber Skye and I have no clue yet what it's about. It had an interesting cover of Doyle by TACS - to be honest, I've seen better. But that's probably what prompted me to pick it up.

1999

This is one of my favorite zines. It hits all my kinks - the time continuum thing, wonderful romance, a Bodie and Doyle I can believe in. Just remembering it makes me sigh. No h/c that I can recall.

I was disappointed -- I've got the same time continuum and romance kink, and I've always found Kathy Resch to be a reliable editor/publisher, so I was expecting to like this a lot. But I kept getting thrown out by historical inaccuracies (including one glaring one in present-day, which really boggled me). There were a few POV problems, too (things like Bodie somehow having access to Ray's memories, iirc).

So. (All of the following is simply my opinion -- YMMV. Also, there are spoilers here.)

The zine is an AU novella, 86 pages long. The format is single-column, single-spaced (indented paragraphs rather than line-between), with 3/4-inch side margins, a one-inch top margin, and an inch-and-a-half bottom margin -- a fair amount of white space, but not too bad.

The premise is one that I, as a relative sap, like -- the "lovers down through time" idea, with the Lads belonging together wherever and whenever they happen to live. In this particular zine, this premise deals with two main lifetimes: late 15th century Ireland, and present-day England.

The story bounces back and forth between the two periods, starting out in present-day. There are also flashbacks within each period to fill in background information.

The plot device of jumping back and forth in time (within and between centuries) is an effective way of giving an audience a -- well, "spherical", for lack of a better word -- view of the story rather than a linear one. The reader is absorbed into the story as a whole, with no real beginning point; given the structure of the story, the author could have chosen to start it at any point without losing anything, and the reader learns about present and past (within centuries, not between them) at almost the same time (for some reason, all I can think of here is the explanation for "Quantum Leap" -- everyone's life is a string that's all bunched up, with many parts touching many other parts). It's a nifty effect.

Unfortunately, if you step back and look at it linearly, you realize there isn't much story there; the sphere is a hollow one. All we get are the highlights of these lives and adventures, with no real supporting underlying story (for instance, although at one point we're told that Bodie and Ray have been having problems, we never *see* the problems happening, so we have no idea why they're acting/reacting the way they are).

The story takes place in three main sections: present, past, present.

The present-day period has the Lads at their series ages or thereabouts (Ray is 28, Bodie is 31 -- another instance of the switching of the difference in their ages in fanfic), but for some reason takes place in 1996. CI5 is not a part of this story at all. Bodie is an ex-soldier and mercenary trying to figure out what to do with his life; Ray is an art dealer. They meet one day when Bodie stops by Ray's stall at an open-air market, where he finds one of a set of paintings that he's been searching for.

The paintings, of course, were done in the late 15th century, and the story goes back in time to fill in some of that earlier story.

In the earlier period, the Bodie character -- who is known in that time as William Collins (a name I had a certain amount of problem with; I see no reason to give a character the actor's name, and lots of reasons not to) -- is a mercenary soldier, and Raymond Doyle is a young prostitute that he falls in love with. Once again, "Bodie" is the elder, but this time by five years, not just three. They're parted by circumstance for a couple of years, and meet again at the monastery where now-Bodie later found the paintings. Ray begins writing a journal/book called "The Eternal Return" about the pair of them.

Back in the present day, Ray and Bodie discover a mutual attraction and a mutual fascination with the paintings and their history, and go off to try to find this fabled book. They have some relationship problems on the way, but eventually they work everything out and head for a happily ever after ending (one of my favorite types of ending, may I add), helped along a wee bit by their earlier selves.

Again, a premise that I like, and that had some promise. But while I thought it an interesting idea overall, I thought it was an effort that didn't quite work. The zine was badly in need of serious editing. While the mechanics (spelling, grammar, etc.) were basically okay, the story itself needed a lot of work.

My main problem, other than the lack of plot details to fill out the underlying story, was the historical and other inaccuracies throughout the zine. I don't expect an author to put in months of research to get the placement of every buckle right, but it's really helpful to at least consider the period that's being written about. I am *not* an historian, and I kept getting thrown out of the story by things, saying "no way!" to myself.

For instance, the brothel that Ray worked in was full of things that would have cost a fortune in the late 15th century, like hundreds of spicy-rose-scented candles, all in glasses (*glass* glasses) to protect them (these were on every table and up the staircase); and free wine for prospective customers (which would have had to have been imported from either France or Spain, and seems unlikely to be served, especially for free, in a brothel that catered to mercenaries). Also, at one point, William Collins pulls from a coat pocket "a small leather pouch containing 800 gold coins" (the physical logistics alone are staggering -- 800 coins is a *lot*, especially when you figure that a gold coin would be about the size of a 50-cent piece, and gold is HEAVY -- this should have been at least a saddlebag's worth of gold, not a small pocket-sized pouch's). He gave the entire pouch to Ray, telling him that 300 was, of course, for his fee, and that the other 500 was to buy his freedom from the brothel. After boggling at the idea of a common whore worth 300 gold coins for an hour's work -- or even for a night's work -- I kept reading, only to find Ray sadly keeping the 300 (because he'd be in trouble if he went back without his fee) and handing back the 500 extra because it wouldn't be enough to free him.

These sorts of inaccuracies occur throughout the earlier-period sections (the story of how Ray became a whore defies belief). I would perhaps find that easier to ignore, but for the fact that the *present-day* section has glaring inaccuracies as well. At one point, Ray is reading a letter, dated March 1992. This letter explains how the writer had come into possession of the paintings, but how, "twenty five years ago... World War II intervened". I find it really difficult to believe that WWII took place in 1967, even if this *is* an AU. This is one of the spots where deciding to have the present-day story take place in 1996 was a mistake, IMO; easier by far to have the story take place in the mid-70s, and have the letter say "thirty (-five) years ago... World War II intervened". (Having the intervention in question be during WWII makes perfect sense.) There's also, in the present-day sections, a tentativeness about technology that would have made sense in the mid-70s but that is fairly odd for 1996. I really can't figure out why the choice was made to pull the present-day section into *actual* present-day, as opposed to canonical present-day, since there was only one spot in the story that seemed to need a later time period (which could have been worked around), and there were many spots that should have been in the canonical period.

If you can suspend *all* disbelief, and enjoy a thoroughly romanticized story, an emotional wallow, you'll probably enjoy this; the author maintains a semi-formal tone and rhythm throughout that pushes this clearly into the realm of Romance, and will appeal to a lot of people. But if you're distracted by incorrect facts and unlikely happenings, this zine will bother you a lot.

I enjoyed this zine; it's perfect reading for an evening when you're feeling stressed out and want something that's total escapism, but I also realised from P1 that I'd have to suspend disbelief from the top of a 500-foot cliff, and mentally relegated it to 'AU fantasy' with the emphasis on fantasy.

There are some stories where I find it totally impossible to suspend disbelief; on consideration, I think that those ones are probably very badly written and/or badly developed. This one is well enough developed inside what it's doing; the writer's biggest problem, if you can call it that, is a pretty fair ignorance of historical... let's say minutae.