The Duchess of Kneedeep by Atanielle Annyn Noel
Trigger warning for discussion of rape of violence against women.
~The Quick Review~
I read the first sixty and the last twenty pages of The Duchess of Kneedeep. Tepid jokes and shallow characterization got nothing on the pervasive use of violence—often sexual—against women as a plot device. Worse, the tone is flippant and satirical.
“Hahaha, the protagonist nearly was raped and murdered again!”
I read the last twenty pages to see if the conclusion somehow made up for the first sixty pages—it did not.
Hard pass.
~The Real Review~
When I first cracked The Duchess of Kneedeep, it had a Discworld vibe to it. Knee-deep oceans cover this planet of Kneedeep, dotted with islands like Fallofaraft or Whatbitya. The point of view switches to whichever is punchiest at the moment, and tone/storytelling is far more important than character or plot.
I think it falls short of Discworld for plenty of reasons: the jokes are sparse and lackluster, there's very little wordplay, and the characters lack personality. I'm not going to focus on that, though. I have bigger literary fish to fry.
Let me paint you a picture of the first 60 pages.
Fleeing her husband on their wedding night, Sidonee is "rescued" by two billionaire brothers. In return for her rescue, they magnanimously allow her to choose which of them she’ll have sex with. She stalls. When one brother enters her bedroom—his intent clear—she must flee again.
Now doubly on the run, she reaches a remote island inhabited by an exiled hermit. He wants her to stay and "clean up the place," and when she grows insistent that she must leave, he forces her through the jungle to a graveyard: the final resting place of all the other girls who wanted to leave.
It's later revealed that the graves are actually full of dead birds—he's been alone so long he doesn't know the difference anymore.
(Aside: If, like me, you were waiting for some joke about not being able to tell the difference between a "bird" and a bird, don't. That wordplay was the lowest of low-hanging fruit, yet still somehow missed.)
Sidonee flees again and lands on the uninhabited Watbitya, which, true to its name, teems with wildlife that wants to bite her. She leaves only to reach Damnit where, out of energy and most of her food, it appears she will die
Instead she escapes on a fisherman's boat. He's smitten with her beauty and almost reverential in his treatment of her—until she says she wants to meet her friend at Missy Rose's House of Plenty Happy.
The man instantly becomes menacing. He's denigrated her from Madonna to whore, and he doesn't like whores. Thus, he shoves her off his boat and heckles her.
In town, a fisherman offers to escort her to Missy Rose's. Others object, and it's not clear why until the scene pans back to the fisherman leering at her and caressing his fish-gutting knife. He clearly wasn't planning on taking her to the brothel.
She reaches Missy Rose's House of Plenty Happy and contacts her father, begging for help. The Duke, she finally reveals, tried to kill her on their wedding night. He's undoubtedly dispatched his Peace Troops to find her, and without her father's help she doesn't stand a chance.
Her father's response? It had to be a simple lover's quarrel, and running home at the first sign of trouble sets a bad precedent. She had better march back and talk things through with the Duke. Also, don't bother trying to be a prostitute. Everyone knows Kneedeep men like well-proportioned women, and she's far too skinny.
Meanwhile, patrons of Missy Rose's House of Plenty Happy are growing increasingly belligerent about their lack of access to the "new girl." The fact that Sidonee is not a prostitute doesn't matter.
Do you see the theme?
Almost every single man encountered by Sidonee tries/wants to rape or murder her. Sometimes both. The only exception is her father, who instead completely dismisses her fear.
I wanted to quit reading, but we haven't met the Duke yet, and I could smell that something was missing there. Maybe the Duke was an imposter, or ... I dunno, something. I figured a comedy couldn't end with Sidonee merely escaping the Duke—there had to be a twist. Thus, I flipped to the last twenty pages to see what I could piece together.
The night of their wedding, the Duke brandished a knife, yelled, lunged at Sidonee. He admits that much. What poor, dumb Sidonee failed to realize, though, is that she had a massive venomous spider on her shoulder. The Duke was trying to protect her.
At this explanation, Sidonee laughs and says something like "Daddy was right all along!"
They live happily ever after.
I suspect the author thinks this twist changes everything. I don't think it does. A woman spends most of the entire book fleeing a man who she thinks will kill her only to stumble across more men who want to harm her. The only reason the plot of The Duchess of Kneedeep lands is because it's easy to believe that her husband does want to murder her. Because men kill women. A lot. And this twist doesn't change or challenge that fact. Instead, it trivializes it for a laugh—an action far too commonly taken.
Take, for example, a story from my younger days. I attended a party where a guest was overly intent on me. Even though it was late at night and a long walk home, I decided to leave. The host turned to the overly-intent guest I was trying to escape and said "You live that way, right? Why don't you walk her home to make sure she gets there safely."
I can, and even have, told that as a joke. It lands because, despite the shittiness of the situation, it has comedic level irony.
But for people to find that story funny, I have to leave out … a lot. Like how he kept groping me even after I hit him, and that during the walk home I was so afraid that I contemplated urinating on myself for tactical reasons.
(For the men reading: girls are often taught by their mothers/aunts/older friends to soil themselves when threatened with sexual assault as it might make the rapist think twice. Ah, the joy of girlhood.)
I also cannot mention him learning where I lived and stalking me—not enough that the cops would take me seriously, but enough that there were days I didn’t feel safe going outside.
For the joke to land, I have to hide the horror of that whole situation.
Hannah Gadsby's standup special Nanette explores this topic with a surprising combination of humor and brutality, and her discussion about how terrible stripping the horror out of violence perpetrated against us so we can offer up a joke is far superior to anything I can articulate. I highly recommend it even though it made me feel far too many feelings.
Yes, The Duchess of Kneedeep is fiction, a spoof set on a ridiculous planet, but Sidonee's experiences are caricatures of often dismissed real-world problems. Trivializing them for a laugh not only feels shitty, but it also helps strengthen the platform on which men stand when they use "it was just a joke" as a defense.
I know, I know. I’m completely humorless and the worst of buzzkills. One review of The Duchess of Kneedeep even explicitly states:
If something in this novel doesn't raise a smile to your face then you're a dead person and you're just beyond hope, so just go away, there's nothing for you to see here.
Maybe I am a dead person, maybe I’m not. But I leave you with a hypothetical. Imagine, instead of a young woman on her wedding night, the protagonist were a child who had just moved in with a relative. Would it still be possible to spin this as comedy?
Cover art by Unknown :(
