Issues of Continuity in Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle
As I read through Blackwood Farm,
I noticed issues of continuity that
were tipped off by the
viewing of movies of all things. Throughout the novel, Mona Mayfair is
said to be fifteen years
old at the time she and
Quinn Blackwood meet at Mayfair Medical. She was thirteen years old in
the Lives of the Mayfair
Witches.
Mona Mayfair's Age
The time setting for The Witching Hour, Lasher and Taltos
was 1989-1990. Rowan and
Michael married in November, 1989 - the same month that Mona later tells
Michael she turned
thirteen during. Gifford
Mayfair notes that Rowan Mayfair had been missing for sixty-seven days
at the start of Lasher
- counting from December
25, 1989, that would set the time and date of the beginning of Lasher to be on or about March
2, 1990.
If Mona Mayfair was thirteen in early 1990, she would be fifteen in 1992.
And herein lies the problem.
Lynelle, Immortal Beloved and the Grand Tour
Quinn
tells Lestat that by the time he met Mona, Lynelle was already dead.
In fact, he asked the
doctor if he remembered Lynelle, who was to study at Mayfair Medical,
while he was hospitalized there
after his encounter with
Petronius. The doctor told him that Lynelle was indeed remembered and
made mention of the car
accident that had killed
her. This is the hospitalization during which he met Mona Mayfair.
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| Immortal Beloved on Internet Movie Database |
While Lynelle was alive, she, Quinn and Goblin watched a film called Immortal
Beloved. This film
starred Gary Oldman as Ludwig van Beethoven and was released in theaters
in January, 1995, making
its video release (DVD did
not exist then, only laser disc) occur later that same year. Quinn
could not possibly have
seen this movie as early as
1992 or before.
If
Quinn took his three and one-half year tour of Europe from 1993/94 to
1997
and was turned into a blood
drinker shortly enough afterward for the concierge at the hotel in
Italy to remember him, it seems
the time between his
turning and his contact with Lestat would not have taken another three
or four years, especially with
Goblin getting more and
more vicious. Again, remember that Quinn could not have seen Immortal Beloved before
January, 1995 at the earliest and certainly not on video at such an early date.
Aunt Queen and Gladiator
Why
do I object to the more than three-year difference between Quinn's
vampirization
and his contact with
Lestat, besides the obvious reason of Goblin? If you recall, on the
night Lestat was introduced
to Aunt Queen (which was
also the night she died), she and her little party were preparing to
watch the movie Gladiator,
clearly identified as the
film directed by Ridley Scott. That film was released to theaters in
May, 2000, meaning it
would not have been
available for rental or purchase until late 2000 or early 2001. Again,
the action at the end
of Blackwood Farm was within months of Quinn's return from his tour of Europe with Aunt Queen.
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| Gladiator on Internet Movie Database |
In Blood Canticle, reference is made to the time of year, which
is summer. The action in Blood Canticle is a direct continuation of the action in Blackwood Farm,
placing
the action in BC in the
summer of 2001 - at that point long enough from the original stories of
Lasher when Rowan Mayfair
would concievably have aged
enough for her blond hair to naturally show streaks of gray as Lestat
notes early on. The
only other possibility is
that the birth of the Taltos caused her to show signs of premature
aging, but this seems unlikely
if the Taltos breast milk
restored her completely - enough to wake her from an almost certainly
fatal coma.
Could
Mona Mayfair have been fifteen when she met Quinn Blackwood?
Not unless we move the
action in the first three books up by about five years and place Quinn
and Mona's first meeting to
be in or about 1996 or 1997
or different movies had been used in the book to set the themes that
influenced the character's
lives. Mona was said to be
about twenty when she was made a vampire. That would have been late
1996 or most of
1997 if we keep to the
timeline of the first three books. Since Gladiator would not
be released for a few years,
this seems impossible,
unless, like I said, the timeline were reset to a few years later. This
is because Mona
Mayfair was made a vampire after Aunt Queen died, and after the viewing of Gladiator,
which would
most certainly have been
available for rental or purchase by the summer of 2001. This means Mona
was actually about twenty-four
years old at the time she
was made a vampire, not twenty.
Mona
being age twenty at the time of her becoming a vampire would only work
if the
action in the Lives of the
Mayfair Witches were moved up in time by four or five years. That would
be inconceivable
since The Witching Hour was first published in or about November 1990. Lasher was first published in 1993,
and Taltos was first published in 1994.
My Estimation of the Timeline of Events
My
estimation is that Mona Mayfair could not have been only fifteen years
old and Quinn eighteen when
they met, despite Michael Curry's assertion that Quinn was that age at
the time. My estimation
is that Quinn met Mona -
after Lynelle died and well after the release of Immortal Beloved
- in late 1996 or early
1997. He then went on his
three and one-half year tour of Europe with Aunt Queen and their
entourage.
Quinn's
return from Europe and subsequent vampirization by Petronia/Petronius
would have occurred around
late 2000 or early 2001, if he had spent months being barred from Mona's
bedside and then hiding
his vampiric state from
Mona, then managed to be informed that Gladiator was being
viewed in his home. It takes
us to Quinn's ultimate
decision to seek out Lestat and ask for his assistance with Goblin in
the summer of 2001.
Mona
would, in this timeline, be about twenty-four years old at this
point, because if we keep
with the timeline of the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, her twenty-fifth
birthday would not have
been until November, 2001.
Since Quinn is older than Mona, he would have had to be about twenty-two
or twenty-three when they met.
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| Abelard and Heloise by Jean Vignaud, 1819 |
Mona Mayfair and Quinn Blackwood: Immortal
Lovers
In Blackwood Farm,
Mona and Quinn signed their emails and
messages to each other "Ophelia" and "Abelard". These
two characters represent the tragedy of the love affair between
a dying witch and a seer of spirits because their
love, while deep, profound, and utterly romantic, is also doomed.
Mona,
already wasting away from the illness brought on by the
birth of her Taltos daughter, cannot have children for
the same reason. Quinn learns, too late to avoid falling in love
with Mona, that he is in fact too closely related to
her to ever marry her. It is not because the Mayfairs do not condone
marriages between cousins; it is because those
marriages between cousins too close and who each possess the 92
chromosomes
required to possibly reproduce Taltos offspring have
resulted in disaster - the near destruction of the Mayfair legacy
and the threat to the continuation of the Mayfair line
into future generations. A marriage between Mona and Quinn would
almost guarantee disaster, even if Mona were healthy
and able to bear at the time she met Quinn.
Unlike
Ophelia, who drowns herself most memorably, or Abelard,
who does not die, but is painfully separated from
Heloise, Mona and Quinn's story becomes different. Quinn, like Abelard,
is separated from Mona because her family (Rowan and
Michael) has taken her access to her computer, her only means of contact
with Quinn while he is abroad. She is ill, dying, and
the computer only excites her and taxes her already waning resources.
Quinn unwillingly becomes a vampire, and at that
point, he deliberately separates himself from Mona, not wanting her to
know
what he has become.
Mona
knows she is dying, but not because she intends to commit
suicide. She has no idea that Quinn has become a
vampire but at the end, leaves Mayfair Medical and has her limo driver
help her collect all the flowers she can find to take
to Blackwood Manor so she can die in Quinn's bed, on a bower of flowers,
just like Ophelia.
What
Mona also does not know is that Goblin, the doppelganger
whose presence she immediately witnessed and
understood (the catalyst for the beginning of Mona and Quinn's romance)
is, at
the moment of her flight from the hospital, being
exorcised by Merrick with Quinn and Lestat in attendance. When Quinn
finds Mona in his bedroom, among the flowers, waiting
to die like Ophelia after he was sure he would never see her again,
he has to reveal to her what he has become.
This
is the moment that turns their romance away from Mona dying
like Ophelia, cut off from the man she loved by that
man for her own sake, as Abelard apparently did. Quinn was, up
until that very moment, ripped away from Mona both by
her family and by Quinn's own vampirism.
It
is Lestat, the Brat Prince, who instead transforms Mona from
a wasted waif of a being who was the most powerful
witch her family had ever produced to an even more powerful vampire.
Quinn had never "turned" anyone and did not understand
that in Mona's weakened state, the tragedy of both Ophelia and Abelard
would have been realized. Mona would not have
survived the attempt, and if she had, the two of them would not be able
to hear each other as maker and makee cannot do this.
The
vampire who turned Quinn, though old, had not received the
blood of Akasha, formerly the Queen Mother of the
vampires. That vampire was not taken by Memnoch to witness the
crucifixion
of Christ and also take in the blood of Christ.
Lestat did both of these things and he is only about 200 years old.
Even so, he had to be careful and prepare her to be
strong enough to survive the turning.
Thus,
the tragic lovers were given a chance that their chosen
literary/historical counterparts did not have. To
remain together forever, to never die, to be able to speak without
words, to enjoy freedoms they never could in their
human lives, perhaps for all eternity.
Abelard and Heloise Website http://www.abelardandheloise.com/
