Two critically acclaimed novels by the Chinese-born American romance author Sherry Thomas are set in part in part in the “Silk Road” regions of Central Asia: the 2010 award winning Not Quite a Husband, much of which plays out in the Swat Valley during the 1897 Pathan Revolt; and the 2014 wuxia romance My Beautiful Enemy, whose flashback love story is set in 1883 in the Takla Makan desert region of Chinese Turkestan. Not Quite a Husband portrays this region as a romantic space in which wounded love can heal and authentic selves can be revealed and as a white-imperial space where British grit and resolve and coolness under pressure can be demonstrated against a backdrop of anticolonial unrest. In My Beautiful Enemy, by contrast, Thomas attends to the region’s deep history as the site of cultural contact and exchange (dating back for many centuries before Western Europe took an imperial interest), emphasising its enduringly multi-ethnic and multireligious character. In this second, interracial love story, Thomas recasts the stubbornly white and Protestant genre of Anglo-American popular romance as a decolonised and itself irreducibly heterogeneous space of cultural interaction and exchange.
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In this essay, I will analyse the relationships between space, place and romantic love in three novels by the American writer Sherry Thomas: her first book, Private Arrangements (2008), which is set in Belle Époque England and (briefly) New York City; her third, Not Quite a Husband (2010), which is framed by scenes in London and Cambridge but predominantly set on the Northwest frontier of the British Raj in 1897; and her final historical romance, My Beautiful Enemy (2012), which moves among late-nineteenth-century English, Chinese, and imperially contested Silk Road settings. (253)
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My Beautiful Enemy is certainly something quite rare: an explicitly Buddhist romance novel designed to give its readers an affective understanding of what otherwise might seem arid or abstract concepts, including the nature of emptiness (sunyata) and the degree to which romantic love can promise to provide an “indestructible grounding” (May 2011: 6) in a world that rests on the “shifting, changing ground” (Batchelor 2015: 62) of impermanence, suffering and dependent origination. (254)
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Not Quite a Husband is structured through contrasts – England and the Swat Valley; the Raj and the rebels; marriage and annulment; London and Cambridge – and this pattern recurs at other levels of the text. (Thomas returns again and again to the shock of white in Bryony’s black hair; she contrasts the polytheistic Kalasha with the “sea of Islam” that surrounds them [Thomas 2009a: 21]; characters are repeatedly categorised by food they can or cannot eat, and so on.) In My Beautiful Enemy, however, every binary opposition is subverted or undercut, and every separate, self-existent category that is named – be it ethnic, religious, political, historical, gendered, generic – gets unmasked as irreducibly plural. (260)
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