Romance novelist Nora Roberts is a publishing phenomenon.  She writes five books a year—a hardcover novel, a paperback trilogy, and a paranormal suspense under the pseudonym J.D. Robb.  For years, all five have reliably hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for weeks or months: Roberts had four books on the Nov. 15, 2006 list, including all three titles in her new fantasy romance Circle Trilogy, which placed at #1, #5, and #7 among all paperback bestsellers.  Critics point to a variety of factors in discussing Roberts’s overwhelming success: an August Times article argued, “What distinguishes Ms. Roberts…is a certain indifference to the material ambition that often supplies the genre's narrative girding,”[i] while an Associated Press profile pointed to “Endless reserves of imagination” and “the discipline of a drill sergeant.”[ii]  In analyzing Roberts’s work, I lean in the direction of the Times’ argument, questioning how her novels’ manipulation of accepted “narrative girding” in romance subverts and complicates genre conventions to produce a reliable chain of bestselling titles. 

Rather than attempting a psychoanalytic evaluation of reader response to romance novels—which, as Rebecca Barrett points out in her discussion of Christian romance, has often been the critical approach to the genre[iii]—I would question how the specific confluence of literary forms in Roberts’ Circle Trilogy constructs an interdependent series that engages the reader in both the overarching fantasy storyline and the individual romantic plots.  I will focus particularly on Dance of the Gods, the second book in Roberts’s trilogy.  In many ways, the basis for this title’s success—as compared to the other books in Roberts’ series—is the most difficult to identify.  The first novel, Morrigan’s Cross, establishes the series’ overarching mythology, while the third, Valley of Silence, depicts the climactic final battle to which all three books build.  In contrast, Dance must operate as a bridge, maintaining the reader’s attention and whetting appetites for the trilogy’s dramatic conclusion without advancing the narrative in ways that dull the emotional impact of that finale.

Dance’s robust sales testify to Roberts’s success in this endeavor;[iv] further, if Dance of the Gods is viewed as an example of the second book’s role in Roberts’s annual trilogies, that same success locates it as a site of particular critical significance.  At its root, Dance is the story of two very different characters that meet, struggle, and fall in love.  That is, Dance is a classic romance narrative nestled among stories of vampyres, shape-shifters, and sword fights.  In stripping the text down to this level, Roberts’s unique ability to repeatedly manipulate, five times a year, the “boy meets girl” storyline and explore the inevitable question of “what happens after?” begins to address--on the level of narrative--that repeated question of interviewers, critics, and fans: “How does she do it?”  If Dance of the Gods is to be believed, Roberts does it by crafting relatable psychological dilemmas for her characters, dilemmas that allow the continual reformulation of the genre trappings surrounding them because at their core, they maintain an essential, optimistic reality.  Viewed through the lens of the Circle Trilogy, Roberts’s success as a romance novelist is attributable to a very specific methodology: an idealism tempered by strategic realism underpins her narratives and tweaks expected plot devices in a manner that makes even a romance between a warrior and a shape shifter ring true.

Powered by this hopeful psychoanalytic dynamism, the trilogy’s core appeal lies in the reader’s involvement with the individual romantic plotline grounding each book despite the ostensive focus on the overarching story and mythology.  In a subtle inversion of marketing expectations, the latter are rendered comparatively tertiary.  The Circle Trilogy tempts with the promise of fantastical battles and paranormal loves. Yet, its final emphasis on character over plot guarantees that each story, particularly Dance of the Gods, operates as a fully-fledged novel despite their variable advancement of the master narrative.  This divide between expected plot development and actual emotional satisfaction is emblematized by the packaging of the novels: the main cover of each gives only the title; the back features a picture of Roberts with a brief summary of the story’s contribution to the fantasy arc, a summary later expanded on the book’s inner flap.

None of the materials mention the specific romance that will drive the narrative in question.  Rather, it is presumably an operating assumption that Roberts will write an involving love story, and paradoxically, the master plotline is touted in a manner that highlights its unimportance in the face of that assumption.  For instance, Dance of the Gods’ blurb describes a book in which, “the battleground shifts.  In Ireland, a stone circle serves as the portal to another land and an ancient time … As their courage is tested, hearts will bond as never before.”[v]  Readers are hailed with the promise of time travel and battles.  Only vague hints of emotional connection are provided.  Yet it is that romantic connection and its relative realism in defiance of what might be expected from a fantasy romance novel that drives Dance of the Gods.  The dependability of that romantic connection ultimately drives each of Roberts’s narratives and ensures the continued solidity of her success. 

In Roberts’s novels, readers are assured a particular kind of romantic satisfaction that—regardless of whether it plays out in the castles of another world or the streets of a modern American city—satisfies an optimistic desire for human connection.  Roberts’s unique contribution to romance lies in making everything about romance even as she makes romance about nothing; that is, she straddles a difficult line between de-romanticizing romance while maintaining the lust, humor, and emotional connections that draw characters together and provide readers with an opportunity for identification in even the most outlandish of settings.  Romance in the Circle Trilogy lies in minute details; it is human even when its frame is most decidedly not.

Indeed, the Circle Trilogy’s master plot is distinctly removed from traditional human concerns.  Simultaneously romance, fantasy, and time travel narrative, the trilogy contains a sprawling collision of genres that find their focus on the level of day-to-day human interaction.  Opening in the year 1128, the trilogy begins with a literally otherworldly confrontation between two brothers.  Hoyt, a sorcerer, battles for the life of his brother Cian, who the villainous Lilith has transformed into a vampyre.  After the fight, Hoyt is visited by the goddess Morrigan, who tells him he is destined to join five others in a final war with Lilith.  That war will decide the fate of both Hoyt’s world and the human world.  In Morrigan’s Cross, Hoyt gathers the titular circle: witch Glenna, warrior Blair, shape-shifter Larkin, princess and wise woman Moira, and Hoyt’s reluctant, vampyric brother Cian.  They begin to train, and Hoyt and Glenna fall in love.  In Dance of the Gods, the narrative picks up after the group’s first large-scale battle with Lilith’s forces, and the love story of Blair, a hard-edged woman from contemporary New York City, and the dreamy Larkin, who comes from Hoyt’s world of the past, unfolds.

Roberts lays the ground for their love story in the opening scene of Dance: Larkin rises early, drinks a Coke, watches Blair stretch, and banters with her.  Their dialogue is full of early morning banalities: Blair to Larkin: “You always eat that much sugar in the morning?”  Simultaneously, it provides exposition: Larkin’s observation that, “In Geall only the ruler would bear a mark on the body … when they lift the sword from the stone, the mark appears.”  And perhaps most importantly, the conversation establishes the sexual tension that will ensue between the pair.[vi]  Larkin is sketched as the less hesitant romantic partner, while hints of Blair’s traumatic past and lack of mental readiness for a relationship are reiterated.  When the pair moves inside the house, Roberts shifts the inner monologue from Larkin to Blair; the latter prepares breakfast while meditating darkly on the upcoming battle with Lilith.[vii]

The dynamics of this opening scene set the tone for the overall operation of the Blair/Larkin romance in Dance of the Gods.  Roberts’s specific, careful focus on the domestic details of the characters’ larger paranormal dilemma grounds the narrative.  While their conversation circles around vampyres, demons, and magic, it lingers on small, inconsequential moments and interactions: Blair swiping the frosting from Larkin’s cake; Larkin’s pride in learning “new idioms” from television; Larkin teasing Blair into making him breakfast.[viii]  Throughout the novel, even as the full extent of Larkin’s shape-shifting powers and the history of Blair’s tangled romantic past--her first love became a vampyre, the second learned she was a demon hunter and abandoned her--become clear, this continued grounding in a relatable realism allows Roberts to elide the hang-ups of writing within a fantasy universe.

Indeed, the romantic plot overrides that universe to such an extent that Roberts is able to obviate the traditional expectation, inherent in fantasy, of a fully realized “other” world.  In the Circle Trilogy, the mythology and history of the parallel lands is often vague; character backgrounds are filled in erratically; characters’ special powers are not specifically defined.  And yet, it is these narrative absences that open up Dance of the Gods and the other novels in Roberts’s trilogy to an interactive reader relationship.  The absence of set fantasy tropes again prioritizes the romantic plotline, and since that romantic plotline is so firmly bound to the world of the everyday, the narrative finally becomes a reflection on Roberts’s engagement with the earthly rather than the fantastic.  Blair’s dialogue is determinedly modern, as in the opening scene when she jumps from colloquialism to colloquialism: “We kicked some vampire ass . . . Hell of a rush . . . and it didn’t suck to go from a handfasting to a fight and back again.”[ix]  Such modern phrasing might be seen as emblematic of the Circle Trilogy’s operation as a whole.  Despite the constant threat of the otherworldly, Roberts never loses her focus on the universal, understandable thread of Blair and Larkin’s romance, even when that romance itself is the vessel for the introduction of fantasy elements.

In particular, Dance of the Gods repeatedly reminds us that Larkin is a shape-shifter, but those abilities emerge as more convenient than complicating.  Given almost no attention in Morrigan’s Cross, Larkin’s powers get a workout in Dance of the Gods but continue to lack specific definition or obvious limitation.  Rather, Larkin’s varied transformations—into hawk, rat, or dragon—though dictated by the need to battle Lilith, often gain their actual usefulness from their service to the main romantic plotline.  In Dance, we see Larkin’s first moment of shape-shifting through Blair’s eyes: “He soared up, a gold hawk that took the air, and circled once over Blair with a cry like triumph.  ‘Wow.’  She stared up, watching his flight … ‘That is so sexy.’”[x]  Rather than complicating Larkin’s abilities with what might be expected fantasy limitations (for instance, Larkin can only transform for a set amount of time, or his transformations sap his strength/cause mental changes), Roberts transforms them into part of the mating dance between her characters.  Blair’s matter-of-fact assessment of Larkin’s abilities (“That is so sexy”) brings the magic down to earth; shape-shifting becomes a fantastic representation of the charisma that draws characters together in traditional romance novels.

This realistic treatment of an unrealistic dilemma simultaneously works to elide the slipperiness of Dance’s plotting, and to obscure the lack of a driving central dilemma.  Reconfiguring Larkin’s ability to change shapes as his ability to appeal to Blair locates Dance of the Gods as a fully realized romance rather than a trilogy bridge book that cannot resolve its main fantasy plot.  Roberts’s utilization of Blair’s traumatic past to hinder Blair’s romance with Larkin functions similarly: abandoned by her emotionally-distant father when she turned 18, Blair is driven by a sublimated anxiety and personal rigidity.  All those close to her have been lost, and she will not make herself vulnerable again.  Roberts’s use of this inflexibility as a deterrent is not particularly unique in the romantic world; the wounded hero or heroine is a genre staple.[xi]  But her ability to yoke this emotional reticence to Dance’s main fantasy narrative again showcases that slipperiness of expected conventions that drives Dance of the Gods’ otherwise slow-moving plotline.  Blair and her father are divided because she is the talented demon hunter in the family; she and Larkin are drawn together because he, unlike her father or previous lovers, is able to appreciate her unique abilities.  That those abilities are otherworldly is almost irrelevant, though again, they provide prime opportunities for drama that does not truncate the holding position in the series Dance must maintain. 

Much of that drama stems from the primary adversary in Dance: Lora, Lilith’s strikingly beautiful, horribly cruel lover.  Lora attacks the minds of her victims, and her battle with Blair is primarily psychological even when it enters the realm of physical violence with the murder of Blair’s ex-fiancé, Jeremy.  Appearing to Blair in a vision, Lora “kills” Jeremy before Blair’s eyes, taunting Blair all the while: “‘This weak—yet attractive—human broke your heart.  Isn’t that so?  … caring, cherie, it’s what you do … Beg for him.  If you beg, I’ll let him live.”[xii]  Though actual violence takes place between the two characters (vampyre Lora bites and kills Jeremy in “an awful parody of sex”), it is waged on the level of the mind; it is as much an emotional confrontation as a physical one.[xiii]  The fantasy elements—Lora appearing to Blair in visions; Lora’s vampyric method of murder—are underscored by their emotional heft.  If Roberts makes romance about the smallest of moments, she makes fantasy about the emotional and psychological burdens unearthly creatures traditionally invoke. 

Lora’s attack on Blair invokes the trope of the “other woman”—Lora captures Jeremy with a faux seduction—within the realm of the unreal.  The battle blatantly invokes the psychoanalytics of Freud and Lacan: Lora and Blair view each other for the first time through a pane of glass; in her second visitation Lora steps through a wall of mirrors.  The implicit doubling of their relationship is repeatedly used by Lora as a weapon.  Before killing Jeremy, she taunts Blair with the possibility of a relationship—“‘What you need is a woman. … Yes, bien sur, you need the power and the pleasure I’d give you’”[xiv]—and the subtextual threat that a “union” will conflate the two women into one.  Blair needs Lora’s “power and pleasure,” Lora implies, for self-actualization.  The threatening double speaks to Freud’s reading of German author Hoffmann in “The Uncanny,” and indeed, in their final confrontation Blair literally destroys the possibility of Lora as double by disfiguring her face with holy water.[xv]  While use of the fantastic as a space of displacement for psychological terror is not new, it is notable in Roberts’ text as another instance in which the unreal or plot-heavy elements of the story are rendered insignificant.  Like the Blair/Larkin romance, the conflict between Lora and Blair that ostensibly helps sustain the overarching narrative is at its base a familiar genre element: the ex-boyfriend and the woman who steals him away.  In Dance, Roberts simply reframes this story.  The Lora/Blair conflict seems special because of its fantasy cloak, but its actual significance lies in its residual psychological realism.

Even the apocalyptic dimensions of the novel’s plotting speak to the minute scale on which the text finally operates: we are repeatedly reminded that a battle is coming that will determine the fate of the worlds, but within Dance of the Gods these dire predictions remain at the level of rhetoric.  Dance lays the stakes for the series but does not realize them.  Rather, by focusing on the romantic plotline and its psychological realism and modern approachability, it presents the reader with something to care about, something definitively good (read: love) that must be saved from Lilith’s overwhelming and unidentifiable evil.  In this way, the Larkin/Blair romance becomes the redeeming center of the narrative.  Before the final two battles—between Blair and Lora, and Moira and the vampire that killed her mother—Larkin and Blair sneak away to a waterfall and make love.  For Blair, “It seemed that nothing beyond this place, beyond this precious time existed.  Here, for now, they could just be […] What did she care for gods now?”[xvi]  This scene is emblematic of the overall restructuring accomplished by the Circle Trilogy: the Larkin/Blair romance serves as a microcosm for Roberts’s overall focus on love over plot, and the small moments of that love (“precious time”) above its ostensibly epic scope.

Viewing Roberts’s novels in this condensed manner thus exposes the condensation practiced by Roberts herself.  The Circle Trilogy, like Roberts’s many bestselling trilogies, can be reduced to the level of one book because Roberts’ primary mode of operation is simultaneously limited in its scope.  She works most effectively in the Circle Trilogy on the level of character, and in the space of moments rather than arcs.  At the same time, the conclusions that can be drawn from this perspective on Roberts’s work are expansive: Roberts’s ability to reduce begins to explain her ability to produce.  Reading Dance of the Gods as a series of charming moments, such as the fascination of a man from the 1100s with Coca-Cola, opens the possibility of seeing these same sustaining moments in Roberts’s other novels.  If I began by raising that recurrent question about Nora Roberts—“How does she do it?”—I would posit that the answer found in the Circle Trilogy is: simply.  Roberts invites readers and sustains her stories in character-based increments that boast near-universal applicability.  They do not require a hook to draw in the reader.  If Larkin’s shape-shifting abilities are not fully explored, it is because they do not have to be; if the psychological struggle between Blair and Lora is not entirely parsed out, it is because it is irrelevant to the text’s exploration of romantic love as a realistic occurrence in the most unrealistic of circumstances.

At the end of Dance of the Gods, Larkin presents Blair with a gold ring in the shape of the dragon.  This scene epitomizes the narrative duality with which I characterize Roberts’s work: an entirely familiar gesture marked by the guise of the fantastic, a moment of humanity that pokes fun at its own otherworldly qualities.  It looks like a dragon, but ultimately, Roberts implies, it’s all about a moment of love.

 Notes