Miss Bates was fascinated by Lamb’s Hot Blood and all that it implied, but she didn’t love it. She couldn’t embrace it as one would a beloved stuffy, a comfort read, a well-worn volume on the keeper shelf. It is a cat, sleek, mysterious, interesting, but definitely not cuddly, or warm. It engaged her and made her think about what defines inspirational romance.

Miss Bates reads, reviews, and enjoys inspirational romance, but has been dissatisfied by its definition and parameters. Inspirational romance is denominationally defined. (The no sex, no alcohol rule is also found in many “sweet” romances. None of these things in the hands of a master writer will detract from the creation of a deeply moving, interesting romantic narrative.) What inspirational romance lacks is plurality.

After reading Hot Blood, Miss Bates would argue two things: first, that inspirational romance and its readers would benefit from an expansion of their delineations; two, romance novels in general, non “inspirational” ones, like Hot Blood, would benefit from being examined through the lens of their religious implications.

Hot Blood was the final volume in Lamb’s “Sins” series and a fascinating concept. Hot Blood, Miss Bates thought in the course of her reading, is inspirational romance, though niche publishers and readers of the genre as described above would not recognize it as such. There is no God talk, and none of its characters practice any religion. Yet, it emerges with a theologically correct position, for want of better words. The key to understanding and appreciating this is evident in Lamb’s characterization; what matters in looking at the novel through this lens is not who these people are, but how do their instinctive selves behave. What do their bodies do as they are overwhelmed by emotions? What makes Lamb’s novel a romance with religious implications is a turning away from the passions, the “hot blood” of the title, to a movement, for the characters, towards “dispassion.” In the romance novel as envisioned by Lamb, this is a movement away from eros and towards agape.

There isn’t much to the plot of this novel; yet, certain unusual elements drew Miss Bates to it. The hero and heroine are in their fifties and they’re sexy as hell. Kit Randall is divorced and a grandmother; her lover, Liam Keble is a widower and grandfather. They’ve been lovers for two years. When the novel opens, they are estranged because Kit wants to marry, but Liam is commitment-shy. There are secondary love interests, Joe Ingram and Cary Burnaby respectively, who exacerbate the main couple’s volatile relationship. Though there is no physical or verbal abuse in this novel, these two seethe with rage, hatred, and jealousy. Note some of the language and imagery Lamb used to describe her characters and build an argument which privileges dispassion over passion:

Kit’s eyes are, “wide, glittering and sharp like shards of broken green glass in sunlight.” (7)

When Kit sees Liam, “She looked at him with love and anger, wanting to smack him hard.” (32)

When Liam confronts Kit about being seen with Joe, “his tone [is] as cutting as a knife going through silk,” and “he bit out like someone snapping cotton between their teeth.” (35) (The grammatical error in that last one grates.)

In just a few pages, note how physical responses represent their extreme emotions: “Are you dating Joe Ingram to stick a knife in me?” and “His voice was angry” and “Face burning, she angrily said,” and “His mouth twisted cynically” and “She bristled, glaring at him” and “she asked in pain” and “His eyes flashed; she felt the violence seething behind his face and tensed” and “her face clenched in misery and anger.” (44 – 47)

As emotions reach feverish intensity, Lamb pens Miss Bates’s favourite little passage describing one of Kit and Liam’s many confrontations, “Across the table their eyes met, like the eyes of deadly enemies with drawn swords between them” (112). These characters are out of control, their passions, or “hot blood,” rule/rules them, so much that their arguments take on a force “as if they had been fighting physically instead of verbally.

One of the ways in which Lamb intensifies the tension between the protagonists is by making Liam’s actions and reactions a mystery to Kit. (Indeed, Miss Bates enjoys this also in Betty Neels’s romances.) The hero is a closed room to the heroine. By staying strictly in the heroine’s consciousness, without accessing the hero’s, the hero holds as much mystery to the reader as he does to the heroine. Note the following passage from Hot Blood: “Yet Liam was still mysterious to her, his responses and emotions as indecipherable as some ancient script scratched on a primitive artefact. You could sometimes make out a line here or there, but the meaning of the whole defeated you. In fact, she was sure that he did not want her to know too much about him” (42). Miss Bates thinks that this is what makes the alpha hero, a hero whose motivations remain mysterious. He remains mysterious, unknowable, other.

As our protagonists boil and seethe and clench their teeth and turn red, even “fuchsia” for poor Kit, as their tempers run rampant and burst out of them uncontrollably, Lamb places her novel squarely in the inspirational camp, establishing an argument for dispassion. Passion puts these characters in a hellish realm. Indeed, the character who speaks for dispassion is none other than Liam’s foil, Joe Ingram, a war photographer who has witnessed what the rule of the passions brings to humanity. He says to Kit, ” ‘I want to believe in things again — in innocence and goodness and kindness. And people. Most of all, I want to like people and believe in them, without getting laughed at for my gullibility. I wanted to get up in the morning without being afraid that before I went to bed again I’d see people being blown apart or tortured or raped’ ” (87). “Hot blood” is outside of the rational, outside of attaining Joe’s “innocence and goodness and kindness.”

Lamb puts sexual passion in that realm too when she writes about Liam and Kit’s reconciliation in their love-making as, “her blood had begun to run like wildfire through her veins” (156). When Liam finally reveals the reason he was reluctant to marry, even though he loved Kit and was eaten by jealousy over her friendship with Joe, it involves “hot blood,” a traumatic experience he lived through with his wife (trying to avoid a spoiler here). “Hot blood” makes a character weak because he/she is not in control of him/herself. Anger, jealousy, lust, these are the passions that beset our protagonists and only dispassion can set them free to love, to be good to each other, to be kind to each other. When Kit and Liam finally come to this loving point, Kit in particular does so as a rational being in full control of her will and heart; her love for Liam and his for her is genuine, freely chosen and given, and will lead to a shared life of loving equals, “it had come at last in a mood of warm contentment, a shared happiness, not in the hot blood of their lovemaking” (188). Agape over eros, dispassion over passion.

This is a provocative and interesting read. In rendering her judgement, Miss Bates must look to Miss Austen’s own propensity for dispassion in creating/critiquing her most pro-passion heroine, Emma, when she described her thus, “A mind lively and at ease.”

(If you’d like to read Hot Blood and Miss Bates recommends that you do, it is available digitally, or used at the usual places. It was published in 1996 by Harlequin. Miss Bates picked it up for pennies at a church bazaar because the hero and heroine on the cover are grey-haired and the coverlet on the bed is kitschy.)