Review: GORGEOUS CARAT

 It's time to dig once more into my collection of BL manga and find a series that looked spectacular at first glance but lost some of its sheen as I read it.

GORGEOUS CARAT (Gojasu Karatto), by You Higuri.  First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

In belle époque Paris, the rumor mill is abuzz about the sad fate of the Rocheforts.  Once they were a wealthy aristocratic family, but now they have been reduced to selling off their family treasures one by one to survive.  The Rocheforts' heir Florian wants to sell the family's most precious jewel, a giant diamond known as the Flame of Mughal, but his mother refuses out of sheer pride.  Fate soon forces their hand by way a distant relative named Ray Balzac Courland, who is better known as the mysterious jewel thief Noir.

Ray offers the Rocheforts a choice: sell him the Flame of Mughal or sell him Florian to do with as he pleases.  Florian agrees to the latter, and soon finds himself swept up in Ray's many schemes.  He and Ray may have started as captive and captor, but more and more the two must work together to solve other crimes around them and live for another day.

STORY:

In many ways, Gorgeous Carat feels like the BL equivalent of an old-fashioned romance novel.  You've got the naïve but determined lead with looks and virtue to spare, a dark and brooding anti-hero, a period setting to give it some historical flair, a supporting cast that's composed not so much of characters as they are plot devices or sounding boards for the leads, and loads upon loads of melodrama.  The only thing missing is the sex, and that can be viewed as something of a mixed blessing.

Higuri is clearly a history nut.  Not only did she make a shojo manga about the life and times of Cesare Borgia, but she also made another BL manga about King Ludwig II of Bavaria.  While she certainly took dramatic license with both of those works, they incorporate more genuine historic detail than you would expect.  That's why I'm so surprised at how little she does with the setting.  There's very little sense of the exact time and place in Gorgeous Carat, and you could easily swap out other major European cities and time periods without changing much beyond some names and costumes.  It's not like late 19th century France is lacking in glamour or real-world scandal to draw from!

The cast is also shockingly lackluster.  Ray and Florian kind of fit into the seme/uke mold that was The Style At the Time, but it's a rather vague fit.  The contrast is more striking at first, where Florian's steadfast virtue and heightened emotions serve as the polar opposite of Ray's aloof lechery and scheming.  As the volume progresses, their personalities mellow out to the point that they kind of blend together.  It doesn't help that Florian gets over being LITERALLY PURCHASED LIKE A SLAVE and BEING TORTURED BY RAY IN THE BASEMENT WITH WHIPS AND CHAINS shockingly fast, to the point where he's vocally defending Ray from a private investigator and deflecting his investigation.  This is not the basis for a healthy relationship of any sort, but Higuri would have you believe otherwise.

Even putting that aside, there's just no chemistry between Ray and Florian.  There's more tension between Ray and his Indian servant/accomplice Laila (who is nursing a schoolgirl crush on him) than there is between Ray and Florian.  Aside from commenting regularly on Florian's impossible purple eyes, Ray never makes a move.  Meanwhile, Florian is far too bland and innocent to ponder what his relationship to his partner/owner/roommate might be.  This lack of emotion between them makes Florian's second-half change of heart all the more baffling.  Even if Higuri wanted to establish more of a slow-burn dynamic, there has to be a spark in the first place!

I'd forgive that more if the story onto itself was more exciting, but somehow it fails even as a pulp adventure/mystery narrative.  Both of the larger stories feature easy-to-spot 'twists' with treacherous relatives who might as well be twirling mustaches and cackling at their own wickedness.  Roy and Florian don't work very well as partners, as Florian is the only one to take initiative while Roy pouts, flounces, and acts like a big tsundere.  I just cannot imagine how You Higuri took such a sparkling setting and lurid premise and completely mess it up.

ART:

Mercifully, Higuri does not slack off on her art.  She always had a fine grasp on character design, so she's able to draw plenty of handsome, expressive dudes that strike that perfect balance between real-world anatomy and shojo stylization.  She doesn't do quite so well with the older characters, because she insists on just drawing those characters in a more masculine bent instead of drawing proper wrinkles.  The costumes and backgrounds are also drawn well and are mostly in-line with the era in which they are meant to be set, although they're lacking in period-specific detail.  She tries her best to make up for the lack of drama in the writing with lots of dramatic close-ups and metaphorical panels that could have come straight out of a 1970s shojo manga.  I don't know if it's entirely successful, but I applaud the effort.

RATING:

Gorgeous Carat isn't as precious as its name would imply.  The story and characters are weak, it barely makes use of its historical setting, and the romantic elements are barely developed.  It's not terrible, but You Higuri has definitely made better manga than this.

This manga was published by Tokyopop under their Blu imprint.  This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes available.  All 4 were released and are currently out of print.