In which I analyze my bizarre relationship to Sarah Monette's novels
I reread Melusine by Sarah Monette for the fourth time on the plane back from Athens. It is such a strange, problematic book. There are a lot of things about it that I don't like, but there are also a lot things in it that I like quite a bit. It's a book that I keep coming back to without really being sure why. I wouldn't have said that it made a particularly deep impression on me--my feelings about it have always been mixed--except that I accidentally plagiarized it in my NaNoWriMo without even being aware of what I was doing, so obviously it somehow wormed its way into my subconscious.
Now my brain is telling me that I read it for the first time when I was fourteen, but since it was published in August 2005, that isn't possible. So I guess I must have read it some time in tenth grade. I remember not being very impressed with it. I thought the pacing was shitty and the story was confusing, and that the way the author tortured the main characters was excessive and unnecessary. But I read the whole thing. And then some time later, I'm not really sure when, I read it again. And I still thought it was problematic, but I was bored and it was something to do. And then, in what I think was 2008, I read The Mirador without realizing it was in the same series. I seriously spent half the book wondering why the hell everything seemed so familiar before I was finally like, Oh. Because that's the thing. It's practically impossible for me to remember the details of Sarah Monette's books after I read them. Maybe it's the way she switches POV all the time, maybe it's something else about her writing. But I got to the end of The Mirador and I realized that I'd already forgotten pretty much the entire plot. It was such a giant mess in terms of POV and pacing, I don't know if the plot even registered while I was reading it. But, bizarrely, I realized that I cared about the characters. So I went back and read Melusine again, and The Virtu, and then Corambis when that came out. And I thought The Virtu was pretty okay, but that Corambis was a huge confusing mess. And then I pretty much forgot all about them again until this November when I realized that I was totally stealing from them without knowing it.
So, my thoughts on Melusine this time around? I'm actually quite a bit more impressed with it than I have been on previous readings. Sarah Monette writes excellent, atmospheric prose, and she is very good with character voices. I never have trouble telling whether the first person POV is Felix or Mildmay. I sometimes have trouble telling what the fuck is happening, but that's a different issue. I don't know when exactly quality of prose became my number one criterion for judging novels. It's always been important, but now it's THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, and I'm willing to put up with a lot for good writing. Especially good writing in fantasy, which is so rare.
And Sarah Monette writes the fantasy aspects of her novels so well. Her magic is creepy, elegant, and interesting, and her worldbuilding is complex and detailed.
There are several clever things about Melusine that I didn't notice until this time around. The first time I read it, the French and Greek went right over my head. And, while I didn't know Greek then, I really have no excuse regarding the French. I must not have been paying very much attention. I caught them both the second time around, and thought it was interesting that she was using French and Greek to name things in her fantasy world, but I didn't realize she was using them systematically.
There are three main languages spoken in Melusine: Marathine, Midlander, and Kekropian/Troian. Marathine is English, Midlander is French, and Kekropian/Troian is Greek. The ancient inhabitants of Lucrece apparently spoke Latin, judging by the reference to the "Forum Imperatoris Quirini" with its correct Latin genitive case. I think there is possibly some sort of implication that this is really just an older form of Midlander (which, after all, is Latin's relationship to French), since De Doctrina Labyrinthorum is supposed to be a Midlander book. This would go along with the fact that the important families in the city of Melusine all have Latin-sounding names like "Teverius".
I am, for the most part, extremely impressed by Sarah Monette's use of other languages for naming. It gives her settings a distinctive flavor and is far more effective than the usual fantasy-author practice of just making up random words. The only thing is, now that I know Greek, some of her choices are unintentionally hilarious. For example, on page 436, she introduces four minor characters named "Astyanax, Potidaia, Myrrha, and Kharis." When I look at this list, I see "Hector's son's nickname in the Iliad, a battle in the Peloponnesian War in which Socrates saved Alcibiades' life, that girl in Ovid's Metamorphoses who had sex with her father because Aphrodite cursed her, and grace/thanks/favor/loveliness."
I don't know if Sarah Monette ever studied Greek. I think maybe yes, but not really extensively. She got her PhD in English Literature, after all. (LOL I'm such a terrible Classics snob.)
Another thing I NEVER NOTICED about Melusine before, which is quite frankly ridiculous, is the fact that Gideon is a fairly significant secondary character in it. And he still has his tongue. I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE HE WAS IN THE GODDAMN BOOK. Okay so maybe I can be excused for not paying very much attention to him the first couple of times I read it, since most of his interactions are with Felix and Felix spends half the time hallucinating that he's a giant green monster and not knowing who the fuck he is. But after I read The Mirador, I really should have picked up on him being in Melusine. And like, when he showed up in The Virtu, how did I miss the fact that he and Felix had met before? I mean, he is FELIX'S PRIMARY LOVE INTEREST IN THE SERIES for God's sake. I don't know whether to blame Sarah Monette for being confusing, or me for being an idiot. Maybe both. But the fact that he IS in the book makes the whole middle section of the story a lot less useless plotwise than it initially appears. At least as far as linking Melusine with its sequels.
And now on to the things I don't like about Melusine, or really the entire series. First of all Sarah Monette's plots are extremely hard to follow. It's not so much that they're complicated as that it takes forever for anything significant to happen, and then when it does happen it usually goes by so fast that you miss it. She has a big problem with pacing. She also switches POV more often than I think is wise. It's not so hard to follow when Felix and Mildmay are in the same place, but when they're off doing different things it gives the reader mental whiplash. And then in the last two books when she adds more first person narrators, it just all sort of collapses in on itself and you don't know what's going on at all. At least I didn't.
This is probably why I end up not being able to remember what the hell happened for huge hundreds-of-pages-long chunks of the books.
But the thing I dislike most about Melusine and the whole series in general is that Sarah Monette is the kind of author who tortures her characters for the sake of torturing them. Some readers enjoy this. I don't. If you asked her about it she'd probably say that she had a reason for doing it and start rambling about katabasis, but I think the truth is that she gets off on the angst. And I get off on angst too, up to a point. Even better than angst is total, crippling despair. But I want the eucatastrophe at the end. I want incandescent transcendence. And Sarah Monette doesn't deliver that to my satisfaction. She just makes her characters cry. Over and over. For four books. And okay, at the end things are looking up for Felix and Mildmay, but it's not enough to justify all the shit she put them through.
Tolkien is the inventor of the eucatastrophe, of course, and he does it with serious flair, but I think a better example of what I'm talking about in this specific instance can by found in Lois McMaster Bujold. She LOVES doing horrible things to her characters, but she balances each crushing defeat with an even more spectacular triumph, creating, I think, a more profound experience for the reader. I'm thinking about her because I just reread Mirror Dance right before rereading Melusine. There really are some striking similarities between them. First of all, they are both about pairs of brothers, but more importantly, they both deal with torture and the collapsing psyches of their main characters. Mark, like Felix, was abused horribly as a child. Mark, like Felix, gets tortured horribly again as an adult. Mark, like Felix, goes totally batshit insane. BUT. There are important differences. There is a distinctly sexual element to what happens to Felix that is not present in what happens to Mark. I don't mean that Mark isn't sexually tortured, because he is, arguably much worse than Felix. But there is nothing remotely titillating about the way it's written. It's not ABOUT the torture at all, it's about Mark's disintegrating personality.
I think for Sarah Monette, it's about the torture. And I'm not saying that's BAD. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Felix's woobie tears UP TO A POINT. The problem is that she allows the torture to take over the story. Felix starts to go insane on page 21, completely loses his mind on page 47, and doesn't recover until page 447. That's 400+ pages of him crying helplessly and being slapped around by bad, mean people. Enough is enough.
Mark, on the other hand, while clearly unbalanced at the beginning of Mirror Dance and quite literally certifiable by the end, is NOT a helpless woobie AT ALL. He is, in fact, a pretty extreme example of "what does not kill you can only make you stronger." He refuses to become a victim.
Like I said, both books are about pairs of brothers. Felix and Mildmay in Melusine, Miles and Mark in Mirror Dance. But whereas Melusine is about how Mildmay saves Felix, Mirror Dance is about how Mark saves Miles. The difference is that Felix survives, but Mark wins. The result is that the ending of Melusine is sweet, but the ending of Mirror Dance makes me want to jump up and down screaming and cheering. In fact I think I did the first time I read it.
And yes, in The Virtu Felix turns it around and defeats the baddies and saves Mildmay, but it's not really an improvement because then Mildmay becomes the woobie torture victim. And all through The Mirador and Corambis they are both like PTSDing all over the place.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want to read novels about people kicking ass in spite of enormous odds. Sarah Monette wants to write about people suffering horribly, and yes, making it through, but definitely coming out more broken than they went in.
I will say that she writes suffering well. She doesn't sugarcoat the psychological trauma, and there's no easy fix for her characters. I respect that.
But then, there's no easy fix for Mark either, but he still gets his happy ending. Him and his four partially-integrated split personalities.
And why, you ask, did I end up accidentally plagiarizing this book when I have so many problems with it? I really don't know. I think it's because despite the glaring flaws, I admire her characters EXTREMELY and am kind of jealous of them. And I don't like what she does to them and want to do something else.
I'm going to be completely honest with myself and say that pretty much what I did is unwittingly rewrite Felix's backstory to make it nicer. Like it could almost be the fucking AU fanfic version. AND MY CHARACTER'S GODDAMN NAME IS ALSO FELIX FOR FUCK'S SAKE. If I'd given him a different name you could write it off as coincidence, but he's pretty well stuck as Felix now. And he even looks kind of like Sarah Monette's Felix, except that he has green eyes instead of one yellow eye and one blue eye, and his hair is auburn-ish, not bright red.
See, here's the thing. Sarah Monette's Felix was a pickpocket until he was 11, and then a prostitute until he was 14, when he was discovered by a wizard whose name begins with M who took him away and taught him magic.
My Felix was a circus performer until he was 14, and then he was almost forced to become a prostitute but a magician whose name begins with M saved him and took him away and taught him magic.
Even worse, in my original idea for the story, he WAS a teenage prostitute. FUCK MY BRAIN FOR DOING THIS TO ME.
Let's just say that the only reason I haven't set my NaNoWriMo on fire and thrown it out the window is that I really like Menalcas and his obsession with philology.
Now my brain is telling me that I read it for the first time when I was fourteen, but since it was published in August 2005, that isn't possible. So I guess I must have read it some time in tenth grade. I remember not being very impressed with it. I thought the pacing was shitty and the story was confusing, and that the way the author tortured the main characters was excessive and unnecessary. But I read the whole thing. And then some time later, I'm not really sure when, I read it again. And I still thought it was problematic, but I was bored and it was something to do. And then, in what I think was 2008, I read The Mirador without realizing it was in the same series. I seriously spent half the book wondering why the hell everything seemed so familiar before I was finally like, Oh. Because that's the thing. It's practically impossible for me to remember the details of Sarah Monette's books after I read them. Maybe it's the way she switches POV all the time, maybe it's something else about her writing. But I got to the end of The Mirador and I realized that I'd already forgotten pretty much the entire plot. It was such a giant mess in terms of POV and pacing, I don't know if the plot even registered while I was reading it. But, bizarrely, I realized that I cared about the characters. So I went back and read Melusine again, and The Virtu, and then Corambis when that came out. And I thought The Virtu was pretty okay, but that Corambis was a huge confusing mess. And then I pretty much forgot all about them again until this November when I realized that I was totally stealing from them without knowing it.
So, my thoughts on Melusine this time around? I'm actually quite a bit more impressed with it than I have been on previous readings. Sarah Monette writes excellent, atmospheric prose, and she is very good with character voices. I never have trouble telling whether the first person POV is Felix or Mildmay. I sometimes have trouble telling what the fuck is happening, but that's a different issue. I don't know when exactly quality of prose became my number one criterion for judging novels. It's always been important, but now it's THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, and I'm willing to put up with a lot for good writing. Especially good writing in fantasy, which is so rare.
And Sarah Monette writes the fantasy aspects of her novels so well. Her magic is creepy, elegant, and interesting, and her worldbuilding is complex and detailed.
There are several clever things about Melusine that I didn't notice until this time around. The first time I read it, the French and Greek went right over my head. And, while I didn't know Greek then, I really have no excuse regarding the French. I must not have been paying very much attention. I caught them both the second time around, and thought it was interesting that she was using French and Greek to name things in her fantasy world, but I didn't realize she was using them systematically.
There are three main languages spoken in Melusine: Marathine, Midlander, and Kekropian/Troian. Marathine is English, Midlander is French, and Kekropian/Troian is Greek. The ancient inhabitants of Lucrece apparently spoke Latin, judging by the reference to the "Forum Imperatoris Quirini" with its correct Latin genitive case. I think there is possibly some sort of implication that this is really just an older form of Midlander (which, after all, is Latin's relationship to French), since De Doctrina Labyrinthorum is supposed to be a Midlander book. This would go along with the fact that the important families in the city of Melusine all have Latin-sounding names like "Teverius".
I am, for the most part, extremely impressed by Sarah Monette's use of other languages for naming. It gives her settings a distinctive flavor and is far more effective than the usual fantasy-author practice of just making up random words. The only thing is, now that I know Greek, some of her choices are unintentionally hilarious. For example, on page 436, she introduces four minor characters named "Astyanax, Potidaia, Myrrha, and Kharis." When I look at this list, I see "Hector's son's nickname in the Iliad, a battle in the Peloponnesian War in which Socrates saved Alcibiades' life, that girl in Ovid's Metamorphoses who had sex with her father because Aphrodite cursed her, and grace/thanks/favor/loveliness."
I don't know if Sarah Monette ever studied Greek. I think maybe yes, but not really extensively. She got her PhD in English Literature, after all. (LOL I'm such a terrible Classics snob.)
Another thing I NEVER NOTICED about Melusine before, which is quite frankly ridiculous, is the fact that Gideon is a fairly significant secondary character in it. And he still has his tongue. I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE HE WAS IN THE GODDAMN BOOK. Okay so maybe I can be excused for not paying very much attention to him the first couple of times I read it, since most of his interactions are with Felix and Felix spends half the time hallucinating that he's a giant green monster and not knowing who the fuck he is. But after I read The Mirador, I really should have picked up on him being in Melusine. And like, when he showed up in The Virtu, how did I miss the fact that he and Felix had met before? I mean, he is FELIX'S PRIMARY LOVE INTEREST IN THE SERIES for God's sake. I don't know whether to blame Sarah Monette for being confusing, or me for being an idiot. Maybe both. But the fact that he IS in the book makes the whole middle section of the story a lot less useless plotwise than it initially appears. At least as far as linking Melusine with its sequels.
And now on to the things I don't like about Melusine, or really the entire series. First of all Sarah Monette's plots are extremely hard to follow. It's not so much that they're complicated as that it takes forever for anything significant to happen, and then when it does happen it usually goes by so fast that you miss it. She has a big problem with pacing. She also switches POV more often than I think is wise. It's not so hard to follow when Felix and Mildmay are in the same place, but when they're off doing different things it gives the reader mental whiplash. And then in the last two books when she adds more first person narrators, it just all sort of collapses in on itself and you don't know what's going on at all. At least I didn't.
This is probably why I end up not being able to remember what the hell happened for huge hundreds-of-pages-long chunks of the books.
But the thing I dislike most about Melusine and the whole series in general is that Sarah Monette is the kind of author who tortures her characters for the sake of torturing them. Some readers enjoy this. I don't. If you asked her about it she'd probably say that she had a reason for doing it and start rambling about katabasis, but I think the truth is that she gets off on the angst. And I get off on angst too, up to a point. Even better than angst is total, crippling despair. But I want the eucatastrophe at the end. I want incandescent transcendence. And Sarah Monette doesn't deliver that to my satisfaction. She just makes her characters cry. Over and over. For four books. And okay, at the end things are looking up for Felix and Mildmay, but it's not enough to justify all the shit she put them through.
Tolkien is the inventor of the eucatastrophe, of course, and he does it with serious flair, but I think a better example of what I'm talking about in this specific instance can by found in Lois McMaster Bujold. She LOVES doing horrible things to her characters, but she balances each crushing defeat with an even more spectacular triumph, creating, I think, a more profound experience for the reader. I'm thinking about her because I just reread Mirror Dance right before rereading Melusine. There really are some striking similarities between them. First of all, they are both about pairs of brothers, but more importantly, they both deal with torture and the collapsing psyches of their main characters. Mark, like Felix, was abused horribly as a child. Mark, like Felix, gets tortured horribly again as an adult. Mark, like Felix, goes totally batshit insane. BUT. There are important differences. There is a distinctly sexual element to what happens to Felix that is not present in what happens to Mark. I don't mean that Mark isn't sexually tortured, because he is, arguably much worse than Felix. But there is nothing remotely titillating about the way it's written. It's not ABOUT the torture at all, it's about Mark's disintegrating personality.
I think for Sarah Monette, it's about the torture. And I'm not saying that's BAD. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Felix's woobie tears UP TO A POINT. The problem is that she allows the torture to take over the story. Felix starts to go insane on page 21, completely loses his mind on page 47, and doesn't recover until page 447. That's 400+ pages of him crying helplessly and being slapped around by bad, mean people. Enough is enough.
Mark, on the other hand, while clearly unbalanced at the beginning of Mirror Dance and quite literally certifiable by the end, is NOT a helpless woobie AT ALL. He is, in fact, a pretty extreme example of "what does not kill you can only make you stronger." He refuses to become a victim.
Like I said, both books are about pairs of brothers. Felix and Mildmay in Melusine, Miles and Mark in Mirror Dance. But whereas Melusine is about how Mildmay saves Felix, Mirror Dance is about how Mark saves Miles. The difference is that Felix survives, but Mark wins. The result is that the ending of Melusine is sweet, but the ending of Mirror Dance makes me want to jump up and down screaming and cheering. In fact I think I did the first time I read it.
And yes, in The Virtu Felix turns it around and defeats the baddies and saves Mildmay, but it's not really an improvement because then Mildmay becomes the woobie torture victim. And all through The Mirador and Corambis they are both like PTSDing all over the place.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want to read novels about people kicking ass in spite of enormous odds. Sarah Monette wants to write about people suffering horribly, and yes, making it through, but definitely coming out more broken than they went in.
I will say that she writes suffering well. She doesn't sugarcoat the psychological trauma, and there's no easy fix for her characters. I respect that.
But then, there's no easy fix for Mark either, but he still gets his happy ending. Him and his four partially-integrated split personalities.
And why, you ask, did I end up accidentally plagiarizing this book when I have so many problems with it? I really don't know. I think it's because despite the glaring flaws, I admire her characters EXTREMELY and am kind of jealous of them. And I don't like what she does to them and want to do something else.
I'm going to be completely honest with myself and say that pretty much what I did is unwittingly rewrite Felix's backstory to make it nicer. Like it could almost be the fucking AU fanfic version. AND MY CHARACTER'S GODDAMN NAME IS ALSO FELIX FOR FUCK'S SAKE. If I'd given him a different name you could write it off as coincidence, but he's pretty well stuck as Felix now. And he even looks kind of like Sarah Monette's Felix, except that he has green eyes instead of one yellow eye and one blue eye, and his hair is auburn-ish, not bright red.
See, here's the thing. Sarah Monette's Felix was a pickpocket until he was 11, and then a prostitute until he was 14, when he was discovered by a wizard whose name begins with M who took him away and taught him magic.
My Felix was a circus performer until he was 14, and then he was almost forced to become a prostitute but a magician whose name begins with M saved him and took him away and taught him magic.
Even worse, in my original idea for the story, he WAS a teenage prostitute. FUCK MY BRAIN FOR DOING THIS TO ME.
Let's just say that the only reason I haven't set my NaNoWriMo on fire and thrown it out the window is that I really like Menalcas and his obsession with philology.