Melusine review from Interzone
Sep. 23rd, 2005 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySince ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fjm has graciously given me permission to post her review:
[also reviewed: Rupert Thomson, Divided Kingdom, and Justine Larbalastier, Magic or Madness]
The current dreariness of the fantasy shelves is in part a generic thing, Sometime around 1975 quest fantasies swept the adult shelves clean of almost every other form of fantasy, and although the likes of Jonathan Carroll, M. John Harrison, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Swanwick and (lately) China Miéville peep through the iron bars of elfland, for those of us whose earliest fantasy memories were Fritz Leiber the landscape has been rather deserted. Just as I had reached the point of saying “no genre fantasy please” I received Sarah Monette’s Mélusine. With the exception of one paragraph which should be sliced out with a razor blade (you’ll know it when you reach it) the book is elegant, joyously written and a break from the current fashion for the baroque.
Felix Harroway, magician of the court, sees his life unravel when someone finds out he was once child prostitute. Mildmay the Fox, once a kept-thief, now a cat burglar, is caught up in the hunt for heretics after Felix destroys the Virtu of the city state of Mélusine. When the wizard Mavortian seeks out Felix to help him on a private quest, he accidentally captures Mildmay as well, and Mildmay finds himself nursing the sick and insane Felix on a journey about which he knows little and which increasingly becomes irrelevant to Felix’s needs.
Felix and Mildmay take their place alongside Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as intriguing, witty, sometimes vicious travelling companions, but they are not mere homage. Monette’s world is far more complex than Leiber’s. This is grown up romance, where one can love knowing it not too wise; where many sexualities exist and contribute to the maelstrom of blackmail, deceit and power politics. The city of Mélusine is governed by the wise and well intentioned who have little idea how politics trickles down and the poisons it acquires on the way, and the individuals who act within it are petty-malicious, not grand-evil. What finally lifts Mélusine above the average however is the sheer quality of Monette’s construction. Mélusine is written from two first person povs. The effect is a little like a radio play, and each voice is crisply distinct. It would have been easy for Monette to apply dialect as a colour code on a map, but in Midmay and Felix she has created people whose syntax is shaped by experience, by different kinds of wariness, different kinds of distrust. The result is an exquisitely painful romp, a return to an old kind of fantasy with a gleaming new edge.
fjm has graciously given me permission to post her review:[also reviewed: Rupert Thomson, Divided Kingdom, and Justine Larbalastier, Magic or Madness]
The current dreariness of the fantasy shelves is in part a generic thing, Sometime around 1975 quest fantasies swept the adult shelves clean of almost every other form of fantasy, and although the likes of Jonathan Carroll, M. John Harrison, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Swanwick and (lately) China Miéville peep through the iron bars of elfland, for those of us whose earliest fantasy memories were Fritz Leiber the landscape has been rather deserted. Just as I had reached the point of saying “no genre fantasy please” I received Sarah Monette’s Mélusine. With the exception of one paragraph which should be sliced out with a razor blade (you’ll know it when you reach it) the book is elegant, joyously written and a break from the current fashion for the baroque.
Felix Harroway, magician of the court, sees his life unravel when someone finds out he was once child prostitute. Mildmay the Fox, once a kept-thief, now a cat burglar, is caught up in the hunt for heretics after Felix destroys the Virtu of the city state of Mélusine. When the wizard Mavortian seeks out Felix to help him on a private quest, he accidentally captures Mildmay as well, and Mildmay finds himself nursing the sick and insane Felix on a journey about which he knows little and which increasingly becomes irrelevant to Felix’s needs.
Felix and Mildmay take their place alongside Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as intriguing, witty, sometimes vicious travelling companions, but they are not mere homage. Monette’s world is far more complex than Leiber’s. This is grown up romance, where one can love knowing it not too wise; where many sexualities exist and contribute to the maelstrom of blackmail, deceit and power politics. The city of Mélusine is governed by the wise and well intentioned who have little idea how politics trickles down and the poisons it acquires on the way, and the individuals who act within it are petty-malicious, not grand-evil. What finally lifts Mélusine above the average however is the sheer quality of Monette’s construction. Mélusine is written from two first person povs. The effect is a little like a radio play, and each voice is crisply distinct. It would have been easy for Monette to apply dialect as a colour code on a map, but in Midmay and Felix she has created people whose syntax is shaped by experience, by different kinds of wariness, different kinds of distrust. The result is an exquisitely painful romp, a return to an old kind of fantasy with a gleaming new edge.
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Date: 2005-09-23 03:35 pm (UTC)(My local library, if one searches by your surname, has one entry that is currently inaccessible. I dearly hope that means that the book is currently in processing, because I can't afford to buy books right now despite really really wanting to read this one!)
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Date: 2005-09-23 04:38 pm (UTC)Yay good review!
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Date: 2005-09-23 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 07:06 pm (UTC)