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Brothers and destroyers: Sarah Monette’s Melusine

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Brothers and destroyers: Sarah Monette’s Melusine

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Brothers and destroyers: Sarah Monette’s Melusine

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Published on May 19, 2009

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Melusine is the first in Sarah Monette’s four book series Doctrine of Labyrinths, and as the fourth, Corambis, just came out, the series is complete, and those people who wait for all the books in a series to come out before starting it can now safely start it—except that the second book, The Virtu, appears to be out of print.

The series is an example of my “type two” series. There’s volume closure, but you need to read the books in order and you need to have read the earlier books for the later ones to make sense.

The world is a detailed secondary fantasy world, with a history that feels real and detailed and is mentioned only in the way people really mention history. The characters also have extensive backstory and are very real. The characters and the world are the real strengths of this series.

Melusine begins with two first person point of view characters, Mildmay and Felix. They both live in the city of Melusine, but otherwise at first glimpse they couldn’t be more different. Felix is a court wizard, Mildmay is a cat-burglar for hire. Felix lives in the lofty Mirador and is the lover of a prince, Mildmay lives in the stinking lower city and falls in love with a shopgirl. Their voices are unmistakable—here’s Mildmay:

I got there early. It’s a habit, like always knowing how to find the back door of anywhere you walk into. It don’t mean nothing in particular, just, you know, she could be fronting for the Dogs, even though I didn’t think she was. No, since you ask, it ain’t a nice way to live, but it sure beats the fuck out of dying.

And Felix:

I stood on the battlements for an hour, my hands clenched around the edge of the parapet, barely feeling the cold. The stars shone heartlessly against the vast indigo drape of the sky. Below me the lights of the Lower City were warmer, smaller, the sordid markers of the things that happened in Melusine after dark. I did not look toward Pharoahlight. I had hoped that I might replace the burning darkness of my mind with the simple, remote darkness of the night sky. Sometimes I could calm myself that way, but tonight the longer I stared at the sky with its untouchable beauty, the more I wanted to hurt someone.

There are books that are like a Greek temple, direct in the sunlight, all columns and stillness. These are like a gothic cathedral, embellished with detail on detail, magic and betrayal and ghosts and gargoyles and voodoo and madness—Felix spends most of the book mad—and heresy and squabbling schools of magic and the Mirador and the Bastion and two different calendars. And there’s Mildmay, who thinks “fuck me sideways” is a reasonable sort of expresssion, and Felix, who worries about being caught out saying “okay.” It’s the kind of book where you want to read fast to find out what happens and you want to read slowly because you don’t want to get to the end yet. This is my fourth reading of it, as I’ve re-read it as each of the subsequent volumes have come out, and I found myself looking forward to the re-reading as much as to the new volume.

Felix and Mildmay are wonderful characters and I love reading about them, but I wouldn’t invite either of them to dinner. Mildmay would be too quiet until he told some appalling story, and Felix would insult all the other guests. I love Mildmay’s stories. I love the names of the characters in them and the way they are consciously stories that he tells. I like the way that connects on to the wider story he is narrating of what happened, to which we are the auditors—Mildmay’s is as much an oral story as Felix’s is a written one.

Melusine is largely an exploration of what it means for Felix and Mildmay to be brothers. Mildmay accepts that they are pretty much as soon as he meets Felix, and Felix is just thinking about it at the end of the book. But that relationship is central to this first novel, it bends everything around it.

Monette does some interestingly odd things here, subversions of genre expectations. To start with, we hardly get any sane Felix before we’re plunged into his madness. We don’t see what he has to lose before he loses it. That was a brave thing to do, and very unusual. She does Felix’s mad point of view brilliantly—it helps that it’s magical madness, so he’s seeing real ghosts and people with animal heads that relate to their personalities, or colours in their auras that are actual information. But even so, writing half a book from a madman’s perspective is daring, and it’s impressive that she makes it work so well.

Then there’s the subversion of “getting the adventuring party together.” Felix finds Gideon and Mildmay finds Mavortian von Heber and Bernard, and they all come together and decide to go off together—and then they get separated again almost at once. If you’re used to the way fellowships are formed in fantasy, this is outrageous. I wanted to cheer.

And there’s the Gardens of Nephele. Felix dreams about them and wants to get there, and he and Mildmay struggle across an entire continent and an ocean to get to them, so Felix can be healed, and it turns out their appalling mother (she sold both of them as small children into what amounts to slavery) came from there. It’s a quest destination. But when, after appalling struggles, they get there, we see it mostly from Mildmay’s point of view, and they’re horrible to Mildmay, not to mention incompetent at healing him. It’s a very realistic magical sanctuary—the people are petty and snotty and involved in power politics and they despise Mildmay’s manners and accent and past. (I’m not convinced his accent would be so awful in other languages, but never mind.) They do manage to heal Felix, but by the time they do it feels like the least they could do.

The use of French and Greek to represent languages that have the same relationship to the nominal Marathine of Melusine as French and Greek to do English disconcerted me the first time I read the book. The months have the French Revolutionary names. I kept trying to figure out a connection to our world. There isn’t one, it’s another subversion of conventions—since Tolkien, people have been making up fantasy languages, generally with much less success, Monette uses real ones. Every word here has been thought about, every metaphor, every name, and these tiny details piled on details help to give the impression of gothic labyrinthine detail that make the series so interesting.

This volume ends at a good resting point, the journey is over and the healing accomplished, there’s still a lot to be done. As a quarter of a story, this is a good break-point, not a cliff-hanger but still with a lot you want to know.

About the Author

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Learn More About Jo
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15 years ago

Wow, your review makes this sound like a tempting read but I would absolutely have to tear the cover off the paperback to carry it around. I wouldn’t even want to catch myself in a mirror holding it. And by your description, the cover art doesn’t connect to the plot or themes in the least.

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bethmitcham
15 years ago

Virtue and Mirador covers weren’t so bad — I wasn’t flinching them away when reading in public. Corambis was rough to be seen with.

And even harder is that when you give short explanations of the books it seems to fit the Corambis cover (OK, yeah, there is S&M gay sex, but that’s NOT THE POINT). But I love the books and their characters and the way Monette messes with genre conventions.

Mildmay’s accent will always be awful because of his scar, which he is convinced makes him sound stupid, which makes him sound surly. That’s how I figured it.

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Jane Dark
15 years ago

That is the great advantage of my (iPhone) Kindle — well, one of the great advantages. No covers, AND The Virtu is still available (in a format where Monette gets paid for it when I buy it.

But it bites that it’s out of print in non-virtual versions.

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15 years ago

You know that part in the review above about how you wouldn’t want to invite either of them to dinner? That was the main thing I got from this book. I think the characters are very well presented and the world is interesting, but she does such a good job of portraying something that would actually be quite unpleasant that I was uncomfortable reading it and never looked for the sequels.

(Hmm…I was a little uncomfortable with A Companion to Wolves, too. And I know she also worked on Shadow Unit which has some disturbing but well drawn stuff in it (although I don’t really know who wrote what over there)…I liked those two overall, though.)

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cbyler
15 years ago

The cover quote makes the embarrassment factor even worse. Anyone who’s even heard of the Kushiel series is going to suspect (or outright know) that Jacqueline Carey is going to have higher-than-normal standards for what qualifies as “decadent”. Or “lush”, for that matter.

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15 years ago

I have to be honest: though I thought Melusine and The Virtu were very well written, I found Felix so thoroughly unlikeable a character that I barely got through the second book, and gave up midway through the third, where it appeared that in addition to Felix being a total dick, the plot had largely disappeared.

I did like Mildmay, though, he was an awesome character. Of course, that just meant he got the worst treatment of any character in the novels. This did not help.

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KatG
15 years ago

Oh great, I wanted to read The Virtu! Berkley Ace is not on my happy list right now.

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15 years ago

I need to read Corambis. Actually I need to reread the first three and then read Corambis because it’s been a while. I liked Melusine overall but I intensely dislike reading books written from the pov of a mad character. It puts me off. Luckily enough he’s cured but if he hadn’t been, I’m not sure I would have read The Virtu. I’m even a little reluctant to go back and read Melusine because I know I have to read crazytalk and that just never sits well.

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OtterB
15 years ago

What I wanted to say probably counts as spoilers for future books, so I guess I won’t say it.

I will say that over the entire series you see both Felix and Mildmay grow and improve, but it’s a slow and nonlinear process. Kind of the way it is in real life.

I reread the series from the beginning when Corambis came out. Some parts of the earlier books I remembered vividly, usually key character interactions, and other parts I didn’t remember at all. Maybe I skimmed them the first time through in the rush to find out what happened. Like Jo, I found Felix’s madness easier on reread because I wasn’t so anxious about when/whether it would end.

And I love Mildmay and would be happy to invite him over to dinner. Though I probably wouldn’t include anyone shockable in the guest list. And I expect he would be happier with a picnic somewhere anyway.

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sherrold
15 years ago

I was sad to see that the Doctrine of Labyrinths series has such a paltry entry on Wikipedia. As you said, “Every word here has been thought about, every metaphor, every name, and these tiny details piled on details help to give the impression of gothic labyrinthine detail that make the series so interesting.”

And I wanted some help with some of those tiny details. As it was, I stopped frequently throughout the series to try to understand her illusions (such as using “tarquin” as a person who likes to give pain).

If anyone has an interest on improving the page, I’d be happy to join — but it’s not something I’m likely to do alone. (sherrold at wordyfolks dot net)