Now into 2007
Jan. 1st, 2007 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaHave not answered LJ comments for the past two or three days, but did spend the entire afternoon and evening reading Mélusine (sent to me by the inestimable ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marej, along with Jamie O'Neill's Disturbance) which is actually a pretty good book to plow through on Recovery Day after staggering in at 9AM from a hard night of partying.
Out of all the people I know who've read this book, no one's seen fit to mention that 50% of it is narrated by a main character who is barking. NO RLY. It is not even much of a spoiler. Or am I the only one who feels that if a novel shuffles every two pages between normal Silent Hill and the other Silent Hill, the fact is as relevant to an aesthetic assessment of the overall effect as the presence of BL tropes (or lack thereof)? XD
That said I enjoyed the book much more than I'd expected from the first ten pages or so. The plot is extremely compelling in a multipart fantasy AU darkfic sort of way; not commercial BL, which has a shorter gratification cycle, but the sort of thing MadamHydra or PL Nunn used to write (or still write?) in Wfandom, fanfic or origfic. Perpetual uke/main chara abuse (physical, emotional, sexual) lands off-center from my "moe" buttons, so I read compulsively to find out what happens but all I get out of it is a woozy feeling at the end. Luckily I very much like Mildmay. XD Possibly it is just based on him being sane, I mean he has problems but they're underworld criminal problems basically and I enjoy that kind of narrative, did I mention he's sane. He doesn't even lose his temper all that often, which says something given that approximately three conversations in the entire book do not end in a shouting match or screaming fit.
By some unknown miracle the prose works when it really shouldn't. Felix's sections are sort of High Livejournal Goth, and Mildmay's sections are sort of My Working Class Grammar Is Pastede On, but the voices themselves ring true and almost never bothered me. I think Monette's a pretty skilled writer for having pulled that off, actually. XD Not much to say about the characters beside the protagonists because none of them are the least bit likeable or are meant to be, apart from the ones that end up in the eventual travel party, and even they spend most of their time bitching at each other (it is almost like reading good Anne Rice fic!). Malkar is scenery-chewingly evil but commits most of his dastardly acts early on, when the reader's barely managed to piece together the world's rules and his relationship with Felix, so the impact is dulled by the lack of lead-up. There isn't much fat to be trimmed though; upon review I have to concur the only way to show the full crippling effect of Felix's crazy is to have half the book be his crazy, even though Monette obviously enjoyed writing it much more than I enjoyed reading it. I mean it was interesting in a morbidly baroque way but at the end of every section I'd think, thank the small gods for Mildmay. XD
When all's said and done I mostly like the book because:
1) I sort of dig the brothercest,
2) Mélusine is a Yazzverse city. NO FOR REALS. Cathedrals, rooftops, monster-infested subterranean rivers, undertowns accessed through cellar doors and streets named after saints, crypts of extinct kings and cursed boneyards of heretics wait did we just summon a lich? I THINK WE JUST SUMMONED A LICH. My brain kept trying to carve the urban geography into "levels" as I read. And lord knows there were dead people a-plenty.
Poor Mildmay was armed only with a dagger throughout and not even silver at that.
marej, along with Jamie O'Neill's Disturbance) which is actually a pretty good book to plow through on Recovery Day after staggering in at 9AM from a hard night of partying.Out of all the people I know who've read this book, no one's seen fit to mention that 50% of it is narrated by a main character who is barking. NO RLY. It is not even much of a spoiler. Or am I the only one who feels that if a novel shuffles every two pages between normal Silent Hill and the other Silent Hill, the fact is as relevant to an aesthetic assessment of the overall effect as the presence of BL tropes (or lack thereof)? XD
That said I enjoyed the book much more than I'd expected from the first ten pages or so. The plot is extremely compelling in a multipart fantasy AU darkfic sort of way; not commercial BL, which has a shorter gratification cycle, but the sort of thing MadamHydra or PL Nunn used to write (or still write?) in Wfandom, fanfic or origfic. Perpetual uke/main chara abuse (physical, emotional, sexual) lands off-center from my "moe" buttons, so I read compulsively to find out what happens but all I get out of it is a woozy feeling at the end. Luckily I very much like Mildmay. XD Possibly it is just based on him being sane, I mean he has problems but they're underworld criminal problems basically and I enjoy that kind of narrative, did I mention he's sane. He doesn't even lose his temper all that often, which says something given that approximately three conversations in the entire book do not end in a shouting match or screaming fit.
By some unknown miracle the prose works when it really shouldn't. Felix's sections are sort of High Livejournal Goth, and Mildmay's sections are sort of My Working Class Grammar Is Pastede On, but the voices themselves ring true and almost never bothered me. I think Monette's a pretty skilled writer for having pulled that off, actually. XD Not much to say about the characters beside the protagonists because none of them are the least bit likeable or are meant to be, apart from the ones that end up in the eventual travel party, and even they spend most of their time bitching at each other (it is almost like reading good Anne Rice fic!). Malkar is scenery-chewingly evil but commits most of his dastardly acts early on, when the reader's barely managed to piece together the world's rules and his relationship with Felix, so the impact is dulled by the lack of lead-up. There isn't much fat to be trimmed though; upon review I have to concur the only way to show the full crippling effect of Felix's crazy is to have half the book be his crazy, even though Monette obviously enjoyed writing it much more than I enjoyed reading it. I mean it was interesting in a morbidly baroque way but at the end of every section I'd think, thank the small gods for Mildmay. XD
When all's said and done I mostly like the book because:
1) I sort of dig the brothercest,
2) Mélusine is a Yazzverse city. NO FOR REALS. Cathedrals, rooftops, monster-infested subterranean rivers, undertowns accessed through cellar doors and streets named after saints, crypts of extinct kings and cursed boneyards of heretics wait did we just summon a lich? I THINK WE JUST SUMMONED A LICH. My brain kept trying to carve the urban geography into "levels" as I read. And lord knows there were dead people a-plenty.
Poor Mildmay was armed only with a dagger throughout and not even silver at that.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-02 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-09 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-02 11:43 pm (UTC)His parts really made me want to pitch the book against the nearest wall. I kept having to put the book down and groan loudly every time I came to the end of his sections.
And that first bit where Felix was in the asylum and no one could figure out why? It was like a freakin' episode of Lost, they were so dumb. Of course if someone had said, "Okay, Felix, tell us exactly what happened in excruciating detail," the book would have been about three hundred pages shorter.
And a lot of it felt very manipulative to me -- like I'm supposed to automatically like these guys because they've suffered. Especially that bit at the end with Mildmay's leg.
Although I did LOL at the use of the French Revolutionary calendar.
That's not to say that I didn't stay up late reading it, hoping it would all come together in an interesting way. (But it didn't. And I was sad.)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 07:19 pm (UTC)Nothing gets resolved because it's a series, yadda yadda - I'm actually going to read the sequel to find out what happens, because I figure all else failing the next book will not be narrated by
Gimpy out of Fatal Framean insane person, and there could only be better.no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 03:09 am (UTC)I DID! seven hundred times. in diff entries (though, i STILL haven't done actual review. oops) which goes to show that NOBODY EVER LISTENS TO ME WHYYYY.
*mwah*
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-09 12:21 am (UTC)i love millyfox, i loove millyfox, i love millyfox. people keep forgetting how incredibly young he is, and we're not reminded of that until felix gets his brain back and starts calling him little brother (and yes, i die every time). so the over-the-top dialect she uses for mildmay worked for me, because he's young and while not stupid he *thinks* he is (and omg he also thinks he's ugly, which OBVIOUSLY he isn't *hearts*). felix's crazycrazy was getting on my nerves by the third quarter of melusine, but that's over in virtu. in short: no, i don't think the series is perfect. yes, i did love it to bitty bits, which is partly accounted for by my love for mildmay. i do think objectively it's very entertaining though, and the world building is quite something.
i remember sai saying that the world wasn't original at all, in fact it's an overdone concept in the genre. to me it felt fresh, but maybe because i'm not overexposed to fantasy series.
YES I WILL DO A REVIEW SOME TIME VERY SOON! you'll read virtu in the meantime, yes? the cover is much better. also, i hear there's an ebook floating around.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-11 05:23 pm (UTC)I can't say the concepts of the world are very original but she handles them very well; some writers of this stripe have terrible taste *cough*Anne Bishop*cough* but Monette's is good, and she has a sharp eye for locale and distinguishing vocabulary.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 06:03 pm (UTC)Works for you, you mean. XD; The Pastede On really bugged me about Mildmay, the way his purported accent was all over a map which ranges from Brokeback Mountain at one end and horror RPG at the other, apparently (me being iggernant of the latter). In general I get the feeling I would like Mildmay much better if I saw him only from the outside, as stone-faced taciturn seme w/o sword or whatever, without being subjected to his internal narrative. Alas his internal narrative is half the book.
It's not the plot that reminded me of commercial BL, no, but the laundry list of moe points, yes. Also the strategic positioning of high-color bondage noncon as a hook right smack at the start.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 07:09 pm (UTC)I think she overdid it, with Mildmay (there's no call for double negatives), but I think the basic idea is... there? I've listened to people talk like that but always had the sense I wouldn't be able to reproduce it.
I tracked down Sarah Monette's LJ last night and AFAICT she's never 1) written slash/yaoi fic or 2) played Japanese survival horror games, but does 3) post a lot of meta. So go figure.