| Apr. 23rd, 2008 @ 04:52 pm The Phantom Project: Phantom by Susan Kay (Part 1) |
|---|
Current Mood:  satisfied
Current Music: Spring Awakening - The Dark I Know Well
This review took forever, but that's because there was so very, very much material to cover. Seriously. My wrist cramped on my notes more times than I can relate.
Phantom by Susan Kay, 1990
Grade: A
So here we finally are, with the grandmother of all fan-published Phantom fiction. Kay wasn't the first to write derivative fiction based on Leroux's work, but she was the first to do so with enough skill and resonance to elevate the exercise suddenly from the realm of "fanfiction" into that of literature deserving of its own examination and consideration. Many fans and followers of this particular literary niche consider Kay's novel so definitive and admirable in quality that they put it on a pedestal of equal authority to Leroux's original.
I'm rather glad I liked it. I didn't really want to be beaten to death by hordes of angry readers.
Even in discussing this review in a preliminary fashion, I've already had objections about the grade, specifically about its lack of a + there. While I thought this was a well-written, thoughtful, expressive and emotionally moving rendition of the story, I did not think it was higher than a solid A grade. Something has to really blow me away to arrive at A+ status, and while this novel was good--even great in some places--it was not stupendous. Calm down, people. Let me finish the review before you get after me with the tar and pitchforks.
Part 1: Madeleine (1831-1840)
Kay's novel is intended to be a biography, covering Erik's life from birth to death, in order to encompass and explain the motivations and history behind the actions and events of Leroux's novel. She shows a good understanding of the themes and ideas behind Erik and his relationship with God and the world around him, but my very first note introduces the biggest problem I had with Kay's work overall: she over-explicates. Her characters, starting with Madeleine here, have a tendency to slip into navel-gazing, and while it never quite goes to the ridiculous extent that would make me want to stop reading, it is annoying enough to distract me more than a few times over the course of the text. In a story so metaphorically and symbolically charged, it is extremely difficult to make sure that the story is being shown instead of told, and I think Kay's single biggest problem is an inconsistency that sometimes tends much more toward telling than showing.
The language used in the prose, however, is descriptive and moving, providing a clear picture not only of the scene as it unfolds but also of the characters and their actions. The characters are the main strength of Kay's novel, which does a beautiful job of making them relatable but also eminently self-contained and applicable to their respective metaphors, so this descriptive prose is likewise a major strength for Kay, and it will continue straight through to the end of the novel without many snags.
Unfortunately, her prose does do one thing that makes me sad, and that is a constant abuse of ellipses. Generally, the English language does not require a lot of ellipses at any given time. Ninety-nine percent of all ellipses can be replaced with other punctuation or removed in favor of sentence reconstruction, usually without disrupting the voice unduly. I'm not opposed to ellipses in general, especially when used responsibly, but if more than five ellipses appear in your novel, you may be treading on dangerous ground. If more than five ellipses appear in one chapter, you will definitely be courting disaster, and if more than five ellipses appear on the same page, except in very singular circumstances, you have erred and will be receiving a sharp note like this one from me. Constant use of the defenseless ellipsis looks lazy, and the trailing off effect that you are looking for is probably ruined if the reader is staring at it and reconstructing the sentence so that it becomes more interesting and self-contained. Trailing off once in a while is fine, but when it happens constantly, I start to wonder if maybe the author is incapable of writing a strong, definitive sentence and must rely continually on the reader's ability to fill in the gaps instead. Kay seems to have a slight problem with trusting her readers to understand the concepts she's setting forth; I promise, a bright reader will be able to read into a statement even if it doesn't happen to have a little dotted trail telling us that the thought should be pursued.
All right, enough format whining. Let's get on to the real stuff--because, Jesus on a pogo stick, there is plenty of it. To start with, let's take a look at the names (everyone knows the name game is my favorite, right?). We've already visited Erik's name in the original Leroux novel ("dark ruler"), but Kay decides to go all out on her naming conventions. Madeleine literally means "woman of Magdala", the birthplace and sacred city of Mary Magdalene from scripture; Madeleine's status as something of a sinful woman struggling to find grace makes it an appropriate moniker. The name Charles means "free man", and also bears connotations of strength and masculinity, all traits that the handsome and carefree father of the Phantom takes for granted, and which provide contrast for his unfortunate son's plight. Marie is the French form of the name Mary, which means "bitter"; it might seem slightly out of place for the sunny, uncomplaining woman, but as an unhappy, downtrodden spinster, it's not that far a stretch. Sascha is a variant of Alexander, which means "defender of man"--obviously appropriate for the faithful family dog, especially as she is the one source of succor for young Erik. Etienne is a variant of Stephen, which means "crown", and he certainly serves as an authority figure for Madeleine in the latter half of Erik's childhood, as well as an example of the kind of respect and social acceptance that Erik can never aspire to. Father Mansert poses more of a problem for me: the name seems to be Slavic, but I can't pin down an exact meaning for it, so Kay's intent may be lost on me forever.
Since we're talking about names anyway, it's fun to note the heavy irony of Erik's own name. Having been named after the priest, Erik becomes a conundrum of nomenclature; the priest, who is representative of God, lends his name to a child who is representative of abandonment by God. Erik is literally named after God, which he is luckily unaware of as he spends the rest of his life being cursed, abandoned, or actively persecuted because of his physical, God-given form. Now that's irony.
Madeleine's horror of her son comes partially from the fact that he is the last remnant of her deceased husband, and the fact that that remaining link is through a child so hideous creates a fundamental rift in her mind, which is unable to reconcile her handsome, loving husband with the terrifying creature that the two of them have created. She calls Erik "the monster that Charles and I had created out of love," not only hammering home that idea but also giving us a little window of foreshadowing into adult Erik's behavior, which will be continually characterized by evil acts that he will perpetrate out of a misguided desire to act on love. Erik's deformity is almost an active betrayal, as far as Madeleine is concerned; Charles had promised her perfection in their child, and as she had come to view the foetus as representative of their love and of Charles' legacy, it is unpardonable for her that Erik should turn out to be so horrifying.
Unsurprisingly, Kay makes Erik's parents a singer and an architect, respectively, in order to give him plausible genetic background for his prodigious talents in both fields. The class lines are set up here, as well, when it's made clear that Madeleine's parents were somewhat relieved that she had chosen to marry a man--even a man somewhat below her social status--rather than becoming a performer with all the stigma that would have entailed. As per the cultural perceptions of the time, professional singing is set up to be representative of worldliness and sin, an idea that will be repeated many times to come in this particular text.
It's interesting to watch Charles actively cast himself in a God role--saying that the creation of his child makes him feel like God, etc.--because it extends the idea of a neglectful God even further. Charles' death is tantamount to abandonment for Erik, who never knew him and was left with only his unstable mother, and that absence of a father figure in his life correlates directly to the absence (or abandonment) of God.
The slight class friction between Madeleine, as a monied lady, and Charles, as a working class man, is present, as previously noted, from the beginning. It isn't as pronounced as the later class dichotomy between Christine and Raoul will be, but it's an obvious parallel to their situation and helps reinforce the idea that class barriers do exist in this time period and are important to keep in mind (which I appreciate, since many an author sort of conveniently forgets all about them).
My favorite part of any version is always taking a look inside Erik's skull, because it is a fucked up place and I am interested in how authors interpret that fucked-up-ness. Kay's Erik isn't quite the same flavor of crazy-go-nuts as most of the interpretations we see; he isn't dual-personality like Bischoff's Phantom, or a totally disconnected psychopath like Englund's 1989 movie portrayal. Instead, he can be best pegged as a sociopath; he is capable of emotion and even of relating to other people, but he has key deficiencies in the areas of recognizing and processing normal human interaction, which leads him to have very little conscience to speak of. He can appreciate inanimate objects and objective ideals of beauty, but he has a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong, and appears to have almost no idea how the average person manages their morals. As a child, he has difficulty distinguishing between animals and humans (he believes the dog to be his mother for a while, for example, and even after he understands that she is a separate species he places her on an equivalent level as the human race), and learns to manipulate others at a very early age, using threats and fear to control his own mother's actions. While his fondness for Sascha and his desperate attempts to drag some motherly love out of Madeleine indicate that he does have emotional capacity, he doesn't have the ability to focus it correctly, and Madeleine's neglect ensures that he never learns how. This confused and fractured childhood is the basis for Kay's adult Phantom, whose moral compass is not so much nonexistent as it is extremely quirky.
Kay also begins a novel-long theme here that ties directly to the archetype of Leroux's original Erik: specifically, that Erik and his musical talents, especially his voice, are representative of sexuality. When Erik first begins to sing, as a boy, Madeleine instantly forbids him to do so again; not because he is not perfectly competent, but because his voice rouses completely inappropriate sexual feelings in her. Leaving aside the normal woman's reaction to such a sensual assault, the situation is doubly untenable for Madeleine because of the stigma of what is essentially aural incest. Her fear of his voice and the feelings it has the power to rouse in her are a direct precursor to Christine's feelings later, especially in light of the fact that Leroux's Phantom had as much desire for Christine to fill a mother's role for him as a wife's. This extremely Freudian Oedipal complex that Erik suffers from is a huge theme for Kay, and will continue on uninterrupted for the entire novel. Madeleine's rejection of Erik's voice also has roots in the societal mores of the time; since she sees it as a fundamentally sexual agent, she rejects it as evil for its sensual connotations. Conversely, the priest sees Erik's voice as spiritually transcendent, a sound he even likens to the voice of God himself; this gentle, never-discussed disagreement is a direct laying out of the central conundrum of Erik's character in the original novel, which saw him continually torn between the two facets of his personality, the sexual "predator" and the transcendent, musical "angel".
This unfortunate sexual conception that Madeleine has of Erik has several root causes; the sensually hypnotic quality of his voice is certainly the most obvious, but Erik's existence has been "tainted" for his mother from the beginning, primarily by her own guilt. Her parents' deaths coincided with her honeymoon, recasting the sexual bliss she had been experiencing in a guilty light because of the timing, and her choice to marry Charles (and the sexual pursuits that marriage entails) has become by the time of Erik's childhood something that she bitterly regrets as it not only curtailed her career but also landed her in an isolated cottage with a hideous son and a dead husband. Erik is a product of all the sexual evil in which she has indulged, and because of that he has become representative, in her eyes, of sin of the worst kind. No one likes a living reminder of their iniquities.
It is fairly unsurprising, in light of this Oedipal undercurrent, that Erik should see his mother's association with Etienne as a sort of betrayal. While he is still far too much of a child to have any understanding of sexuality or of his mother's differing perceptions of him and of Etienne, he is very firmly able to grasp the idea that he wants her attention to be his and his alone. Even at this early age, he is already setting the dynamic of his later relationships, most notably that he shares with Christine: just as Christine is drawn by his magnetism and terrified by his bestiality into running to the haven of Raoul, so is Madeleine desperate to break free to the safety she sees with Etienne in order to deny the unnatural power her son has over her.
Erik, like many genius children, is resentful of the restrictions placed upon him by his mother and fairly disdainful of her (as he is totally convinced of his own superiority, an idea that Madeleine doesn't do much to discredit). His mental complacency is shattered when his mother forces him to confront the horror of his own face, however; like everyone else, he immediately begins to hate himself. As a child in an environment surrounded by fear and loathing, there is hardly anything else he can do. His penchant for illusion and sleight-of-hand grows directly from this self-hatred; when combined with his natural curiosity and affinity for understanding the way things work, that self-loathing makes some ability to change his environment necessary for him, even if it should be only via illusionary means. His mastery of the arts of illusion is another layer of "mask", insulating him from the world around him and, to some degree, from himself.
I have been known to get uncommonly annoyed with authors that treat public opinion in a bustling metropolis like Paris, in the nineteenth-century, the same way they would treat public opinion in the middle ages. Ostracization and fear, yes, definitely, but I just don't see a torch-bearing mob running through Paris bent on destroying Erik because of his unfortunate demeanor. Kay avoids my ire adroitly by setting Erik's earliest years in a small, provincial French town, where religion is a facet of everyday life and superstition is much more likely to abound; the setup makes the idea of fearful peasants with suspicions of demons an easier pill to swallow. Even so, as the age of science is coming on strong, it's a bit difficult to see a mobscene, but Kay's characterization of Erik himself helps with that; his uncontrollable temper and tendencies (even in childhood) toward extreme violence, combined with his hideous physicality, make the idea of demon possession suddenly look not so far-fetched to the townsfolk, who are desperate for a solution that makes some sense (God having a capricious sense of humor is not what they are looking for here). Even better, the demon metaphor is not totally inapplicable to Erik: whatever else he may be, his innate sensuality and ability to arouse even the most horrified of women will make him, in his adult years, very much an incubus (a virgin incubus--now there's an interesting concept).
Erik's preference for illusion intersects, near the end of this portion of the novel, with his desperate desire for some kind of reciprocal affection from his mother. She can't bear to touch or love him, and after the terrible revelation of his appearance he understands her revulsion and accepts that he is unlovable. Therefore, he creates a proxy for her to love: the statue of the shepherd boy, which he animates with his ventriloquism and invests with enough life-likeness that she is almost drawn into believing it to be her second child. Via the shepherd boy, Erik is able to experience a mother's love vicariously; but even more than that, he is at heart a boy yearning to please his mother, and he is in a way making amends for the terrible sin of his birth by giving her the perfect child that she wanted to make her happy. Erik's choice to construct an entire self-contained world, in which his mother is his and his alone, is of course something that he will repeat time and time again as he ages, up to and including his hidden fortress below the opera house; and Madeleine herself falls prey to his illusion, the two of them living in a fantasy world entirely of Erik's making in order to avoid facing the painful reality of their lives. The poignancy of it lies in this longing for escapism, and in the fact that Erik will continue hopelessly trying to achieve this balance of fantasy and reality for the rest of his life.
Madeleine's continued musings irk me, perhaps more strongly than I'm letting on. She often seems to be the vehicle for Kay to slip in some more telling, which generally seems totally unnecessary since there is plenty of showing going on. There was no need for Madeleine to say, "I was a practicing Catholic..."--we see her going to Mass, seeking counsel from the priest, at prayer. Similarly, she doesn't need to sit there and ponder how Erik is a law unto himself, outside of humanity. The entire novel is making that fairly clear. Unfortunately, Kay seems to have a real problem trusting her readers to draw their own conclusions, and the end effect is that I feel like a sulky child being led by the hand.
Part 2: Erik (1840-1843)
Erik's decision to abandon his mother and make a run for it has two motivating factors: the one that he admits to himself is that he is leaving her for her own safety, which is certainly true enough in its own way (I'm sure she's not enjoying all the mob attention and black stares). This first letting go is, of course, a parallel to his later release of Christine; now, as then, the extremely possessive nature of his love is nevertheless finally conquered by selflessness. He's not being entirely selfless, however, because he also wants (understandably) to avoid letting Etienne ship him off to a mental institute; he does very few things over the course of the novel that do not benefit him personally in some way.
Kay couldn't have made the Madeleine = Christine parallel any clearer if she'd painted it in red all over the pages of her manuscript. Everything Erik says, does, or thinks in regards to his mother bears it out: he wistfully thinks about how beautiful she is and yet how remote from him, he sternly controls himself and knows that he must not touch her despite his desire to do so and his uncontainable love for her, and he understands her revulsion and hates himself for having caused it in her, as though he had created a flaw in something beautiful just by being present. He will repeat this exact sequence of emotions and action with Christine forty years down the road, which makes perfect sense--Leroux's Erik, after all, was obviously seeking not only a wife but a mother figure in Christine to make up for his neglected, malnourished emotional state, and Kay is providing a very plausible background for that behavior here.
The overdramatic prose is somewhat more noticeable here, probably because of the super-angst that Erik is experiencing in his flight; likewise, there's a little too much reflection going on, and while I appreciate her metaphor for a spider as representational of Erik, the over-explication of the idea took some of the fun out of it. Again, it's not bad enough to make me beat my fists on the desk in frustration, but it is present.
Erik's particular brand of navel-gazing confuses me, also. I don't care how mentally precocious he is--would a nine-year-old, especially a nine-year-old who's just fled his home and mother after being traumatized and seeing his dog killed, really think the line, "Even a spider has the right to a mate"? This line is, however, an isolated incident, and I wasn't so distressed by it that I wasn't able to get back into Erik's character. (The line was intended to be a foreshadowing of his situation with Christine, of course, but since the rest of his internal narration is entirely grounded in what is happening at that moment, the sudden leap to "recollection voice" was out of place and made the character confusing.)
Once Erik falls in with the gypsies and starts his career as sideshow attraction, the symbolism heats back up. Both Erik and the watching crowd see the sudden revelation of his hideous face as a kind of indecent exposure, a glimpse of something that should be kept private and not spoken of; this ties into Erik's role as a primarily sexual creature (even Javert makes passing note of Erik's power of fascination over females, quipping that "Don Juan himself couldn't have drawn more skirts in one afternoon"), making the crowd's reaction one of revulsion and embarrassment, as though they had been confronted with a flasher. Javert's forcing of Erik into repeated facial exposure is tantamount to prostitution.
Javert's sexual overtures toward the boy are indicative of this underlying, inescapable sexuality--even as an innocent boy, Erik is still representative of desire. The boy himself still does not understand the sensual effect his voice and presence have on others; he is aware of sensuality as a phenomenon, which we can see when he witnesses the gypsy girls and their lovers, but as a social outcast (even among social outcasts, as the average Frenchman was still none too fond of gypsies at this point in history) he has no frame of reference with which to apply that phenomenon to himself. At best, he understands his sexuality as a tool, like his voice, which can be used to manipulate the actions of others and gain him a little bit of power over his surroundings. Power is the ultimate attainment for Erik, who has a near-pathological need to control his surroundings; the unfairness of his life to date, in which he cannot control God's choice to curse him with disfigurement nor society's reaction to it, motivates him to seek constant control over others. It is simple desperation, a need to convince himself that he has some say in his fate, and this tenacious desire for power is one of the most enduring of Erik's traits.
Part 3: Giovanni (1844-1846)
Incidentally, Kay's use of several narrators to give us a piecemeal, patchwork account of Erik's life from many different viewpoints is quite faithful to Leroux's original style, which (probably because of his reporting background) involved several different characters narrating parts of the story as the need arose.
By this point in the novel, I was finding it easier to settle into Kay's slightly overwrought style; it became a little less noticeable as time went by, probably because I was getting used to it. I will note that I will be reading this novel again, later, when I have time; it's much more of a pleasure read in style than a text you want to sit down and analyze, and the story is immersive enough that I occasionally had to go back when I realized I'd passed an important point in my momentum.
Having established Erik's bitterness, mistrust, and general mistreatment by the world at large, we now move on to shoring up his artistic cred. Creation (which is the motivating factor behind sexual force and thus inextricably attached to Erik's character in more ways than one), specifically in the musical field, is an integral part of Leroux's characterization of Erik, but Kay takes this one step further and introduces him as an architectural genius as well. It's not that great a stretch; Leroux's novel placed him as a building contractor on the construction of the opera house, and since Kay's version of Erik is so precociously genius-ified that his head might burst at any moment, it only makes sense for her to extrapolate that into a full-blown talent. Erik's pursuit of architectural perfection and his utter disdain for anything less reflects his inner morals; when he declares that "I would rather starve than build ugly houses!", he means it. He has very little idea what to do in a social context, having been consistently rejected and reviled by the society in which he lives, but when it comes to inanimate objects he worships beauty and perfection, the ultimate symbols of control in a craft. Erik's desire to create, both in this field and in music, is yet another way of attempting to seize control, to impose his will onto his environment.
Erik's morality, revealed by this particular interlude and many others throughout the novel, is peculiar but perfectly understandable. The nebulous concepts of good and evil that were taught to him during his Catholic upbringing have little real substance for him, especially when so many contradictions (for example, the priest informing him that his beloved, affectionate dog was not going to Heaven when she died) and cruelties in the world seem unfathomable in that context. Instead, Erik's morals revolve around beauty, which he worships most of all as it symbolizes perfection, control, and a will to create something without compromise. Unfortunately, as beauty is the pinnacle of "good" for him, so ugliness and incompleteness are the depths of "evil"; therefore, he knows himself to be the greatest of affronts in nature, leading him even further into self-loathing.
Much of Leroux's original novel deals with the idea of parental nurturing and/or control, specifically in the relationships between Christine and her deceased father and Christine and Erik, who comes to represent him; Kay also picks up on the theme of fatherhood, and inserts Giovanni, who becomes the father figure to Erik that he was denied in his early childhood. Giovanni, who has had only daughters in his lifetime and whose wife is deceased, also gets in on the transference, coming to view Erik as the son that he feels he should have had.
The most major conflict between Giovanni and Erik, who otherwise coexist quite happily, has to do with religion (Giovanni, incidentally, means "grace of God"). As a devout Catholic, Giovanni is constantly distressed by Erik's refusal to acknowledge God; he sees Erik's condition as a curse placed upon him by the Devil, rather than a disfigurement inflicted by an uncaring God. Erik, conversely, professes to be an atheist but obviously is not one, failing even to convince himself that he doesn't believe in Heaven and Hell; unlike Giovanni, he is quite certain that his condition is the will of God, and that that, combined with the many cruelties and unfairnesses he has seen in the world, proves God to be a righteous asshole. He will continue to pretend to be an atheist for most of his adult life, but he is never quite able to banish that deeply-ingrained belief from his Catholic upbringing.
We've established that Erik is a creative genius, a sexual force, and a closet sociopath, but another facet of his personality comes into clearer focus here: his obsessive tendencies. He continues on with a project (such as pretty much any architecture project under Giovanni, or his own inventions) long past the point that others have quit, even to the point of having to be reminded of his physical needs--rest, food--in order to avoid keeling over. He lacks the mental failsafe that would give him that moment to stop and say, "I'm tired, let's take a break," probably because his ability to fixate is extremely strong as a result (again) of his desire to control his environment. His pursuit of perfection is not leisurely; the longer he takes to accomplish his task, the longer there are elements present which defy his control. This is yet another element that Kay introduces into her character in order to reflect the actions that Erik takes in Leroux's novel, in this case his inability to set boundaries on his pursuit of Christine.
Life is placid and enjoyable for Giovanni and Erik, in large part because of the absence of Erik's strife-inducing sexual influence, which doesn't affect the old man. That all explodes, however, when Giovanni's daughter, Luciana (whose name means "light", a concept that has always been equal parts desire for beauty and fear of discovery for Erik), comes home from school and destroys that peaceful order. Not only does she immediately latch onto Erik's sensually magnetic presence and fall deep into infatuation with him, but she reintroduces that sexual dynamic into the relationships in the house, irrevocably destroying the serenity that had been there before her return. As it is in society at the time, sexuality and its accoutrements basically equate to discord and wickedness in much of Kay's novel (in order to highlight this particular cultural perception).
The constant, almost insurmountable need of humanity to see what it is denied is presented here through Luciana, who cannot bear not knowing what lies beneath Erik's mask. This is an interesting idea that I've seen touched on in many other pieces, both intentionally and otherwise (for example, no movie version of the story can dispense with the unmasking of the Phantom; the viewers wouldn't stand for being denied the satisfaction of that curiosity). The idea that this curiosity is usually detrimental to us is fairly obvious, as Luciana's insistence that Erik show her his face leads directly to her death; and, of course, this is yet another preemptive parallel that Kay is inserting in order to impress the cyclical nature of Erik's life upon us, as Luciana's demand to see Erik's face and subsequent horror correlate directly to Christine's unmasking of him in Leroux's novel.
Also, there was a grammar snag on page 126. Which I point out in the hopes that somewhere a copy-editor for the seemingly endless parade of releases of this book will notice. It's not repeated, so there's no reason to get all up in arms over it, but if I noticed it, so will someone else.
This is part one of this review; like the Webber review before it, it is too hoss for LJ to contain, and I had to break it up into two separate posts.
(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.) |
|  |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
silent_lorelei's journal
