| Apr. 23rd, 2008 @ 04:54 pm The Phantom Project: Phantom by Susan Kay (Part 2) |
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Current Mood:  accomplished
Current Music: Spring Awakening - Totally Fucked
And, part two of the Kay-extravaganza, featuring yet more of the same. My friends, you have no idea how tired I am now.
Part 4: Nadir (1850-1953)
While Kay keeps her world mostly within general period guidelines, there are a few moments where anachronism will jump out and sock me between the eyes. Many of them are in this part of the book; when the Persian said sarcastically, "I get all the good jobs," my eyes crossed a little bit.
Leroux's enigmatic Persian has always been a source of speculation, mainly because Leroux himself didn't bother to furnish us with too many details about the man (who basically serves as an exposition point and a deus ex machina to further the plot, but doesn't get to be much in the way of an actual character). Kay does an incredible job of expanding him into a real person, giving him a believable moral framework and a background that jibes with his role in the original novel. He also gets to be another part of the constant mirroring of events that surrounds everything in Erik's life, starting with the fact that his wife, Rookheeya, has recently died and that his son, Reza, is damaged and dying because of the lack of mothering. The motherlessness of Leroux's original novel is repeated again in Rookheeya's absence, and is only intensified by the earlier interludes with Madeleine (who, depending on how you view it, can represent either the one mother figure in Erik's world or the lack of mother figures).
Leroux's "reporting" style in the original novel, featuring very anecdotal personal accounts, is fairly accurately represented in Nadir's personal account, which is fraught with short anecdotes and personal asides that, while they don't really have much to do with the point, add a nice flavor to the proceedings. He occasionally makes things very obvious via these side notes, much the same way that previous characters have made points extremely obvious (for example, the fact that left-handedness is traditionally associated with the black arts, etc. is explained quite flippantly) in their personal reflection time, but it works better in this context.
Much to Nadir's horror and the shah's amusement, Erik is predictably disrespectful and his usual, superiorly disdainful self, which he gets away with by virtue of it being a novelty for the greatly-feared ruler. His lack of respect for the shah is a direct example of his lack of respect for any mortal authority; he knows both that he is superior and that they reject him out of hand because of his appearance, so it isn't surprising that Erik sees little point in paying respect to a society that not only rejects him, but that he has great difficulty in viewing as "like himself" in any way. There's no irony when he says dryly, "The king of kings must learn patience... like everyone else." His lack of connection with humanity is further highlighted by his passionless dissection of bodies and his study of human remains, ideas which are not yet scientifically accepted and which have a ghoulish and sacrilegious stigma in the time period; his ability to mess around with corpses and their icky bits without qualms further refines (and introduces Nadir to) Erik's sociopathic apartness from the rest of society.
Nadir's son is dying of a degenerative, progressive disease; his inevitable death, which we are very aware is imminent for most of this section of the book, mirrors the constant themes of parental loss of children and childrens' loss of their parents which are repeated time and time again (Madeleine and Erik, Giovanni and Erik, Giovanni and Luciana, and of course the later paternal shenanigans with Christine). Erik's unexpected kinship with Reza is confusing in light of his complete disregard for most of humanity, but it's not so much a glimmer of unnoticed softness as it is simply approaching him the right way; Erik understands pain that he has suffered himself (it will be the same story later, when he sympathizes with rape victims but not murder victims), so he is perfectly able to sympathize with a doomed child, who is begging for a little parental affection (the fact that Nadir is losing his son not only to disease but also to Erik, to whom the boy transfers much of his affection, is heavily and tragically ironic). By contrast, Erik is totally unmoved by pitiful living conditions and people in poverty and pain in the capitol city, since they are part of the overall picture of humanity, but he is quite incensed at the sloppiness of the architecture (he is still much more able to relate to inanimate objects, which conform to standards of beauty and craftsmanship, than to humans who operate on a mystifying moral system to which he is neither party nor invited).
One of the few times a point is made and not explained to death is when Nadir, discussing the exiled vazir's wife, says casually, "There is nothing you can do to destroy the love of others." Besides being an obvious foreshadowing to the tragedy with Christine that will occur later (which involves in large part Erik's inability to force her to love him instead of Raoul), the line enrages Erik in the present; not specifically because he cares whether someone loves someone else, but because he cannot abide the idea that there may be a realm of human behavior over which he has little to no control. Not only does Erik not strictly understand the motivations behind unselfish love, but he is driven to assert his dominance over it in the same way that he has a need to manipulate others in every other arena in order to reaffirm his worth and place in a universe which rejects him at every turn.
Then, there's some more overt telling instead of showing. "This face, which has denied me all human rights, also frees me of all obligation to the human race." Mmhmm, we know, honey. Less tell plz, kthxbye.
Even the daroga can see the sexuality inherent in Erik, despite said phantom's oblivious ignorance to the effect he has on people; the khanum (the shah's mother) has more than a slight interest in Erik, but a combination of confusion at social signals and inability to believe that anyone would want to see his hideous body keep him from realizing it. The later interlude with the odalisque shows us that he is certainly not without his own sexual urges, but as a consequence of his past captivity he will not force those urges on anyone, despite the fact that his life sort of royally sucks. This is another case of compassion that seems to be more motivated by Erik's ability to empathize with a certain situation, rather than to empathize with people, which he is notoriously terrible at.
Erik's statement later (while he's retching up blood from an unfortunate poisoning incident) that he requires death to be esthetically pleasing is yet another example of his desire to achieve perfection and his somewhat horrible ability to be without normal human qualms or morals when it comes to the taking of a life. Where most of humanity sees death (and any reminders of its inevitability) as a terrifying and disgusting thing (which is, incidentally, a large part of the instinctive revulsion most people in Kay's novel feel upon meeting Erik, who is essentially a brutal reminder of what they're going to look like a few years down the road), Erik sees it as just another facet of the world, and like any other situation, he looks for control and artistry in a field to which the vast majority of his fellow men have the very strongest of objections.
The etymological shenanigans continue: Nadir is an Arabic name meaning "rare", but it is also an astronomical term in English that refers to "the point of the celestial sphere that is directly opposite the zenith and vertically downward from the observer" (thanks, Merriam-Webster!). Essentially, it means "the opposite point", and Nadir's function in Kay's novel is to serve as the opposite pole for Erik--to balance out his madness with reason, his dissociation with emotion, and his violence with calmness (Erik himself refers to Nadir as his "conscience", both cognizant of the fact that he lacks the ability to understand morality and accepting of the fact that Nadir can provide him with that compass externally). His son Reza's name means "contentment" or "satisfaction", suitable for his gentle character and the comfort that he provides for Erik before his death.
Part 5: Erik (1856-1881)
Erik is now an adult, and as an adult no longer has as much access to pure fantasy as a form of escapism from the depressing reality of his life. Instead, like many a tortured artiste before and after, he turns to drugs, in this chapter abandoning the opium that Nadir had introduced him to (for vocal reasons, which is valid--smoking of anything is hella bad for your lungs) in favor of morphine. It is interesting to note that while opium might trash his voice, morphine in large quantities will kill him a lot faster by collapsing his veins and damaging his circulatory system; Erik is very clearly much more willing to be cavalier with his health than with his voice, which is not only one of his instruments of manipulation and a source of power, but also the only truly beautiful thing that he has to his name.
A few more style irks occur in this section, mostly having to do with unnecessary statements ("I was growing very cynical..." No shit, really?) and heavy-handed foreshadowing ("Good job we didn't have a chandelier..."). Like the similar places in the rest of the novel, it's not overtly bad or so jarring that the text can't still be enjoyed, but every time I see it I wish that Kay had gone for just a little more subtlety. In a story with such well-crafted characters and such a carefully constructed backstory, I expect more out of the prose.
Erik continues to be far more invested in the beauty and maintenance of inanimate objects than he is in his fellow humans; the destruction of Paris and its beautiful old buildings is far more of a real emotional occurrence for him than the many Parisian citizens who are killed, maimed, raped, etc. War infuriates him for entirely separate reasons from most of his society; he hates the wanton destruction far more than the human cruelties that the actual people involved may be suffering.
Kay introduces an interesting metaphor when she introduces the Paris opera house, the Palais de Garnier. Erik sees the place as a direct correlation to himself (or rather, he treats it exactly as he would wish to be treated, without admitting that he is relating the place to himself); he sees it as an ugly, malformed, hideous child from whom he first recoiled due to its terrible design, but which must be nurtured and brought along so that it can be loved for the beauty that will be within it--specifically, the beauty of music. It's a very neat metaphor that had never occurred to me before, though, like most metaphors, Kay beat it into the ground a little bit.
Erik, now middle-aged and having seen a great many things, is beginning at this point to display signs of social anxiety. He no longer views society's fear and loathing as a challenge to his skills, but as a painful ordeal that he wishes to avoid. He begins to use proxies for all interaction with others--using Jules to run his errands and procure his necessities, refusing to work on the opera house plans in an office with other architects and going directly through Garnier instead, etc.--all leading up to his desire to finish the work on the opera house and immure himself beneath it in order to permanently sever contact with the world of men. This underground kingdom that he is building is a subconscious attempt to regain the peace and solitude of his happy period when living in Giovanni's basement; as the one period in his life when he was happy, unmolested, and allowed to pursue his own activities in privacy, the memory has a powerful nostalgic effect on him. He reminisces that "As long as Giovanni was there above me, like God in his heaven, I was safe."; not only was Giovanni a replacement for the father figure that Erik never had, but he was also a replacement for a God that had never loved him. The desire to return to that uncomplicated solitude is fairly understandable in light of the general awfulness that is the sum of Erik's experiences to date.
Erik's withdrawl is also a form of very quiet suicide. He is removing himself from society; he has convinced himself that it's because he's accepted the fact that he doesn't belong with the rest of mankind, but in reality it is mostly because he is giving up. Having completed works and destroyed countless people, he is tired. Building his tomb and sleeping in his coffin until he finally dies, pre-buried for society's convenience, is the ultimate in gentle suicide (though Erik, as a Catholic no matter how hard he tries to deny it, will never admit this as he retains a horror of suicide above all other crimes--it is the only form of self-destruction with enough plausible deniability to sate his odd "conscience").
Erik has a cat, Ayesha, that he rescued from the streets as a kitten, and she serves as a vehicle to show us the juxtaposition of Erik's obvious fondness and caring for the animal and the complete lack of normal mores he displays toward ther people at the same time. He states with total seriousness that he would have killed people and fed them to Ayesha if food supplies ran low; her well-being is far more important to him than any human's, just as Sascha was the most important figure in his childhood. Erik appreciates innocence, usually in children and animals, but not adults, who have made their own decisions and created their own destinies; as usual, he is empathizing with what he can understand, the helplessness of the young. This deep-rooted empathy for the innocent and the doomed is one of the greatest factors that will initially draw him to Christine.
Erik's hatred of the war with the Prussians, stems, as usual, from a source other than misery at the suffering of his fellow man; by putting Paris under seige and creating a general panic, the Prussians have metaphorically trapped Erik in another cage, one that forces him to remember and participate, however peripherally, in the affairs of a society he is trying to ignore. It is frustrating, especially since Erik's desire to escape from society is still quiety waging war on his desire to be loved.
Why, hello, Greek mythology! We haven't seen you in such a long time that I was wondering if the writers had abandoned you for good! Kay uses only one reference, but it's a good one, tried and true when it comes to comparing the Phantom story to Greek mythology: "And so my labyrinth was wired for death, a vast web encircling the minotaur's secret lair." Unsurprisingly, Erik is casting himself as the monster, in a situation wherein it would have been perfectly feasible to view himself as the master maze-builder (Daedalus); his self-image is still one of personal loathing.
Charles Garnier, Paris' celebrated architect, has a role in Kay's novel, making him one of few real people to make an appearance in this or any other Phantom story to date. He is interesting because he represents, in many ways, what Erik should have been; quite apart from being appreciated for his talents, he is strong-willed, intelligent, and physically quite ugly. It's a socially acceptable ugly, however. Where Garnier falls short of true beastliness in his appearance, he also falls short of true genius, and is very aware that Erik is a far greater talent than he could ever aspire to. The almost overpoweringly obvious point is that genius has a price, and that there can be no incredible ability without a counterpoint of extreme consequences (in Erik's case, disfigurement and mental instability).
Erik's return to his first love, music, has all the qualities of a man returning to his childhood sweetheart. He says that "The urge to create had been burned out of me during thoses fifteen years..." and immediately follows that with the feverish desire to complete Don Juan Triumphant, a creative drive that is, as always, obviously correlated with the sexual drive to reproduce (which has no direction in Erik, who is sort of doomed to never have much in the way of physical contact; this probably enhances the need for a musical outlet). His repetition of traditional wedding vows afterward is a telling moment: he has ceased sowing the wild oats of his creative ability all over the landscape and has "married" the opera house itself (or, more accurately, his solitude and perceived sanctuary there).
Then I whined a little bit about page 316, on which Kay writes that Erik "played Chopin's Prelude in B minor, sotto voce..." Sotto voce is an Italian musical term that literally means "under the voice", and is used to refer to a particular style of singing or speaking in which a line is uttered somewhat under the breath, giving it a furtive or hushed quality. However, it is almost never used as a notation in instrumental music (which, perforce, involves instruments and not voices). It's not strictly incorrect--there are instrumental pieces out there that use it--but it's very rarely used outside of vocal literature, which Chopin is not. It's a tiny thing, and most likely overlooked by all but the most obnoxiously retentive of readers (me).
Erik finally gets in touch with his greatest source of despair in that it becomes obvious that he is aware, subconsciously, that walling himself up under the opera house is simply putting himself in another sort of cage. The insoluble problem for Erik is that his life has been nothing but a succession of cages, from his mother's attic to Javert's literal cage to the shah's court to his underground dwelling; and even further, that his entire existence is lived in a cage of the inescapable fear and hatred of his fellow men, who consistently bar every door to him and deny him the most basic of human comforts.
Another minor thing that irks me is Erik's tarot card dabbling, which happens a few times throughout the text. I have no objection to him having picked up tarot from the gypsies or to Kay's use of it in a metaphorical context, but it seems to have been somewhat under-researched. Those cards that are mentioned--Death, The Lovers, and The Fool--are interpreted on a strictly face-value basis. Tarot divination as it is practiced today (I don't have a reliable source to tell me how it was practiced in the late nineteenth century, but I presume this much fortune-telling insanity couldn't have been come up with in a scant hundred years or so) assigns several factors and gradients of meaning to each card, increasing the supposed accuracy and detail of the reading. For example, the Death card's interpretation doesn't usually have much to do with actual physical death--it's about change and growth, the end of something so that something else can begin, etc.--and The Lovers generally presages a choice ahead or an impulse toward action, rather than having anything to do with actual lovers. It's not something that makes much difference to the text either way, but it damaged my perception of Erik as steeped in gypsy lore when he seemed to have only rudimentary knowledge.
It's here, when we finally reach the point of Kay's retelling that intersects with Leroux's original novel, that the influences become blurred. Pretty much everything up to this point has been based directly on the Leroux novel where it hasn't been made up out of the whole cloth of Kay's imagination, but now there are obvious elements of Webber's musical beginning to make themselves known. Most obvious are Meg's close friendship with Christine, the apparent assertion that Carlotta is talentless, the chronological positioning and motivation of the chandelier crash, the single rose (here incorporated into an Arabic fairytale), and the final kissing scene between Erik and Christine; all are patently borrowed from Webber's popularized version of the story. This makes a lot of sense--Kay's romanticized style is certainly quite reminiscent of Webber's more sympathetic version of the story, even though she includes much of the ugliness of Erik's original conception--and is strangely easy to absorb for the reader. There's no conflict of continuity as Kay has taken great care to make sure that her version of events meshes perfectly with itself, incorporating elements of both Leroux's original novel and Webber's musical into a cohesive and compelling whole. It's not often I get to say that about an author, is it?
At long last, Christine is introduced. Her character is reminiscent of Leroux's pure maiden in its timidity and innocence, but she grows and displays more interesting traits as time goes by, making her much more compelling as a character than her original incarnation. I love the symbolism introduced with her voice; she has a near-perfect instrument, but she has no idea how to use it because of an inherent spiritual weakness, which manifests itself in her timid and easily damaged behavior. She can sing the notes perfectly, but she has no passion, no emotional resonance with her audience, because of this weakness; which of course paves the way to the idea that Erik, who is himself representative of passion, is the means by which her voice can become truly transcendent. This passion is an alien idea for Christine, who is drawn to it (as are pretty much all other females Erik comes into contact with) at the same time that she is terrified of it.
Unfortunately for Erik, the terrifyingly familiar sight of Christine and the accompanying return of human emotion completely destroy the illusion of not needing humanity to which he has been clinging so fiercely. The problem with Christine is that she is a dead ringer for Madeleine--not just similar, but absolutely identical--which brings up a host of buried psychological problems for Erik and brings our Oedipal issues back in full force. Having been denied love from his mother, the one person that should have fostered his emotional growth, Erik is almost insanely driven to achieve that love from Christine, who is a proxy for his mother almost more than she is a woman in her own right. The issues of maternal abandonment from Leroux's novel are heightened and intensified through these very concrete parallels in Kay's backstory.
Part 6: Counterpoint: Erik and Christine (1881)
So Erik and Christine start in on the bizarre teacher/student relationship from Leroux's novel. They are not so much in love as in awe of one another--Christine of Erik's otherworldly genius and almost supernatural abilities, and Erik of her beautiful potential and symbolic significance.
Christine utters here what might be my favorite line of the entire novel: "His music swells within my body like a beautiful, burgeoning child..." Now, how is THAT for symbolism? Erik, as the sexually creative, musical force, has always been pretty recognizable as "impregnating" Christine with his music, but the somewhat innocent comparison by the character herself is delightful. Add to that Kay's addition of Christine as an almost literal mother figure for Erik himself, and the subtle symbolism of Leroux's original work has burst into full, glorious bloom.
Raoul is certainly present, but he's almost invisible until the very last section of the book, instead serving merely as a catalyst for Erik's and Christine's relationship to go through the violent trials that it does. Poor Raoul. He never gets any love. Erik is aware that his irrational hatred and jealousy of Raoul is tragically unwarranted, but he has never been particularly good at governing his worse emotions, and he is experiencing a powerful transferrence of envy as he sees Raoul enjoy the cream of every indulgence and human comfort he has ever been denied. He's watching Etienne steal his mother from him all over again, and he is understandably (not defensibly... but understandably) irrational as a result.
Erik, who continues to view himself as a sort of cancerous, evil influence on everything he touches (as a result of what he sees as the innate corruption of his soul), is deeply troubled by his attraction to Christine. Quite aside from the undeniably strong sexual attraction he feels toward her (and believe me, he does plenty of agonizing over that one), his mere association with her "taints" her innocence with his deception. He recognizes the parallel between this situation and his previous associations, but he feels powerless to avoid it, remaining trapped in an addictive cycle which calls to mind his ongoing love affair with morphine. His love for her remains unconsummated, and in fact he strives not to even suggest any kind of physical contact to her, being all too obviously cognizant of the disastrous effect when he begged his mother for kisses as a child. Christine, in turn, is beginning to see Erik as a man (at odds with Leroux's original conception of the character, who was devastated when she discovered that her "angel" was flesh and blood), but the continuing arrangement is preferable for her; by not acknowledging his very mortal origin, she can keep the relationship in a non-threatening, safe arena wherein nothing untoward will be expected of her.
Christine's continual fascination with seeing Erik's face is a forceful reminder, both for Erik and for the reader, of the doomed Luciana; consequently, his tendency to treat Christine with incredible annoyance and eventually murderous fury when she refuses to leave it alone is understandable since he can't bear to be reminded of the inevitable, tragic end of this love affair with Christine. And barely had I written that down than Erik turned around and told us that exact thing in his narrative voice, much to my dismay, in another example of Kay telling us something that was already easily apparent to the reader. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Erik's subsequent heart attack, the symbolism of which is perfectly obvious (and the source of which was pretty obvious, too, considering all the morphine he's still shooting up).
The knowledge that Christine will not actually be his is not particularly good for Erik's psyche, and, having ruined his previous effort by becoming the Phantom, he now attempts to commit suicide via inaction once again, this time by giving Christine all the keys and access to his haven. He even goes so far as to suggest that she have Raoul ambush him if she wants to; he accepts, subconsciously, that he can never have her, so he hopes that she will put him out of his misery. Christine, for her part, is actually somewhat relieved at Erik's threats against Raoul; they give her an easy out, an opportunity to be reactionary instead of examining her own feelings, which is quite seductive as she's very much afraid to find out exactly where her heart lies.
Leroux's basic conflict for Christine, between the warmly undemanding safety of Raoul and the sexually-charged growth of Erik, is brought into full, brilliant focus in the scene where Erik destroys Christine's innocence. Even having locked her in her room in order to spare her the ravages of his unconquerable lust, Erik still manages to rape her--aurally defiling her with his organ (I can't help it; it is immature of me to not be able to type that without giggling like a madwoman?) as he plays the uncontainable Don Juan Triumphant. Christine, who is simultaneously having her first honest to god orgasm and also mentally begging Raoul to come rescue her, is caught in exactly the dilemma that Leroux originally placed her in: she is torn between the forbidden but enticing world of Erik, and the safe, unchallenging world of the vicomte.
Finally, when Christine has betrayed him for the final time and planned to take off with Raoul, Erik admits that his atheism has been a sham, a sort of flipping the finger at the big guy because he can't really do anything else. The hatred is central to his character; by accepting that God is real, he must accept that all of the sufferings and injustices that he has been subjected to and inflicted on others were not only allowed by an apparently conscienceless God, but foreordained. The irony that he has finally broken down and gone to the roof to pray, begging for Christine to love him, is doubly cruel as it becomes knife-sharp when he overhears her planning to leave with her fiance. God has answered his prayer by showing him what he cannot have, and it is no particular wonder that he snaps and dedicates himself henceforth to mayhem. Just as Christine is regressing toward her childhood, choosing Raoul to keep her safe and remove the awful need to think about the frightening realities she has experienced, so too is Erik regressing to his bleak, dissociative childhood, becoming once more a child with no more care for the evil he perpetrates against others than he would have for stepping on an ant. Through Christine, the unwitting representative of love denied, Erik is reliving the pain of Madeleine's rejection and Giovanni's betrayal, and it's more than his tentative sense of morals can handle.
In the end, much to his own dismay, Erik is unable to be the truly heartless monster that he sees himself as; he is unable to cause his own mother pain, and this inability to hurt Christine is something that he sees as the final, damning failure. He has already failed at being human, failed to understand and properly emulate the behaviors and morals of others, failed to be a part of society or to gain any kind of adequate acceptance, and now he has also failed to be the evil monster that he is generally perceived as. He is a total failure--not a creature proudly living outside the laws of man, but a person incapable of being either a proper man or a credible beast. Failure is the result of loss of control, and here as Erik realizes finally that he has no control whatsoever, the very underpinnings on which he has built his self-image are destroyed, leaving him confused and mentally destitute.
He is so damaged that he is almost incapable of understanding Christine's final kiss, instead becoming lost in loops of regressive memories of his mother. His final snap back to lucidity comes with a fierce return of his protective love for Christine, and he finally steps back and releases her to depart with Raoul.
Part 7: Raoul, 1897
The time skip brings us to Raoul, Christine having died a few years ago, and to their son Charles. Via flashback, we get to watch Erik finally choose to be a father to Christine, to give her that parental guidance that he was denied in his own childhood rather than taking the role of a child begging for his mother; having accepted that he cannot have her, he graciously gives her away to Raoul, who he knows will love her.
I appreciate the idea that Raoul flees to Britain with Christine prior to marrying her; the fact that his social standing would be mostly ruined and the remnants of his family in France quite upset by his marrying an opera girl is not ignored, though it is a little bit glossed over for my taste. Still, he's a rich dude; he can go live in England with his wife and nobody's going to argue, least of all me. It wasn't necessary to the plot to elaborate further.
Christine's determination to return to Erik before her wedding is impressive, but not really surprising; his influence is still extremely strong, even now, and she is incapable of breaking that final promise to him, even to the point of letting Raoul dump her because of it. She has a daughter's devotion, which is all the more oddly poignant when it turns out that she does, in fact, "marry" Erik. The marriage is short-lived; she is his wife for his last night on earth and widowed in the morning, just in time to marry Raoul (which is not as bad as it sounds; she fully intended to keep her promise to Raoul as much as to Erik, and this way has been faithful to them both). Ironically, it is therefore Raoul who is the virgin on their wedding night.
Christine's son, Charles, is the spitting image of his grandfather, Erik's deformity apparently having been an aberration that was not passed down to the next generation. Charles represents the final remnant of Erik's life; he is the last vestige of his genius father, the legacy that will not only perpetuate Erik but also, by virtue of his impressive compassion and intelligence, help bring more humanity to the very society that rejeted his father.
Raoul is never bitter about all of this, surprisingly; he is more resigned to it all. Having achieved what he wanted, his marriage to Christine and their happy life together, he is nevertheless aware that a part of her continued to belong to Erik until her dying day, and he accordingly lays her to rest with all of the tokens and mementos of Erik in recognition of the fact that he has been her husband just as much as Raoul has for the remainder of her life. Raoul holds Christine in a sort of trust, and while he is thankful of the time spent with her and knows that she loved him, he is always aware that the influence of Erik could not be forgotten, and he behaves more like a guardian than a husband, often governing his choices based upon what Erik might have done in the same situation. It is a strange triple marriage, one member of which is absent but nevertheless profoundly important.
The only thing that I could really have done without in this novel were occasional phrases, thrown here and there, that were extremely similar to lyrics from Webber's musical version of the story. I, personally, tend to feel that while some of the lyrics are undoubtedly resonant and poignant, they are nevertheless much too recognizable to be repeating back in other fiction, even in slightly altered form. The effect, far from carrying over the poignancy of their original usage, was instead irritating and disappointing; I would much have preferred to hear a new turn of phrase from Kay, rather than a regurgitated one.
So, to recap the metaphorical situation: Erik marries his mother and sires his father, while Christine marries her father and gives birth to her grandfather, and Raoul ends up fathering the child of his wife's father. That, ladies and gentlemen, is metaphorical incest on an epic scale.
Kay's characters are interesting, engaging, relatable, eminently real and amazingly fleshed out. She has done an incredible job of taking characters that were little more than archetypes and metaphorical markers and making them human, without sacrificing any of their representational significance (and, in many cases, adding more). She explains too much; her characters and their actions speak for themselves, and the reader doesn't need to have them think the whole thing out in black and white terms to understand that. There's no faith in the cognition skills of the reader, and I wish there were; but even with the tendency to over-explicate, Kay demonstrates an in-depth understanding of Leroux's original work and an ability to embroider and expand upon it in such a way as to bring something more of her own to the table. That understanding is a rare commodity in Phantom literature, apparently.
Kay Gets It. If only she were more willing to trust that maybe we, too, get it, I would have almost nothing to complain about in this novel.
(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.) |
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