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The Phantom Project: Night of the Phantom by Anne Stuart (Part 1)
This was hilarious in the way that only a Harlequin romance can be.


Night of the Phantom by Anne Stuart, 1991
Grade: C-

Ah, yes. It has Fabio on the cover, so immediately you know it's going to be awesome, right? Right. This book is, in a few words, incredibly silly. It is absolutely not concerned with any of the themes or commentary of Leroux's original novel, so it is a testament to the old man's writing abilities that a surprising number of correlations do come through anyway. Anne Stuart has mentioned on her website that she conceived and wrote it as a combination of the Phantom story and the Beauty and the Beast myth (mildly ironic, since the Phantom story pretty much IS just a later form of the Beauty and the Beast myth), and the elements she uses of both are pretty readily apparent. Her love of complete insanity is also fairly apparent.

Some of you may be looking at the cover and wondering who, exactly, that totally not deformed dude is. Oh, read on, my friends. You are in for such a deliciously crazy-sauce treat.

Prologue

This prologue would totally have made me think that the main character was a vampire if I hadn't already had a general idea what was going on. It's very short, which is probably all right since it's extremely dramatic and somewhat silly. Unnamed figure sits in his room, broods about how he hates the light and only the night is fit for him, plots revenge on someone. Standard set-up stuff. We establish here that the Webber stage musical is going to be a big, big influence on this book; the language here is reminiscent of Webber's lyrics, though it's going to get very much more obvious later on in the novel.

Chapter 1

Names can be entertaining things. Used properly, they can also give the reader a little insight into the characters they're going to be spending time with. Alas, the names in this novel almost baffled me sometimes. For example, our main character (and Christine analogue... sort of) is named Megan and often called Meg for short, which is confusing since Meg is a ballerina in the opera in Leroux's novel and a friend and confidante for Christine in Webber's musical version. This may, in fact, be deliberate; Meg and our Phantom character do not have any kind of a mentor relationship going on in Stuart's novel, being strictly concerned with power balance and romance. This could actually be looked at as the first traditionally published romance that prefers to stick Meg and the Phantom together as potential romantic partners, though many other elements of Megan's character are more in line with Christine. Still, Meg Carey vs. Meg Giry... it's pretty darn similar.

The Phantom, not incidentally, is named Ethan Winslowe. There's the name Ethan, which means "strong, firm, and impetuous" (why, look--the romance hero trifecta!), but more importantly there's the surname Winslowe, which was the Phantom's name in the 1974 de Palma/Finley film. I was both surprised and exhilarated by this; I hadn't expected Stuart to be doing much in the way of research, and would have been ashamed of my assumptions if it hadn't turned out that there was no discernable Phantom of the Paradise influence anywhere else in the novel. I was forced to write the name off as having no relevance, though the extreme coincidence of it continues to arouse my suspicions every time I see it.

We get right in here with my greatest annoyance in the prose: it is riddled with sentence fragments. Skilled authors can use sentence fragments judiciously in their prose to great effect, but that is not what's going on here. The fragments are overused and often thrown in there with reckless, nonsensical abandon where they aren't needed, and the result is a choppy, irritating style that, despite its intention to emphasize the words, actually detracts from the impact of a given sentence.

This version of the Phantom is set up exclusively as an architect, rather than a musician; the change is a fundamental one, removing the option of a transcendental musical ability from the Phantom's scope and leaving him that much more destitute without a source of spiritual "beauty" to counteract his hideous physicality. The idea's source is an interesting topic for speculation, especially as Leroux's original work only mentioned Erik as a contractor working on the opera house's construction once in his epilogue. It seems possible that Stuart may have encountered Kay's novel of the previous year, though the time between the publishing of the two books is slim enough to cast serious doubt on that idea. A few short stories from Greenberg's anthology mentioned Leroux's Erik in an architectural context, but Kay's novel was the first to really give him a thorough, concrete background in that particular field.

Anyway, he's a reclusive genius architect who never leaves his house because of some kind of mysterious medical condition. Reese Carey runs a big-name contracting firm and builds a lot of Ethan's buildings. Reese is also a generic asshole--self-involved, conniving, conscienceless, and generally slimy, all of which neatly set him up as the big villain of the story (though there will be others later, as well). His dialogue is accordingly not overly realistic, since Stuart isn't giong to waste much time giving his character a lot of complexity. To set up the basic conflict, Reese failed to build one of Ethan's buildings exactly to the specifications he ordered; the building subsequently collapsed, and Ethan is now threatening to out Reese to the authorities as responsible for the debacle. Reese is here representative of society, particularly affluent business society (the elite of modern-day America), which the Phantom finds alternately disgusting in their hubris and strangely alluring in that he is not allowed to be privy to their world. I actually don't think that Stuart intended to introduce any class friction in her novel, implied or otherwise, but the concept was such a strong part of Leroux's original narrative that it may have carried over without her even having been aware of it. It's worth noting that I found the juxtaposition of the Phantom character being concerned about his reputation (without knowing that the builder didn't construct it properly, people are inclined to blame his maverick architectural design) a little bit odd, since he's traditionally been fairly unconcerned with the opinions of a society that rejected him, but Stuart solves that problem by giving Ethan a well-developed conscience so that he can be angry that people were hurt in the name of greed rather than angry that his name was attached to the situation.

Reese, of course, is Meg's father, and in the expected Beauty and the Beast form he sends her off to face Ethan and plead his case, despite the fact that she was planning on quitting and touring the world, like, tomorrow. This constant kowtowing to her father was one of my greatest problems with Meg's character. Not only is she supposedly excited by the prospect of her new life and firmly set in her resolve to reach independence, but her father stages a suicide attempt in order to grab her sympathy and convince her to do his dirty work--and even though she KNOWS he staged it, she goes off to do what he wants anyway. And she feels guilty for even thinking of leaving him to his own mess. I understand familial love, but seriously, honey--grow a goddamn spine. I was totally unconvinced by all Stuart's efforts to make Meg spunky, independent, and powerful after that little scene. Her internal narration over the whole affair is mind-boggling: "If Ethan Winslowe held to his revenge, there'd be no way she could leave Chicago. She'd have to stand by her father in his disgrace." (pg. 15)

Honey, no. Get your ass on the plane to the south of France and let your dad rot for his crimes. Even taking into account that she believes her father (no, I don't know why) when he says that it was an honest mistake and Ethan is just witchhunting him out of spite, she still utterly fails every Independent Heroine litmus test I know of.

But, no matter how little sense it makes, she goes off to the little town of Oak Grove, which is the most hilariously horror-movie little place ever. Stuart makes it a point to inform us that no one ever goes there; the town line sign says, "Founded 1835, Lost 1902", which nearly made me snort with laughter. It's full of people who hide in their houses and peer out through the shades, and everything is overgrown and old. Everyone Meg meets there is a creepy hickish hulk, bent on intimidating her. I seriously could not wait for ghoulish children to start wandering out of the cornfields, but, alas, this did not happen. The inhabitants of the town are totally ridiculous; grown men and women are constantly talking about how Ethan has the evil eye and anyone who looks at him goes blind or mad. The consensus of the entire community is that he is the Devil's son (Mammon, is that you?) and that he steals children. It's like it is actually STILL 1835 in Oak Grove, and there seems to be no real reason for this (other than, of course, Stuart's need for a convenient setting for the crazy she has in store for the reader).

Chapter 2

Upon arriving at Ethan's mansion, Meg meets Salvatore (meaning "savior" or "salvation"--she's a subtle one, Ms. Stuart!), his manservant. I initially thought that Salvatore (whom Ethan calls "Sally" for no apparent reason other than to send the reader into unscheduled fits of laughter) must be analogous to the Phantom's henchmen in earlier film forms of the story--i.e., Ivan in the 1962 Fisher/Lom film and Lajos in the 1983 Markowitz/Schnell film--but other than being very strong and intimidating and working for the Phantom, there seems to be no correlation between him and his predecessors. Even if she didn't consciously borrow from earlier versions, however, Stuart's inclusion of his character raises an interesting question: why do later interpreters of the story so frequently feel the need to give the Phantom some kind of sidekick or co-conspirator? In Ivan's case, it was to absolve the Phantom of any blame in the murders and terrorizing of the opera company, allowing him to have all of the mystique and fear and none of the responsibility. Lajos, on the other hand, was more of a plot device, intended to make the Phantom's added-for-the-film fall from grace and escape into the catacombs more believable for the audience. The unnamed assistant boy that Raoul shoots in Bischoff's 1976 novel is almost certainly borrowed from the 1962 film, but he is an innocent in that version, the lonely Phantom's only companion. Conversely, Webber's version of Madame Giry serves as both aide and traitor, held at arm's lenth from the character, much the same way Carriere does in the 1990 Richardson/Dance miniseries. By the time we get to Stuart's novel and Salvatore, the idea of a secondary assistant character for the Phantom is pretty solidly established. Is this because we, as a culture, are so very socially tight-knit that the idea of someone existing completely without human contact is unrealistic for us? Or, maybe closer to the mark, is it that we can't relate very well to a completely solitary character, and require some human interaction in order for us to see him as a person rather than a monster (there's no denying that, starting with the 1943 Lubin/Rains film, there has been a real push to humanize and sympathize the Phantom's character)? Since Webber's musical version seems to be the largest influence on Stuart's novel, it's likely that Salvatore and Ruth (who will be introduced later) are intended to fill the same role as Madame Giry, but their very presence only intensifies the basic question of their purpose.

Leaving psychological conjecture for later, and back to the plot: Ethan decides to just outright kidnap Meg, which is illegal and downright silly, but which he will get away with for way, way too long because Stuart is not overly concerned with things like realism (you have no idea, yet. Just wait). Meg never gets to see him, but she assumes from all the machine sounds she hears and the rumors circulating about him that he has some kind of terminal disease and is an invalid being kept alive by machines. Ethan, unsurprisingly, is a grade-A asshole to her, because that's what romance heroes do (oh, don't pretend you didn't know he was going to be the hero). A few continuity WTF moments also appeared, including the sudden revelation that there were video cameras in all the rooms of the house, despite the fact that we had just been assured that half the house wasn't even wired for electricity.

In this chapter, I continued to have little respect for Meg as a character. Not only was she so alarmed by the architecture of Ethan's house that she almost fainted (from seeing architecture? Do gables freak her out or something?), but she doesn't even object when Salvatore locks her in a room or constantly tells her she's a prisoner. She just sort of wanders around in dumbfounded amazement that this is happening, which I can understand, but give me a break.

Chapter 3

Meg needs to stop whining about how her father doesn't deserve this kind of treatment. Granted, his truly assholish nature is yet to be revealed, but she KNOWS that he's a manipulative prat who's basically run her life, she KNOWS that he intentionally cut corners in order to save money and got people killed as a direct result, and she KNOWS that he faked a suicide attempt just to force her to do his bidding. I completely fail to see how she could possibly believe that he doesn't deserve to go to jail for putting his financial gain ahead of the physical safety and well-being of the people who were going to be using his buildings. Maybe it's just that I'd make a really lousy romance heroine; if a member of my father was enough of a dick to do that and then not even be sorry about it, I wouldn't be feeling particularly guilty for not throwing myself on the sword for them. The fact that the whole premise is entirely ridiculous--this modern-day dude just up and kidnaps a woman and keeps her in his house, saying that she has to stay because she "amuses him", and nobody seems to notice or care?--doesn't really help me look more favorably upon Meg's choices.

However, I did find it pretty awesome that Stuart included that mainstay of Greek mythology, the Rape of Persephone. It's one of those myths that is closely tied to the Phantom story (and one of the reasons that said story is so enduring, I think), so even if she was a bit blatant about it, it was good to see the ideas connecting there. The idea of Persephone's swallowing of the seed as a fairly sexually charged act is one that isn't often explored, and that makes the whole thing even more appropriate for the setting and the story. She makes another, brief reference to Ethan as a Gorgon a little bit later; while I approve of the inclusion of the mythological bases of the story, I think this one was a bit misguided since the Gorgons are such powerfully feminine figures. Unless there's somethnig about Ethan that Stuart isn't telling us.

Then there's some kind of bizarre moment where Meg feels someone's breath on her in the corridor, or something, and makes a big deal out of it mentally. Even after having finished the novel, I have no fucking clue what that was about. Unless it was ghosts.

Ethan is frequently refered to throughout the novel as a metaphorical spider--sitting in the center of his web, spinning nets to trap people, feeding on others, etc. I couldn't help but wonder if this might also suggest a bit of influence from Kay's novel, which is the only previous place that I've seen the spider metaphor used so consistently.

Chapter 4

I enjoyed the constant struggle over food that Stuart kept going for the first part of this novel; the continual offering of food from Ethan and Salvatore and Meg's steadfast refusal to eat any of it was a neat mirror-precursor that would play itself out again in the form of the constant tug-of-war involving sexual desire between Ethan and Meg later (oh, come on, you knew they were going to get it on eventually). It was a nicely subtle touch in a sea of unsubtle insanity.

Things continue to follow a pretty traditional Beauty and the Beast mold, as Ethan informs Meg that he will leave her father alone as long as she stays with him and she spends a lot of time alternately moping and plotting her escape (she's not a very good plotter, so this goes on for a bit). I understand what Stuart is trying to do here, but the story just doesn't survive the transplant to modern times very well; Meg's disappearance not raising a flag for SOMEONE, even if not her asshat father, just doesn't make much sense, and neither does the ready-made witchhunt village or the constant insistence that no one ever sees Ethan's face.

Then there was an illegal use of simple past tense when the rest of the sentence was in present perfect. Ten point penalty.

Ethan's character is pretty indefensible for most of the novel, which made it difficult for me to align him as a hero. His omgsoTRAGIC past did not give him license, in my opinion, to sit around and snicker over how he planned to rape Meg (or at the very least initiate sexual advances and then scare the bejeezus out of her with his face). He wasn't just an asshole; he was an asshole in a different manner from the original Erik's insane behavior. Rather than begging Christine (as a representative of the "good" in society) to accept and love him despite his ostracization, Ethan is pretty much just an asshole using his deformity as an excuse to treat people, including Meg, badly. Having been treated badly is not an excuse for visiting the same treatment on others, and while lashing out at a humanity that scorned him is a big part of the Phantom's M.O., this kind of specific pettiness is not only a little bit out of place, but it also makes the character completely unpalatable for the hero role. It's a well-established romance novel trope that the heroine generally redeems the hero, in some form, from some kind of character flaw, but I both didn't believe that Meg's influence would have a lasting effect on him and didn't think that he was a particularly worthwhile dude even if it had. He has a perfect right to be upset over the discrimination he's faced, but some of the shit he pulls in later chapters is too obnoxious for me to forgive so easily (Meg has no problem, but then again, see her relationship with her father).

Speaking of her father, she finally decides not to be on his side anymore after it's made clear to her that he'd rather leave her for dead in Ethan's clutches than out himself on his building mistakes. It's an uphill battle for anyone to get her to believe it even then, though so far no one has seen an ounce of humanity out of Reese, and I have no idea why Meg is so sold on the idea that "he wouldn't do that".

Meg falls ill with pneumonia, which is a romantically consumptive disease that strikes characters when the author is in need of a plot device to drive them together. She is discovered passed out on the ground by the gardener, Joseph, whose warm and kindly exterior and general fatherly air were completely confusing to my parallel-oriented brain, which was trying to wrap itself around the idea of Buquet as a mentor figure. Like Meg, this seems to be a case where Stuart borrowed the name but assigned it to a completely different character, so I left it alone after a few more chapters made it pretty clear that Joseph really wasn't going to play any kind of a Buquet role.

Stuart has a little bit of a problem with misleadingly incorrect sentences, the sort that say something when they were clearly trying to say exactly the opposite (like the made-up word "irregardless"; seeing it in any published context makes me want to descend into a frothy rage). Statements like, "He picked her up in his arms with an effortlessness that made her grimace and curse her extra ten pounds," (pg. 63) abound. They're so close to saying what they're trying to, and yet so very far away.

Chapter 5

The town doctor gets hauled in to diagnose and help treat Meg, and he serves as yet another reminder that the townsfolk are terrified of Ethan and think he's the spawn of Satan. After all this cringing and doom-crying and insanity from the townspeople, my expectations are extremely high; this had better be an awesome deformity, because these are modern people with modern sensibilities. Ethan had better have a maggot crawling from his eye socket and a hideous rictus of supernatural evil permanently stamped on his face, or I am going to have to shake my finger admonishingly and maybe throw a tantrum. There's some side plot involving the doctor and something bad that he did a long time ago, but my curiosity was not really piqued, being more concerned with what insane levels of traumatic deformities that would be required to justify all this wide-spread craziness.

Delusional from the fever, Meg thinks that Ethan (whose face she doesn't see, but already we're noting that this is very much a Webber-inspired Phantom, whose body is not subject to the same deformity as his face) is some kind of saving angel tending her in her sickness. It's actually a very nice way to set up the mental divide that Christine has in the original novel between her "angel" and the Phantom; the fever allows her to have a plausible reason to believe that the man taking care of her is almost angelic, and keeps her off her bearings enough to justify her not putting the pieces together to conclude that it's Ethan. The Phantom is in the basement and the angel is in the tower, and it's a neat way of giving us a well-thought-out translation of Christine's confusion in a modern context.

Unfortunately, this did not exonerate Stuart in my eyes when she kept reusing the EXACT SAME lines in her prose. I was trying to pretend they were probably just similar lines and I wasn't yet acclimated to her style, but when she said that Ethan was "pouring that sickly sweet medicine down her throat" TWICE in two pages, verbatim, I was forced to take action (which means I wrote an admonishing note in my notebook. Tremble in horror, authors). Other images were repeated ad nauseum, such as the darkness of the night (which was very dark, I hear) and the distressing fact that Meg's chest seemed to keep catching on fire.

In a ridiculously dramatic scene wherein Ethan carries the feverish Meg over to the open window and stands there with her, with the curtains blowing impressively about his knees and the rain pouring down on their faces, she becomes lucid enough to catch a glimpse of his face (when it's illuminated by a dramatic flash of lightning!), but it is intentionally under-described to stop anyone from figuring out the deformity so early on in the novel. Feverish, half-dead Meg still has the mental acuity to think that he looks like "a fallen angel gone to rule in hell", which is kind of totally ridiculous to read in context, but which clearly gets the point across and brings to mind several previous versions of the story (Webber's, most obviously).

And then, the most stomach-churning, squirm-inducing moment of the novel: we've established that Ethan keeps pouring the "sickly sweet medicine" down Meg's throat. In her haze, she mumbles that it tastes like bubble gum, and Ethan remarks that he's never had bubble gum; she suggests that he try it, but clearly he's not about to go drink her cold medicine out of the bottle. So instead, he decides to STICK HIS TONGUE DOWN HER THROAT, and suddenly they are making out with hot fiery passion (even though she's internally also going "oh no, I'm not strong enough to stop him!") and he's swabbing the cold medicine off the inside of her mouth and she's still at death's doorstep and, seriously, ewww. The conversation I had with John, my frequently unwitting co-conspirator, sounded like this:

John: Why do you keep squirming? I'm trying to take a nap here.
Anne: This book. It's awful.
John: Why?
Anne: Currently, Phantom-dude is making out with sick-Christine-girl, even though she has pneumonia and is sick and gross and not even strong enough to fend him off.
John: Eww.
Anne: He says it's because he wanted to taste the cold medicine he's been pouring down her throat. He's all licking it off the inside of her mouth and shit.
John: Jesus Christ. What the fuck is wrong with authors?
Anne: It's supposed to be sexy.
John: It's not. I was going to kiss you, but now all I can think about is kissing gross helpless plague victims.

After that, I was really kind of despondent about the novel's chance of not driving me out of my mind by the end; it is a testament to Stuart's storytelling skills (sort of) that I was more entertained than disgusted by the time I finished it. I've read Stuart before, and I tend to like her; I wanted to like this novel, but whoo damn. That has to be in the top ten most hideous first kiss scenes ever.

Unsurprisingly, Meg pulls through her illness and wakes up the next morning by herself in her room, where she promptly realizes that Ethan and the Phantom in the basement must be one and the same (despite retaining enough of her faculties to put all the pieces together, she has still conveniently forgotten what his face looked like so she can continue to be fascinated by the mystery of it all), depressingly derailing that excellent duality that Stuart had managed to establish against all odds. Sigh. Back to the status quo of Ethan lurking in the basement and Meg alternately angsting over how she wants him (but will NEVER admit it, OMG) and whining about how he's keeping her a prisoner against her will. The disappointment was almost as crushing as the boredom.

And then, another illegal use of simple past tense! Madame Stuart, please investigate a basic grammar textbook ASAP. Feel free to share it around with your copy-editors.

Meg's train of thought reverses on itself (in the same inner monologue!) and she suddenly doesn't know that Ethan and the Phantom are the same... or does she? I'm so confused at this point that I don't have the first clue what Meg is thinking, other than that life is unfair. Somehow, out of all the mysteries Stuart has set up here, I don't think she intended "What, exactly, is the bird-brained heroine thinking?" to be one of them.

Chapter 6

By the beginning of this chapter, she knows that they're the same person again, though I'm not sure why she changed her mind again. Regardless, she knows what's going on now. Cool. Solid.

As part of his campaign of asshattery and attempts to scare Meg, Ethan has made sure she's given access only to Stephen King books in her long hours of sitting around waiting for him to let her go. Much to my amusement, the only time one is named is when Salvatore comes to talk to her about something and says off-handedly, "Oh, you've been reading Christine." Mad giggles here. Even if it wasn't very subtle, it was cute. Meg's internal monologue continues to get on my nerves, especially when she says things like, "How could one have erotic fantasies wearing bright red Reeboks?" (pg. 85) Clearly, this woman never went to college.

Then, another short foray into the confusing mindset of the townsfolk, wherein Meg meets the local minister, who is bugfuck out of his mind. Not only do we learn that the entire town considers television and modern electrical appliances to be sinful (what? Is this an Amish community, and Stuart just forgot to tell us? What the damn hell?), but the minister informs us that Ethan is the spawn of the Devil. No, really, he's ACTUALLY Lucifer's offspring. Then, as if I wasn't already about to toss the book across the room out of sheer disbelief at the anachronism of it all, the minister starts claiming that Meg is a succubus and that God will smite her from on high with a thunderbolt. My mind boggled at the idea that there could be a modern town, even a small one in Arkansas, that was this united in insanity, but Stuart is hell-bent on forcing it down our throats. What fucking century IS this supposed to be? Because, seriously, it is not the twentieth, and that means we have continuity problems.

Meg is bright enough to realize that the minister is insane, but she is not bright enough to take his offer of rescue, preferring to remain locked in the house with the crazy deformed blackmailing pseudo-rapist instead of spending some uncomfortable time with the local zealots. I can understand that the local crazies aren't going to be too much help with her escape back to civilization, but at least with them she wouldn't be LOCKED UP. It seems like an improvement to me, but whatever. Leaving would have gotten in the way of the True Love that's a-brewin'.

My big problem with Stuart's setting this story in Crazytown in the heart of NotVeryLikely, USA is that it's a big, fat contrivance to aid her in trying to make Ethan's character more palatable and sympathetic than his original form (Erik). Not only is the entire community uniformly nuts, but she makes them hostilely, confrontationally nuts in order to set Ethan up as a martyr. She can't, or won't, set the entire thing in a world or time period that would be intolerant of Ethan's situation, so instead she creates a little pocket reality in the middle of "normal" space where her story can play out uninterrupted. Most writers do this, to some extent, but here it renders many of the original novel's (and, by extension, this one's, too) ideas moot. It's only the people of Oak Grove who are evil and unloving and willing to set store by appearances, so Leroux's original statement about the intolerance and hypocrisy of society as a whole is totally lost. It's not society as a whole; it's just Oak Grove, and who cares what the hell they think? I would really have loved for this novel to try to tackle an update of the idea, showcasing the way normal society reacts to ugliness in this day and age; sadly, all I got was rampant anachronism in order to make the plot easier and shallower, and I wept for what might have been.

The dialogue that doesn't come spewing forth from the mouths of crazy preachers is actually pretty good; it's certainly engaging enough to make me what to see where Stuart is going with things, and at times it's even--dare I say it--snappy. It has some pizazz now and then.

Meg's discussions with Joseph, the gardener with the confusing name, make a few things blindingly clear. For one, Joseph is obviously the town doctor's "mysterious" mistake, which we will not be told for several more chapters. For another, Joseph is kind of a jackoff who talks about how his deceased wife deserved to die for being so awful to Ethan. And for yet another, Joseph is obviously Ethan's father, which is a problem because Ethan's father is dead (this doozy won't be revealed until the fifteenth chapter or so, but you'd have to be dumber than a barn door not to figure it out). Wait, hold the phone. We're allowing ghosts, now? Hot dog, are we going to do some kind of magic realism thing? Maybe Ethan really IS the son of Satan, struggling with his own inner conflicts!

...no. Never mind. Turns out that Joseph is the only thing even remotely supernatural about the whole novel. Stuart adheres strictly to reality (anachronistic and confusing reality, but reality nevertheless) for everything else in her novel, making Joseph this frustratingly random element that she seems to have thrown in just for the hell of it. Well, not for the hell of it: he has a purpose, and its name is Exposition. Take away Joseph, and another fifty pages or so would be necessary to bring everyone up to speed on what was going on, at least. This smacks of laziness, and the confusion of KNOWING that Joseph was a ghost the whole novel even though Stuart refused to say so until the very end (perhaps assuming that her readers had the collective I.Q. of zucchini) just made all the anachronisms and ridiculously contrived situations that much more frustrating because I was always looking for a supernatural explanation for the madness that, of course, wasn't there.

Chapter 8

Now, we've spent the entire book listening to Meg whine about how she's ten pounds overweight. She brings it up a lot, and it's mildly annoying, but most of the time I'd just write it off as, "Hey, look, a romance novel heroine that isn't a perfectly gorgeous supermodel, nice," and go about my business. She moans and complains about how she's too heavy and she's not really attractive and etc., ad nauseum. So, at the beginning of this chapter when her actual proportions were revealed, my indignation was vocal. She's 5'2", and weighs 125 pounds.

Bitch, please. That's not overweight by any stretch of the imagination. Take your whining and your moaning and your crying about how fat you are elsewhere, because no one in their right mind is buying it anymore. Overweight my ass. I clearly find Meg just more and more endearing as I go along, don't I?

There's an amusing interlude, in which I tried to figure out how on earth Meg could have gotten through all her schooling without learning what a succubus was (of course, it was necessary so Ethan could say dirty things to her by way of explanation!), that culminates in Ethan revealing that Meg's father is a monumental asshole who not only is not going to come find and rescue her, but who has also been cutting corners and costs and not building Ethan's buildings right all over the place, not just in the one building that he swore was a "mistake". Meg is unaccountably shocked by all this, and keeps saying things like, "I don't believe you. He wouldn't... he couldn't!", despite the fact that she keeps TELLING us in her internal monologue that he totally WOULD and she KNOWS it. I am still not impressed by her "independence". Stuart seems to be trying to make her somewhat innocent about the ways of the world (another fairly common device in romance novel dynamics), but she makes such a point of telling us over and over again that the character ISN'T innocent or virginal or inexperienced or naive about anything that I'm forced to reach the only conclusion left: she must be stupid.

If we can digress for a moment and look at the idea of Erik as a romantic hero, it's actually a very interesting metamorphosis. In his original form, Erik was extremely hideous and about as un-romantic as it is possible to be, but over time he has been "updated" in the cultural subconscious; Leroux's version of Erik represents a sexually-charged, forbidden love that was unacceptable in the time period that the novel was written, but which is viewed as tantalizing and attractive to our currently more relaxed social morals. The same phenomenon crops up again and again in later intepretations of the story, especially those based (as this one is) mostly on Webber's greatly sentimentalized stage musical: we view Erik's devotion, sensuality, and piteous circumstances with a great deal more sympathy and attraction than a reader would have in the time period that the story was initially introduced, and that leads many a writer and interpreter to place Erik in the hero role rather than Raoul (whose childlike attributes make him much less attractive to us in a modern context, rather than more). Much of this idea stems directly from Webber's extremely popular musical, which was the first version to really popularize the idea of the Phantom having a relatively small, half-face deformity and the accompanying angst instead of a hideous full-body condition and an irreparably demented mind. Stuart isn't really doing anything particularly new with the story here (unless, as earlier discussed, she's starting the ball rolling for the idea of a romance between Erik and Meg Giry), but her novel is an excellent example of these tendencies toward romanticizing and idealizing a character that, while originally a villain with sympathetic tendencies, has been changed so radically in the eyes of the typical reader during the passage of the last century that he becomes instead a tragic hero.

Meg actually makes an outright reference to the Beauty and the Beast myth here, which I found somewhat excessive since we'd have to be blind not to have seen all the obvious borrowing from that tale. Then she goes on to do one of the most confusing things she does the entire novel; she decides to do a striptease for the camera in her room, knowing that Ethan is watching on the other end. Supposedly, she still hates and fears this guy, and she can just go change in the bathroom where he can't see her (as she does in the rest of the book), so what gives? I don't get it. She says that she wants to taunt him and make him suffer by showing him her hot sex-ay body which he can't have (careful, Meg, he's already made some creepily rape-esque statments), but she's totally mortified after she's done it and she never, ever does anything like it again (or before, we're given to understand). It seems like just another contrived situation to stir the pot a bit and get Ethan's nether parts all aflame so the sexual tension can rise. Frankly, I wasn't impressed (though I do have to say that the scene, as it was written, was rather deliciously naughty and enjoyable). Also, Meg manages to sneak in another dig about her weight, which made me roll my eyes more vigorously than was probably healthy.

As I said earlier, Stuart is attempting to give Meg a certain innocence to her character, which is in keeping with a Christine character since Leroux's little opera singer had innocence as one of the most central of her traits. You wouldn't think this would be particularly intact after that little striptease, but it strangely is; this is most likely a product of a more modern view of human sexuality as natural and healthy, rather than sinful or perverted. This modern view allows innocence to co-exist with sexuality in a way that would not have been possible for the morals of the nineteenth century, and I found it an enjoyable attempt to keep both ideas intact (even if it was ruined by Meg's unendingly ridiculous life choices).

I'm getting more and more verbose in my old age; this review turned up too large for LJ's size limit as well. Second post will follow with the remainder!

(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.)