Review: Mélusine, Sarah Monette

Title: Mélusine
Author: Sarah Monette
Date Begun: December 15, 2006
Date Completed: December 17, 2006

To be quite honest, I picked the book up because one of the characters is a cat burglar. I have a shameful, shameful weakness for cat burglars - it's all Cary Grant's fault. And also fantasy novels about thieves. Even if the characters are only moonlighting as thieves. (See: The Death of the Necromancer.) Gets me every time. (Damn you, Cary Grant!)

I enjoyed Mélusine quite a lot. Monette has an interesting and enjoyable style. She writes well enough for me to overcome my dislike of first person, and that's not something any author can do, you know? When I realized the book would be told in alternating first person POV I was even more leery but I stuck with it and I'm glad I did. The parts of the book where the narrative is strongest are from Mildmay's perspective, though to be fair Felix is insane more than half the time so his passages are going a little...odd. Although, even when Felix is lucid Mildmay's passages are much more engaging. But I guess Mildmay isn't a flash son of a bitch on a good day and Felix...is.

The summary on the back cover makes it fairly obvious [SPOILER!] that they're long-lost brothers. (I will avoid spoilers from now on, or do my best, but come on, guys, like you couldn't tell from the synopsis?) Sadly, the minor characters all disappear when Felix and Mildmay team up, and while I love Mildmay a lot it's sort of like watching Firefly with only Simon and River. You know, they're great but - I love Wash and Zoe too, at least.

Another thing that Mélusine suffers from is the new vocabulary. I am all for authors inventing new vocabularies for their characters. I mean, that's what Tolkien's work is based on. But I feel like Monette should have reconsidered who she gave what vocabulary to. The lower classes (Mildmay) use a different way of reckoning time, or at least of naming it, than the upper classs (Felix) who use the typical "week", "month" etc. This wouldn't be a problem, except the lower classes use words like "septad" which makes more sense to me in the mouth of a nobleman or something. Mildmay is the character we get most of our time updates from, and I have no concept of time with a standard vocabulary so I wasn't clear on how long some things had been going on. The other thing that bothers me is that by creating a new vocabulary for time I assumed time would be an important theme throughout the book and it...wasn't. Which is a pity, because time is always an interesting concept to explore.

The other vocabulary problem is from the mixture of real English words (like with reckoning time), real French words and just fake words. (I have some similar problems with Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel books and their mixture of French and English and fake words.) I don't have a problem understanding the French, because I speak it (badly) and anyway most of the words Monette uses are cognates or common knowledge. But she goes out of her way to change other words so I don't understand why she kept these. I would have preferred she stick to English, at least for Mildmay who, after all, swears in English. And he swears a lot.

The other problem, for me, was that two characters seem to undergo personality changes. They're both secondary characters at best, but they are important secondary characters. The first character changes almost completely soon after we're introduced to him, he turns into a snippy, whiny little bitch when before he'd seemed quite sensible and had been (more or less) a sort of refuge. There's another character who changes similarly, but the explanations are brief and unsatisfactory. If Monette had meant them to be unsympathetic from the beginning, I would have appreciated more notice. I only mention it because it was distracting for me to read scenes with both characters. Change isn't something I mind, but I like changes to be explained.

It's still a good story, and Monette has created a wonderfully rich universe. Although the book would benefit from at least one map. Especially since maps are mentioned several times in the course of the story and there are some very important geographical discussions...

I'm nitpicking now. Which is too bad, because I feel like Mélusine deserves a lot of praise. The writing is rich, the plot is interesting - though largely unresolved, but this is only the first book - and the characters are great. Besides Mildmay, I really loved both Gideon and Stephen.

In fact, let me talk about how much I love Gideon: I love Gideon. Seriously. I am confident that this means his death is rapidly approaching, but I don't care. He is great. And so is Stephen, because he is probably the sanest person in the book. Stephen! Call me!

I enjoyed Mélusine and will be checking out the sequel, though not until it is in paperback and/or the third book is easily accessible. I bought books as they came out with Robin Hobb's Tawny Man trilogy and that made me a nervous wreck. Monette probably has the power to do the same thing and I'll enjoy seeing what she does with her writing in the future.

Provided she sticks to one language.

Mélusine on Amazon. :: Sarah Monette's site.