"Liberté", Gita Trelease
10 July 2024 04:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI have very mixed feelings about this book. The premise in itself intrigued me (a parallel-universe French Revolution where magic is real and it is magicians being blamed for crop failures and strung up from lamp-posts), and the idea of a magic system based on *sorrow* is very original; it both leads to magic being associated with suffering for the user, thus making its use less inviting, and, humans being what they are, gives rise to the temptation to develop techniques for mining the suffering of other people to fuel your own power, thus giving magicians in general a bad name. (In this world, Gilles de Rais would have been a genuinely powerful practitioner, although the book doesn't make that connection...)
The beginning felt very odd, with a lot of references back to events that happened before the start of the plot but which didn't feel natural as backstory (unlike, say Paladin of Souls), and eventually I turned to the pre-title pages and saw that it was the sequel to another book, which explained a good deal. The author probably never expected it to be read as a stand-alone novel, and there is enough information here to explain what the reader needs to know (although not necessarily in the order one would expect to learn it), but it did come across as clunky as a result.
Trelease can write, and in many ways she has a good sense of period: she manages to write 'period' costume credibly from the protagonist's contemporary perspective rather than as corset-porn, with references to the sound of a man's heels tapping down a corridor or with shoulder-length hair on a woman perceived as a mannish style, for example. (Though I did find the reference to a man's 'chemise' a bit weird: I know it's the normal French term for a man's shirt -- en bras de chemise, in one's shirt-sleeves -- but the book doesn't talk about the hero's 'gilet' in place of his waistcoat, a term which likewise has rather different associations in English...)
My main gripe with it is that the book turned out to be very clearly flavoured as a 'Young Adult' novel. If you want to write Strong Independent Female Leads, the French Revolution is a pretty good place to do it, and I've read a couple of seriously good historical novels by women writers that do just that: Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety" and Madge Pierce's "City of Darkness, City of Light". But this book simply doesn't convince on that level. The romance is pretty generic. The characters' feelings and reactions could have come out of any modern YA fantasy; it all feels very shallow, while everyone is non-racist, queer-supportive, gorgeously attractive and *young* -- even Rosier the puppeteer with his pipe, whom I had read as a middle-aged love interest for the protagonist's younger sister, gets later unexpectedly described as a 'boy', presumably because for the target audience a young girl marrying a diffident older man, however much books of an earlier era might have seen that as a touching romance à la "Sense and Sensibility", would be regarded as 'creepy'.
In fact the whole 'boy' thing when referring to functioning independent adult males started to jar enormously for me; even when the heroine is imprisoned in La Force and the jailor announces that she has visitors, he describes them as "a girl and a boy", which I cannot picture anyone of the era saying unless referring to someone with a little brother in tow. Roland in "The Yellow Poppy" is described as a boy at the age of nineteen/twenty, but that is when he is seen through the eyes of characters who are old enough to be his parents (and by the end of the novel, Valentine comments that he has grown up a lot)-- he and his contemporaries would *never* refer to one another as anything other than young men, and they are written as very clearly innocent and immature in a way that the modernly knowing and self-aware male characters in this novel are not.
The 'pamphlet' style is well done; we see pages interpolated throughout the novel which represent sheets handed out either by the protagonist or by unseen antagonists. Those did sound like something that could have been written at the era, and yet is accessible enough to carry weight to a modern readership (and the author clearly knows something about the principles of printing and page design, and managed to make it sound like organic knowledge from the protagonist rather than info-dump from her research!) And it's an interesting idea to have the heroine as a pamphlet-writer, which is a plausible way to have her wield genuine influence in the Paris of this era despite being young and obscure.
The implications of adding magic and a fear of magicians into the Revolutionary mix are potentially rich, although it might have been interesting to push this a bit further -- at the moment I got the impression that it was a bit tacked on to the historical events rather than being a central part of them, and that everything was destined to turn out as in our own world plus a bit of extra persecution on the side. I wasn't clear (this may have been addressed in the first book) whether magic and aristocracy were inherently associated, or whether all the magicians Camille knows simply happen to be aristocrats because of the nature of her previous existence skulking around the fringes of Versailles. The book does rather seek to have its cake and eat it in that respect, in that the heroine seeks to help the disadvantaged, having pulled herself up from poverty by her bootstraps, and yet owns a big house and a title by marriage, obtained by slightly dodgy means -- and her love-interest is a dashing young Marquis who just happens to be half-Indian and supports the huddled masses while also engaging in a Scarlet-Pimpernel-type adventure to rescue the innocent families of the accused. None of these things are completely historically implausible, but taken all together they come across rather as special pleading!
But we get the intriguing scenario that Marie Antoinette was apparently preserving her beauty with the aid of court magic, and Louis XIV was responsible for executing all the magicians he'd used to compel the aristocracy to Versailles, while the current King attempts to divert the anger of the mob by blaming magicians for the ills of the country, thus resulting in a dreaded Comité des Récherches Magiques in place of the Comité du salut publique. A big part of the plot concerns attempts to make people invisible/unnoticeable in a foreshadowing of the infamous attempts by suspects to 'pass the barriers' and escape Paris which feature as a significant recurring feature in stories like "The Scarlet Pimpernel"... but when the characters do have to make a similar escape, they do it in fancy dress, because in fact the whole magic aspect of the book basically comes to nothing.
Camille has an ongoing quest to master her self-taught magic by getting hold of a book her mother once owned which will supposedly give her all the basics (and it is supposed to have been a very common magical primer, but thanks to the book-burning activities of the Comité every single copy in the city has apparently disappeared). There is a scheme by the Marquis de Chandon and the Comte de Roland, along with the bookseller Blaise Delouvet, to locate the secret of 'tempus fugit', which is likewise characterised as "such an everyday working that no one bothered to write it down" --wouldn't it have made more sense if these really *were* incredibly rare knowledge hidden away?-- and which is also discovered to have been described in Camille's missing book. But neither of these arcs have any influence to speak of on the plot outcome. Camille mastering her magic and accepting it as a part of her identity rather than an evil thing is presented as a big theme of this story, but she doesn't really succeed in learning anything about how magic works in the course of the novel (and hence we as readers don't learn anything either). When she does eventually lay hands on the missing book it is almost the end of the novel and it turns out not to help anyone anyway.
In fact so much seems to be left hanging and the story ends at such an early point in the Revolution that I assumed this was the middle book in a trilogy, with Camille destined to return to France and play a significant magical role in future events... but apparently it isn't, since it is being billed as "a duology" (ugh!) I did discover that it has apparently been reissued under the title "Everything That Burns", with the previous book being renamed "All That Glitters" instead of "Enchantée", which I feel is a great improvement: "Enchantée" just makes me think of those modern-day-princess-in-New-York stories!
The use of random bits of French in the text was another thing that grated. It's done idiomatically (as one might guess from the fact that the books are correctly entitled "Liberté" but "Enchantée" in the feminine, since one is a noun and the other an adjective!) and yet it doesn't feel natural. I think it's partly the usual problem that there is no real reason why people who are all speaking French to one another by default should have random phrases left untranslated 'for flavour', and partly, ironically enough, that the French is not italicised and *is* incorporated as part of the normal speech -- this should make it seem less forced, but it didn't work for me.
Examples: "You never opened it?"/"It’s yours, n'est-ce pas?"
"Bienvenue à Bellefleur, my ancestral home!"
"We must plot, bien sûr!"
And then when I hit the end and found the author had provided a glossary of every French phrase she had used (despite the fact that, as seen above, they are all extremely trivial and simply background colouring), plus a summary of the important historical events referenced in the text, it felt all the more 'Young Adult', not to say patronising. I can imagine that there is indeed a constituency of modern readers who both expect and demand such an approach, as I've seen them complaining about classic novels that don't do it, but it just redoubled my feeling that this book was not aimed at the likes of me.
And that ending is very rushed; Camille's escape from execution (I did appreciate that it is scheduled to be death by hanging at this early date rather than the cliché of going to the guillotine) didn't feel credible, and nor, despite the fact that it was all too easy (no need for a Scarlet Pimpernel here!) did the fact that it is all supposed to have been arranged via a five-minute jail visit under supervision, during which there simply isn't time to come up with any plans and they can't talk openly. What subsequent tension there is over Lazare's fate is dissipated as everything simply comes out right without any action on Camille's part at all, thus coming across as merely an attempt to insert a bit of angst in a rather anticlimactic finale.
Mixing magic with the French Revolution in an alternate version of history was a promising concept, and could potentially have been as compelling as the extraordinary The Dragon Waiting (which mixes vampires with the Wars of the Roses in an AU Early Modern Europe) or Temeraire. But the politics all felt pretty superficial and the magic isn't really dealt with (and the book just isn't *that deep*, or, probably, intended to be). I did like the story of Camille and the Lost Girls, vagrants of the underworld whom she tries to help by publicising their stories, and who aren't all of them grateful for her role, but the ending of that also felt a bit rushed through. On the other hand, the book definitely succeeded in gripping me enough that I wanted to know what happened (and pushed on to the end in snatched moments when I should have been otherwise engaged, in the hopes of finding out!)
Online version (though I question the legality of this...) https://archive.bookfrom.net/gita-trelease/582703-everything_that_burns.html
The beginning felt very odd, with a lot of references back to events that happened before the start of the plot but which didn't feel natural as backstory (unlike, say Paladin of Souls), and eventually I turned to the pre-title pages and saw that it was the sequel to another book, which explained a good deal. The author probably never expected it to be read as a stand-alone novel, and there is enough information here to explain what the reader needs to know (although not necessarily in the order one would expect to learn it), but it did come across as clunky as a result.
Trelease can write, and in many ways she has a good sense of period: she manages to write 'period' costume credibly from the protagonist's contemporary perspective rather than as corset-porn, with references to the sound of a man's heels tapping down a corridor or with shoulder-length hair on a woman perceived as a mannish style, for example. (Though I did find the reference to a man's 'chemise' a bit weird: I know it's the normal French term for a man's shirt -- en bras de chemise, in one's shirt-sleeves -- but the book doesn't talk about the hero's 'gilet' in place of his waistcoat, a term which likewise has rather different associations in English...)
My main gripe with it is that the book turned out to be very clearly flavoured as a 'Young Adult' novel. If you want to write Strong Independent Female Leads, the French Revolution is a pretty good place to do it, and I've read a couple of seriously good historical novels by women writers that do just that: Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety" and Madge Pierce's "City of Darkness, City of Light". But this book simply doesn't convince on that level. The romance is pretty generic. The characters' feelings and reactions could have come out of any modern YA fantasy; it all feels very shallow, while everyone is non-racist, queer-supportive, gorgeously attractive and *young* -- even Rosier the puppeteer with his pipe, whom I had read as a middle-aged love interest for the protagonist's younger sister, gets later unexpectedly described as a 'boy', presumably because for the target audience a young girl marrying a diffident older man, however much books of an earlier era might have seen that as a touching romance à la "Sense and Sensibility", would be regarded as 'creepy'.
In fact the whole 'boy' thing when referring to functioning independent adult males started to jar enormously for me; even when the heroine is imprisoned in La Force and the jailor announces that she has visitors, he describes them as "a girl and a boy", which I cannot picture anyone of the era saying unless referring to someone with a little brother in tow. Roland in "The Yellow Poppy" is described as a boy at the age of nineteen/twenty, but that is when he is seen through the eyes of characters who are old enough to be his parents (and by the end of the novel, Valentine comments that he has grown up a lot)-- he and his contemporaries would *never* refer to one another as anything other than young men, and they are written as very clearly innocent and immature in a way that the modernly knowing and self-aware male characters in this novel are not.
The 'pamphlet' style is well done; we see pages interpolated throughout the novel which represent sheets handed out either by the protagonist or by unseen antagonists. Those did sound like something that could have been written at the era, and yet is accessible enough to carry weight to a modern readership (and the author clearly knows something about the principles of printing and page design, and managed to make it sound like organic knowledge from the protagonist rather than info-dump from her research!) And it's an interesting idea to have the heroine as a pamphlet-writer, which is a plausible way to have her wield genuine influence in the Paris of this era despite being young and obscure.
The implications of adding magic and a fear of magicians into the Revolutionary mix are potentially rich, although it might have been interesting to push this a bit further -- at the moment I got the impression that it was a bit tacked on to the historical events rather than being a central part of them, and that everything was destined to turn out as in our own world plus a bit of extra persecution on the side. I wasn't clear (this may have been addressed in the first book) whether magic and aristocracy were inherently associated, or whether all the magicians Camille knows simply happen to be aristocrats because of the nature of her previous existence skulking around the fringes of Versailles. The book does rather seek to have its cake and eat it in that respect, in that the heroine seeks to help the disadvantaged, having pulled herself up from poverty by her bootstraps, and yet owns a big house and a title by marriage, obtained by slightly dodgy means -- and her love-interest is a dashing young Marquis who just happens to be half-Indian and supports the huddled masses while also engaging in a Scarlet-Pimpernel-type adventure to rescue the innocent families of the accused. None of these things are completely historically implausible, but taken all together they come across rather as special pleading!
But we get the intriguing scenario that Marie Antoinette was apparently preserving her beauty with the aid of court magic, and Louis XIV was responsible for executing all the magicians he'd used to compel the aristocracy to Versailles, while the current King attempts to divert the anger of the mob by blaming magicians for the ills of the country, thus resulting in a dreaded Comité des Récherches Magiques in place of the Comité du salut publique. A big part of the plot concerns attempts to make people invisible/unnoticeable in a foreshadowing of the infamous attempts by suspects to 'pass the barriers' and escape Paris which feature as a significant recurring feature in stories like "The Scarlet Pimpernel"... but when the characters do have to make a similar escape, they do it in fancy dress, because in fact the whole magic aspect of the book basically comes to nothing.
Camille has an ongoing quest to master her self-taught magic by getting hold of a book her mother once owned which will supposedly give her all the basics (and it is supposed to have been a very common magical primer, but thanks to the book-burning activities of the Comité every single copy in the city has apparently disappeared). There is a scheme by the Marquis de Chandon and the Comte de Roland, along with the bookseller Blaise Delouvet, to locate the secret of 'tempus fugit', which is likewise characterised as "such an everyday working that no one bothered to write it down" --wouldn't it have made more sense if these really *were* incredibly rare knowledge hidden away?-- and which is also discovered to have been described in Camille's missing book. But neither of these arcs have any influence to speak of on the plot outcome. Camille mastering her magic and accepting it as a part of her identity rather than an evil thing is presented as a big theme of this story, but she doesn't really succeed in learning anything about how magic works in the course of the novel (and hence we as readers don't learn anything either). When she does eventually lay hands on the missing book it is almost the end of the novel and it turns out not to help anyone anyway.
In fact so much seems to be left hanging and the story ends at such an early point in the Revolution that I assumed this was the middle book in a trilogy, with Camille destined to return to France and play a significant magical role in future events... but apparently it isn't, since it is being billed as "a duology" (ugh!) I did discover that it has apparently been reissued under the title "Everything That Burns", with the previous book being renamed "All That Glitters" instead of "Enchantée", which I feel is a great improvement: "Enchantée" just makes me think of those modern-day-princess-in-New-York stories!
The use of random bits of French in the text was another thing that grated. It's done idiomatically (as one might guess from the fact that the books are correctly entitled "Liberté" but "Enchantée" in the feminine, since one is a noun and the other an adjective!) and yet it doesn't feel natural. I think it's partly the usual problem that there is no real reason why people who are all speaking French to one another by default should have random phrases left untranslated 'for flavour', and partly, ironically enough, that the French is not italicised and *is* incorporated as part of the normal speech -- this should make it seem less forced, but it didn't work for me.
Examples: "You never opened it?"/"It’s yours, n'est-ce pas?"
"Bienvenue à Bellefleur, my ancestral home!"
"We must plot, bien sûr!"
And then when I hit the end and found the author had provided a glossary of every French phrase she had used (despite the fact that, as seen above, they are all extremely trivial and simply background colouring), plus a summary of the important historical events referenced in the text, it felt all the more 'Young Adult', not to say patronising. I can imagine that there is indeed a constituency of modern readers who both expect and demand such an approach, as I've seen them complaining about classic novels that don't do it, but it just redoubled my feeling that this book was not aimed at the likes of me.
And that ending is very rushed; Camille's escape from execution (I did appreciate that it is scheduled to be death by hanging at this early date rather than the cliché of going to the guillotine) didn't feel credible, and nor, despite the fact that it was all too easy (no need for a Scarlet Pimpernel here!) did the fact that it is all supposed to have been arranged via a five-minute jail visit under supervision, during which there simply isn't time to come up with any plans and they can't talk openly. What subsequent tension there is over Lazare's fate is dissipated as everything simply comes out right without any action on Camille's part at all, thus coming across as merely an attempt to insert a bit of angst in a rather anticlimactic finale.
Mixing magic with the French Revolution in an alternate version of history was a promising concept, and could potentially have been as compelling as the extraordinary The Dragon Waiting (which mixes vampires with the Wars of the Roses in an AU Early Modern Europe) or Temeraire. But the politics all felt pretty superficial and the magic isn't really dealt with (and the book just isn't *that deep*, or, probably, intended to be). I did like the story of Camille and the Lost Girls, vagrants of the underworld whom she tries to help by publicising their stories, and who aren't all of them grateful for her role, but the ending of that also felt a bit rushed through. On the other hand, the book definitely succeeded in gripping me enough that I wanted to know what happened (and pushed on to the end in snatched moments when I should have been otherwise engaged, in the hopes of finding out!)
Online version (though I question the legality of this...) https://archive.bookfrom.net/gita-trelease/582703-everything_that_burns.html
no subject
Date: 2024-07-12 05:09 pm (UTC)I'm looking at the 17th century at present, but both men and women had a long shift as the first layer of clothing. Though the man's was shorter. But it's possible she might have used the term to distinguish it from a shirt (maybe).
no subject
Date: 2024-07-12 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-12 06:30 pm (UTC)Hang on, let me find the passage online...
'Chemise' and 'shirt' are fairly clearly intended as synonymous here, I think, though it was the former I remembered as being mentioned in this context due to the surprise of it ;)
(The only reason *why* he is soaked to the skin is that the character gratuitously chose to stand under her window and throw pebbles "for a very long time" until she woke, then climb up the drainpipe, instead of (as Camille points out) simply coming in through the front door like a normal person -- the author obviously wanted her movie-Raoul-in-a-wet-shirt moment without the excuse of having a lake where the boat was on the wrong side :-p)
no subject
Date: 2024-07-12 06:36 pm (UTC)It's not a big point and it *is*, of course, the authentic French terminology for a man's garment (with a chemise de nuit being a nightshirt). The choice of wording just made me do an inappropriate double-take in the middle of what the author clearly intended to be a suggestive passage...
no subject
Date: 2024-07-13 08:23 am (UTC)that's a very thin fabric for a top garment.... But I can see the writer is having fun with it.
Though, a gentleman would indeed have used the front door.
"his warm brown skin had gone dull and worn." That looks like a modern view creeping in. Are we in the period where a sun tan suggested you were working class? Or could men get away with if they did a lot of hunting? A society woman certainly wouldn't.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-13 10:09 am (UTC)Well, I suppose it *could* have been an indication that it was an extremely expensive shirt...!
No, that's the author fetishising the non-white love interest :p
(The improbably although not entirely impossibly half-Indian Marquis, who can be titled and yet discriminated against at the same time, à la Chevalier de Saint-Georges... she also has an immigrant flower seller character to boost the diversity so that her readers can further 'identify'.)