Author: Jacqueline Carey
Publisher: Tantor
Rating: WORTHY!
Audio Book read by Anne Flosnik
Call this an act of faith! I swapped The Girl who Played With Fire which was due back at the library, for an even longer audio book! This one is 25 disks! (no, my car doesn't play mp3!) - or about a thousand pages if it were printed. God only knows how long it will take at the rate of about one hour/day as I drive to/from work. But the faith part comes from the fact that at this point I have no idea if I'm going to like this. It sounded interesting from the blurb, but...! This is evidently book one in the Kushiel’s Legacy series.
The story is about Phèdre nó Delaunay, who starts out as a young child in the nation of Terre D'Ange (land of angels - France, but in an alternate universe)) who is "flawed" in that she has a very obvious blood red spot of discoloration in one of her dark eyes (in other words, she was hit with Kushiel's Dart). This prevents her from reaching her true potential in her guild, so her mother ends up selling her into indentured servitude to the disgraced poet, Anafiel Delaunay, who has secrets of his own and a fake name. Phèdre unsuccessfully runs away (she doesn't run far and is easily tracked down), and is now looking at entering the poet's service when she turns ten, a few months hence.
Throughout the first two disks, I kept thinking, "Why am I listening to this?" but then I would become so mesmerized by Flosnik's voice and cadence that I couldn't stop listening. So here's the deal: I make no promises! I'm content so far, but if it continues to be talking so much and apparently saying so little, I might have to revise my opinion, the poetic delivery of the prose notwithstanding! We'll see.
Delaunay buys Phèdre's 'marque' hence her name: nó Delaunay. This means he owns her until she can buy her own marque, which she cannot even begin to save towards until she comes of age and starts earning. In the meantime, Delaunay educates and trains her along with a young boy, Alcuin, who he also has in training. His plan is to use them as incidental spies. As the two of them mature, they become of interest to people from the other guilds/houses, and are rented out as sex partners to whoever wants them. Alcuin is "rented", as a virgin, for 6,000 ducats. Phèdre's price is only 4,500 ducats, but as Delaunay tells her, unlike Alcuin, she will become ever more valuable as she matures, and her price will only go up, whereas the boy's value will soon decline.
As an anguissette (a devotee of Kushiel, the punishing angel, a servant of Namaah, and a worshiper of Elua), someone who is supposed to be masochistic: unable to enjoy pleasure without accompanying pain), Phèdre is extremely rare, and her virginity, both vaginal and anal, is sold to a cruel enemy of Delaunay's by the name of Childric d'Essoms. Delaunay is willing to put up with this (and so is Phèdre) in the short term for the prospect of long-term gains if Phèdre learns anything of value. Delaunay tells her to ask nothing, and to be cooperative for the first couple of visits. It is after this that the information will flow - so Delaunay hopes, and the hope isn't misplaced, although a hot poker is - and I'm not using that as a euphemism.
Talking of which, a few words about Carey's authorship: I found it entertaining, but she has her quirks. I found it curious that she would relate all kinds of sexual deviation and peccadillo without hesitation, but then baulk at calling genitals what they were! Instead, she would use euphemisms like "phallus" and "nether lips" which struck me as utterly bizarre.
Finally, I got past the halfway point in this novel! I was still hanging in with this story even though I had, until I reached this point, really no idea at all where it’s supposed to be going. I have discovered a few quirks and points of interest to relate. Anne Flosnik's British narration is charming, but I found it really amusing that her voice for Hyacinthe, Phèdre's male friend who she met on the street, sounds almost exactly like Simon Vance's voice for Lisbeth Salander in his narration of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. Flosnik also has a really odd way of reading in that she will frequently read the first part of a sentence in a very soft voice and then finish it up with a very slightly hoarse or growling voice. And her pronunciation of the name of the traitorous Prince Baudoin de Trevalion is hilarious. She makes the middle bit sound like Duhh!
But rough times are about to hit the house of Delaunay. Joscelin Verreuil, a servant of Cassiel, is drafted in to replace the slain Guy, also a servant of Cassiel, but whereas Guy was expelled from the order, Joscelin has barely completed his training. The evil is visited upon Delaunay due to the machinations of the very woman with whom Phèdre is cluelessly infatuated: Melisande Shahrizai.
After Melisande seduces Phèdre, she finally has sufficient funds to make her marque - that is to complete the tattoo on her back, and become a free citizen. As she is at the tattooist having the work done, Delaunay and his entire household, including Alcuin, are slaughtered, and Phèdre and Joscelin taken prisoner by the Skaldi. All of this was orchestrated by Melisande on behalf of the Duc de De-Glamor (or whatever the spelling is! That's one big problem with audio books. How do you review something when you can't look up the spellings?! I had to go on line to find these, which is a royal pain, so I'm going to simply make them up from this point onwards!The Skaldi are modeled on Vikings, and the tribe which captured them held them only for a short time before presenting them as a gift to the Skaldi overlord, an educated, smart, cunning, and powerful man who has dreams of ruling Terre D'Ange as a king. I had a real problem with the plot here for the first time which is why Joscelin and Phèdre didn't slaughter the Skaldi in the night when they were sleeping off their daily drunken binges? They could have been done with them and escaped. Of course, that would have seriously screwed with Carey's plotting, but it could have been written around.
Because she didn't do this, we're treated to Captivity by Skaldi 2.0, wherein Joscelin and Phèdre are now prisoners of the overlord who treats them like slaves, which isn't how they were treated by their previous captors. Here, Phèdre, spying on the Skaldi council meeting, overhears their plans to invade Terre D'Ange. Now she and Joscelin plan a daring escape, which, despite bad odds and appallingly cold Skaldi winter weather, they bring off, finally making it back to Terre D'Ange, but there are traitors there, and they must tread carefully to bring their news of impending invasion to the right ears.
I haven't quite finished this novel yet, but I've given way too may spoilers here, so I am going to simply wind this review up and call this novel a worthy! It's kept my interest this far and I don't see it going so far south that I end up disliking it. Call it a vote of confidence! Having said that, I don't know at this point if I'm enamored enough of this to want to read any sequels. If I do read any more in this series, rest assured that it won't be in audio format! It takes too long to get through such a lengthy work listening to it only to and from work, and there are too many distractions on the highway which readily take precedence, meaning that I'm constantly having to jump back to re-listen to something I missed! I think I'm going to keep my audio books short and light from this point onwards!
So having now finished this novel and still happy to recommend it as I had expected to be, I decided that I can’t let it go as though it was all plain sailing and no issues! All novels have issues. The problem isn’t the issues, it’s what the ratio of issues is to absorbing and skilful writing. Readers will forgive much if the writers make it worth the readers' while to persevere. This novel had a positive ratio of quality to issues for me, and this is why I had no problem with it in general, and am happy to recommend it. Other reviewers have not found it so.
There are of course things which I did not like. The length was one, and this length, I feel was likely exacerbated by experiencing it in audio rather than on the printed page/screen. Much of the novel is occupied with long descriptions of things and events which could have been adequately addressed with less, and this seems worse in the last third than in the first two-thirds, but perhaps this was some sort of fatigue setting in?! OTOH, the last disk was a tedious one indeed, so maybe it was just that the story became boring. I skipped none of the story in the first two thirds, but I found myself hitting the skip button on the CD player quite often for the last six disks or so. I have read some reviews which complain of 'flowery' language, but that was one of the attributes which appealed to me. It was like reading poetry but without the tangled tedium of such a medium. But that style of writing seems to me to be more wisely confined to a shorter work, so perhaps it wasn't the flowery language so much as so much of it!
I have to say I found Carey's over-use of 'mayhap' to be jarring, and her use of the term 'red blood' (as if fresh human blood is ever any other color!) to be inexplicable, especially such copious use. She pretty much excelled that, though, at one point by using the phrase "wooden tree". Seriously? Some have complained about Phédre's frequent foreshadowing, but that didn’t stand out to me, given the tone of the novel in general. I found Carey's eagerness to write 'thusly', but to avoid-like-the-plague committing 'scarcely' to the page (writing the cruelly trimm'd 'scarce' instead) to be as inconsistent as it was an oddball affectation.
I know that one reviewer expended an entire review in obsessing on the sexual encounters (and it wasn't the only one which focused on those). Those encounters took up perhaps one or two percent of this novel! For any reviewer to agonize over those and completely ignore the other ~99% of the novel is inexplicable to me and says far more about the reviewer than ever it does about the novel which the reviewer failed to properly review! What a disservice to the novel and to reviewing. It seems that, for some reason, this particular reviewer was mesmerized into thinking the sexual scenes were intended to be a cheap thrill! Weird, huh?
The fact is that people behave this way sexually in the real world, and especially so in Carey's world for good reason because that was the nature of the story, and it was tied inextricably to the religious aspects of the story. Sexuality and religion go back a long way, as do sado-masochism and religion. Nothing new there. So are such disingenuous reviews advocating, in their fumbling manner, that the novelist mustn't write about naughty things or cruel things? Perhaps I should downgrade Kushiel's Dart for featuring sword-fighting? I mean really, how dare the writer portray people being hurt? Some were even cut or stabbed, and some (gasp!) lost their lives! This must never be allowed to happen in a fantasy novel. Clearly Carey is a sadistic brute to write about fighting and stabbing; it didn’t turn me on at all, and I should have based my entire review on that brutality and dismissed the novel as unworthy for no other reason!
Fortunately for Carey, for writing, and for reviewing, I am neither that shallow nor that blinkered. I hope the majority of other reviewers share at least those traits with me.
