Sarah Monette, Melusine and The Virtu [Library of Babel]

Sarah Monette, aka truepenny is somebody that Kate knows from LiveJournal, so when her first novel, Melusine was published, Kate bought it right away. Weirdly, though, I got around to reading it before she did (thanks to positive reviews of the sequel in Locus, and in spite of the dreadful cover), and then went directly on to the recently-released sequel, The Virtu. Thus, the combined booklog entry.

Melusine is a major city in a fantasy world, of the sort parodied by Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, full of run-down neighborhoods, crime, and riff-raff, and ruled by an elite group of wizards in the citadel known as the Mirador. These wizards all draw their power from an ancient and powerful magical artifact known as the Virtu, and use that power to defend the city against a number of other hostile nations. And also to plot and scheme and jockey for power among themselves.

The books alternate between two different first-person viewpoint characters. One, Felix Harrowgate, is a wizard of the Mirador with a dark past. That past included a long period of virtual slavery to an unpleasant fellow named Malkar, who in the first fifty pages recaptures Felix, and uses him to unleash a magical assault on the Mirador that leaves the Virtu broken. Malkar’s attack leaves Felix badly damaged, mentally and spiritually, and the rest of the books concern his attempts to find healing, and repair the damage that was done through and by him.

The other viewpoint character, Mildmay the Fox, is your standard charming rogue, a thief and sometime killer from the lower classes of Melusine, and it takes a while before the conenction between the two becomes apparent.

The world is nicely textured, with a few different competing magic systems, and a nice range of different cultures. There are a few quirks in the writing that take some getting used to– the calendar is never particularly clear, and Mildmay uses “septad” sort of like “smurf”– but the voices are handled well. There’s nothing too terribly surprising in the plot, but it moves along well, and the various threads come together in a satisfying manner.

All in all, these are good books, and worth reading. I had one very big problem with them, though, which I can’t discuss without major spoilers, so click through at your own peril…

The problem has to do with the structure of the two books, and the alternating viewpoints. In the aftermath of Malkar’s attack, Felix goes out of his mind, and spends about two-thirds of the first book batshit insane. Which wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, except he’s not insane in an interesting way– he’s cringing and frightened and useless, and really sort of annoying to read about.

So, you spend two thirds of the first book alternating between Mildmay POV sections, in which he’s competent and capable, and herding Felix along for the latter part of that stretch, and Felix POV sections in which he’s crazy and useless. And finally, at the end of all that, Felix gets healed.

“Great,” you say, “Now we’ll get to see both of them at full strength, which will be fun.”

Except that the last bit of the journey takes a heavy toll on Mildmay, who proceeds to spend two-thirds of the second book moping around suffering from a crushing lack of self-confidence, and generally being just as useless and annoying as Felix was in the first book.

It’s maddening. It doesn’t help that the recovered Felix is kind of a dick, too.

Anyway, that major caveat aside, I did enjoy the books. The world is very inventive, and the plot comes to a satisfying conclusion, with some nifty pyrotechnics here and there. I just wish there hadn’t been quite so much angst getting there.