56. The Virtu by Sarah Monette (Fantasy) 439 p.

Oh my God. My love for Sarah Monette is confirmed. She rocks my socks.

I mentioned in my last post that I’d wanted to read Mélusine for a long time, and was lucky enough to find it in hardcover at the Book Depot for $7.99. When I finished it yesterday I was dying to read the sequel, The Virtu, right away. When I checked the Indigo website, it told me that there was one copy left in my area, a trade paperback marked down to $6.99. I would rather have had a hardcover, to match the first in the series, but I wanted to read it too badly to be picky, and the price was right.

So I went downtown to the World’s Biggest Bookstore (after a stop at BMV, my favourite used bookstore, conveniently located next door,) and found, when got there, that the copy listed on the computer as a trade paperback was actually a hardcover. So my copies do match after all! A little thing, maybe, but it made me happy. (I was also already in a good mood after finding Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard, one of my favourite books from childhood, in hardcover for $3.50—my original paperback copy has been read so many times that it looks ridiculously bedraggled and pathetic, even though it was new when I first got it. I also found a Patricia Wentworth mystery that I’ve never read for $1, and I paid only $3.50 for a paperback copy of The Complete Adventures of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit, another favourite childhood author, although I’ve never read any of these particular books.)

Anyway, The Virtu is even better than Mélusine. I can’t understand why I haven’t heard more about Sarah Monette. Maybe I just don’t read enough of the right book blogs. The Virtu picks up pretty much where Mélusine left off, and continues the shift between Felix and Mildmay’s first-person POV’s, a technique that works just as well in this book as it did in the first one. The sections are still labelled with the POV character, which is a courtesy to the reader that more authors who use similar techniques could stand to employ, although with Monette it’s probably not necessary—she’s done such an amazing job giving Felix and Mildmay distinct and wildly different voices that it would be difficult to confuse the two.

There was a brief incident in Mélusine which I had wondered if Monette would pick up again in The Virtu. I wasn’t sure she would, since it was only briefly mentioned and happened while Felix was mad, but to my delight, she explored it in some depth in The Virtu. The relationship between Felix and Mildmay is still my favourite thing about the series; it’s certainly one of the most interesting fictional relationships I’ve read about in a long time. I’m not too keen on Felix in this book, but I’m hoping that he’ll grow as the series progresses, even despite himself. Mildmay is as charming and wonderful a character as ever.

[spoilers]

The Virtu starts with Felix and Mildmay in Troia, still in the Gardens of Nimphele, but it’s not too long before they start to make their way back to Mélusine. I like how the plot basically mirrors that of Mélusine, with the first half of the novel devoted to travel, and the second half set in Mélusine, the reverse of how it was in the first book. It helps to highlight the contrast between the journey out to Troia, while Felix was mad and Mildmay was dominant, and the journey back to Mélusine, when Felix is definitely the one in control. The difference between Felix vulnerable and confused and Felix back to his old self (who we’re actually meeting for pretty much the first time) is really startling. The gap between the two is vast, exacerbated by the fact that Felix initially remembers very little of what happened during his year of madness. He remembers people and how he feels about them, but not the circumstances that led to those feelings. And since he can’t remember much about his madness, he’s forgotten most of what he learned from the experience.

He and Mildmay make their way back across the sea, and back across Kekropia, picking up a few companions on the way. One of things I like about Monette’s writing is that she doesn’t rush to the finish line, doesn’t put overmuch stress on the resolution of the main plot. It makes her books infinitely more lifelike, and lends her narrative a certain fluidity, as well as allowing her to introduce new characters and situations that don’t necessarily have any connection with the main plot.

I was glad to see Gideon, Mavortian, and Bernard again. I didn’t think she’d just drop them, and it was nice to be right about that. One of the best things about Mélusine was how it turned some of the traditional heroic character traits on their heads; neither Felix nor Mildmay is a traditional hero, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s Felix, by far the less likable of the two, who comes closest to fulfilling that pattern. Mildmay is a very good man, but not a fantasy hero, and nowhere is that more obvious than when he leaves Gideon, Mavortian, and Bernard behind in Mélusine. It’s not just that he leaves without them—there are plenty of justification for it, some of them which could even be used by a fantasy hero—but that he doesn’t even try to find out what’s happened to them, or even really decide to abandon them. It just that going back to investigate or help them in any way doesn’t even occur to him. Still, it wouldn’t have made sense not to bring back the other three in this book, since a sudden and unexplained disappearance is a loose end just begging to be resolved.

Really big spoilers! I’m serious—don’t read this if you might read the books.

Mildmay and Felix. When I first read the blurb for Mélusine, I thought it would be a fairly traditional (except gay) fantasy romance. I was a little confused when it started to look like Mildmay was straight, although Felix was pretty flaming. By the time I discovered that they’re actually brothers, I was so invested in Monette’s world that I actually liked that turn of events better than the one I’d anticipated (and I still do think it’s a lot more interesting than having the two of them become lovers.) I was considerably pleased with Felix’s attraction to Mildmay in Mélusine, and, as I said above, delighted to see it continued and expanded on in The Virtu.

The most interesting thing about it, though, is how many other people read a sexual aspect into the relationship between Felix and Mildmay. Astyanax makes that out-of-the-blue dig at Felix about hoping Mildmay’s good in bed, and he’s only the first in a long line of people to allude to, or outright speculate about, a sexual relationship between the two. It makes me wonder just how obvious Felix is being in his attraction—we know he flirts with Mildmay, although presumably that’s mostly a social reflex and a way to keep Mildmay off-balance and at a distance, rather than an expression of his attraction. But since we’re clearly shown that most people don’t recognize that about Felix—that his flirting is a way to control his relationships with people and get what he wants, and not a genuine expression of desire or intimacy—it’s possible that they misread the way he treats Mildmay (sort of.) I also have to wonder how much Gideon sees of that—he knows Felix isn’t having sex with Mildmay, but is he aware that Felix wants to? That Felix would rather be sleeping with Mildmay than with him?

[/spoilers]

Awesome book. The release of the next book in the series, The Mirador, on August 7 gives me another new book to look forward to. I can hardly wait!

Books read: 56/100
Pages read: 16,605/25,000

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Doctrine of Labyrinths, Sarah Monette