Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Legacy of Susan Kay - this is a terrible title

Most medium-to-hardcore Phantom fans have read or tried to read the novel Phantom by Susan Kay. It's a tricky book to find; eBay or finding a stray copy on Amazon is usually your best bet. I happened to chance upon a copy at a secondhand bookstore one magical summer.

I was entranced with Phantom, which is a "biography" of Erik, starting from before his birth, and going through his childhood, his life as the Phantom and his affair with Christine, to after his death.

If you find it and read it, have a box of Kleenex handy.

Susan Kay has only written one other novel, that was actually published before Phantom, and is even harder to find, called Legacy. The story of Legacy is as follows:

Phantom - Erik + Queen Elizabeth I = Legacy

I'm being glib, it really is a good book. I can't help comparing it to Phantom, though, and I have to say that in the five year gap between novels, Susan Kay really honed her craft.

I can't complain about the subject matter. I love history, and Elizabeth Tudor is a fascinating figure, and real, unlike Erik (I can tell the difference every now and again). I kept having issues with the narration though, which prevented me from breezing through the book in a day like I did with Phantom. I could also be slightly biased towards the subject matter in Phantom, but like I said, the Tudors are an interesting set.

The issue seemed to be that the book hovered between using a (with apologies for sounding like a prat) limited third-person omniscient narrator and an objective third-person etc. etc. So while the pronoun usage, in theory, placed the reader in the minds of different characters, one always felt divorced from the action of the story, and this left some important moments of the story feeling rushed, or the impact lessened. Towards the end, it also seemed she was trying to build Elizabeth up to be an unreliable narrator, but I couldn't tell if this was deliberate, or just a result of the narration issues from all the way along.

Being a historical book, of course I can't resist nitpicking at a few points. If you, dear reader, actually intend on exerting the energy to find Legacy and read it, you might want to stop here. Spoilers. No, it doesn't matter if you're already familiar with the story of Elizabeth Tudor, you want to stop here.

Are we all sorted out now? Good.

Legacy is very accurate, to my knowledge, though I would be the first to say that I am not an expert. Two fairly significant issues jumped out at me, however:

1. There is a suggestion towards the end of the book that Elizabeth was actually the daughter of Anne and George Boleyn. Based on every source I've ever read, that is absolute bollocks, and really didn't add anything to the story to suggest it. Matter of fact, it pissed me off about fifteen pages from the end. Taking liberties with history in fiction can be forgiven, sometimes, if it actually adds something worthwhile to the story. Having Elizabeth spend six hundred and fifty pages fighting to keep the throne because the Catholics think she is a pretender and a bastard, and then telling the reader, "Hey check it out! They're right! PWNAGE"? It defeats the purpose of the character. You've just invalidated six hundred and fifty pages of your own work, and the time it took your reader to read them. Good job.

2. Elizabeth is described as being very naturally beautiful well into her forties and fifties in Legacy, and her appearance gradually changes to being very mannequin-like due to wigs and cosmetics as she ages. This is not the case. Elizabeth I suffered through a bout of smallpox in 1562, when she was 29. This left her scarred, and she began to use heavy make-up from that point forward, which hastened the loss of her hair, so by her mid-thirties there would have been nothing natural left about her beauty. This was not an unusual case in her time, but in Legacy, Elizabeth comes through the bout of smallpox miraculously un-scarred, and actually marvels at her unbelievable luck at having done so. A major inaccuracy like that is annoying enough, but more to the point, why change it? It doesn't add anything to the story, and in fact it would have been more interesting to read about Elizabeth's struggle with her vanity; historically that's one of the interesting points about her.

And those are my gripes.

For all my complaining, I still loved Legacy very much. Whoever finds my cold corpse one day will have to pry both it and Phantom out of my dead arms with the jaws of life. I'm sure it will find it's way into my regular book rotation. Just not for a little while.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where is the reference to Elizabeth being Anne and George's offspring? I must have missed that nuance, so now I'm curious! Kindly reply...

Elle

Tiffany Maxwell said...

Hi there!

In my edition (hardcover) it's on page 578. I found the passage and re-read it, and it's possible I might have misinterpreted it when I read the book three years ago. It now seems kind of ambiguous. The implication could be either:

a) Elizabeth is actually the daughter of George and Anne

or

b) Anne and George are relieved that Elizabeth doesn't have any physical anomalies that would mark her as a witch.

I still lean toward my original interpretation, because Elizabeth's birth was long before Anne was accused of witchcraft.

Anyway, there you are!

Tiffany