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Corambis book report (spoilers)
So, after my flist gave me some hope that I wouldn't hate it, I went ahead and read Corambis (the fourth book in Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series).
I didn't hate it. Actually, I really wish she'd taken the series this way back in book 2 or 3, back when I cared about the characters and actually wanted Felix to find peace and redemption. Because I kept thinking throughout the book that a couple of books earlier, I would've been really grooving on the emotional and redemptive aspects of the book. As it was, though, I guess the past couple of books brought me to the point where I don't care all that much about these people anymore. At this point, I find Felix so thoroughly unsympathetic that watching him build a healthier life for himself isn't all that much fun, and Mildmay just ... frustrates me, I guess; I really sympathize with him and at the same time his appalling lack of self-esteem and the way he keeps failing to build an independent life for himself makes me want to shake him.
I also don't believe for a minute that Felix's newfound ability to self-analyze is going to keep him from backsliding into the same abusive behavior he's engaged in before. I mean, we've seen him promise to do better before, and then he doesn't. So I kinda see this as an upswing before another inevitable downswing. There were times when the book would almost ... lure me into liking the characters and really enjoying their interactions, and then I'd yank myself back, because I've gone down that road before with these guys and it wasn't much fun. (Though Mildmay's little ways of showing affection to touch-averse Felix without freaking him out are pretty damn cute, I must admit.) I still feel kind of betrayed by the previous books and I don't think I'm ready to forgive and forget quite yet.
On the other hand, on an intellectual level, I really love what she did with this book -- well, the whole series, actually: the way she deconstructs and takes down the archetype of the abused child/orphan/child thief that fantasy loves so much. It's not romantic and it's not forgotten or ignored; her abused orphans are broken, damaged adults, and in Felix's case at least, he tends to perpetuate that damage to other people. Actually, in general, I thought she did a really good job with this book of dealing with the emotional aftermath of the damage the characters have suffered without descending to the excesses of the previous books. Felix's behavior is believable and consistent in view of his past; I felt as if she betrays her own premise somewhat, though, by continuing to treat him as a hero, and in the end I felt as if his happy ending was too easy -- it wasn't and yet it was, because as much as I thought she worked hard on making the emotional aspects of the book believable, I felt as if he'd gone too far into darkness to find the light again that easily.
As people had suggested, though, I really did like Kay. I really disliked the fact that he was there as a third narrator, though; I wished that Kay had been the hero of his own book, because on the initial reading I ended up just skipping all of his sections until the very end when his story becomes thoroughly entangled with Mildmay and Felix's, and I didn't feel like I missed anything, plotwise. I didn't like it when the Coldfire series introduced a new major narrator into the last book of the series with his own story arc, and I didn't like it here either -- Mehitabel in the previous book, at least, was thoroughly entwined in Mildmay and Felix's story, and had been there throughout much of the previous book as well. I liked Kay as an individual but he felt very ... grafted on, here, more of a distraction from Felix and Mildmay's story than a part of it.
I loved that the book didn't go towards the predictable Felix/Kay romance that I was expecting. In skimming the author's LJ, I wasn't surprised to find that she had originally planned to go in a Felix/Kay direction; it really feels like it's being set up for that. But she doesn't go the whole sexual-healing route, and I liked that -- about the closest thing that we get in the book is Felix's brief dalliance with the Duke, and that made dramatic sense to me because he kinda needed to find out that sex, and especially BDSM sex, can be about love and giving as well as pain and taking. But in general, he didn't jump into either another abusive relationship or True Love, and I was glad of that.
And I was thoroughly thrilled that the obligation d'ame got taken off -- also, on a side note, I think my single favorite world-building aspect to the books is the view of magic as a series of metaphors for something that no one quite grasps, with each magic-using society's metaphors giving them control over different aspects of it. That's cool, and it's a wonderful parallel with science, and the way that we keep learning new ways of looking at it as we learn to ask new questions. Overall, I enjoyed the steampunky vibe to this book a lot more than the high-fantasy vibe to the previous ones.
There's a part of me that really does wish I'd just skipped books 2 and 3 (well, definitely book 3, at the very least) and gone straight to this one, because I think I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if Felix's behavior over the last couple of books, and to a lesser degree Mildmay's, hadn't left me predisposed to dislike them. As a book, overall, I liked it and I liked the way that it wrapped up, though as I said earlier, I don't really believe that Felix's new leaf is going to stay turned over; based on his behavior in the past couple of books, he just totally reads as "recidivist abuser" to me. And I wish that Mildmay had built more of a life apart from Felix, as opposed to continuing to tag along wherever Felix goes. But overall I did enjoy it and I found it a pleasing and satisfying ending, not fixing everything but offering hope and the promise of a stable life that I can imagine they could both enjoy, eventually. (Also ... LIGHTHOUSE. I've got two different unfinished novels in which the protagonists live in abandoned, refurbished lighthouses, because for whatever reason, I just love the concept that much. So, "... and then they all moved into a lighthouse!" is a perfectly cool ending to me; I just wish we'd gotten to see it!)
I didn't hate it. Actually, I really wish she'd taken the series this way back in book 2 or 3, back when I cared about the characters and actually wanted Felix to find peace and redemption. Because I kept thinking throughout the book that a couple of books earlier, I would've been really grooving on the emotional and redemptive aspects of the book. As it was, though, I guess the past couple of books brought me to the point where I don't care all that much about these people anymore. At this point, I find Felix so thoroughly unsympathetic that watching him build a healthier life for himself isn't all that much fun, and Mildmay just ... frustrates me, I guess; I really sympathize with him and at the same time his appalling lack of self-esteem and the way he keeps failing to build an independent life for himself makes me want to shake him.
I also don't believe for a minute that Felix's newfound ability to self-analyze is going to keep him from backsliding into the same abusive behavior he's engaged in before. I mean, we've seen him promise to do better before, and then he doesn't. So I kinda see this as an upswing before another inevitable downswing. There were times when the book would almost ... lure me into liking the characters and really enjoying their interactions, and then I'd yank myself back, because I've gone down that road before with these guys and it wasn't much fun. (Though Mildmay's little ways of showing affection to touch-averse Felix without freaking him out are pretty damn cute, I must admit.) I still feel kind of betrayed by the previous books and I don't think I'm ready to forgive and forget quite yet.
On the other hand, on an intellectual level, I really love what she did with this book -- well, the whole series, actually: the way she deconstructs and takes down the archetype of the abused child/orphan/child thief that fantasy loves so much. It's not romantic and it's not forgotten or ignored; her abused orphans are broken, damaged adults, and in Felix's case at least, he tends to perpetuate that damage to other people. Actually, in general, I thought she did a really good job with this book of dealing with the emotional aftermath of the damage the characters have suffered without descending to the excesses of the previous books. Felix's behavior is believable and consistent in view of his past; I felt as if she betrays her own premise somewhat, though, by continuing to treat him as a hero, and in the end I felt as if his happy ending was too easy -- it wasn't and yet it was, because as much as I thought she worked hard on making the emotional aspects of the book believable, I felt as if he'd gone too far into darkness to find the light again that easily.
As people had suggested, though, I really did like Kay. I really disliked the fact that he was there as a third narrator, though; I wished that Kay had been the hero of his own book, because on the initial reading I ended up just skipping all of his sections until the very end when his story becomes thoroughly entangled with Mildmay and Felix's, and I didn't feel like I missed anything, plotwise. I didn't like it when the Coldfire series introduced a new major narrator into the last book of the series with his own story arc, and I didn't like it here either -- Mehitabel in the previous book, at least, was thoroughly entwined in Mildmay and Felix's story, and had been there throughout much of the previous book as well. I liked Kay as an individual but he felt very ... grafted on, here, more of a distraction from Felix and Mildmay's story than a part of it.
I loved that the book didn't go towards the predictable Felix/Kay romance that I was expecting. In skimming the author's LJ, I wasn't surprised to find that she had originally planned to go in a Felix/Kay direction; it really feels like it's being set up for that. But she doesn't go the whole sexual-healing route, and I liked that -- about the closest thing that we get in the book is Felix's brief dalliance with the Duke, and that made dramatic sense to me because he kinda needed to find out that sex, and especially BDSM sex, can be about love and giving as well as pain and taking. But in general, he didn't jump into either another abusive relationship or True Love, and I was glad of that.
And I was thoroughly thrilled that the obligation d'ame got taken off -- also, on a side note, I think my single favorite world-building aspect to the books is the view of magic as a series of metaphors for something that no one quite grasps, with each magic-using society's metaphors giving them control over different aspects of it. That's cool, and it's a wonderful parallel with science, and the way that we keep learning new ways of looking at it as we learn to ask new questions. Overall, I enjoyed the steampunky vibe to this book a lot more than the high-fantasy vibe to the previous ones.
There's a part of me that really does wish I'd just skipped books 2 and 3 (well, definitely book 3, at the very least) and gone straight to this one, because I think I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if Felix's behavior over the last couple of books, and to a lesser degree Mildmay's, hadn't left me predisposed to dislike them. As a book, overall, I liked it and I liked the way that it wrapped up, though as I said earlier, I don't really believe that Felix's new leaf is going to stay turned over; based on his behavior in the past couple of books, he just totally reads as "recidivist abuser" to me. And I wish that Mildmay had built more of a life apart from Felix, as opposed to continuing to tag along wherever Felix goes. But overall I did enjoy it and I found it a pleasing and satisfying ending, not fixing everything but offering hope and the promise of a stable life that I can imagine they could both enjoy, eventually. (Also ... LIGHTHOUSE. I've got two different unfinished novels in which the protagonists live in abandoned, refurbished lighthouses, because for whatever reason, I just love the concept that much. So, "... and then they all moved into a lighthouse!" is a perfectly cool ending to me; I just wish we'd gotten to see it!)