Sarah Monette’s Melusine: A Review of the Well-received Fantasy Novel

Melusine, the fantasy novel from Sarah Monette, is, despite many positive qualities, in many ways a blueprint on how not to write a fantasy novel. Sarah Monette’s Melusine is filled with the tropes of the fantasy genre (I think the only one she doesn’t hit on is dragons – otherwise we have long separate siblings, vague stuff about wizards and magic, nefarious one-dimensional villains, a pseudo-medieval environment and a cat burglar who winds up being the book’s heart). Sarah Monette’s reliance on these tropes weakens and distracts from the story she wants to tell in Melusine; unfortunately, I’m also not that entirely clear on what story she is trying to tell in her novel.

One of the most challenging things about writing a fantasy novel is creating a new, convincing world that draws the reader in. There are several ways to try to create this fantasy world. One approach is to focus on small, relatively unimportant details to remind the reader that they’re nowhere they’ve ever been before. Sarah Monette predominantly attempts to tackle this in Melusine with the naming and structure of time units and money. Unfortunately, Sarah Monette executes on both of these sloppily and then overuses the terms such that they never seem organic or particularly clear. In addition, Sarah Monette’s naming of the money in the world of Melusine is particularly problematic – the monetary unit is a “Gorgon” and this reference to a mythical creature that has no relevance to Sarah Monette’s created world is just the first of many sloppy distractions that include similar pointless use of mythological creatures and figures from phoenixes to labyrinths.

Melusine also has problems in the area of characterization, while Mildmay, the previously mentioned cat burglar rises above the fantasy novel clichÃ?©’s he’s saddled with to be an engaging, funny and occasionally touching creature, his counterpart in the nobility, Felix Harrowgate, never comes to life. Sarah Monette clearly doesn’t truly understand status issues (not uncommon from American authors) and so the habits, desires and prides of nobility in the world of Melusine seem well beyond her.

Additionally, Felix’s backstory involves several problematic themes including rape, prostitution and magical training. None of these three elements (which interlock in a critical way in the narrative) is handled in any fashion that I found believable. Sarah Monette feminizes Felix’s character in his response to all three subjects, and this really works against her clear desire to portray the book’s gay and lesbian characters as just like anyone else. More research on sex work and the real-world theories of magic would have done a tremendous amount to ground the fantasy world Sarah Monette tries to create in Melusine.

The matter of magic, which is essential to any fantasy novel is particularly problematic. Sarah Monette never decides if magic in Melusine is a scientific or spiritual discipline, nor does she clarify to us why some people can and some people cannot do it. Its place in society is presented in an unclear fashion, and the structure of what is possible and how is never clearly presented. If the reader doesn’t desire to do magic or have access to magic from reading a fantasy novel, a large part of the fantasy novel has failed. For Sarah Monette, magic in Melusine seems like an afterthought – sure, it drives the story, but it’s only there so that she could write about these characters.

Similarly Sarah Monette lets us down in the villain of Malkar (first of all, could she have worked a little harder on coming up with a name slightly less clichÃ?©d?). We’re never given any insight into his motivations, nor an understanding of what is seductive (or particularly impressive) about his power. I can appreciate her desire not to make him a complex villain, object of desire or even an anti-hero (like say Philip Pullman’s Lord Asriel in the His Dark Materials trilogy of Severus Snape in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series), but more than two dimensional would help provide a better understanding of Felix as well..

I do give Monette credit for being willing to kill off and disappear characters. The real world isn’t neat, and it’s important to Sarah Monette to reflect this. Unfortunately, Sarah Monette takes this habit too far in Melusine and leaves many loose ends hanging. Similarly, it’s unclear just what Sarah Monette felt Melusine is about – was it about family reunion? The nature of love? A quest narrative? A political struggle? Perhaps Sarah Monette intended for Melusine to be an epic encompassing all these aspects, but instead it feels like a fantasy novel without a goal.

I read Melusine as part of a queer book club. The greatest benefit I’ve gotten from Sarah Monete’s novel is that is has forced me to make a significant start on my own novel, partially out of frustration with the idea that I should celebrate mediocre novels merely because they have queer content.