Delia Sherman: The Porcelain Dove

[shewhomust]

During that rainy afternoon on Lindisfarne, helenraven lay on the window seat reading Delia Sherman's The Porcelain Dove. She'd bought it, I think, as a result of recommendations from a "overlooked gems" panel at a convention, and gave it a guarded endorsement. She was enjoying it, but I might, she thought, be irritated by the abundance of semi-gallicisms ("petits écoles" was her example, I think: if you feel the need to use the French word for school, it's feminine). And certainly I had not taken to Delia Sherman's La Fée Verte, her contribution to the Salon Fantastique ("sub-Maupassant", says my diary). But I was curious, so when helenraven departed, leaving the book behind, I picked it up.

I was very rapidly hooked on The Porcelain Dove. Whatever else I say about it, it was absorbing and more-ish, one of those books that gives you a warm feeling while you're reading it, because whatever else you may be doing, you have a good book to return to. I don't know what it was about the book that made this true, despite all the aspects of it that didn't work for me, but this much, certainly: it was gripping and enjoyable to read.

The book is both a fairy tale, and a serious historical novel. On the edge of France, at the time of the French revolution, there is an enchanted castle, taken out of time and place, whose inhabitants - the duke, the duchess, their virtuous son and their wicked son, the groom and the lady's maid, and Colette, the peasant girl whose precise identity is one of the keys of the story - have each been granted their heart's desire, and live perpetually happy in the ever after, attended by a number of ghosts. And yet... Berthe, the duchess's maid, is entreated by Colette to write their history, and she does so, recounting her own autobiography and the story of her mistress with which it has been so long and so closely entwined.

It's clear from the narrative that Berthe has always been the more intelligent of the two women, and her two centuries in the bubble of enchantment make plausible her literate style: she sets aside Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste to take up her pen. If her choice of book implies a warning that her narrative will not be straightforward, nonetheless it's more plainly told than Diderot's. Delia Sherman has clearly studied both the history and the literature of the period: there's a flavour of Laclos, there's a hint of Manon Lescaut, and I really didn't need the peppering of French expressions to remind me that I was reading about France (this is even more irritating when the French is approximate, when a fairy tale is not a "conte de fées" but a "conte des fées" or when the province of Burgundy is referred to as "Bourguignon", but if this truly were a translation from the French, I would hand it back to the translator with an instruction to finish the job). The modern author is visible behind the contemporary narrator in the maid's tolerant condescension towards her mistress's flirtations (or affairs), and perhaps too in the charater of the Duchess's sister, Hortense, feminist and egalitarian - but I won't complain of this, for I liked Hortense - liked her better than Berthe does, and would have liked to know more of what happened to her in the end.

Ah, yes, in the end. I found the ending unsatisfying. After the best part of 400 pages, I'd been hoping for something more than "And that's where we came in," but to the extent that the book has a dénouement, it consists in the revelation not just of the vents that have gone before, but of what motivates those events. And that too is partially revealed in the prologue: there's a curse. In fact, there's a sort of layered curse, and the initial curse is in part retribution for something which happened centuries earlier, and that something (and its undoing, in as far as it can be undone) are the genuine revelations that the tale has in store for its readers. Yet they are also a piece of avoidance. You might think that the conduct of the aristos towards their social inferiors, the peasants whose labour creates their wealth as well as the servants with whom they live day to day without ever really seeing them, this might in itself be grounds for a peasant's curse. But no, these people are in no way wicked when compared to the first duke who... Well, that would be telling.

Up to a point The Porcelain Dove is a historical novel about the years leading to the French Revolution, as seen by someone positioned between aristocracy and third estate, a comparatively realistic novel about a world in which magic exists but does not impinge. And I think I've already indicated where I think that point lies. But what happens when the magic intervenes, when the central characters are removed from time, from place, from society, from need and from work? Berthe's prologue shows the shift in their relationships: the duchess is "my former mistress", now just "Adèle". I'd love to read about how that happened, but that isn't the book that Delia Sherman has written here. I also assumed that the book would end with the bursting of the bubble, the end of stasis, the return to the world - and as the pages ahead of me grew fewer, I wondered more and more how it would be achieved. It isn't, of course. The book ends when Berthe catches up to the eternal present. This leaves some loose ends, some major characters who are simply lost - and Berthe obligingly lists them, in case we hadn't noticed. Is this a hint that there could be a sequel? I'm ambivalent about that possibility: yes, I'd like to know what happened to some of these people, but I dislike being given an unsatisfying ending in order to make way for a sequel.

Not in my view an overlooked gem, then, but certainly an entertaining holiday read. And if this limited recommendation attracts you, let me know and I in my turn will pass it on.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Iwondered about a sequel, when it first came out. I know I enjoyed it more than you did, though I, too, finally found the ending a bit disappointing. I'd thought we were building toward a twist--that seems the promise of narrative frames. But I enjoyed getting there.