Book report - Kari Sperring : Living with Ghosts -

[shewhomust]

One of the pleasant things I might have posted about before I went on holiday, had I found time, was lunch with desperance and la_marquise_de_. After lunch I borrowed Living with Ghosts from desperance, and read it pretty much at a gulp.

Living with Ghosts might well be the title of a novel with no fantasy content; a story of people who have lost someone very important to them, and who are constantly affected by that loss. And this metaphorical, mundane understanding of the title applies for one group of Kari Sperring's characters, the sister, widow and best friend of the late Valdarrien, aristocrats from the city of Merafis, where ghosts do not walk.

But this is a fantasy, and other characters know that ghosts do walk - in fact, that's how the novel opens: "Even the lieutenant's ghost looked startled as the door slammed shut." It's a clever opening to match a clever title, with its introduction of a ghost who is so real, and, being real, so unghostlike, that he is startled rather than startling others, a ghost who has a rank but no name, and who becomes familiar as an ever-present character long before his importance and his relevance to the character he is haunting become clear. Well, OK, that may be a bit of an overstatement. It fairly rapidly becomes clear who he is, who he has to be; as for why he is important to Gracielis, the person he follows and who is forbidden to dismiss him, that comes later and has a rather bolted on feel.

And that's characteristic of the novel, too: Living with Ghosts is an extremely clever book, but there are gaps in even its cleverness, only mostly you don't care because it goes with such a swing that you just carry on reading to find out what happens next. So the set-up: the city of Merafis (or Paris under the ancien regime, if you prefer) home of rationalism, claiming dominion over the two other societies present, both of whose names currently escape me, the sophisticated society of the assassin-priests, each with his or her own signature perfume which spells their name, and the simpler and let us face it Celtic nation whose clans imperfectly recall a shape-changing magic accessible only to those of pure blood. This is great. Merafis has dominion because long ago it won it, and the heir to the Celtic title now seeks independence - the reader might well be on his side. But he is a bad guy, because despite being the grandson of a wise ruler, and despite being brought up in an exceptionally egalitarian society, he is nonetheless a spoiled brat: will that do? OK, he is a bad guy because he has been seduced by the witch priestess whose name begins with Q (which shows how decadent and sophisticated she is), and she is evil because - well, it does rather sound as if she comes from an evil system, born of interbreeding with demons. The interest, in other words, is in seeing how the characters confront the various threats, not in making sense of where those threats come from.

There are a whole lot of featured characters, someone for everyone. The concensus appears to be that the hero is Gracielis, failed assassin-priest turned gigolo-spy. Certainly, he seems to get the majority of the Point of View narration, and he has a lot of charm, which he lays on with a trowel. This wins him a sympathy from the reader which he doesn't otherwise deserve, and not just because he is technically aligned with Madame Q, and continues to be so long after she has ceased to be aligned with him. I was not clear how much his inability to break free of her was due to magical constraints, and how much was that he chooses not to. (There's an interesting motif in which that statement 'I can't' is repeatedly challenged: 'Can't or won't?': I don't think this ultimately went anywhere, but it was an intriguing counterpoint to the narrative).

Alternatively, consider as hero not the Byronic figure (Valdarrien is so Romantic a character that it took me a while to realise how unsympathetic he is, how all-round Wrong) but the Byronic figure's Best Friend. Thierry is the all-round nice guy and underachiever. He isn't really Sir Percy Blakeney without the alter ego, I just think of him that way because the inability of this allegedly loving couple to sort out their difficulties by - gasp! - talking to each other reminded me how irritating I found this trope in The Scarlet Pimpernel. He isn't a silly ass, but he has no real interests in life (and I did mention, didn't I, that he is effectively an aristocrat under the ancien regime?). Yet he sets the plot rolling by seeing a ghost, and by allowing himself to believe this impossible thing and to act on it; he constantly moves outside his comfortable life in the attempt to do the right thing.

There are a number of strong female characters. Setting aside la Quesadilla (because once you've said she is beautiful and evil, but old - does this make her a 'dem fine woman', as Uncle Andrew put it? - what else can you say?) there's Iareth, who I rather liked despite the emphasis on how she has frozen all her emotions. Merafis appears to be run by women, and I don't know how they get away with it. Amalie's a widow, I think, though she was probably the brains of the outfit while her husband was alive too. But both the queen and her first mimister (who run the country respectively by being ill and doing paperwork, which may explain why it's in such a mess) are women, though there's no indication that it's generally a matriarchy. Miraude starts out as a pimpernel figure, doing clever things under the guise of a society butterfly, but goes to pieces later in the book, which I regretted.

I could go on - and on. There's a repeated trick where people appear to die, and then it turns out weren't dead after all (even by the reversible value of dead which prevails here). And there's a very clever convention whereby a nickname is formed by dropping the middle syllable of the name - a delightful crossword puzzle trick, which resulted in several nicknames that I just didn't believe, and kept mentally heckling.

But throughout all this, I kept turning the pages, and grinning with delight at the next clever twist or neat phrase. It's an enormously accomplished novel, with a confident and distinctive voice, and I look forward to finding out what Kari Sperring will do next.

Comments

[sovay]

"Even the lieutenant's ghost looked startled as the door slammed shut."

That sentence does make me want to read the novel.

He isn't really Sir Percy Blakeney without the alter ego,

*snerk*

I just think of him that way because the inability of this allegedly loving couple to sort out their difficulties by - gasp! - talking to each other reminded me how irritating I found this trope in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Amen to that. I want to shake the relevant characters whenever it appears.

I think you have sold me on this book.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I think you have sold me on this book.

I'd certainly enjoy hearing how that turns out!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I love this book so much.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I know you do. And your enjoyment of it was one of the reasons I remembered to borrow it from desperance.