This isn't exactly a timely review (more like a very belated rant), but I've only just gotten around to reading Dark of the Sun, yet another Saint-German novel by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (10/04, Tor Books, editor: Melissa Singer). This post is full of spoilers, but don't let that worry you, since my overall recommendation is to not waste your money buying it or your time reading it.
Here's the problem. Yarbro is a perfectly capable writer and does wonderful, in-depth historical research that makes my heart happy. But for the last dozen or so books (I've lost track of the total number), this series has been treading water. And Dark of the Sun epitomizes all its problems.
I started reading the Saint-Germain novels back in the early 1980s when there were only three of them and the notion of a vampire hero was unusual. I developed an intense and abiding fondness for the series and its continuing characters. When the original series (five novels and a short story collection) ended, I was quite unhappy. I remember asking Yarbro at the 1984 worldcon whether there would be any more. She was definite: the character had stopped speaking to her, and there would be no more novels. At seventeen, I thought this was ridiculous. And sure enough, within a few years we had four related novels and then a restart of the series. At first I was thrilled, but with each new book I've been more and more disappointed. The original books grabbed me hard and built up such reserve of positive feelings that for years I was faithfully buying the books as they came out, hoping against hope that I'd get that buzz of excitement back. But not any more; it took me three years to get around to buying this one and another month of owning it to get around to reading it. Then it took me four days to finish the book, since it was literally putting me to sleep. This, in a series that used to keep me up all night reading!
I wondered for some time if it was simply that I was no longer an eager teenager, and if the original books only held up for me (on many, many rereads over the years) because of the glow of nostalgia for favorites of my youth. But I don't think that's it. It's not that her research is less rich, or her writing has suddenly become incoherent. The problem is that the plots and characters no longer summon up anything more for me than a shrug of indifference. And that's when there actually is a plot and characters; in Dark of the Sun, she really seems to have just phoned the whole thing in.
The plot, what there is of it: Saint-Germain and his manservant Roger, under whatever linguistic variants of their names they're using this time/place, leave Shanghai after a summons from the Emperor. Saint-Germain leaves behind people and things he cares about. I start to care about them a little too, until it becomes clear that we're never going to see any more of these characters and their little subplots will be resolved offscreen if at all. Yarbro can sketch in intriguing characters very quickly, but then they just sort of blow away, out of the story, and the incipient interest collapses. In this book, Saint-Germain doesn't stay anywhere long enough for the minor characters to have time to flourish.
The major adversary is the weather: an Indonesian volcano has blown its top, the weather has changed, crops are failing, sulfuric snow is falling, and the sun has weakened or vanished. (This is all based on actual historical events - nothing wrong with the research.) As a result of all this, people are starving and thus cranky and hostile. So Saint-Germain can't get to the Emperor because of some cranky, starving soldiers who take away his servants and horses and possessions. So he shrugs off everything he left in Shanghai (and if he doesn't care, why should I?) and decides to head home to the Carpathians. He meets some nomads, who are cranky and starving. They go to various places full of cranky, starving people whom one might be able to care about if they were around for more than a chapter or two. They keep traveling. They go to more places full of even more cranky, starving, interchangeable people. They meet the nomads again. His one friend among them slashes Saint-Germain's throat, nearly beheading him, as a sacrifice to try to improve the weather. Needless to say, this doesn't actually work out to be fatal, and it doesn't even seem like all that stressful an experience, except that he has to wear a scarf around his neck and not talk for a few chapters. Even the friend only seems mildly perturbed by the whole thing. (If she had any strong emotions on the subject, Yarbro couldn't be bothered to actually write about them, but I definitely sensed some perturbation. She kind of looked funny right before the whole throat-slashing episode!) So she's perturbed, then she's rejected by the nomads, and then she dies offscreen.
At this point, I was yawning. Let me repeat for emphasis: a character tried to saw off the protagonist's head, and all it elicited from me was a yawn. Why? Because there is NO suspense to this sort of thing. We know Saint-Germain survives (given the scope of the series, we know he survives to the 1970s), so all that's in question is how complex it will be for Roger to rescue him and how long it will take him to heal up again. (The answers are "not very" and "not very long".) He doesn't even scar.
So what we have is essentially a buddy survival story: Saint-Germain and Roger vs. the cold, cruel world. And if you're going to write this, you need to really focus on those two aspects. Maybe bring the whole survival thing into question, or at least make the reader forget that the end is already known. Threaten the buddy, or the relationship. Make the challenges of survival interesting. If the main character is known to survive, bring in some other characters to threaten and make the reader actually care about them. This is perfectly doable; read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air for a great example of a real-life slow-motion weather disaster/survival story where the end is known going in.
But we don't get much to worry about. We've got the sun vanishing - shouldn't that be an interesting thing for a sun-sensitive vampire? Yeah, I think she mentions that it makes his life easier. Mostly, it makes crops fail and people starve and become cranky.
So Saint-Germain is slowly starving to death because he has no one to turn to for blood and the accompanying emotion/life that sustains him. What would happen if he became stuporous from lack of sustenance and Roger had to secretly transport what looks a lot like a corpse for thousands of miles? That might be tough even for the preternaturally capable Roger. But he doesn't; starvation just seems to be a mildly frustrating experience that causes him to lose weight. He does not become cranky; Saint-Germain is never cranky.
What if Saint-Germain fell madly in love and they had to try to bring a human along on the journey, making the cold and lack of food a much larger problem? Well, he doesn't. He does get to have a sexual relationship with a depressed widow, which lets Yarbro get her all-time favorite word, "esurience", in. (Am I the only one who learned that word because of the sex scenes in Saint-Germain novels and has never seen it used anywhere else?) Hey, a romantic subplot, at last! Maybe a character to care about? But no, it's not to be. Their interaction goes something like this:
Widow: I am depressed and want to have sex.
Saint-Germain: Okay, but I'm impotent and I want to suck your blood.
Widow: Right, let's do it.
Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a somewhat off-key reaction. Also, it's dull. She isn't torn at all by the whole thing, either by the heresy/ickiness of a vampire or by any strong emotions when he leaves. And since he leaves fairly quickly, her story is also concluded (sort of) offscreen via letters. I realize that every Saint-Germain novel can't involve him finding the love of his lifetime, or even a really good long-term friend, but Yarbro's just going through the motions here.
Sad to say, the most interesting thing going on in this book is the series of letters exchanged by various Christian monastics, who are slowly starving but at least aren't cranky. I do like Yarbro's use of correspondence as chapter headings and have a dark suspicion that I would have enjoyed the book more if I'd skipped the story proper and just read all the letters.
Anyway, after some more travel, they finally get to the Carpathians and we find out his original name. And then it just sort of stops.
Now, contrast that with the five earlier novels. I haven't reread any of these in several years, but they were sufficiently intense experiences that I can do this from memory:
In Hôtel Transylvania, set in the glittering aristocratic world of 18th-century Paris, there are actual villains: Satanists! You can't go wrong with Satanists; they provide strange religious practices and kinky sex (of the bad, nonconsensual kind, but still). People end up dead or permanently screwed up, and since they've been in the book for quite a few chapters and you've gotten to know them, you actually care. There's a real love story with a major character. Madelaine. The countess with her viola da gamba. The alchemists with their athanor. The Green Lion. The hunt in the forest. The gigantic diamonds.
In The Palace, we have the fabulous setting of Renaissance Florence, with great use of historical personages like Botticelli and Lorenzo de Medici. There are wonderful minor characters among the members of the construction guilds. And the story takes us into the era of the fanatic monk Savonarola and his bonfires of vanities, which make you weep as much for the destroyed works of art as the destroyed people. Oh, and there's a crazy nun who talks about kinky nonconsensual sex. Demetrice. Io sono stragnero. The Franciscan friar. The white horse and brightly-colored clothes. Jupiter and Semele.
Blood Games takes us back to the days of Nero's Rome and the gladiatorial games. There is a convincing love interest (again, a major character) and kinky nonconsensual sex. Some of the gladiators are important characters, so their trips to the ring add suspense. Tishtry. The Armenian spy. The decadent sons of Vespasianus. Atta Olivia Clemens. Aumtehotep. The arena. The crocodiles. The charioteers. The mute and castrated servant. The early Christians.
Path of the Eclipse was probably the weakest of the original novels and was the first to depart from Western Europe. It has superficial similarities to Dark of the Sun, but it's actually interesting to read. There's the Mongol invasion, a trip across Asia that actually feels dangerous and non-routine, a crazy Hindu "priestess", kinky ritual sex (with gore), and a strange child-monk. Two female leads, neither love-of-his-life romances, but both interesting characters in their own right. The Yellow Hats. Kali. China. India.
The thickest of the novels with the biggest departure from the standard romantic plotlines was Tempting Fate, set between World Wars I and II, primarily in Germany. Once again there are can't-miss villains (Nazis) and a flock of interesting minor characters, including a precariously assimilated Jewish family. But the big switch here is that Saint-Germain's major relationship is with a young girl he adopts. His discovery of fatherhood is sensitively portrayed and gives both the character and the reader someone to worry about. There's a second story (woven in and around the main plot) of one of Saint-Germain's former lovers, now a vampire herself, and her attempts to deal with a new love of her own. Irina. Nikolai. The horse show. The fabulous automobiles. The three tutor-candidates. Decadent Berlin. The bookstalls. James Emerson Tree.
Compare all this with a book where the major adversary is dangerous but essentially undramatic climate change and the settings are primarily wilderness or poor towns full of cranky, starving people, none of whom stick around long enough for me to remember their names two weeks later, let alone two decades later. What a comedown! Yarbro should be ashamed; she can do so much better. Her editor should sit her down for a heart-to-heart on why one should not make one's long-term fans feel like idiots for continuing to buy her books. I'm sure the series must be making money, or Tor wouldn't keep putting it out, but can't we raise the quality bar a little higher?
All this said, if you're still suffering from your own quarter-century addiction to Saint-Germain and are bound and determined to read Dark of the Sun, you can get it here. But if you're new to the Saint-Germain series, I suggest that instead you spend your money buying the first six books (shopping links below), and then quit while you're ahead. I recommend reading them either in order written (HT, P, BG, PE, TF, SGC) or in chronological order (BG, P, PE, HT, TF, SGC), or at least reading TF and SGC fifth and sixth, respectively, since I consider the unavoidable spoilers in the latter two a problem when reading the first four (especially HT).
And in case you want to do as I do (sigh), rather than as I say, I just ordered two more books in this series to see whether (1) a novel (Borne in Blood) set in a place/time (the Napoleonic era) with which I'm more familiar will be more to my liking, or (2) Saint-Germain still works as a short story character (Saint-Germain: Memoirs
), where perhaps the lack of plot and character development will be less noticeable (or at least the experience will be over more quickly).
Yes, I'm addicted. Take my advice: just say no.
What you said reminds me of myself as I was going thru Elizabeth Peters’s The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog. I kept thinking that the Amelia Peabody mystery series had run out of steam. It’s probably because my reading of it was interrupted a lot, which made it feel very scattered. It was not helped by the setting being the same archeological dig as that of of the first novel and by Amelia having to make her husband fall in love with her all over again because a bop on the head has made him forget the last 10 years of his life. I haven't given up yet, and the next book will hopefully confirm that this was just a case of the author having an off day.
Hopefully.
Posted by: Serge | February 22, 2008 at 04:37 PM
Amelia having to make her husband fall in love with her all over again because a bop on the head has made him forget the last 10 years of his life.
What a colossal idiocy that sounds like; remind me never to read that book. I think I tried one of the early ones in that series and just didn't get into it. Sounds like I've saved myself some later annoyance.
Now if only I could manage to cut off Yarbro like I finally cut off Anne McCaffrey after several Pern books too many!
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | February 24, 2008 at 07:16 PM