![]() But the role is based unmistakably on her own secret past. The novel opens with a triumphant Lilliet Berne, the toast of Paris, confronting a mysterious stranger (naturally, a mysterious stranger) who asks her to originate the lead soprano role in his new opera. We can imagine ourselves into such strange places-so why stop at Revolutionary Road? Audiences continue to go to see fairy-operas like Mozart’s The Magic Flute (which gives Chee’s novel its title and structure) as if these bonkers stories still communicate something interesting about being alive, evil sorceresses and all.Īnd The Queen of the Night is a little bonkers. That freedom to engage the outlandish and improbable, that way of breaking realism’s gravity, is also one of speculative fiction’s cardinal virtues. ![]() The novel's broad, uninhibited narrative gestures show not just an operatic sensibility, but a taste for the shameless as well so while it lacks for gay characters, it's still fair to rank The Queen of the Night alongside the other Great, Unabashedly Gay Books of 2015-16. Call it a curse, call it heteropatriarchy, but there’s few ways for an author to capture this particular human sensation of helplessness, without the register of the superhuman.Ĭhee is also a gay author, of the Angels in America generation, and The Queen of the Night shares that play's conviction that high camp and high art can and should feed each other. One of Chee’s best tricks is the way he grounds that tragic suspicion-that one’s life is the plaything of the gods-in the concrete ways in which class, gender, and similar structural forces determine Lilliet’s life. Like Chee says, he has no business writing about opera if he’s embarrassed by the genre’s outlandish coincidences, its ominous curses and beleaguered heroines struggling against Fate. Few reviewers have passed up the opportunity to compare it to the extravagant plots of a Verdi or Mozart opera some have meant this as a criticism, which seems off to me, and awfully stuffy. The novel follows Lilliet Berne, a celebrity soprano in late 19th-century Paris, and her rise from circus equestrienne to courtesan, from palace spy to opera diva, in a trotting narrative rich with reversals, villains, unmaskings, revenge and transcendence. The Queen of the Night, itself a superb literary-historical crossbreed, is anything but shy about the fantastical. But I’m willing to put pedantry aside just to talk about Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night: That’s how much I loved it.īut maybe it isn’t such a stretch after all. Does Wolf Hall, say-a superb literary-historical crossbreed with no hint of wizards, alternate universes, or technological allegory-fall into our jurisdiction, or not? I’m on the side (actually I pretty much am the side) that says it doesn’t. The editors of Fiction Unbound have a healthy internal debate over whether historical fiction ‘counts’ as ‘speculative’ fiction.
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