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Witness for the Dead (Addison)
4/5. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cenozoicsynapsid recced The Witness for the Dead to me, in the sense that they said it a) was only very loosely connected to The Goblin Emperor, b) starred Celehar, the titular Witness for the Dead, and c) involved a murder investigation much of which took place at an opera house. This is all very much my jam. I liked Goblin Emperor very much, but I also sort of felt like I didn't want a sequel to it, which I thought could very easily either be too saccharine or too grim. And I remembered really liking Celehar.
And I'm happy to say that this book delivers, if you like fantasy-noir with a prelate protagonist solving mysteries that might have to do with opera, which I really really do. There are several cases Celehar is involved in (only one of which is the opera case), and a bit of politics on the side, and I enjoyed it all very much. It is a rather more slight book than Emperor, partially due to the subject matter/thematic matter as noir mystery rather than epic fantasy, and partially due to Celehar's opaqueness as a character (more on this in a bit), and it definitely helps if you go in with the right expectations (which I did).
I must say that my obsession with opera didn't really give me a lot of insight into the operatic shenanigans (sorrycenozoicsynapsid), although I did enjoy them quite a lot (especially the bit with Shelsin's dresses/costumes, lol forever). I suspect someone who knew more about operatic history (selenak? zdenka?) might have something to say about the way that Pel-Thenhior writes and puts on a shocking opera that is not about gods and heroes (as all the other operas are -- shades of what Mozart says in Amadeus, to me) but is instead about a sordid factory manager who tries to have his way with a worker, and the way there's rioting afterwards -- I know there are a lot of historical stories out there about opera rioting, even if I don't really know them! (Interestingly, the situation with the opera sort of mirrors the books, in the sense that Goblin Emperor was, of course, about the emperor and court and so on, and Witness is much more about ordinary people doing ordinary, sometimes rather sordid, things.)
And certainly the way that the goblin soprano is extremely good and yet it's totally a thing where she's not able to get prestigious positions/roles, not without someone like Pel-Thenhior explicitly writing one for her -- yeeeeeah. That's a thing, especially in the US. See for example here.
The one thing where I did kind of chuckle was how Pel-Thenhior stopped rehearsal when Celehar asked him to, so that Celehar could talk to everyone. I suck at chronology in books, but I am pretty sure this was a few days before performance. I gotta say that first this struck me as extremely unlikely -- I cannot imagine any of my conductors stopping rehearsal a few days before performance for anything less than a major act of God -- and then I thought, hmm, Pel-Thenhior must be really into Celehar :D
The ending was a bit... abrupt? Like, we find out the resolutions to the mysteries, and then the book basically ends. In general, Celehar's character development was very understated. There's an understated arc for Celehar (where he is given the absolution that grieving for a monster -- in his case, his lover who, we find out during the course of the book, turned out to be a murderer -- doesn't make one monstrous. Which also was a little odd to me; like, therapy for everyone for sure, but his whole life and calling is basically helping people with this kind of thing, and this only occurred to him just then? I guess it's a truism that it's much easier to see this kind of thing in other people than in oneself) but he's such an opaque kind of character (he really, really does not like thinking about himself) that it's not really clear what the deeper character-implications of this arc might be (or if there even are any).sophia_sol says there's a sequel coming, so maybe there will be more? But as it was, the book seemed to end on a sudden and not-entirely-satisfying note. Still, I really liked it!
cenozoicsynapsid recced The Witness for the Dead to me, in the sense that they said it a) was only very loosely connected to The Goblin Emperor, b) starred Celehar, the titular Witness for the Dead, and c) involved a murder investigation much of which took place at an opera house. This is all very much my jam. I liked Goblin Emperor very much, but I also sort of felt like I didn't want a sequel to it, which I thought could very easily either be too saccharine or too grim. And I remembered really liking Celehar. And I'm happy to say that this book delivers, if you like fantasy-noir with a prelate protagonist solving mysteries that might have to do with opera, which I really really do. There are several cases Celehar is involved in (only one of which is the opera case), and a bit of politics on the side, and I enjoyed it all very much. It is a rather more slight book than Emperor, partially due to the subject matter/thematic matter as noir mystery rather than epic fantasy, and partially due to Celehar's opaqueness as a character (more on this in a bit), and it definitely helps if you go in with the right expectations (which I did).
I must say that my obsession with opera didn't really give me a lot of insight into the operatic shenanigans (sorry
cenozoicsynapsid), although I did enjoy them quite a lot (especially the bit with Shelsin's dresses/costumes, lol forever). I suspect someone who knew more about operatic history (selenak? zdenka?) might have something to say about the way that Pel-Thenhior writes and puts on a shocking opera that is not about gods and heroes (as all the other operas are -- shades of what Mozart says in Amadeus, to me) but is instead about a sordid factory manager who tries to have his way with a worker, and the way there's rioting afterwards -- I know there are a lot of historical stories out there about opera rioting, even if I don't really know them! (Interestingly, the situation with the opera sort of mirrors the books, in the sense that Goblin Emperor was, of course, about the emperor and court and so on, and Witness is much more about ordinary people doing ordinary, sometimes rather sordid, things.)And certainly the way that the goblin soprano is extremely good and yet it's totally a thing where she's not able to get prestigious positions/roles, not without someone like Pel-Thenhior explicitly writing one for her -- yeeeeeah. That's a thing, especially in the US. See for example here.
The one thing where I did kind of chuckle was how Pel-Thenhior stopped rehearsal when Celehar asked him to, so that Celehar could talk to everyone. I suck at chronology in books, but I am pretty sure this was a few days before performance. I gotta say that first this struck me as extremely unlikely -- I cannot imagine any of my conductors stopping rehearsal a few days before performance for anything less than a major act of God -- and then I thought, hmm, Pel-Thenhior must be really into Celehar :D
The ending was a bit... abrupt? Like, we find out the resolutions to the mysteries, and then the book basically ends. In general, Celehar's character development was very understated. There's an understated arc for Celehar (where he is given the absolution that grieving for a monster -- in his case, his lover who, we find out during the course of the book, turned out to be a murderer -- doesn't make one monstrous. Which also was a little odd to me; like, therapy for everyone for sure, but his whole life and calling is basically helping people with this kind of thing, and this only occurred to him just then? I guess it's a truism that it's much easier to see this kind of thing in other people than in oneself) but he's such an opaque kind of character (he really, really does not like thinking about himself) that it's not really clear what the deeper character-implications of this arc might be (or if there even are any).
sophia_sol says there's a sequel coming, so maybe there will be more? But as it was, the book seemed to end on a sudden and not-entirely-satisfying note. Still, I really liked it!
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Celehar's arc is basically him being slowly tamed, like a stray cat, by the people he grudgingly allows to like him. (I wondered at some point why the book opens with him feeding strays on his doorstep, and then realized.) This is a theme Sarah Monette seems to really like. Kyle Murchison Booth is basically the same way. One could argue about whether Felix really fits into this mold in Doctrine of Labyrinths, but there's at least a little of it in his story line. And (in a non-romantic way) Chaz's developing relationships with the rest of the team in Shadow Unit fit here as well. You're quite right that Celehar shouldn't have these problems given his profession. It's only his heroic determination not to introspect that allows him to remain as miserable as he feels he should be.
Is Sarah Monette really my most-ficced author? It seems she is. Possibly I am drawn to stray cats?
I looked over Wikipedia's list of classical music riots and didn't see any related to operas; I'd be very interested by what tales your salon can manage to dig up. Mostly, I found incidents where audiences raised a stir over atonal and modernist pieces... I looked up Steve Reich's "Four Organs" on youtube, since I quite like some other Reich pieces, and I have to confess that by ten minutes, I was glad I could make it stop. Anyway, Pel-Thenhior doesn't fit here, since he seems to have written a musically conventional opera with a controversial plot. One can only imagine what the audience would have done if he'd used the twelve-tone system!
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I really like arcs about people being tamed, though I didn't at all make the connection with the feeding strays at the beginning, nice. Which probably explains why I like this book so much! It's still so understated (not least in Celehar's mind) that I wasn't even all that clear on it by the end, mind you. And related to that, I forgot to say that one of the things I really appreciated about this book is the sense it gave me that there was a world a) outside the Emperor's court, and b) that was wider than one or two people, or one or two organizations. As you noted, Desolation Called Peace wasn't great on that front, and I've been reading all that Hugo YA which was in general really bad at that, so I appreciated it a lot here.
Huh, I thought there were stories about opera rioting? I'll have to see if I can dig any up if I can't get salon to :)