Kushiel's Dart is Jacqueline Carey’s highly successful debut and the first instalment of a trilogy that chronicles the exploits of Phèdre nó Delaunay - exquisite courtesan, talented spy and god-touched masochist. The book received the 2002 Locus Award for Best First Novel, and it established Carey as one of the new and innovative talents within the fantasy genre.

Kushiel's Dart is first and foremost the story of Phèdre, who enters the world graced with an ill-luck name and a flaw in her beauty; a mote of scarlet in one of her dark eyes. She is sold into indentured service at a very young age, and when the enigmatic nobleman Anafiel Delaunay buys her service, he also names what the scarlet fleck in Phèdre’s gaze denotes: Kushiel’s Dart. Phédre is not merely an unlucky child of flawed beauty; she is an anguisette, chosen by the gods to experience pain and pleasure as one.

Reared in the Court of the Night-Blooming Flowers, an exclusive district of sacred prostitution, Phèdre enters the household of Delaunay at the age of ten, where she together with her foster-brother Alcuin is instructed in the arts of love and the skills of languages as well as the arts of covertcy. She and Alcuin are meant to serve as both courtesans and spies at the behest of their master, who is deeply embroiled in the political intrigues that surrounds the throne of Terre d’Ange.

Employed as a courtesan in order to spy on her high and mighty patrons, Phrèdre stumbles on a plot that threatens not only the throne of Terre d’Ange, but also the land and the people itself. Along with her bodyguard Joscelin, a celibate warrior-priest, Phèdre is betrayed into slavery among the barbarian and war-like Skaldi. Here, she must use all her talents, both of the bedchamber and of the intellect, in order to escape and warn her beloved country of an impending invasion and expose treachery hidden at the heart of the d’Angeline court.

Carey spins an elegant and exciting tale where the unravelling of deeply laid conspiracies is well-balanced with action and character development. Kushiel's Dart is not only peopled with a truly wonderful heroine, but also with some great secondary characters: Joscelin, the one-man Cassiline fighting machine; Phèdre’s childhood friend, the irrepressible Tsingano Hyacinthe and last but not least Melisande Shahrizai, a beautiful and alluring noblewoman of Kushiel’s line, subtle and very dangerous.

Kushiel's Dart is a first person narrative, which is one of the strengths of the novel since it provides the heroine with a compelling and persuasive voice, where Carey seamlessly blends the hindsight of an older and more mature Phèdre with the depiction of her youth and emotional development. Through the course of the story, the reader intimately follows her emotional development from an impetuous young girl revelling in her sensuality to a young woman who has to make difficult choices and endure loss and sorrow with dignity and compassion. The effect of the first person POV is one of strong psychological characterization in relation to Phèdre, but less so with other characters since every observation is filtered through Phèdre’s voice, which the reader is invited to identify with exclusively.

In many respects it is not Phèdre but Joscelin who undergoes the greatest change throughout the narrative as he develops from a rather arrogant and prudish boy with a tendency for the dramatic to a man that can accept both love and laughter as well as take responsibility for his actions and choices. His devotion to Phèdre puts him through a lot of trials and tribulations, but I must admit that I found him most engaging when he is posing as a Mendacant, a travelling story-teller since where the reader glimpses a wholly different side to him apart from his awesome fighting abilities and his rather dramatic temperament.

It is also a very beautifully written book. Carey manages to give the language a slightly archaic “feel” without belabouring the point. Rather, she cleverly uses interjections and carefully spaced repetitions that endow Phèdre’s narrative voice with the rhythms and cadences of a masterful story-teller:

As seen in the excerpt above, Carey’s prose is also littered with an abundance of sensual similes and metaphor, which gives the story a lush and visual “feel”, making it a pleasure to read.

Kushiel's Dart is set in a world both familiar and strange. The European continent is the obvious reference point for Carey’s world-building as she mixes loans from many different cultures and historical epochs into a recognizable yet strange and fascinating world. Renaissance France, Celtic Britain and the Old Norse cultures of Scandinavia all serve as distinctive, individual threads that Carey weaves skilfully together into a tapestry of vivid beauty. As with all forms of alternate history/historical fantasy, the depth and resonance of Carey’s constructed world is to some degree dependant on the reader’s own horizon of knowledge. Her world-building doesn’t stop at the level of surface resemblance; she actually incorporates pieces of European history beneath the skin of the story for the discerning reader to discover. The use of place names is a good example since she often uses names loaned or constructed from actual history. Thus Alba is the ancient Celtic name for the British Isles, while Skaldia is named after a specific poetic tradition in Old Norse literature. For me, one of the pleasures of reading Carey’s Kushiel books is the pleasure of recognizing the historical roots of the different elements of Phèdre’s world.

One of the most original aspects of Kushiel's Dart is the fact that Carey constructs a revisionist Judo-Christian theology as an integral part of the world-building. Inspired by Biblical books of Apocrypha as well as Jewish legend and folklore, Carey crafts a very interesting myth of creation for Phèdre’s homeland, Terre d’Ange (“Land of Angels”), centred on a deity (Elua) that symbolizes the marriage between earth and heaven and a race of men begotten by angels:

Carey builds on Biblical apocrypha, particularly the stories of rebel angels who begets children on human women and who betrays divine secrets to the race of mankind. Her unique creation of Elua, child of the union of the chthonic with the celestial, allows her to explore the idea of love as the most powerful and important of divine attributes. The central tenet of D’Angeline religion is simple: Love as thou wilt. Consensuality is a scared tenet, wherefore rape is not just a crime in Terre d’Ange, but heresy! This idea also allows her to explore the different aspects of the sexual in an interesting manner. In Terre d’Ange, sexuality is an integral aspect of the divine, embodied in the goddess Naamah. Prostitution (the Service of Naamah) is an integral part of the religious system, and the act of love itself is seen as a form of prayer. As institutions of the sacred prostitution of Naaham’s Service, the Thirteen Houses of the Night Court highlights different aspects of sexual love; joy, passion, solace, etc. Since her heroine is consecrated as a Servant of Naamah, Carey has included a few graphic sex scenes in her novel, but they are quite tastefully done and always integral to the plot.

Through Phèdre, Carey explores different forms of love; the love between siblings and friends, the love for the mentor, tinged with romantic love, sexual and romantic love, etc. One form, however, predominates, namely the love of country – an aspect that is curiously enough often is overlooked in the reception of Carey’s work. The people of Terre d’Ange are bound to their home by both love and blood as they are the descendants of their own deities, Elua and his angelic companions. Carey highlights this love of country to a discreet and lyrical effect by way of a repeated catch-phrase: The bee is in the lavender /The honey fills the comb, a verse from “The Exile’s Lament”, a fictional piece of D’Angeline poetry.

Another original aspect of Kushiel's Dart is Carey’s decision to feature an openly masochistic heroine. Carey has pointed out that one of her aims with the novel was to highlight and subvert some of the sexist clichés inherent in not only the fantasy genre, but in popular culture at large.
By making Phèdre’s sexual nature play such a prominent part in the story, Carey is able to tap into both the subtext of eroticized violence as well as the time-worn trope of the-woman-as-victim, inverting these aspects in order to explore questions of strength and weakness, cruelty and compassion and the ways that power can play out between individuals. All of these aspects are in one way or another present in the complex relationship between Phèdre and the villain Melisande:

Theirs is a relationship of dominance and submission, of coercion and resistance as well as an almost compulsive attraction. As an anguisette, Phèdre is not only the victim of Kushiel’s harsh love; she is also his weapon, cast against the subtle machinations of Melisande Shahrizai, scion of Kushiel’s bloodline. Phèdre pitches her wit and will against her opponent, but at the same time her very nature makes her vulnerable to Melisande. In a way, they are perfectly matched, Phèdre’s masochism to Melisande’s sadism, but what I find so interesting about that relationship is the fact that Phèdre, despite her god-touched nature, is able to walk her own path and that she struggles to do so.

All in all, I find that Jacqueline Carey’s first novel is a wonderful and almost hypnotic reading experience. It is, as said, a beautifully written and well constructed story, and I haven’t found much to criticize. However, it does feel like Kushiel's Dart is two books pressed into one volume. The first part of the book can perhaps best be characterized as a coming-of-age tale where Phèdre’s education and political intrigue plays the dominant part, while the second part of the book is more like a classic quest-narrative developing into a travelogue as Phèdre and Joscelin struggles to escape slavery in Skaldia and later travels on to the isle of Alba. This is, however, a minor criticism of a most impressive debut. Phèdre and her world made a huge impact on me when I first read Kushiel's Dart and it continues to exert its influence on my imagination. Carey manages to explore some very interesting issues about love, in all its form, as an attribute of the divine, about suffering and compassion as well as will and desire in the power plays that people engages in. She offers up an exciting story with a compelling heroine that also has something to say about the human condition that transcends genre.

In my opinion, simply stated, with no reservation what so ever, the best novel published in 2004. The best Fantasy novel? Well, yes, but also, the best fictional novel, bar none. Susanna Clark’s debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, is so impressive that it immediately bypasses comparisons to the bulk of contemporary fantasy mired in mediocrity and should be included in discussions pertaining to other recent efforts in fantasy that have rightfully elicited conversations and accolades of modern classics like of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Gaiman himself says of the novel:

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was released last year amidst incredible pre-release hype generally unusual in fantasy at that level. This “hype” was generated behind the novel by reports of it being the next Harry Potter, a notion that for some reason still perpetuated even after publication. Besides the irrelevant and obvious similarities, both Rowling and Clarke are English, they are published by the same publisher, and both have London as a setting in their works, I simply see absolutely no validity to the comparisons from a thematic sense, nor in scope, nor in terms of their writing, nor are the novels even targeting the same audience. This is no intentional slight to Rowling, or her work, which I also admire, but merely the truth. I must admit, generally when a novel get this type of acclaim pre-releases I have been disappointed, the most recent prior such example I can point out would be the novel Eragon, which approaches levels of unoriginality and atrocious prose that would make one lose all faith in pre-release reviews. I purchased Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell with very little expectations; save to be disappointed… I could not have been more wrong.

Susanna Clarke chooses the dawn of the 19th century England as her setting for the novel, during a time where magic has all but disappeared, and centers on the efforts of at the time perhaps the greatest living magician left Mr. Norrell and his efforts to restore English magic, and bring it back to the forefront of society. He later meets the younger Jonathan Strange and takes him on as an apprentice and they act in unison in bringing back the prosperity of magic. Clarke’s description and use of magic is absolutely breathtaking and imaginative, its workings and origins well documented throughout the novel in a series of detailed, informative footnotes, that accomplish both that and relaying numerous anecdotes revealing a sprawling back history. The land of Faire, which co-exists with London proper, is depicted as a location sense of wonder, but the same wonderfully detailed and imaginative yet still remaining mysterious and magical, the domain of the Jon Uskglass the all powerful magician-king who makes one of the most awe inspiring entrances in recent memory. Clarke’s depiction of magic and its use is one of the strongest such examples I have ever read in fantasy.

Magic is not the only element Clarke succeeds in depicting in the novel. Clarke’s recreation of the Regency era of England is exemplarily. Not only does she not neglect the occurrences of the time such as the Napoleonic War, but her depiction of the architecture, the fashion of the time, and social nuances transports readers back into time. Her prose, enhances the experience, carefully researched, but not overdone, as to turn the novels feel into a historical recant, but finds a fine balance weaving the story of Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange and in doing so rewriting a fabulous history that includes yet another delightful element that absolutely enhances the novel and that is Clarke’s smart choices in appearances of historical figures such as Lord Byron (which is rather ingenious as Strange is decidedly a Byronic character, and even in the footnotes Clarke plays on this saying Byron wrote a poem about Strange, later in life), who befriends Strange in Venice, The Duke of Wellington whom Strange aids at Waterloo, and King George whose spats of insanity are chronicled and mischievously explained, and she doesn’t merely use Byron or Wellington as cameos as some authors tend to, but boldly gives them scenes of merit.

Other characters that make up one of the most unique and gratifying casts include the likes of Childermass, Norrell’s mysterious, tarot reading assistant, Steven a butler who is befriended by a creature of faire “The man with the thistled down hair” serves as our window into the social structure, and the conversations between the two offer some of the most notable sequences of the novel. There is also Vinculus, a street magician whose role in the novel as it progresses is incredibly satisfying and unpredictable. There are a myriad more but the one I found most engaging, is the most ambiguous, and that is the Raven King, the aforementioned John Uskglass. Uskglass, exists in the novel at same time both as myth and absolute reality and is a topic of the conflict in views of Norrell and Strange. Norrell in effect, and simply stated is a conservative, and Strange a liberal in their views of magic. Norrell fears and denounces the Raven King, wishing for his impact to be forgotten, Strange believes this foolhardy and limited in thinking. This is only one of examples of the contrasts between the characters that make for an engaging read. Norrell is old, cautious, and can be described as anti-social, alone, Norrell is young, comely, ambitious, and married. This causes for a splitting of partnership and the birth of two different thoughts of magic.

Negatives? Well some will say that the novel is a bit arduous in the beginning. An observation I can agree with on some levels, however I think it necessary. Clarke shows us a country with no magic, and I think uses portions of the novel to aptly describe a setting, before the introduction of magic back into society, in terms of the perceptions of magic relevant to the society at the time. Also, the beginning portion of the novel does not take place in London but in Yorkshire, and Clarke takes the time to differentiate the two distinctly different settings, and actually spends time depicting Norrell’s transition to moving to London. Also any qualms with the pacing of the beginning of the novel are put away after reading the novel, which is gifted with one of the most vivid, and inspiring conclusions I have read in a novel, putting Norrell and Strange’s debate of Uskglass in ultimate perspective. I also don’t recommend this novel to those that are exclusive fans of hack and slash fantasy novels this is simply not your element. In saying this I am not saying the novel is devoid of action, but it is not central in the novel. The action scenes that are included are ones of original spells both terrible and magnificent, particularly well used by Strange aiding Wellington. This novels strength is the superior depiction of setting, remarkably apt prose, and what I think is a landmark representation of magic and its use. Honestly most negatives I hear about this novel are of the worst variety, and that is of the type one find when something achieves a standard so high that people just desire to find something negative about it, just to feel at ease about their own personal favorites. I have heard people saying disparaging remarks about this novel saying it did not live up to the Harry Potter comparisons, which is ridiculous. Harry Potter is an excellent series, that can be and is enjoyed by many adults (particularly the last installments), however it is still a juvenile series. Clarke’s novel is decidedly not targeted at juveniles, and honestly aspires to be more than a child’s reading fodder.

This is one of the best Fantasy novels I have ever read, which is impressive, as although there are more novels in setting planned by Clarke, it certainly is a stand-alone novel. Call it want you want, a modern masterpiece in speculative fiction, The Time magazine Fiction Book of the Year, a work of genius, all of them are apt, and the only reason it’s not a 10 is I don’t believe in the concept of a perfect novel, my final rating for Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a 9.5. This is what fantasy should be, and is, at the highest level.

Jay
The Bodhisattva

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