This review took forever, but that's because there was so very, very much material to cover. Seriously. My wrist cramped on my notes more times than I can relate.

Phantom by Susan Kay, 1990

Grade: A

So here we finally are, with the grandmother of all fan-published Phantom fiction. Kay wasn't the first to write derivative fiction based on Leroux's work, but she was the first to do so with enough skill and resonance to elevate the exercise suddenly from the realm of "fanfiction" into that of literature deserving of its own examination and consideration. Many fans and followers of this particular literary niche consider Kay's novel so definitive and admirable in quality that they put it on a pedestal of equal authority to Leroux's original.

I'm rather glad I liked it. I didn't really want to be beaten to death by hordes of angry readers.

Even in discussing this review in a preliminary fashion, I've already had objections about the grade, specifically about its lack of a + there. While I thought this was a well-written, thoughtful, expressive and emotionally moving rendition of the story, I did not think it was higher than a solid A grade. Something has to really blow me away to arrive at A+ status, and while this novel was good--even great in some places--it was not stupendous. Calm down, people. Let me finish the review before you get after me with the tar and pitchforks.

Part 1: Madeleine (1831-1840)

Kay's novel is intended to be a biography, covering Erik's life from birth to death, in order to encompass and explain the motivations and history behind the actions and events of Leroux's novel. She shows a good understanding of the themes and ideas behind Erik and his relationship with God and the world around him, but my very first note introduces the biggest problem I had with Kay's work overall: she over-explicates. Her characters, starting with Madeleine here, have a tendency to slip into navel-gazing, and while it never quite goes to the ridiculous extent that would make me want to stop reading, it is annoying enough to distract me more than a few times over the course of the text. In a story so metaphorically and symbolically charged, it is extremely difficult to make sure that the story is being shown instead of told, and I think Kay's single biggest problem is an inconsistency that sometimes tends much more toward telling than showing.

The language used in the prose, however, is descriptive and moving, providing a clear picture not only of the scene as it unfolds but also of the characters and their actions. The characters are the main strength of Kay's novel, which does a beautiful job of making them relatable but also eminently self-contained and applicable to their respective metaphors, so this descriptive prose is likewise a major strength for Kay, and it will continue straight through to the end of the novel without many snags.

Unfortunately, her prose does do one thing that makes me sad, and that is a constant abuse of ellipses. Generally, the English language does not require a lot of ellipses at any given time. Ninety-nine percent of all ellipses can be replaced with other punctuation or removed in favor of sentence reconstruction, usually without disrupting the voice unduly. I'm not opposed to ellipses in general, especially when used responsibly, but if more than five ellipses appear in your novel, you may be treading on dangerous ground. If more than five ellipses appear in one chapter, you will definitely be courting disaster, and if more than five ellipses appear on the same page, except in very singular circumstances, you have erred and will be receiving a sharp note like this one from me. Constant use of the defenseless ellipsis looks lazy, and the trailing off effect that you are looking for is probably ruined if the reader is staring at it and reconstructing the sentence so that it becomes more interesting and self-contained. Trailing off once in a while is fine, but when it happens constantly, I start to wonder if maybe the author is incapable of writing a strong, definitive sentence and must rely continually on the reader's ability to fill in the gaps instead. Kay seems to have a slight problem with trusting her readers to understand the concepts she's setting forth; I promise, a bright reader will be able to read into a statement even if it doesn't happen to have a little dotted trail telling us that the thought should be pursued.

All right, enough format whining. Let's get on to the real stuff--because, Jesus on a pogo stick, there is plenty of it. To start with, let's take a look at the names (everyone knows the name game is my favorite, right?). We've already visited Erik's name in the original Leroux novel ("dark ruler"), but Kay decides to go all out on her naming conventions. Madeleine literally means "woman of Magdala", the birthplace and sacred city of Mary Magdalene from scripture; Madeleine's status as something of a sinful woman struggling to find grace makes it an appropriate moniker. The name Charles means "free man", and also bears connotations of strength and masculinity, all traits that the handsome and carefree father of the Phantom takes for granted, and which provide contrast for his unfortunate son's plight. Marie is the French form of the name Mary, which means "bitter"; it might seem slightly out of place for the sunny, uncomplaining woman, but as an unhappy, downtrodden spinster, it's not that far a stretch. Sascha is a variant of Alexander, which means "defender of man"--obviously appropriate for the faithful family dog, especially as she is the one source of succor for young Erik. Etienne is a variant of Stephen, which means "crown", and he certainly serves as an authority figure for Madeleine in the latter half of Erik's childhood, as well as an example of the kind of respect and social acceptance that Erik can never aspire to. Father Mansert poses more of a problem for me: the name seems to be Slavic, but I can't pin down an exact meaning for it, so Kay's intent may be lost on me forever.

Since we're talking about names anyway, it's fun to note the heavy irony of Erik's own name. Having been named after the priest, Erik becomes a conundrum of nomenclature; the priest, who is representative of God, lends his name to a child who is representative of abandonment by God. Erik is literally named after God, which he is luckily unaware of as he spends the rest of his life being cursed, abandoned, or actively persecuted because of his physical, God-given form. Now that's irony.

Madeleine's horror of her son comes partially from the fact that he is the last remnant of her deceased husband, and the fact that that remaining link is through a child so hideous creates a fundamental rift in her mind, which is unable to reconcile her handsome, loving husband with the terrifying creature that the two of them have created. She calls Erik "the monster that Charles and I had created out of love," not only hammering home that idea but also giving us a little window of foreshadowing into adult Erik's behavior, which will be continually characterized by evil acts that he will perpetrate out of a misguided desire to act on love. Erik's deformity is almost an active betrayal, as far as Madeleine is concerned; Charles had promised her perfection in their child, and as she had come to view the foetus as representative of their love and of Charles' legacy, it is unpardonable for her that Erik should turn out to be so horrifying.

Unsurprisingly, Kay makes Erik's parents a singer and an architect, respectively, in order to give him plausible genetic background for his prodigious talents in both fields. The class lines are set up here, as well, when it's made clear that Madeleine's parents were somewhat relieved that she had chosen to marry a man--even a man somewhat below her social status--rather than becoming a performer with all the stigma that would have entailed. As per the cultural perceptions of the time, professional singing is set up to be representative of worldliness and sin, an idea that will be repeated many times to come in this particular text.

It's interesting to watch Charles actively cast himself in a God role--saying that the creation of his child makes him feel like God, etc.--because it extends the idea of a neglectful God even further. Charles' death is tantamount to abandonment for Erik, who never knew him and was left with only his unstable mother, and that absence of a father figure in his life correlates directly to the absence (or abandonment) of God.

The slight class friction between Madeleine, as a monied lady, and Charles, as a working class man, is present, as previously noted, from the beginning. It isn't as pronounced as the later class dichotomy between Christine and Raoul will be, but it's an obvious parallel to their situation and helps reinforce the idea that class barriers do exist in this time period and are important to keep in mind (which I appreciate, since many an author sort of conveniently forgets all about them).

My favorite part of any version is always taking a look inside Erik's skull, because it is a fucked up place and I am interested in how authors interpret that fucked-up-ness. Kay's Erik isn't quite the same flavor of crazy-go-nuts as most of the interpretations we see; he isn't dual-personality like Bischoff's Phantom, or a totally disconnected psychopath like Englund's 1989 movie portrayal. Instead, he can be best pegged as a sociopath; he is capable of emotion and even of relating to other people, but he has key deficiencies in the areas of recognizing and processing normal human interaction, which leads him to have very little conscience to speak of. He can appreciate inanimate objects and objective ideals of beauty, but he has a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong, and appears to have almost no idea how the average person manages their morals. As a child, he has difficulty distinguishing between animals and humans (he believes the dog to be his mother for a while, for example, and even after he understands that she is a separate species he places her on an equivalent level as the human race), and learns to manipulate others at a very early age, using threats and fear to control his own mother's actions. While his fondness for Sascha and his desperate attempts to drag some motherly love out of Madeleine indicate that he does have emotional capacity, he doesn't have the ability to focus it correctly, and Madeleine's neglect ensures that he never learns how. This confused and fractured childhood is the basis for Kay's adult Phantom, whose moral compass is not so much nonexistent as it is extremely quirky.

Kay also begins a novel-long theme here that ties directly to the archetype of Leroux's original Erik: specifically, that Erik and his musical talents, especially his voice, are representative of sexuality. When Erik first begins to sing, as a boy, Madeleine instantly forbids him to do so again; not because he is not perfectly competent, but because his voice rouses completely inappropriate sexual feelings in her. Leaving aside the normal woman's reaction to such a sensual assault, the situation is doubly untenable for Madeleine because of the stigma of what is essentially aural incest. Her fear of his voice and the feelings it has the power to rouse in her are a direct precursor to Christine's feelings later, especially in light of the fact that Leroux's Phantom had as much desire for Christine to fill a mother's role for him as a wife's. This extremely Freudian Oedipal complex that Erik suffers from is a huge theme for Kay, and will continue on uninterrupted for the entire novel. Madeleine's rejection of Erik's voice also has roots in the societal mores of the time; since she sees it as a fundamentally sexual agent, she rejects it as evil for its sensual connotations. Conversely, the priest sees Erik's voice as spiritually transcendent, a sound he even likens to the voice of God himself; this gentle, never-discussed disagreement is a direct laying out of the central conundrum of Erik's character in the original novel, which saw him continually torn between the two facets of his personality, the sexual "predator" and the transcendent, musical "angel".

This unfortunate sexual conception that Madeleine has of Erik has several root causes; the sensually hypnotic quality of his voice is certainly the most obvious, but Erik's existence has been "tainted" for his mother from the beginning, primarily by her own guilt. Her parents' deaths coincided with her honeymoon, recasting the sexual bliss she had been experiencing in a guilty light because of the timing, and her choice to marry Charles (and the sexual pursuits that marriage entails) has become by the time of Erik's childhood something that she bitterly regrets as it not only curtailed her career but also landed her in an isolated cottage with a hideous son and a dead husband. Erik is a product of all the sexual evil in which she has indulged, and because of that he has become representative, in her eyes, of sin of the worst kind. No one likes a living reminder of their iniquities.

It is fairly unsurprising, in light of this Oedipal undercurrent, that Erik should see his mother's association with Etienne as a sort of betrayal. While he is still far too much of a child to have any understanding of sexuality or of his mother's differing perceptions of him and of Etienne, he is very firmly able to grasp the idea that he wants her attention to be his and his alone. Even at this early age, he is already setting the dynamic of his later relationships, most notably that he shares with Christine: just as Christine is drawn by his magnetism and terrified by his bestiality into running to the haven of Raoul, so is Madeleine desperate to break free to the safety she sees with Etienne in order to deny the unnatural power her son has over her.

Erik, like many genius children, is resentful of the restrictions placed upon him by his mother and fairly disdainful of her (as he is totally convinced of his own superiority, an idea that Madeleine doesn't do much to discredit). His mental complacency is shattered when his mother forces him to confront the horror of his own face, however; like everyone else, he immediately begins to hate himself. As a child in an environment surrounded by fear and loathing, there is hardly anything else he can do. His penchant for illusion and sleight-of-hand grows directly from this self-hatred; when combined with his natural curiosity and affinity for understanding the way things work, that self-loathing makes some ability to change his environment necessary for him, even if it should be only via illusionary means. His mastery of the arts of illusion is another layer of "mask", insulating him from the world around him and, to some degree, from himself.

I have been known to get uncommonly annoyed with authors that treat public opinion in a bustling metropolis like Paris, in the nineteenth-century, the same way they would treat public opinion in the middle ages. Ostracization and fear, yes, definitely, but I just don't see a torch-bearing mob running through Paris bent on destroying Erik because of his unfortunate demeanor. Kay avoids my ire adroitly by setting Erik's earliest years in a small, provincial French town, where religion is a facet of everyday life and superstition is much more likely to abound; the setup makes the idea of fearful peasants with suspicions of demons an easier pill to swallow. Even so, as the age of science is coming on strong, it's a bit difficult to see a mobscene, but Kay's characterization of Erik himself helps with that; his uncontrollable temper and tendencies (even in childhood) toward extreme violence, combined with his hideous physicality, make the idea of demon possession suddenly look not so far-fetched to the townsfolk, who are desperate for a solution that makes some sense (God having a capricious sense of humor is not what they are looking for here). Even better, the demon metaphor is not totally inapplicable to Erik: whatever else he may be, his innate sensuality and ability to arouse even the most horrified of women will make him, in his adult years, very much an incubus (a virgin incubus--now there's an interesting concept).

Erik's preference for illusion intersects, near the end of this portion of the novel, with his desperate desire for some kind of reciprocal affection from his mother. She can't bear to touch or love him, and after the terrible revelation of his appearance he understands her revulsion and accepts that he is unlovable. Therefore, he creates a proxy for her to love: the statue of the shepherd boy, which he animates with his ventriloquism and invests with enough life-likeness that she is almost drawn into believing it to be her second child. Via the shepherd boy, Erik is able to experience a mother's love vicariously; but even more than that, he is at heart a boy yearning to please his mother, and he is in a way making amends for the terrible sin of his birth by giving her the perfect child that she wanted to make her happy. Erik's choice to construct an entire self-contained world, in which his mother is his and his alone, is of course something that he will repeat time and time again as he ages, up to and including his hidden fortress below the opera house; and Madeleine herself falls prey to his illusion, the two of them living in a fantasy world entirely of Erik's making in order to avoid facing the painful reality of their lives. The poignancy of it lies in this longing for escapism, and in the fact that Erik will continue hopelessly trying to achieve this balance of fantasy and reality for the rest of his life.

Madeleine's continued musings irk me, perhaps more strongly than I'm letting on. She often seems to be the vehicle for Kay to slip in some more telling, which generally seems totally unnecessary since there is plenty of showing going on. There was no need for Madeleine to say, "I was a practicing Catholic..."--we see her going to Mass, seeking counsel from the priest, at prayer. Similarly, she doesn't need to sit there and ponder how Erik is a law unto himself, outside of humanity. The entire novel is making that fairly clear. Unfortunately, Kay seems to have a real problem trusting her readers to draw their own conclusions, and the end effect is that I feel like a sulky child being led by the hand.

Part 2: Erik (1840-1843)

Erik's decision to abandon his mother and make a run for it has two motivating factors: the one that he admits to himself is that he is leaving her for her own safety, which is certainly true enough in its own way (I'm sure she's not enjoying all the mob attention and black stares). This first letting go is, of course, a parallel to his later release of Christine; now, as then, the extremely possessive nature of his love is nevertheless finally conquered by selflessness. He's not being entirely selfless, however, because he also wants (understandably) to avoid letting Etienne ship him off to a mental institute; he does very few things over the course of the novel that do not benefit him personally in some way.

Kay couldn't have made the Madeleine = Christine parallel any clearer if she'd painted it in red all over the pages of her manuscript. Everything Erik says, does, or thinks in regards to his mother bears it out: he wistfully thinks about how beautiful she is and yet how remote from him, he sternly controls himself and knows that he must not touch her despite his desire to do so and his uncontainable love for her, and he understands her revulsion and hates himself for having caused it in her, as though he had created a flaw in something beautiful just by being present. He will repeat this exact sequence of emotions and action with Christine forty years down the road, which makes perfect sense--Leroux's Erik, after all, was obviously seeking not only a wife but a mother figure in Christine to make up for his neglected, malnourished emotional state, and Kay is providing a very plausible background for that behavior here.

The overdramatic prose is somewhat more noticeable here, probably because of the super-angst that Erik is experiencing in his flight; likewise, there's a little too much reflection going on, and while I appreciate her metaphor for a spider as representational of Erik, the over-explication of the idea took some of the fun out of it. Again, it's not bad enough to make me beat my fists on the desk in frustration, but it is present.

Erik's particular brand of navel-gazing confuses me, also. I don't care how mentally precocious he is--would a nine-year-old, especially a nine-year-old who's just fled his home and mother after being traumatized and seeing his dog killed, really think the line, "Even a spider has the right to a mate"? This line is, however, an isolated incident, and I wasn't so distressed by it that I wasn't able to get back into Erik's character. (The line was intended to be a foreshadowing of his situation with Christine, of course, but since the rest of his internal narration is entirely grounded in what is happening at that moment, the sudden leap to "recollection voice" was out of place and made the character confusing.)

Once Erik falls in with the gypsies and starts his career as sideshow attraction, the symbolism heats back up. Both Erik and the watching crowd see the sudden revelation of his hideous face as a kind of indecent exposure, a glimpse of something that should be kept private and not spoken of; this ties into Erik's role as a primarily sexual creature (even Javert makes passing note of Erik's power of fascination over females, quipping that "Don Juan himself couldn't have drawn more skirts in one afternoon"), making the crowd's reaction one of revulsion and embarrassment, as though they had been confronted with a flasher. Javert's forcing of Erik into repeated facial exposure is tantamount to prostitution.

Javert's sexual overtures toward the boy are indicative of this underlying, inescapable sexuality--even as an innocent boy, Erik is still representative of desire. The boy himself still does not understand the sensual effect his voice and presence have on others; he is aware of sensuality as a phenomenon, which we can see when he witnesses the gypsy girls and their lovers, but as a social outcast (even among social outcasts, as the average Frenchman was still none too fond of gypsies at this point in history) he has no frame of reference with which to apply that phenomenon to himself. At best, he understands his sexuality as a tool, like his voice, which can be used to manipulate the actions of others and gain him a little bit of power over his surroundings. Power is the ultimate attainment for Erik, who has a near-pathological need to control his surroundings; the unfairness of his life to date, in which he cannot control God's choice to curse him with disfigurement nor society's reaction to it, motivates him to seek constant control over others. It is simple desperation, a need to convince himself that he has some say in his fate, and this tenacious desire for power is one of the most enduring of Erik's traits.

Part 3: Giovanni (1844-1846)

Incidentally, Kay's use of several narrators to give us a piecemeal, patchwork account of Erik's life from many different viewpoints is quite faithful to Leroux's original style, which (probably because of his reporting background) involved several different characters narrating parts of the story as the need arose.

By this point in the novel, I was finding it easier to settle into Kay's slightly overwrought style; it became a little less noticeable as time went by, probably because I was getting used to it. I will note that I will be reading this novel again, later, when I have time; it's much more of a pleasure read in style than a text you want to sit down and analyze, and the story is immersive enough that I occasionally had to go back when I realized I'd passed an important point in my momentum.

Having established Erik's bitterness, mistrust, and general mistreatment by the world at large, we now move on to shoring up his artistic cred. Creation (which is the motivating factor behind sexual force and thus inextricably attached to Erik's character in more ways than one), specifically in the musical field, is an integral part of Leroux's characterization of Erik, but Kay takes this one step further and introduces him as an architectural genius as well. It's not that great a stretch; Leroux's novel placed him as a building contractor on the construction of the opera house, and since Kay's version of Erik is so precociously genius-ified that his head might burst at any moment, it only makes sense for her to extrapolate that into a full-blown talent. Erik's pursuit of architectural perfection and his utter disdain for anything less reflects his inner morals; when he declares that "I would rather starve than build ugly houses!", he means it. He has very little idea what to do in a social context, having been consistently rejected and reviled by the society in which he lives, but when it comes to inanimate objects he worships beauty and perfection, the ultimate symbols of control in a craft. Erik's desire to create, both in this field and in music, is yet another way of attempting to seize control, to impose his will onto his environment.

Erik's morality, revealed by this particular interlude and many others throughout the novel, is peculiar but perfectly understandable. The nebulous concepts of good and evil that were taught to him during his Catholic upbringing have little real substance for him, especially when so many contradictions (for example, the priest informing him that his beloved, affectionate dog was not going to Heaven when she died) and cruelties in the world seem unfathomable in that context. Instead, Erik's morals revolve around beauty, which he worships most of all as it symbolizes perfection, control, and a will to create something without compromise. Unfortunately, as beauty is the pinnacle of "good" for him, so ugliness and incompleteness are the depths of "evil"; therefore, he knows himself to be the greatest of affronts in nature, leading him even further into self-loathing.

Much of Leroux's original novel deals with the idea of parental nurturing and/or control, specifically in the relationships between Christine and her deceased father and Christine and Erik, who comes to represent him; Kay also picks up on the theme of fatherhood, and inserts Giovanni, who becomes the father figure to Erik that he was denied in his early childhood. Giovanni, who has had only daughters in his lifetime and whose wife is deceased, also gets in on the transference, coming to view Erik as the son that he feels he should have had.

The most major conflict between Giovanni and Erik, who otherwise coexist quite happily, has to do with religion (Giovanni, incidentally, means "grace of God"). As a devout Catholic, Giovanni is constantly distressed by Erik's refusal to acknowledge God; he sees Erik's condition as a curse placed upon him by the Devil, rather than a disfigurement inflicted by an uncaring God. Erik, conversely, professes to be an atheist but obviously is not one, failing even to convince himself that he doesn't believe in Heaven and Hell; unlike Giovanni, he is quite certain that his condition is the will of God, and that that, combined with the many cruelties and unfairnesses he has seen in the world, proves God to be a righteous asshole. He will continue to pretend to be an atheist for most of his adult life, but he is never quite able to banish that deeply-ingrained belief from his Catholic upbringing.

We've established that Erik is a creative genius, a sexual force, and a closet sociopath, but another facet of his personality comes into clearer focus here: his obsessive tendencies. He continues on with a project (such as pretty much any architecture project under Giovanni, or his own inventions) long past the point that others have quit, even to the point of having to be reminded of his physical needs--rest, food--in order to avoid keeling over. He lacks the mental failsafe that would give him that moment to stop and say, "I'm tired, let's take a break," probably because his ability to fixate is extremely strong as a result (again) of his desire to control his environment. His pursuit of perfection is not leisurely; the longer he takes to accomplish his task, the longer there are elements present which defy his control. This is yet another element that Kay introduces into her character in order to reflect the actions that Erik takes in Leroux's novel, in this case his inability to set boundaries on his pursuit of Christine.

Life is placid and enjoyable for Giovanni and Erik, in large part because of the absence of Erik's strife-inducing sexual influence, which doesn't affect the old man. That all explodes, however, when Giovanni's daughter, Luciana (whose name means "light", a concept that has always been equal parts desire for beauty and fear of discovery for Erik), comes home from school and destroys that peaceful order. Not only does she immediately latch onto Erik's sensually magnetic presence and fall deep into infatuation with him, but she reintroduces that sexual dynamic into the relationships in the house, irrevocably destroying the serenity that had been there before her return. As it is in society at the time, sexuality and its accoutrements basically equate to discord and wickedness in much of Kay's novel (in order to highlight this particular cultural perception).

The constant, almost insurmountable need of humanity to see what it is denied is presented here through Luciana, who cannot bear not knowing what lies beneath Erik's mask. This is an interesting idea that I've seen touched on in many other pieces, both intentionally and otherwise (for example, no movie version of the story can dispense with the unmasking of the Phantom; the viewers wouldn't stand for being denied the satisfaction of that curiosity). The idea that this curiosity is usually detrimental to us is fairly obvious, as Luciana's insistence that Erik show her his face leads directly to her death; and, of course, this is yet another preemptive parallel that Kay is inserting in order to impress the cyclical nature of Erik's life upon us, as Luciana's demand to see Erik's face and subsequent horror correlate directly to Christine's unmasking of him in Leroux's novel.

Also, there was a grammar snag on page 126. Which I point out in the hopes that somewhere a copy-editor for the seemingly endless parade of releases of this book will notice. It's not repeated, so there's no reason to get all up in arms over it, but if I noticed it, so will someone else.

Part 4: Nadir (1850-1953)

While Kay keeps her world mostly within general period guidelines, there are a few moments where anachronism will jump out and sock me between the eyes. Many of them are in this part of the book; when the Persian said sarcastically, "I get all the good jobs," my eyes crossed a little bit.

Leroux's enigmatic Persian has always been a source of speculation, mainly because Leroux himself didn't bother to furnish us with too many details about the man (who basically serves as an exposition point and a deus ex machina to further the plot, but doesn't get to be much in the way of an actual character). Kay does an incredible job of expanding him into a real person, giving him a believable moral framework and a background that jibes with his role in the original novel. He also gets to be another part of the constant mirroring of events that surrounds everything in Erik's life, starting with the fact that his wife, Rookheeya, has recently died and that his son, Reza, is damaged and dying because of the lack of mothering. The motherlessness of Leroux's original novel is repeated again in Rookheeya's absence, and is only intensified by the earlier interludes with Madeleine (who, depending on how you view it, can represent either the one mother figure in Erik's world or the lack of mother figures).

Leroux's "reporting" style in the original novel, featuring very anecdotal personal accounts, is fairly accurately represented in Nadir's personal account, which is fraught with short anecdotes and personal asides that, while they don't really have much to do with the point, add a nice flavor to the proceedings. He occasionally makes things very obvious via these side notes, much the same way that previous characters have made points extremely obvious (for example, the fact that left-handedness is traditionally associated with the black arts, etc. is explained quite flippantly) in their personal reflection time, but it works better in this context.

Much to Nadir's horror and the shah's amusement, Erik is predictably disrespectful and his usual, superiorly disdainful self, which he gets away with by virtue of it being a novelty for the greatly-feared ruler. His lack of respect for the shah is a direct example of his lack of respect for any mortal authority; he knows both that he is superior and that they reject him out of hand because of his appearance, so it isn't surprising that Erik sees little point in paying respect to a society that not only rejects him, but that he has great difficulty in viewing as "like himself" in any way. There's no irony when he says dryly, "The king of kings must learn patience... like everyone else." His lack of connection with humanity is further highlighted by his passionless dissection of bodies and his study of human remains, ideas which are not yet scientifically accepted and which have a ghoulish and sacrilegious stigma in the time period; his ability to mess around with corpses and their icky bits without qualms further refines (and introduces Nadir to) Erik's sociopathic apartness from the rest of society.

Nadir's son is dying of a degenerative, progressive disease; his inevitable death, which we are very aware is imminent for most of this section of the book, mirrors the constant themes of parental loss of children and childrens' loss of their parents which are repeated time and time again (Madeleine and Erik, Giovanni and Erik, Giovanni and Luciana, and of course the later paternal shenanigans with Christine). Erik's unexpected kinship with Reza is confusing in light of his complete disregard for most of humanity, but it's not so much a glimmer of unnoticed softness as it is simply approaching him the right way; Erik understands pain that he has suffered himself (it will be the same story later, when he sympathizes with rape victims but not murder victims), so he is perfectly able to sympathize with a doomed child, who is begging for a little parental affection (the fact that Nadir is losing his son not only to disease but also to Erik, to whom the boy transfers much of his affection, is heavily and tragically ironic). By contrast, Erik is totally unmoved by pitiful living conditions and people in poverty and pain in the capitol city, since they are part of the overall picture of humanity, but he is quite incensed at the sloppiness of the architecture (he is still much more able to relate to inanimate objects, which conform to standards of beauty and craftsmanship, than to humans who operate on a mystifying moral system to which he is neither party nor invited).

One of the few times a point is made and not explained to death is when Nadir, discussing the exiled vazir's wife, says casually, "There is nothing you can do to destroy the love of others." Besides being an obvious foreshadowing to the tragedy with Christine that will occur later (which involves in large part Erik's inability to force her to love him instead of Raoul), the line enrages Erik in the present; not specifically because he cares whether someone loves someone else, but because he cannot abide the idea that there may be a realm of human behavior over which he has little to no control. Not only does Erik not strictly understand the motivations behind unselfish love, but he is driven to assert his dominance over it in the same way that he has a need to manipulate others in every other arena in order to reaffirm his worth and place in a universe which rejects him at every turn.

Then, there's some more overt telling instead of showing. "This face, which has denied me all human rights, also frees me of all obligation to the human race." Mmhmm, we know, honey. Less tell plz, kthxbye.

Even the daroga can see the sexuality inherent in Erik, despite said phantom's oblivious ignorance to the effect he has on people; the khanum (the shah's mother) has more than a slight interest in Erik, but a combination of confusion at social signals and inability to believe that anyone would want to see his hideous body keep him from realizing it. The later interlude with the odalisque shows us that he is certainly not without his own sexual urges, but as a consequence of his past captivity he will not force those urges on anyone, despite the fact that his life sort of royally sucks. This is another case of compassion that seems to be more motivated by Erik's ability to empathize with a certain situation, rather than to empathize with people, which he is notoriously terrible at.

Erik's statement later (while he's retching up blood from an unfortunate poisoning incident) that he requires death to be esthetically pleasing is yet another example of his desire to achieve perfection and his somewhat horrible ability to be without normal human qualms or morals when it comes to the taking of a life. Where most of humanity sees death (and any reminders of its inevitability) as a terrifying and disgusting thing (which is, incidentally, a large part of the instinctive revulsion most people in Kay's novel feel upon meeting Erik, who is essentially a brutal reminder of what they're going to look like a few years down the road), Erik sees it as just another facet of the world, and like any other situation, he looks for control and artistry in a field to which the vast majority of his fellow men have the very strongest of objections.

The etymological shenanigans continue: Nadir is an Arabic name meaning "rare", but it is also an astronomical term in English that refers to "the point of the celestial sphere that is directly opposite the zenith and vertically downward from the observer" (thanks, Merriam-Webster!). Essentially, it means "the opposite point", and Nadir's function in Kay's novel is to serve as the opposite pole for Erik--to balance out his madness with reason, his dissociation with emotion, and his violence with calmness (Erik himself refers to Nadir as his "conscience", both cognizant of the fact that he lacks the ability to understand morality and accepting of the fact that Nadir can provide him with that compass externally). His son Reza's name means "contentment" or "satisfaction", suitable for his gentle character and the comfort that he provides for Erik before his death.

Part 5: Erik (1856-1881)

Erik is now an adult, and as an adult no longer has as much access to pure fantasy as a form of escapism from the depressing reality of his life. Instead, like many a tortured artiste before and after, he turns to drugs, in this chapter abandoning the opium that Nadir had introduced him to (for vocal reasons, which is valid--smoking of anything is hella bad for your lungs) in favor of morphine. It is interesting to note that while opium might trash his voice, morphine in large quantities will kill him a lot faster by collapsing his veins and damaging his circulatory system; Erik is very clearly much more willing to be cavalier with his health than with his voice, which is not only one of his instruments of manipulation and a source of power, but also the only truly beautiful thing that he has to his name.

A few more style irks occur in this section, mostly having to do with unnecessary statements ("I was growing very cynical..." No shit, really?) and heavy-handed foreshadowing ("Good job we didn't have a chandelier..."). Like the similar places in the rest of the novel, it's not overtly bad or so jarring that the text can't still be enjoyed, but every time I see it I wish that Kay had gone for just a little more subtlety. In a story with such well-crafted characters and such a carefully constructed backstory, I expect more out of the prose.

Erik continues to be far more invested in the beauty and maintenance of inanimate objects than he is in his fellow humans; the destruction of Paris and its beautiful old buildings is far more of a real emotional occurrence for him than the many Parisian citizens who are killed, maimed, raped, etc. War infuriates him for entirely separate reasons from most of his society; he hates the wanton destruction far more than the human cruelties that the actual people involved may be suffering.

Kay introduces an interesting metaphor when she introduces the Paris opera house, the Palais de Garnier. Erik sees the place as a direct correlation to himself (or rather, he treats it exactly as he would wish to be treated, without admitting that he is relating the place to himself); he sees it as an ugly, malformed, hideous child from whom he first recoiled due to its terrible design, but which must be nurtured and brought along so that it can be loved for the beauty that will be within it--specifically, the beauty of music. It's a very neat metaphor that had never occurred to me before, though, like most metaphors, Kay beat it into the ground a little bit.

Erik, now middle-aged and having seen a great many things, is beginning at this point to display signs of social anxiety. He no longer views society's fear and loathing as a challenge to his skills, but as a painful ordeal that he wishes to avoid. He begins to use proxies for all interaction with others--using Jules to run his errands and procure his necessities, refusing to work on the opera house plans in an office with other architects and going directly through Garnier instead, etc.--all leading up to his desire to finish the work on the opera house and immure himself beneath it in order to permanently sever contact with the world of men. This underground kingdom that he is building is a subconscious attempt to regain the peace and solitude of his happy period when living in Giovanni's basement; as the one period in his life when he was happy, unmolested, and allowed to pursue his own activities in privacy, the memory has a powerful nostalgic effect on him. He reminisces that "As long as Giovanni was there above me, like God in his heaven, I was safe."; not only was Giovanni a replacement for the father figure that Erik never had, but he was also a replacement for a God that had never loved him. The desire to return to that uncomplicated solitude is fairly understandable in light of the general awfulness that is the sum of Erik's experiences to date.

Erik's withdrawl is also a form of very quiet suicide. He is removing himself from society; he has convinced himself that it's because he's accepted the fact that he doesn't belong with the rest of mankind, but in reality it is mostly because he is giving up. Having completed works and destroyed countless people, he is tired. Building his tomb and sleeping in his coffin until he finally dies, pre-buried for society's convenience, is the ultimate in gentle suicide (though Erik, as a Catholic no matter how hard he tries to deny it, will never admit this as he retains a horror of suicide above all other crimes--it is the only form of self-destruction with enough plausible deniability to sate his odd "conscience").

Erik has a cat, Ayesha, that he rescued from the streets as a kitten, and she serves as a vehicle to show us the juxtaposition of Erik's obvious fondness and caring for the animal and the complete lack of normal mores he displays toward ther people at the same time. He states with total seriousness that he would have killed people and fed them to Ayesha if food supplies ran low; her well-being is far more important to him than any human's, just as Sascha was the most important figure in his childhood. Erik appreciates innocence, usually in children and animals, but not adults, who have made their own decisions and created their own destinies; as usual, he is empathizing with what he can understand, the helplessness of the young. This deep-rooted empathy for the innocent and the doomed is one of the greatest factors that will initially draw him to Christine.

Erik's hatred of the war with the Prussians, stems, as usual, from a source other than misery at the suffering of his fellow man; by putting Paris under seige and creating a general panic, the Prussians have metaphorically trapped Erik in another cage, one that forces him to remember and participate, however peripherally, in the affairs of a society he is trying to ignore. It is frustrating, especially since Erik's desire to escape from society is still quiety waging war on his desire to be loved.

Why, hello, Greek mythology! We haven't seen you in such a long time that I was wondering if the writers had abandoned you for good! Kay uses only one reference, but it's a good one, tried and true when it comes to comparing the Phantom story to Greek mythology: "And so my labyrinth was wired for death, a vast web encircling the minotaur's secret lair." Unsurprisingly, Erik is casting himself as the monster, in a situation wherein it would have been perfectly feasible to view himself as the master maze-builder (Daedalus); his self-image is still one of personal loathing.

Charles Garnier, Paris' celebrated architect, has a role in Kay's novel, making him one of few real people to make an appearance in this or any other Phantom story to date. He is interesting because he represents, in many ways, what Erik should have been; quite apart from being appreciated for his talents, he is strong-willed, intelligent, and physically quite ugly. It's a socially acceptable ugly, however. Where Garnier falls short of true beastliness in his appearance, he also falls short of true genius, and is very aware that Erik is a far greater talent than he could ever aspire to. The almost overpoweringly obvious point is that genius has a price, and that there can be no incredible ability without a counterpoint of extreme consequences (in Erik's case, disfigurement and mental instability).

Erik's return to his first love, music, has all the qualities of a man returning to his childhood sweetheart. He says that "The urge to create had been burned out of me during thoses fifteen years..." and immediately follows that with the feverish desire to complete Don Juan Triumphant, a creative drive that is, as always, obviously correlated with the sexual drive to reproduce (which has no direction in Erik, who is sort of doomed to never have much in the way of physical contact; this probably enhances the need for a musical outlet). His repetition of traditional wedding vows afterward is a telling moment: he has ceased sowing the wild oats of his creative ability all over the landscape and has "married" the opera house itself (or, more accurately, his solitude and perceived sanctuary there).

Then I whined a little bit about page 316, on which Kay writes that Erik "played Chopin's Prelude in B minor, sotto voce..." Sotto voce is an Italian musical term that literally means "under the voice", and is used to refer to a particular style of singing or speaking in which a line is uttered somewhat under the breath, giving it a furtive or hushed quality. However, it is almost never used as a notation in instrumental music (which, perforce, involves instruments and not voices). It's not strictly incorrect--there are instrumental pieces out there that use it--but it's very rarely used outside of vocal literature, which Chopin is not. It's a tiny thing, and most likely overlooked by all but the most obnoxiously retentive of readers (me).

Erik finally gets in touch with his greatest source of despair in that it becomes obvious that he is aware, subconsciously, that walling himself up under the opera house is simply putting himself in another sort of cage. The insoluble problem for Erik is that his life has been nothing but a succession of cages, from his mother's attic to Javert's literal cage to the shah's court to his underground dwelling; and even further, that his entire existence is lived in a cage of the inescapable fear and hatred of his fellow men, who consistently bar every door to him and deny him the most basic of human comforts.

Another minor thing that irks me is Erik's tarot card dabbling, which happens a few times throughout the text. I have no objection to him having picked up tarot from the gypsies or to Kay's use of it in a metaphorical context, but it seems to have been somewhat under-researched. Those cards that are mentioned--Death, The Lovers, and The Fool--are interpreted on a strictly face-value basis. Tarot divination as it is practiced today (I don't have a reliable source to tell me how it was practiced in the late nineteenth century, but I presume this much fortune-telling insanity couldn't have been come up with in a scant hundred years or so) assigns several factors and gradients of meaning to each card, increasing the supposed accuracy and detail of the reading. For example, the Death card's interpretation doesn't usually have much to do with actual physical death--it's about change and growth, the end of something so that something else can begin, etc.--and The Lovers generally presages a choice ahead or an impulse toward action, rather than having anything to do with actual lovers. It's not something that makes much difference to the text either way, but it damaged my perception of Erik as steeped in gypsy lore when he seemed to have only rudimentary knowledge.

It's here, when we finally reach the point of Kay's retelling that intersects with Leroux's original novel, that the influences become blurred. Pretty much everything up to this point has been based directly on the Leroux novel where it hasn't been made up out of the whole cloth of Kay's imagination, but now there are obvious elements of Webber's musical beginning to make themselves known. Most obvious are Meg's close friendship with Christine, the apparent assertion that Carlotta is talentless, the chronological positioning and motivation of the chandelier crash, the single rose (here incorporated into an Arabic fairytale), and the final kissing scene between Erik and Christine; all are patently borrowed from Webber's popularized version of the story. This makes a lot of sense--Kay's romanticized style is certainly quite reminiscent of Webber's more sympathetic version of the story, even though she includes much of the ugliness of Erik's original conception--and is strangely easy to absorb for the reader. There's no conflict of continuity as Kay has taken great care to make sure that her version of events meshes perfectly with itself, incorporating elements of both Leroux's original novel and Webber's musical into a cohesive and compelling whole. It's not often I get to say that about an author, is it?

At long last, Christine is introduced. Her character is reminiscent of Leroux's pure maiden in its timidity and innocence, but she grows and displays more interesting traits as time goes by, making her much more compelling as a character than her original incarnation. I love the symbolism introduced with her voice; she has a near-perfect instrument, but she has no idea how to use it because of an inherent spiritual weakness, which manifests itself in her timid and easily damaged behavior. She can sing the notes perfectly, but she has no passion, no emotional resonance with her audience, because of this weakness; which of course paves the way to the idea that Erik, who is himself representative of passion, is the means by which her voice can become truly transcendent. This passion is an alien idea for Christine, who is drawn to it (as are pretty much all other females Erik comes into contact with) at the same time that she is terrified of it.

Unfortunately for Erik, the terrifyingly familiar sight of Christine and the accompanying return of human emotion completely destroy the illusion of not needing humanity to which he has been clinging so fiercely. The problem with Christine is that she is a dead ringer for Madeleine--not just similar, but absolutely identical--which brings up a host of buried psychological problems for Erik and brings our Oedipal issues back in full force. Having been denied love from his mother, the one person that should have fostered his emotional growth, Erik is almost insanely driven to achieve that love from Christine, who is a proxy for his mother almost more than she is a woman in her own right. The issues of maternal abandonment from Leroux's novel are heightened and intensified through these very concrete parallels in Kay's backstory.

Part 6: Counterpoint: Erik and Christine (1881)

So Erik and Christine start in on the bizarre teacher/student relationship from Leroux's novel. They are not so much in love as in awe of one another--Christine of Erik's otherworldly genius and almost supernatural abilities, and Erik of her beautiful potential and symbolic significance.

Christine utters here what might be my favorite line of the entire novel: "His music swells within my body like a beautiful, burgeoning child..." Now, how is THAT for symbolism? Erik, as the sexually creative, musical force, has always been pretty recognizable as "impregnating" Christine with his music, but the somewhat innocent comparison by the character herself is delightful. Add to that Kay's addition of Christine as an almost literal mother figure for Erik himself, and the subtle symbolism of Leroux's original work has burst into full, glorious bloom.

Raoul is certainly present, but he's almost invisible until the very last section of the book, instead serving merely as a catalyst for Erik's and Christine's relationship to go through the violent trials that it does. Poor Raoul. He never gets any love. Erik is aware that his irrational hatred and jealousy of Raoul is tragically unwarranted, but he has never been particularly good at governing his worse emotions, and he is experiencing a powerful transferrence of envy as he sees Raoul enjoy the cream of every indulgence and human comfort he has ever been denied. He's watching Etienne steal his mother from him all over again, and he is understandably (not defensibly... but understandably) irrational as a result.

Erik, who continues to view himself as a sort of cancerous, evil influence on everything he touches (as a result of what he sees as the innate corruption of his soul), is deeply troubled by his attraction to Christine. Quite aside from the undeniably strong sexual attraction he feels toward her (and believe me, he does plenty of agonizing over that one), his mere association with her "taints" her innocence with his deception. He recognizes the parallel between this situation and his previous associations, but he feels powerless to avoid it, remaining trapped in an addictive cycle which calls to mind his ongoing love affair with morphine. His love for her remains unconsummated, and in fact he strives not to even suggest any kind of physical contact to her, being all too obviously cognizant of the disastrous effect when he begged his mother for kisses as a child. Christine, in turn, is beginning to see Erik as a man (at odds with Leroux's original conception of the character, who was devastated when she discovered that her "angel" was flesh and blood), but the continuing arrangement is preferable for her; by not acknowledging his very mortal origin, she can keep the relationship in a non-threatening, safe arena wherein nothing untoward will be expected of her.

Christine's continual fascination with seeing Erik's face is a forceful reminder, both for Erik and for the reader, of the doomed Luciana; consequently, his tendency to treat Christine with incredible annoyance and eventually murderous fury when she refuses to leave it alone is understandable since he can't bear to be reminded of the inevitable, tragic end of this love affair with Christine. And barely had I written that down than Erik turned around and told us that exact thing in his narrative voice, much to my dismay, in another example of Kay telling us something that was already easily apparent to the reader. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Erik's subsequent heart attack, the symbolism of which is perfectly obvious (and the source of which was pretty obvious, too, considering all the morphine he's still shooting up).

The knowledge that Christine will not actually be his is not particularly good for Erik's psyche, and, having ruined his previous effort by becoming the Phantom, he now attempts to commit suicide via inaction once again, this time by giving Christine all the keys and access to his haven. He even goes so far as to suggest that she have Raoul ambush him if she wants to; he accepts, subconsciously, that he can never have her, so he hopes that she will put him out of his misery. Christine, for her part, is actually somewhat relieved at Erik's threats against Raoul; they give her an easy out, an opportunity to be reactionary instead of examining her own feelings, which is quite seductive as she's very much afraid to find out exactly where her heart lies.

Leroux's basic conflict for Christine, between the warmly undemanding safety of Raoul and the sexually-charged growth of Erik, is brought into full, brilliant focus in the scene where Erik destroys Christine's innocence. Even having locked her in her room in order to spare her the ravages of his unconquerable lust, Erik still manages to rape her--aurally defiling her with his organ (I can't help it; it is immature of me to not be able to type that without giggling like a madwoman?) as he plays the uncontainable Don Juan Triumphant. Christine, who is simultaneously having her first honest to god orgasm and also mentally begging Raoul to come rescue her, is caught in exactly the dilemma that Leroux originally placed her in: she is torn between the forbidden but enticing world of Erik, and the safe, unchallenging world of the vicomte.

Finally, when Christine has betrayed him for the final time and planned to take off with Raoul, Erik admits that his atheism has been a sham, a sort of flipping the finger at the big guy because he can't really do anything else. The hatred is central to his character; by accepting that God is real, he must accept that all of the sufferings and injustices that he has been subjected to and inflicted on others were not only allowed by an apparently conscienceless God, but foreordained. The irony that he has finally broken down and gone to the roof to pray, begging for Christine to love him, is doubly cruel as it becomes knife-sharp when he overhears her planning to leave with her fiance. God has answered his prayer by showing him what he cannot have, and it is no particular wonder that he snaps and dedicates himself henceforth to mayhem. Just as Christine is regressing toward her childhood, choosing Raoul to keep her safe and remove the awful need to think about the frightening realities she has experienced, so too is Erik regressing to his bleak, dissociative childhood, becoming once more a child with no more care for the evil he perpetrates against others than he would have for stepping on an ant. Through Christine, the unwitting representative of love denied, Erik is reliving the pain of Madeleine's rejection and Giovanni's betrayal, and it's more than his tentative sense of morals can handle.

In the end, much to his own dismay, Erik is unable to be the truly heartless monster that he sees himself as; he is unable to cause his own mother pain, and this inability to hurt Christine is something that he sees as the final, damning failure. He has already failed at being human, failed to understand and properly emulate the behaviors and morals of others, failed to be a part of society or to gain any kind of adequate acceptance, and now he has also failed to be the evil monster that he is generally perceived as. He is a total failure--not a creature proudly living outside the laws of man, but a person incapable of being either a proper man or a credible beast. Failure is the result of loss of control, and here as Erik realizes finally that he has no control whatsoever, the very underpinnings on which he has built his self-image are destroyed, leaving him confused and mentally destitute.

He is so damaged that he is almost incapable of understanding Christine's final kiss, instead becoming lost in loops of regressive memories of his mother. His final snap back to lucidity comes with a fierce return of his protective love for Christine, and he finally steps back and releases her to depart with Raoul.

Part 7: Raoul, 1897

The time skip brings us to Raoul, Christine having died a few years ago, and to their son Charles. Via flashback, we get to watch Erik finally choose to be a father to Christine, to give her that parental guidance that he was denied in his own childhood rather than taking the role of a child begging for his mother; having accepted that he cannot have her, he graciously gives her away to Raoul, who he knows will love her.

I appreciate the idea that Raoul flees to Britain with Christine prior to marrying her; the fact that his social standing would be mostly ruined and the remnants of his family in France quite upset by his marrying an opera girl is not ignored, though it is a little bit glossed over for my taste. Still, he's a rich dude; he can go live in England with his wife and nobody's going to argue, least of all me. It wasn't necessary to the plot to elaborate further.

Christine's determination to return to Erik before her wedding is impressive, but not really surprising; his influence is still extremely strong, even now, and she is incapable of breaking that final promise to him, even to the point of letting Raoul dump her because of it. She has a daughter's devotion, which is all the more oddly poignant when it turns out that she does, in fact, "marry" Erik. The marriage is short-lived; she is his wife for his last night on earth and widowed in the morning, just in time to marry Raoul (which is not as bad as it sounds; she fully intended to keep her promise to Raoul as much as to Erik, and this way has been faithful to them both). Ironically, it is therefore Raoul who is the virgin on their wedding night.

Christine's son, Charles, is the spitting image of his grandfather, Erik's deformity apparently having been an aberration that was not passed down to the next generation. Charles represents the final remnant of Erik's life; he is the last vestige of his genius father, the legacy that will not only perpetuate Erik but also, by virtue of his impressive compassion and intelligence, help bring more humanity to the very society that rejeted his father.

Raoul is never bitter about all of this, surprisingly; he is more resigned to it all. Having achieved what he wanted, his marriage to Christine and their happy life together, he is nevertheless aware that a part of her continued to belong to Erik until her dying day, and he accordingly lays her to rest with all of the tokens and mementos of Erik in recognition of the fact that he has been her husband just as much as Raoul has for the remainder of her life. Raoul holds Christine in a sort of trust, and while he is thankful of the time spent with her and knows that she loved him, he is always aware that the influence of Erik could not be forgotten, and he behaves more like a guardian than a husband, often governing his choices based upon what Erik might have done in the same situation. It is a strange triple marriage, one member of which is absent but nevertheless profoundly important.

The only thing that I could really have done without in this novel were occasional phrases, thrown here and there, that were extremely similar to lyrics from Webber's musical version of the story. I, personally, tend to feel that while some of the lyrics are undoubtedly resonant and poignant, they are nevertheless much too recognizable to be repeating back in other fiction, even in slightly altered form. The effect, far from carrying over the poignancy of their original usage, was instead irritating and disappointing; I would much have preferred to hear a new turn of phrase from Kay, rather than a regurgitated one.

So, to recap the metaphorical situation: Erik marries his mother and sires his father, while Christine marries her father and gives birth to her grandfather, and Raoul ends up fathering the child of his wife's father. That, ladies and gentlemen, is metaphorical incest on an epic scale.

Kay's characters are interesting, engaging, relatable, eminently real and amazingly fleshed out. She has done an incredible job of taking characters that were little more than archetypes and metaphorical markers and making them human, without sacrificing any of their representational significance (and, in many cases, adding more). She explains too much; her characters and their actions speak for themselves, and the reader doesn't need to have them think the whole thing out in black and white terms to understand that. There's no faith in the cognition skills of the reader, and I wish there were; but even with the tendency to over-explicate, Kay demonstrates an in-depth understanding of Leroux's original work and an ability to embroider and expand upon it in such a way as to bring something more of her own to the table. That understanding is a rare commodity in Phantom literature, apparently.

Kay Gets It. If only she were more willing to trust that maybe we, too, get it, I would have almost nothing to complain about in this novel. 

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