Oh, my god. People kept telling me about this book, but I wasn't listening because I like to find things out for myself.

 

The Phantom of Manhattan by Frederick Forsyth, 1999

Grade: D-

 

I'm not sure what I was expecting here, really. I mean, I was aware that a lot of people greatly dislike this book, but then again, a lot of people greatly dislike the Argento/Sands film, and I kind of enjoyed that in a crazy way. Forsyth is a very well-known British author of political and military thrillers, so I was kind of intrigued to see how he was going to handle a plot that didn't really involve those all that much. I really wandered into this book thinking blithely, oh, it couldn't be that bad. Everyone is probably just overreacting.

 

Oh, Anne.

 

Ah, the infamous preface. I'm afraid that I was unable to avoid having some idea what was in this preface before I ever got to read it, because it induces a white, frothy rage in a lot of people who then post about it on the internet in very large letters. I still did my best to maintain a fresh approach to it.

 

The first thing I noticed was that Forsyth relates Carl Laemmle's tale about meeting Leroux in France and reading his novel before deciding that it should be made into the 1925 film. Philip J. Riley's book, published the same year, claims that this story was entirely fabricated by Laemmle, who had been mostly bullied by industry pressures and fractious stars into doing the film, in order to make it look like the whole enterprise was his own excellent idea. Who is correct? Well, since neither of the gentlemen really bothered to cite their sources, the world will never know. I, personally, am tending toward Riley on this one; he doesn't specifically cite in this case, but his knowledge of the film industry is very in-depth and his interviews with people involved give him some more credibility, while Forsyth offers us diddly-squat to back his claims up (though, to be fair, he's going with the official version of the story from the studio head, so it's not as though he's being entirely reckless).

 

I have the same mild disagreements I generally have with a lot of nonfiction on the subject--I disagree that the story is basically a love story, since I think it's more of a mystery/horror, etc.--but things really begin to heat up around page xiii, when he calls the Phantom story as originally written "ill-used" and that Webber's version has "pared away the unnecessary illogicalities and cruelties featured by Leroux and extracted the true essence of the tragedy". Now, it is quite true that Leroux's writing does feature a number of illogical moments; he forgets characters, cuts a few corners on execution in favor of letting the reader's suspension of disbelief carry the idea, and occasionally contradicts himself or just fails to explain things. The original novel has a wealth of fantastic ideas and is very much a classic of the Gothic tradition, but it ain't perfect. However, Forsyth makes a big deal in previous paragraphs about this "unnecessary cruelty" thing, and I think he couldn't be more wrong. In fact, I think I don't even understand what he's trying to say, because if it's what I think it is--that Leroux wrote the characters as too cruel and imperfect and twisted the story to be more violent than it should have been--then it makes no goddamn sense. Leroux can't have written it wrong. That's not actually possible, because, you see, he's the original author. Forsyth can dislike the "cruelty" of the novel all he likes, but it's complete fantasy to say that the original author wrote it "wrong" because of it, and pretty damn obnoxious fantasy at that (for the record, I don't think the original novel was excessively cruel at all, but that's my opinion and the people who care about that have already been duly informed).

 

Forsyth moves on into an informative discussion of the building of the Opera Garnier (nothing too fancy that you couldn't find out with an hour or two in the library, but still nice for the casual reader), and I thought, "Oh, huh. So that must have been the page that makes everyone loathe this book with such burning passion. Well, yeah, I think he sounds like a presumptuous dick there, but maybe all this reaction is still blown out of proportion some." Oh, me. Are there no limits to my naivete?

 

But after that wee interlude, Forsyth heads back into an in-depth analysis of A) the things he doesn't like about Leroux's novel, and B) the reasons that the Webber musical is far superior. Again, of course, he's totally entitled to that opinion; I mean, I certainly like the Webber musical and think it's one of the best versions of the story out there. But it's his third idea that really makes me think that he's being totally irresponsible as both an author and an essayist here, and that's C) all the reasons that Leroux's version is actually wrong, and Webber's version is the correct interpretation of the story.

 

He starts out by pointing to Leroux's introduction, in which he claims that his story is true, and criticizing it for making such a dangerous and, basically, un-back-up-able (so not a word) claim. While I agree that a serious claim that your story is true can be a very bad thing when you're trying to convince your reader (god knows I lambasted D'Arcy's book for doing that), I can't help but feel like Forsyth is missing the point here. Leroux's story is obviously fictional, and, moreover, obviously written in the reporting/true account style because that's Leroux's strong suit in most of his mysteries. If I had thought for a second that Leroux was actually trying to convince me that his story actually happened, I might be annoyed, too, but it seems patently obvious to me that Leroux is using the claim as a literary device in keeping with his style; that is, he's claiming the story is true in order to enhance the real-life investigation and mystery aspects of his story (but, since he's writing for a Parisian audience, too, I have trouble believing he's actually trying to convince them that their opera house's chandelier fell off and they didn't hear about it). It seems as though Forsyth is intentionally ignoring this idea, which baffles me; his examples make it look as though he would prefer Leroux write in his style, a la his pseudo-real-life thrillers which usually can't be disproved one way or the other, and while that's fine it's hardly the only acceptable style of writing out there.

 

Forsyth does make a few good points here, however, when he discusses the trouble with pinpointing the year in which the story is supposed to take place. He points out that Leroux is translated as saying that the events of the novel "do not date more than thirty years back"; since the novel was formally published in 1911, most readers (including me, usually) place the date of the events thirty years prior in 1881. However, "not more than" indicates that it may also have been less than thirty years, so the actual date might be anywhere between 1881 and 1911 (in the same way that Leroux's claims of authenticity don't bother me in the context of the fiction, so this doesn't bother me; many an author intentionally leaves a time period a little bit vague in order to avoid paving the way for specifics that might hurt the reader's suspension of disbelief). I would like to point out here, however, that Forsyth seems to be discounting the presence of alternative translations of the text; I don't know which one he's consulting here (though the de Mattos translation is still the most widespread, I think), but the Wolf translation I'm looking at now presents the line as "not much more than thirty years ago", which is substantially different in meaning and would place the date at 1880 or earlier. Since I'm not a native French speaker, either one could be correct as far as I know (though the whole exercise seems pretty nitpickery, doesn't it?).

 

Anyway, Forsyth uses his translation and its indication that the year is probably slightly later than 1881 to back up his decision to set the events of the story in the year 1893. He points specifically to the passage in Leroux's text in which Erik effects a blackout of the entire opera house for a scant few seconds before turning the lights back on; he makes a very good observation when he notes that, as described, this would be much easier and more plausible to do with electric lights than with the gas lights that would have been in the house prior to the refit in 1893, and sets his story accordingly. I have no problem with this, since he's reasoned it through (and, while we're at it, he's far from the first to move his story to that general area--the 1987 animated film and Meyer's novel were both set in 1890, while the Siciliano novel was placed in 1891, etc.), but I do find his continual ragging on Leroux's failure to give an exact time both annoying and tiresome. I wanted to smack him when, at the conclusion of his thesis regarding the electric lights, he stated, "This would put the date rather later than Leroux would have it." Dude. You just got through saying that Leroux didn't give a date, and pointing out that his range encompasses the very date you've chosen yourself.

 

At any rate, all of this is mostly fine and dandy. Forsyth is displaying logic, he's obviously thought on the story quite a lot, and he's applying his thoughts to his writing. Super. But now, my friends... it is time for some Webber ass-kissery on an epic scale. Our esteemed author gives up all pretense of paying any attention to the merits of the original novel in favor of making a complete ass of himself in a long list of things that Leroux did "wrong" in his writing.

 

Look, dude. You are an author yourself. It boggles my mind that you have the gigantic brass cojones to say something like that. If someone wrote a derivative version of one of your books, and some jackass came around and said that, obviously, this derivative version was the right telling of the story because you'd done it wrong when you wrote your book, would that also be okay?

 

Particularly incensing is the very next paragraph, which begins with the statement, "[Leroux] appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Mme. Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical. His lady appears in the original book as a half-witted cleaner. She was in fact the mistress of the chorus and the corps de ballet..." Now look, I know, I just said it. But it bears repeating again. In its own paragraph stop, yet:

 

The original author cannot "make an error" when it comes to the characterization of his characters. He INVENTED them.

 

Forsyth carries on in an obnoxiously condescending tone, discussing how this error should be forgiven because it was obviously simply the product of faulty reporting and Leroux's own unreliable memory that made him record the original woman's personality incorrectly. There are a great number of things wrong with this entire paragraph (oh yes, I said it, they are wrong). For one thing, why are we discussing Madame Giry as though she were a real person? I've seen absolutely no record of the character, or even someone she might have been based upon, ever having actually existed. If Forsyth has some magical source of Phantom-related historical information that the rest of the world doesn't have access to, I wish he'd share (or at least fucking cite, hey?). For another thing, if Leroux got all the details of Madame Giry's personality, job, appearance, social security number, family history, college years, and favorite foods so heinously wrong, how on earth could Webber--whose musical is BASED ON LEROUX'S NOVEL--possibly "correct" him seventy-six years later? Does he ALSO have access to the Secret Crypt of Madame Giry Info? Forsyth just isn't making any SENSE with his claims, and it is seriously upsetting me. I LIKE SENSE, OKAY? WHEN WRITING NONFICTION, PLEASE MAKE SENSE, THANK YOU, BYE NOW.

 

His next paragraph is chiefly concerned with the fact that the opera house chandelier never actually fell out of the sky and that it weighs much less than Leroux's chandelier does, which facts he refers to as a "glaring error". Has this man never heard of fiction? I am almost without the ability to conceive of how Forsyth could possibly take Leroux's honestly kind of half-assed "this is reality" conceit, intended to make the mystery more immediate and spine-tingling for his audience, and take it as The Author's Gospel rather than a literary device. He is correct that the chandelier does not actually weigh twenty thousand kilograms; perhaps he has also not heard of artistic license. I hear it occurs in fiction sometimes. Had this been something that a reader would have handily known (like, say the weight of a pair of opera glasses being grossly misreported), then sure, I would have been there complaining with him. But has any reader weighed the Garnier's chandelier? No? Then it's not really damaging the suspension of disbelief for his audience, now is it?

 

But even all of that--even the total insanity pertaining to the mysterious nature of Madame Giry--pales in comparison to Forsyth's ridiculous conclusions regarding Leroux's Persian. I was clued in that things were about to get un-gentlemanly when he referred to the character a couple of lines in as a "mountebank" (in the parlance of the internet: I lol'd). Once again, Forsyth treats the character as though he were a real person from whom Leroux had gotten a real story, despite the fact that, again, there is not even the teeniest tiniest shred of evidence to tell us that any such person existed (in fact, various implausibilities like the Sultana's torture chamber that really probably wouldn't work as advertised argue against it). Forsyth's statements here are just willy-nilly craziness, first an accusation that Leroux didn't cross-check his allegations (OH MY GOD IT'S FICTION YOU PSYCHO), then an outright claim that, if Leroux had REALLY wanted to, he could totally have found Raoul to do so (FICTIONAL CHARACTER WHAT?). Even if we assume that Raoul WAS a real person with whom Leroux COULD have had conversations, Leroux makes a point of saying in the text that he ran away with Christine and could not be found, which Forsyth counters with the brilliant, totally unsubstantiated argument, "Of course he could have!" Leroux is, in addition to being a terrible reporter, a slipshod relayer of facts, and an idiot when it comes to his own characters, also a liar who is too lazy to check his facts, it seems. Who the fuck knew? (Answer: Forsyth. Obviously.)

 

But, anyway, the Persian. Forsyth is not a fan. Why does he dislike the character? Why, it's simple: he was mean to poor, misunderstood Erik. Forsyth greatly dislikes what he refers to as the Persian's "character assassination" of the Phantom, claiming that the Persian must have hated Erik for some reason and intentionally set out to make him look bad by telling Leroux, the gullible writer (FICTIONAL CHARACTER WHAT?), a lot of evil lies about this tragic figure in order to villainize him. I am forcefully reminded of Siciliano's novel, in which he portrayed the Persian as an evil, manipulative figure (in fact, this characterization and the time period change make me wonder if Forsyth had encountered that book prior to writing this one), but at least Siciliano didn't try to convince me that his character wasn't fictional. The problem here is not with the Persian (Forsyth doesn't, of course, offer any citations or evidence to back up his claim that the character is an unreliable narrator; he just says that it's "farcical" and leaves it at that), but rather with Erik: specifically, Forsyth doesn't like the Phantom as originally written (in another parallel, it's almost exactly the same as Siciliano's dislike of the original Holmes). Erik, as written by Leroux, does a number of extraordinarily evil things--he murders, kidnaps, terrorizes, tortures, and is generally an all-around ghoul when he's not trying to win the hand of his lady fair. And--again, this is always where Forsyth and I seem to lose one another--that's the way it's supposed to be, because Leroux is the original author and therefore knows (is in fact, the only person who knows) what the author intended for his story and characters. What possible basis could Forsyth--or anyone else, for that matter--have for contradicting him?

 

Forsyth's biggest problem with the Persian's "villainizing" of Erik seems to be the fact that, while Leroux obviously portrays the character somewhat sympathetically (say what you will about the Phantom--he's the bad guy, certainly, but he's a very sympathetic bad guy, which is why he's endured with such popularity), this is "a sentiment utterly impossible if one believes the Persian". In essence, because Forsyth is unable to conceive of sympathy for the Phantom as he is written, he doesn't see how Leroux or any other reader could do so (fun fact: Webber, who Forsyth spends as much time as possible figuratively fellating, obviously did or he wouldn't have been able to emphasize those qualities and write the musical that Forsyth feels is so vastly superior to the original). I just can't understand this attitude; sure, Forsyth is absolutely free to prefer a more romanticized version of the Phantom, one whose flaws and evil deeds are played down or at least less fleshed out, but for fuck's sake, that doesn't make the original WRONG. The last time I checked, Forsyth's Opinion was not synonymous with Ultimate Truth.

 

The leaps of logic just get crazier, as Forsyth starts really stretching in his attempts to discredit the Persian (poor Persian. It isn't enough that he gets constantly forgotten or replaced in most derivative versions; now he's gotta get hated on, too). The great "flaw" in the Persian's story that he points to as proof that it's all lies is the fact that the daroga tells Raoul that Erik had had a long and varied life before coming to live beneath the opera house. Forsyth's unequivocal response is this: "If the man had enjoyed such a life over so many years he would certainly have come to terms with his own disfigurement... Why on earth should he then decide to flee into exile...? Such a man... would have made a tidy packet from his contracting work and then retired..."

 

What the fuck. Seriously. Is Forsyth a disfigured man living in the nineteenth century? No, Wikipedia says he's a regular guy from Kent. Then what in the name of God is he doing making wild claims about the psychological state of a man who is almost totally removed from his sphere of experience and expertise (caveat: if someone can bring me proof of Forsyth making a serious study of nineteenth century disfigurement cases, by all means, I'll recant)? Leroux's backstory is directly opposed to these claims, and since Forsyth, once again, doesn't give us jack diddly in terms of supporting evidence or ideas here to back himself up, I don't give the tiniest damn that he thinks the Persian is an unreliable narrator. This preface is shaping up to be one of the absolute worst examples of argumentative writing that I've seen in the professional field in... well, in ever. And while Forsyth certainly isn't required to have read all the derivative works that preceded his, had he ever encountered Kay's 1990 novel he'd have an excellent example of a perfectly plausible and Leroux-jibing backstory for the Phantom (and, incidentally, one which retained all the elements of evil from the original character but still managed to make him sympathetic).

 

Two and a half pages remain in the preface, but I think I've lost my objectivity (I'm sorry: I know that my objectivity expired in a rain of fiery outrage). Forsyth's closing argument, that "the only logical step for a modern analyst to take" is to assume that a full third of Leroux's book is incorrect despite the patent impossibility of stating that an author is wrong about his own book, is pure, unadultered, and unattractive presumption. Leroux wrote the story he intended to write, using the characters that he created; Forsyth, and anybody else, is totally free to dislike that story or its characters, or to prefer someone else's interpretation of them, but that's not the same as the original being incorrect. To say so is tantamount to saying that the original author was not bright enough to know what the hell he was writing about, which is insulting to the creator of the very story that is so popular. From a technical standpoint, I even agree that the Webber musical is a little bit better in technical execution than the original novel--but stating that that version is "the only one to make sense"? No. You, sirrah, are full of hubris-flavored horseshit.

 

Lest anyone think it hasn't yet occurred to me, I have indeed wondered if I'm committing the same sin that I'm accusing Forsyth of in taking all of his statements in the preface so seriously. After all, Leroux's preface really was meant to heighten suspension of disbelief, right? Forsyth could just be playing all of this up for the dramatic factor of it, trying to add some "realism" to his own story by presenting some pseudo-research to back his take on things up. He could even be having an elaborate joke, pranking people like me who are poking at the book. In fact, the more I read it, the more I think that he's definitely trying to do something very similar, at least in his declarations about the characters.

 

But you know what? I think that even if it's on purpose, it's irresponsible as a writer and offensive to his readers. I think he's making a serious damn fool of himself by making unfounded claims, unsupported leaps of logic, and underdeveloped theories in the hopes of convincing his audience that the version of the story he prefers is, in fact, the correct one. I think that, as an author writing a sequel to a piece of literature, he is being extremely short-sighted in his apparent assumption that his readers will not be readers of the original novel. And it's profoundly difficult for me to take him seriously as a professional author because of it.

 

At least we know exactly what this book is based on; Forsyth mentions the films in passing, but discounts them as flawed interpretations, and his disdain for the original source material is more than evident. It's not much of a mystery; this is going to be a Webber-inspired piece of fiction.

 

I read the actual fiction part of the book a full three days after I read the preface, because there was still boiling indignance and I wanted to give the text a fair reading without bringing in my opinion of the author's nonfiction statements. I returned refreshed and mellow, a cocktail in one hand a bowl of popcorn in my lap. Let's do this thing.

 

This is not a retelling, as we've been mostly used to seeing, but a sequel to the events of Webber's musical.

 

Chapter 1:

 

Interestingly, Madame Giry is here given a first name: Antoinette. This is not actually the first version to give her a name; Bischoff's 1976 novel assigned her the name Michelle, but it seems unlikely that Forsyth's novel has much to do with that one, which was primarily based upon Leroux's text and the 1925 Julian/Chaney film.

 

Before I get any more in-depth, though, I have to note that there was a grammar error. Just a tiny one; mostly a vernacular one; but it was there. And it is the hallmark of Forsyth's writing style. As can probably be deduced from some of the quotes in the preface portion of the review, Forsyth dances the razor's edge frequently, always in danger of tipping over into the Pit of Run-On Sentences. He needs to make the acquaintance of the mighty comma--not all the time, but maybe just now and then? In addition, sentence structure is almost overly simplified, and the prose suffers from an overuse of sentence fragments that makes it choppy and difficult to focus on for long periods of time. The prose is always a hair shy of being outright annoying; most of the time, it just sounds slightly stilted, as if it's reaching just a little bit too hard toward erudition and falling short of working things in naturally. It's not unreadable, but it's not enjoyable, either, and I found myself bored with it for much of the book.

 

Madame Giry, who is currently dying with entirely too much fanfare in a convent somewhere, has been given some more backstory; in addition to the changes from the Webber musical upon which this is based (she's referred to as the "Mistress of the Chorus", which apparently also includes the ballet girls now, a confusion that probably stems from Webber's tendency to concatenate the two in order to showcase Sarah Brightman's ballet talents), she's also been given two marriages (one young and passionate, the other later and loveless) and a generally tragic widow-with-child role to play. Forsyth assigns Meg Giry to Christine as her personal maid now that Christine is a heap-big opera singer, because apparently she is totally necessary to the plot despite being almost unnecessary even in her role in Webber's musical (and even more unnecessary in her blink-and-you-missed-it appearances in Leroux's novel), and wahey, we've got all the characters from the musical in general proximity to one another (well, except for the Phantom, but I'm sure Forsyth isn't about to omit him)! Awesome!

 

More interesting than Giry's backstory, however, is the new backstory Forsyth has invented for the Phantom (who, of course, couldn't have Leroux's backstory because that one was stupid). According to Madame Giry, who insists on telling all of this to a comically disinterested priest, she rescued a five-year-old Erik (who gets the name from Leroux's novel, even if he gets no other characteristics) from a traveling freakshow, in which he was being abused and displayed for money. There's a lot of silliness about Giry's burgeoning mothering instinct and how she came to think of him as one of "her two boys" (don't ask who the other one is yet. Just... don't.) and let him live in her flat, scaring the bejeezus out of her actual daughter, before transferring him to his exciting new existence underneath the opera house. The idea of Erik performing in a circus or freakshow was mentioned in passing in Leroux's novel, though it wasn't really expanded on until Kay's 1990 prequel; it seems unlikely that Forsyth is drawing from the latter, and he doesn't really add much to the former, pretty much immediately moving on from the idea without much in the way of description.

 

Erik is also given a new last name here: Mulheim. It joins the ranks of other versions that slap a last name on the Phantom for one reason or another; here, it seems to be a result of Forsyth seeking to make the Phantom more of a real-life person with societal ties, however tenuous. The name itself doesn't seem to have much of an applicable connotation, unless this version of Erik is secretly a miller's son or something.

 

Now, it's time for some math, when Madame Giry claims that Erik was born forty years ago. Since it's 1906, and she says that Erik was born forty years ago, and Forsyth places the events of Leroux's novel in 1893, that makes Erik... twenty-seven during all those terrorizing and kidnapping shenanigans. Oof. The change to something close to half the original character's age is disorienting; it makes sense in that a character pushing seventy would be less effective for the kind of sequel that Forsyth has in mind, but it also diminishes quite a lot of the Phantom's powerful presence and father imagery from the original. Much of Erik's psychological hold on the original Christine came from the father parallel, and it's very difficult to take that seriously with a mid-twenties Phantom.

 

Erik's given a generalized and unhappy backstory here; his parents were carnies for a traveling circus (interestingly, his father was a carpenter and an engineer, though again I doubt strongly that this is any influence from Kay's novel), and they eventually got tired of his hideous face and sold him off to be exhibited in another carnival. From there, Madame Giry rescued him, and he gets down to business educating himself by reading the extensive library at the Garnier (which, by the way, is indeed enormous and fantastic). I really like the idea of him giving himself an eclectic, self-taught education on any and all subjects he finds interesting, except that I can't get past the part where I can't figure out where he learned to read.

 

Forsyth's writing continues to suffer from Not Quite Right Disease (technical medical term there); it's not terrible or anything, but it's so often just slightly wrong--a comma out of place, a sentence that just jumped the tracks into run-on, a mis-arrangement of adjectives--which is a shame, since good writing could really have helped make some of the insanity to come more palatable.

 

And speaking of insanity, Forsyth is wasting no time in sympathizing the shit out of his version of Erik (well, after all, he has to undo the damage caused by the Persian, right? Face, meet palm). His first move will be to assure us, the readers, that Erik has never actually killed anybody on purpose; in case we're confused (come on, even Webber's Phantom killed people!), he explains that Buquet hung himself and Erik was just blamed for the death, and that he'd just meant to quiet Piangi in order to go onstage, but the other man fought him and was accidentally killed. Oh, noes! Poor, misunderstood, tragic Erik! Apparently Webber's version of the Phantom is too nasty for Forsyth's delicate sensibilities, too, so even that holy grail of interpretations needs a little retconning to line up with Forsyth's kinder, gentler Erik. (Of course, there's not even a tiny mention of the tragic fate of Phillippe; he's from the original novel, so as far as Forsyth is concerned, he doesn't exist in the story.)

 

And here, AGAIN, I want to say that there's influence from Kay's novel, but I really think it's more influence from daytime soaps: when Raoul finally makes his way down to rescue Christine, it turns out that she's pregnant (because he's a nice guy and he loves her, he marries her and pretends the kid is his). Kay used the same device, having Raoul bring Erik's child up, but she did it with a lot more buildup and reasonable deduction, even if I wasn't exactly a fan of her version of this, either. Forsyth just kind of hurls it at us out of the blue, and makes sure to tell us that Christine was two months pregnant at her wedding, to make sure nobody gets any scurrilous ideas about the baby actually being fathered by Raoul or something. The only person who knows this, apparently, is the still-expiring Madame Giry, even though it's a pretty safe bet that most of the French aristocracy can probably count to seven and deduce that a few months are missing.

 

So, at any rate, Madame Giry, who has the stamina of a Wagnerian soprano because this exposition has been going on a very long time in her ostensibly dying breath, smuggled Erik out of the opera after the mob failed to hunt him down, and packed him off to New York in the hopes that he would Start a Brave New Life, or something along those lines. It's interesting to take a look at the fact that, rather than just implying it as some versions do, Forsyth has actively given Madame Giry the role of Erik's mother; he's not the first writer to "correct" the lack of a mother figure for the Phantom in the original novel. Christine, who was the original mother figure, is therefore free to be simply a romantic interest; I wonder how many writers that make this change are subconsciously reacting to the fact that they're finding the metaphorical incest kind of ooky.

 

Then Antoinette Giry finally dies and sails off toward the light and the ghost of her dead first husband amid a rain of maudlin joy, or something, all of which was pretty boring since the backstory it was based on was flat, unembellished, and introduced five pages ago.

 

Chapter 2:

 

Well, damn, it's been a little while since I've been able to get excited about someone using Greek mythology forms in a Phantom story, hasn't it? Forsyth describes the present-day Erik as possessing "wealth and power beyond the dreams of Croesus"; while Croesus is not strictly an imaginary figure, since historians are fairly certain he was an actual Ionian king, he's been blended with myths (particularly those pertaining to Apollo) over time until achieving mythic status on his own. The phrase is used ironically here, since Croesus was very much a representative of light and a servant of Apollo, while Erik really can't be said to represent any kind of light at all.

 

My question about where Erik learned to read is now joined by the question of where he learned to speak English, which he apparently doesn't have much trouble with upon arriving in New York. Forsyth's offhand explanation that he picked it up from a few English librettos in the Garnier library doesn't hold water; trust me, as a former opera student I have read so many Italian librettos that I could probably recite them in my sleep, and I can recognize individual words easily because of it, but if you dropped me in Parma and told me to have a conversation with a random person, I wouldn't fare much better than any other non-Italian-speaker. True, I'm not a mad genius, but even genius has to have a basis to work with. Librettos aren't big on grammar or vernacular, and the sheer volume of English librettos one would have to read and fully understand with no help in order to gain a decent grasp of the language is mind-boggling (and in excess of the Garnier's library, I'm pretty sure).

 

At this point, we are introduced to a new character, who will proceed to make me sad for the state of supporting characters everywhere. His name is Darius, which is confusing off the bat because Leroux's Persian had a servant named Darius, though he didn't really get to do much in that novel. He was also, presumably, Persian, though nobody ever really tells us. As far as I can tell, this Darius doesn't have much to do with that one--he's a guy from Malta that Erik runs into and then takes with him mostly by chance--but why the same name? All I can think of here is that the name is being used to tie Darius more closely to the original Persian's roles--at least, as defined by Forsyth, since Darius is the most cartoonishly cardboard evil villain I've seen in a while.

 

But the fun doesn't end there. Erik mentions that Darius converted him from his old and foolish beliefs to "worship of the one true god". Now, Darius is already obviously evil (seriously, Forsyth is all but hitting us in the face with an iron with Darius' face embossed on it); since Malta is one of the most uniformly Catholic countries in the world, I was wondering if Forsyth was going to try for some kind of Catholicism = evil idea here, which might possibly have been interesting if difficult to pull off (this is not what he was doing, however). But that was a very secondary consideration to my confusion over the fact that the original Erik already WAS Catholic, which makes "converting" him hard. The second largest (which is about one percent of the population, so "largest" is a very relative term) religion in Malta, according to quick and dirty research, is a tie between Judaism and Islam; a conversion to either of which would have been a really interesting new take on Erik's character, but, alas, that is also not what is going on. In fact, no amount of rational thought or educated guessing could actually have come up with what is going on, which will be revealed shortly (I thought, at this point, that Forsyth had just been vague and not explained himself; his suspense buildup went by totally unnoticed).

 

And now, Erik is a clown. Er... what? But yes, there he is, working the Coney Island fairgrounds and amusement parks in a clown suit. While I understand what Forsyth is going for here--he's using this as a way for the character to move around and interact without having to deal with the consternation caused by his face--it just makes no sense whatsoever in light of the original character. Leroux's Erik, who wanted to be a respected gentleman with a wife and go walking on Sundays, would find the very idea of literally playing the fool for the entertainment of the grubby masses to be abhorrent. The defense that we're basing this on the Webber musical doesn't work here, since that version of the character was, if anything, more of a power in control of his environment. It doesn't even make sense in light of Forsyth's own backstory--this man was abused and exhibited as a freak in a cage for years as a child, and traumatized by the experience, so now he wants to voluntarily exhibit himself for the amusement of gawkers? He works as a clown for two YEARS, and I can't even understand the character doing it for two WEEKS. Forsyth's version of the Phantom appears to have completely lost the drive and ability to master his environment; I spent this entire segment trying to figure out why he didn't DO SOMETHING ELSE. Yes, he makes money as a clown, and yes, he has to eat like everybody else, but why doesn't he get up to his old tricks here? He makes a point of telling us how superstitious the carnival folk are, but he doesn't bother trying to do the same thing he managed with supposedly rational upper-crust people in the heart of Paris? If he's so big on avoiding public mockery (which he is, as he tells us repeatedly), why doesn't he just hide instead of running around covered in greasepaint? I tried to write something about how it might be acceptable for him because the people are laughing at the mask rather than at the face beneath it, but, to be honest, I very much doubt that the character in ANY incarnation would find it acceptable.

 

Also, he's now carrying a gun to defend himself from muggers. Apparently all that badassery that he displayed with the killing and strangling and terrorizing evaporated somewhere during the Atlantic crossing. Oh, wait... this version of Erik didn't kill anybody. That's right. Okay, Fluffy Bunnykins Pacifist Erik can have a gun. Sweet Christ.

 

This is what I ranted about back when I read the Siciliano book, with its bizarre characterization of Sherlock Holmes. If Forsyth wanted so badly to write a book about a misunderstood genius who never killed anyone and was betrayed by a woman he had never wronged, and who then bartered his self-esteem to survive and became a sort of Everyman Rising from the Dust of the American Dream, why the hell is he writing a Phantom of the Opera based book? I wouldn't have had anything to bitch about AT ALL if this had been an original character, because when authors invent original characters, THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT WITH THEM. Sweet candy crackers, I even would have tried to go with it if he'd shown the character's personality changing through adversity, or given us an event or backstory that explained Erik's change of heart, or given us any kind of justification at all, but it was just wham, bam, thank you, ma'am, he's a clown! What the fuck.

 

We're moving on to one of Forsyth's strengths; he really has a visible fondness for Old New York, and his interest in the subject makes his descriptions and events on Coney Island some of the most interesting of the book. I was very excited when Erik met Paul Boyton, who was a real-life Coney Island showman, and the builder of the very first permanent amusement park; however, as Erik predictably began to help him design the place, my excitement began to wane and dissipate when it became apparent that Forsyth's research into this bit of history was pretty cursory. For one thing, he claims that Erik designed six rides for Boyton's Sea Lion Park, and that they were all great successes when the park opened, but the park, in fact, had only three rides when it first opened. Forsyth's description of the rides Erik designed is also hella vague: "I designed them... using deception, optical illusion and engineering skill to create sensations of fear and bewilderment among the tourists..." Okay, but that makes it seem like Forsyth has no idea what Erik designed, and is just trotting out the most generic of generic amusement ride descriptions in order to placate his readers. Considering that the original rides at the park were a slide ride, a water ride, and a mini roller-coaster, all that malarkey about deception and optical illusion doesn't seem to apply at all.

 

When the park's popularity begins to decline, Erik moves on to start working for the next large one that was built there, Steeplechase Park. Forsyth doesn't explain or describe anything whatsoever in Erik's contribution to this park except to again say that he designed rides. His final move to Luna Park is similarly vague and disappointing; I would at least have thought that Erik might have noticed the destruction of his rides when Sea Lion Park was destroyed, but apparently he didn't give much of a shit, so Forsyth didn't bother to mention it.

 

As a former New Yorker myself, and one who really, really finds Coney Island and its fanciful, checkered history fascinating, I was deeply bummed by the slapdash handling of what could have been an awesome opportunity to transport readers to an almost completely forgotten age (the last Coney Island amusement park, Astroland, just closed permanently this past year). For those that might be interested in a little bit on the lost land of illegality and sleaze rubbing shoulders with carefree entertainment, there's a decent website on it here for those that aren't into library-diving.

 

A particularly bewildering new running theme here is Erik's newfound obsession with money. The original Erik had his extortion racket going on, of course, but that was really a means to an end in order to live comfortably; Forsyth's Erik appears to have gone bonkers at the mere sight of the green stuff. His schemes balloon to enormous, ridiculous heights, until he's described as a gigantic multi-millionaire (in 1906? Holy cats, dude) who keeps on collecting, collecting, collecting. He talks about it a lot, and is obviously fixated on the acquisition of wealth. I spent a lot of time despairing and asking in increasingly desperate tones why something so out of line with the original character was being given so much prominent handling, but never fear (or, fear a lot): Forsyth is coming to the rescue with a completely insane reason that made me twitch a little bit. You see, the religion that Darius has converted Erik to is not in fact Catholicism, or Judaism, or Islam. It is a religion that does not actually formally exist except in a metaphorical sense: the cult of Mammon.

 

I had a vague idea what this was all about because I live with John, he who has a Degree in Religious Stuff, but I went looking for specifics only to discover that there really aren't too many. The term "mammon" occurs in Biblical literature and generally means greed or avarice associated with ill-gotten wealth; in the New Testament, the concept is vaguely personified a few times, probably in order to contrast the undesirable concept with God. The Catholic church latched onto this, as it did with many things, and the Middle Ages saw the "demon" Mammon referred to in some non-canonical texts as an actual entity, despite the lack of textual support for this.

 

So Darius is a worshiper of Mammon? Um. Okay, sure. Weird, but okay. My first thought was that this was going to be metaphorical, like most references to mammon (usually just translated as "wealth" or "greed" in modern bibles); i.e., Darius is out for himself, he acknowledges no authority over him, he's reaching for the ultimate symbol of power, etc. But no, no... actual conversations (albeit opium-induced ones, but still) with said god occur later, dashing my hopes that we were going to be going with anything resembling sense. So Darius (who, by the way, is evil, did I mention how evil he is? It's very reminiscent of the heavy-handed treatment of the Persian in Siciliano's book) is a worshiper of Mammon, who is totally an evil demon, and Erik is now also his disciple, because... well, apparently, because Darius told him about it and he thought it sounded nifty. I just don't buy Erik's unexplained conversion to this cult here, not when the original character was so solid in his beliefs (all we get from Forsyth is some offhand remark about how worship of this god won't include pain, or some such self-indulgent rubbish), but then again, I don't buy most of what this crazy mirror-image version of Erik is up to.

 

Much time is spent telling us what Erik is up to, which seems to be mostly world conquest. He owns huge stakes in Coney Island; then he wins enormous sums of money in illegal gambling; then he plays the stock market for a while with fantastic results; then he decides to be a railroad and steel baron. It is therefore not a glaring surprise when it turns out that he also constructed the Manhattan Opera House for his own enjoyment, mostly because he had a hissy fit when the Metropolitan wouldn't cater to his whims (this version of Erik is just going to take his toys and go home, so there!). And then he carved out the canals with his fingernails, shat out the pristine new Staten Island Ferry, and created the Flatiron building by pancaking its roof with the massive weight of his dick! Woo! I UNDERSTAND THAT ERIK IS SPECIAL AND AMAZING AND AWESOME AND THAT EVERYONE IS STUPID FOR BEING MEAN TO HIM, THANK YOU, FORSYTH.

 

A few readers may be fooled into hope when several characters discuss legendary opera singer Nellie Melba and her imminent arrival in New York, but they shouldn't be. She will not be discussed at length, and because she is not part of the omgzomgzorsdrama going on between the characters of Leroux's novel, she will not actually be allowed to do so much as set foot in Manhattan within the pages of the novel.

 

Erik's internal monologues are painful to those familiar with the original character (and, really, to anyone looking for a character with whom they can sympathize); long periods of agonizing over how Madame Giry was the only person who ever loved him (TOTALLY SUBTLE SUBTEXT: MADAME GIRY IS BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE EVER) are only interrupted by long periods of whinging about how unfair it was of Christine to leave him (come on! All he did was kill some people and stalk her mercilessly and destroy her performances for revenge and threaten the life of her lover! Ungrateful wench, incapable of true sympathy!), and how it's because she was such an unfeeling creature that he's turned to the worship of Mammon and become A Bad Person. Needless to say, the original themes (extremely present in Webber's musical, too, even if we're ignoring the novel) of the Phantom finally achieving his own salvation and growing as a person by letting her go have been completely axed. Learning? Growing? Achieving redemption through sacrifice and maturity? Fuck that! Instead, he's going to angst angrily in his piles of money before locking himself in his room and listening to Disturbed and Rage Against the Machine at unsafe decibel levels. YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND HIM.

 

Chapter 3:

 

This chapter is mostly devoted to showing us how silly French people are by letting us follow the hapless guy that Madame Giry sent off to give a letter to Erik and watching him fail catastrophically at his task. Personally, I felt bad for the guy, since, "Find a guy named Erik in New York and give this to him" is not exactly the most reasonable request of the year, but who cares what I think? Naturally, through a stroke of fortune and the intervention of a plucky New York reporter, the letter finds its way to Erik anyway.

 

Chapter 4:

 

This reporter has immediately begun referring to Erik, who is known to him only as a mysterious tycoon who owns half the city and doesn't mingle with the common folk much, as the Phantom of Manhattan. Yeah, that's not contrived or anything.

 

Chapter 5:

 

It is revealed here that Totally Evil Darius is the reason that the Met wouldn't give Erik a private box, because he was trying to stop him from messing around with this opera stuff and getting distracted from his True and Glorious Purpose of Amassing Wealth for the Great Lord and Master the Totally a Real Deity Mammon. Evil! Evil!

 

Every note in this chapter has "Oh, god," appended to its beginning. Oh, god, of course he's importing Christine to sing at his new opera house, because that's a great idea. Oh, god, of course he wrote another masterpiece opera, because apparently Don Juan Triumphant was just a hobby or some shit. I'm having trouble getting on the bandwagon for this new opera after the way that Don Juan Triumphant was carefully set up as a metaphor for the Phantom's life and was played so climactically. Even if we're, as Forsyth prefers, looking at Webber's version, the Phantom's final sung lines ("It's over now, the music of the night," etc.) seem to be indicative of a departure of artistic inspiration after Christine is gone. Wouldn't his rejection/sulk party following Christine's departure and his decision to devote himself to the acquisition of wealth be sort of counter to the production of that transcendental music that was so central to the original character (tip: composing this opera and whining about the events of years past will be the only musical things Erik does until the very end of the book)?

 

Chapter 6:

 

I do love this chapter, because the column by obvious fop Gaylord Spriggs is much better suited to Forsyth's writing style. It's interesting and informative without dumping too much, the voice is engaging, and the overwrought style suits the subject matter. Alas that it is not very long and we're back to the rest of the book now.

 

Chapter 7:

 

Forsyth's love of New York City is still apparent here, and again, the description is one of his strengths. The fond immigration litany here from the random Catholic priest almost makes up for the fact that there is a random Catholic priest involved for no reason other than to Oppose the Forces of Evil (Darius).

 

Chapter 8:

 

The Phantom's new opera, in keeping with the very American theme we're running with here, is about the American Civil War. It's called The Angel of Shiloh, which caused all sorts of misgivings in my belly, but I decided to reserve judgment until I got a more thorough idea of what it's supposed to be about.

 

There's quite a bit more reporter nonsense and newspaper article time, all of which seems like a fairly obvious nod toward Leroux. Unfortunately, this is mostly overshadowed by some more confirmation of how heinously evil Darius is. Sigh. It is because he really is the original Darius, and he caught Evil Bastard disease from the Persian?

 

Christine has arrived with her son, Pierre de Chagny. Anyone who didn't get a premonition of literary doom at that statement has not been paying attention to Forsyth's proclivities.

 

Chapter 9:

 

All right, the reporter is calling Erik the Phantom of Manhattan again. Why is he doing that? This is not France, so the word fantome is not involved--and even if it were, it means "ghost", not "guy I don't know anything about". There is no haunting going on here! He's just living in a skyscraper! Arrgh!

 

In this chapter, some mysterious agency (GEE WHO COULD IT BE?) sends Pierre the monkey music box that was featured so prominently at the end of Webber's musical. Magically, Pierre manages to take it apart, put it back together, and put it through a large number of hoops, all with a tiny screwdriver and only his own ingenuity. Now, we already knew about Pierre's parentage from Madame Giry, but the fact that he is a natural engineering genius (JUST LIKE SOMEBODY ELSE IN THIS STORY, EH?) is very obvious foreshadowing, provided just in case we, the readers, are on the same mental level as cabbage. Also, while I can accept that Pierre is able to figure machines out with facile ease and that he probably speaks pretty good English thanks to the efforts of his Catholic priest tutor, I find it a little bit too much of a stretch that he can discuss complicated mechanical concepts in English.

 

The music box, in case anyone was wondering, does indeed play "Masquerade" from the Webber musical, which prompts Christine to go into a fit of hysterics and hide herself and her son in her hotel room for a while, which is a reasonable response to the resurfacing of a crazed stalker from her past. Unfortunately, reason deserts her shortly thereafter, and rather than increasing security or informing the authorities, she decides that the thing to do is to hunt Erik down and give him a stern talking-to, which leads her to set up an appointment to go tour the amusement parks of Coney Island on her quest. Of course, Erik, who owns them and probably everything else in the entire borough of Brooklyn, instructs the workers to open the place up for a private tour for her, even though it's winter and everything is closed down. On the one hand, I approve of derelict amusement parks, since they're creepy as hell; on the other, I am deeply afraid that this is going to be handled with Forsyth's general amount of subtlety and finesse up to this point (which is to say, not much).

 

I kind of wanted to know if there would be oompa loompas, but no, there were not.

 

Chapter 10:

 

More sentence fragments and missed commas occur here, though again it's just enough to annoy, not enough to cause active rage. Instead, I just sighed a great deal, as Erik's internal monologue revealed his master plan to beg Christine to love him some more. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. Not only has he thrown the redemption and growth of the original novel's ending out the window, but he hasn't even retained any of the maturity he keeps so desperately trying to convince us he must have. He's regressing. It's depressing and I'm sad.

 

The next part of this chapter, however, replaced sadness with a shocked, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder kind of incredulity. This is, verbatim, what my notes say at this point:

 

OH MY GOD YOU DID NOT JUST BLOW RAOUL'S DICK OFF TO MAKE SOME KIND OF IMPOTENCE/UNIMPORTANCE COMMENT

 

I'm sorry, enraged note-writer. You can deny it all you want in your zany, crooked scrawl of outrage, but that is in fact what happened. We're treated to another flashback-style retelling of events from Madame Giry's perspective, where we discover that she also "adopted" Raoul after, in a tragic sequence of events, he attempted to stop a rape/mugging in progress and was shot in the groin. I'm exaggerating a little bit; he does still have the equipment, but it doesn't actually work. In essence, he is permanently impotent (though everyone makes it a point to make sure we know that he can still feel desire and is just unable to act on it... because this wasn't miserable enough yet). So, according to Forsyth, Raoul was already unmanned by the time he met Christine again at the opera and swept her off. Many pointed statements, akin to, "Oh! How tragic that he can never marry! What kind of strange, desperate woman would marry him when he has no penis function?!", are made, hammering home the idea that Christine had to marry him because of her pregnancy and that he is essentially less than a man with all the subtlety of a jackhammer to the forehead.

 

To be fair, I am not impressed by Forsyth's whiny, bitchy, regressing-to-childhood version of Erik, so he is correct that his readers might need a little push to regard him as the manly hero here. But was it really necessary to literally emasculate Raoul in order to make sure everyone was ABSOLUTELY SURE that not only is the child Erik's, but that Raoul is totally unable to compete with the Phantom's sexy allure in any way? Couldn't you have just written one character more strongly, or shown contrasting qualities? It makes my brain burn. While I have talked about Raoul's role as the traditional "sexless hero" of Gothic literature, that doesn't mean ACTUALLY sexless. It just means that he's sexually nonthreatening (i.e., safe, comforting, representative of stability and family), which he can definitely be while still having an intact babymaker. I doubt that Forsyth is trying to work with that idea here, since he doesn't actually work with any of the familiar roles of Leroux's work; and anyway, if he wanted to play with Gothic character types, being able to love a woman but unable to physically ravish her pretty much makes Raoul the perfect male love interest for that kind of literature, which is not what I think Forsyth is trying to go for.

 

It's worth pointing out, now that I can see straight again, that Madame Giry's usurpation of the mother role for Raoul, too, is something we haven't seen before. She's basically taken Phillippe's place (but better, because, you know, Madame Giry is being canonized as we speak), since that character was removed from this version. It seems unnecessary to me; Raoul, as a character, doesn't really require much in the way of familial interaction, since he lacks the orphan imagery appended to the Phantom.

 

As if things weren't causing me permanent brain damage already, the end of the chapter features the Phantom bursting into spontaneous rhyme:

 

"You can spit on me, defile me; jeer at me, revile me; but nothing you can do will hurt me now. Through the filth and through the rain, through the tears and through the pain, my life's not been in vain: I have a son."

 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

 

Chapter 11:

 

Blah blah blah, pointless chapter is pointless. Meg-the-maid angsts around the place, too, not to be left out of the general angsting-over-things-that-happened party. I would probably have some angst, too, if the author had busted my knee and ruined my ballet career in order to have a reason to ship me off with Christine and keep the original cast together, even though I had no function whatsoever to the story.

 

Chapter 12:

 

Again, I was mildly mollified when Forsyth's obvious love of old New York in general and Coney Island in particular came through in this chapter. I enjoyed his characterization of the fun master, and I share his enjoyment of the self-contained universe of craziness that was Coney Island. I really wish that things had been described here with a little more flair and skill, but he is trying, and at this point, I'll take anything this author does that isn't a grievous sin and file it under success. Sadly, it trends gradually downward, until I'm just reading in a blank haze of boredom, reflecting on the brutal fact that this prose is boring me by talking about things that I usually find interesting.

 

Oh, look, Religious Confrontation! Naturally, the Catholic priest is able to sense the obvious Evil of Evils radiating from Darius, Mammon-Worshiper Extraordinaire, and there is a Staredown of Souls. Darius loses and runs away, because he's the bad guy and that's how it works.

 

Christine has apparently suffered a head injury, because she decides to leave her kid with the priest and go play in the Hall of Mirrors. You would think that a woman looking for a crazy psychopathic stalker who once almost murdered her husband in his cunningly-designed mirrored torture chamber might not want to dive into that particular attraction, but she decides it's the best place to find Erik for a chat. And, of course, she's right, so screw my opinion to the wall.

 

Erik pops up and, predictably, begs Christine to love him some more, and, predictably, she says no. The shock! The angst! Actually, neither of those emotions were present for me; the best I could muster was vague disinterest bordering on boredom, because I seem to recall already having read a book about this situation. Christine's heartfelt declaration of love for Raoul here is actually quite touching, though I suspect that Forsyth was not trying to move us with her emotion so much as he was trying to make us sympathize with Erik's wounded, tragic heart. Please. Seriously. Are they going to do ANYTHING new here?

 

So, being the big, grown-up boy that he is, Erik immediately demands that Christine leave her son here with him if she's not going to stay, because apparently no lessons were learned the last time he tried to force his wishes and emotional needs on others. On the one hand, I can kind of see this, since he might view the boy as his creation and therefore something to shape... but on the other hand, he found out about his existence last night, and generally seems vastly antisocial, so I have great difficulty taking his internal protestations of love for his son seriously. I don't care if your sperms were involved; you haven't even talked to the kid yet, so I'm really not sure you can say that you love him in more than a very, very abstract sense. And if you DID love him, you might have some pause in demanding that he never see his mother again. Just a thought. He's only twelve. Their argument over custody of the unsuspecting Pierre also failed to inspire interest in me, though I did wonder if Jerry Springer was going to MC. Christine eventually manages to get Erik to agree to wait until the kid is eighteen and let him decide for himself if he wants to hang out with his biological father whom he's never met.

 

Forsyth gives up, by the way, in the writing of this scene. Rather than using things like sentences or prose, even badly, he just writes their conversation out in script form. I am not even kidding. He might have been trying to give his readers a more immediate sense that they were listening to the characters, but whatever he was trying to do failed miserably. It's choppy and disorienting to suddenly toss the readers into, it completely lacks flow and disrupts the story already in progress, and it is entirely devoid of any kind of description. In short, it sucks like a thousand black holes.

 

The chapter ends with the shocking realization that, oh, noes, the Phantom was lying when he agreed to wait five years for Pierre to come back! Letting his son grow up and make an adult choice is for losers! We leave him plotting his attack, because things just went so well last time he kidnapped someone and demanded their affection.

 

Chapter 13:

 

As I mentioned in passing earlier, Darius has an actual conversation with Mammon at one point, during which they decide that, hmm, yes, it's very troubling that Erik might start paying more attention to people than to acquiring wealth, and he should be discouraged. I put it down to the fact that Darius was enjoying a large quantity of hashish at the time, because otherwise I would have to accept the fact that Forsyth was asking his readers to deal with the idea of a demon-god controlling Darius' actions and whispering in his ear, and I was trying to cling to the idea that this book seems to be mostly realism. However, I pretty much gave up on my fond hopes that that had all been a bad trip on Darius' part when, in obvious parallel, Pierre's priest tutor has a conversation with God. Not a generalized one, either; a straight-up discussion, in which God is so conversational and vernacular that even the priest seems bewildered. As a reader, I was almost as jarred out of the story as I was when we switched to script form.

 

The conversation made me ill. I refused to describe it to John, because I didn't want him to lose his mind. It's not that I have a problem with the presentation of religion, but I have a major problem with the badly-written poor presentation of religion. God talks like a very modern, very open-minded Protestant, which doesn't make any sense in light of the context (again, even the priest seems confused); particular moments of divine bizarreness included the priest saying, "There are no other gods, Lord," and God replying, "Nice idea, but there are many," and the revelation on page 130 that apparently God has a finite amount of time, since he needed to wrap this prayer up and get on over to a war happening in the Balkans. He also does a nice Religion for Dummies spiel on basic Christian theory for his priest (who apparently slept through divinity school), and for those of us out here in readerland who weren't yet bored or confused. If you want to use the Christian God as a character in your novel, fine, go for it! Do it and do it well! But who the fuck is this guy supposed to be?

 

The general thrust of the conversation, and the task God eventually drops on this priest, is that Erik must be redeemed, and they should get right on that. The blindingly obvious fact that the redemption of the character in the original story has been COMPLETELY DISCARDED made me weep.

 

Also, God does not comma splice. TWICE.

 

Chapter 14:

 

Someone refers to Erik as a "phantom financier" of the new opera house being built, since no one has ever seen him. Now, see, that is an appropriate use of the word. Yay! Immediately followed by incorrect comma placement.

 

Christine, despite this madman lurking about waiting to kidnap her kid, goes ahead and performs the debut of The Angel of Shiloh. The fact that Erik knocked out the lead tenor and took his place made me hurt a little bit inside, despite the fact that I should have seen it coming a mile away. Why, oh, why, do I insist on being surprised by these asinine things? Haven't I learned by now that Forsyth thinks that originality is for losers and that Webber's musical is a magical drug that causes eternal happiness and makes bluebirds sigh in ecstasy or some shit? Apparently not, because it made me unaccountably depressed and disappointed that this scene is just a reprise of the end of Webber's musical (but without all that mean stuff with the unmasking and kidnapping and whatnot).

 

The plot of Erik's opera was actually interesting from an academic point of view; the fact that Christine is playing a nurse is reminiscent of one of the early, discarded drafts of the 1943 Lubin/Rains film, while the fact that Erik's character's entire face has been destroyed and he wears a mask of gauze while he contemplates suicide reminded me strongly of the 1937 Weibang/Shang movie. I doubt any of this is on purpose from Forsyth, who made it clear in his foreword that he doesn't think much of any of the film versions of the story, so I can't extrapolate anything from it.

 

Chapter 15:

 

I laughed a lot when Teddy Roosevelt came to the premiere of this opera.

 

The articles on the opening are suffering from excess silliness; while I like Forsyth writing in journalist mode better than in novelist mode, his reporters are reporting completely incidental things for no apparent reason, like the fact that the lead tenor passed a note to Pierre. I mean, yes, you want to tell the reader things, but could you do it in a plausible fashion?

 

Chapter 16:

 

And then, bang, boom, it's 1947! Didn't see that coming, did you? Forsyth, who really enjoys other people writing flashbacks, has jumped us forward in time so that the rest of the story can be told by this reporter when he is an old man. This chapter features what is by far the best-written part of the book: the reporter's (now a professor) lecture soliloquy on journalism. It's not the best-written part of a lot of books, but in this book, it looks positively brilliant. Sadly, it doesn't have anything to do with anything, and is over pretty quickly.

 

The professor's monologue on events is much more poorly written. Please, please, please, stop him from reversing verbs and objects when he talks. "Here was I..."? "Matters not much..."? There's just no reason for it. His description of the final events of this book is also hampered by the fact that apparently he needs to do a four-page recap first, even though we JUST READ ABOUT THAT, OH MY GOD.

 

Darius decides that, naturally, the thing to do here is to murder Pierre. Because he's distracting Erik from making money, or something, but mostly because Darius needs to be an appropriately evil prick to make Erik look better by comparison and help effect this "redemption" that everyone is losing their minds over. The priest figures this out by translating some murderous Latin that Darius was conveniently shouting in case anyone wanted to learn his plans, and then I snort-giggled a lot as everyone piled into a coach to have a mad carriage-chase to try to rescue him.

 

Snort-giggling died quickly, though, because the events surrounding Pierre's conception were revealed. Allow me to quote Christine:

 

"That last evening, in the darkness by the lake beneath the Opera I was so afraid I thought I would die of fear. I was half-swooning when what happened... happened."

 

Erik does not refute this sequence of events in the slightest. So I'm left staring incredulously at this book that's trying to convince me to be on the side of a man who is not only a stalker/murderer/psycho, but who also raped a terrified, half-fainting girl? And I'm supposed to feel bad for his pain and want her to give her kid to him? What in the name of fucking God are you trying to do here, Forsyth? because you have done a spectacular job of making me hate your main character's guts, and I don't think that was the plan!

 

His subsequent impassioned speech about how he loved his son didn't raise my opinion of him one iota. No, I'm sorry; you discovered his existence two minutes ago and have never spoken to him. You don't love him with yearning, uncontrollable emotion. And if you did love him, you'd leave him the hell alone instead of bursting into his life to destroy the foundation of his loving, happy family. But all of that would require the level of maturity necessary to sacrifice your own wishes in order to let someone you loved go to be happy--and apparently, that was a fucking fluke the first time you did it (oh, wait, I'm sorry, you raped her first. Okay, so it's just in general something you don't possess).

 

Darius shoots Christine at this point because his aim is bad. I don't care anymore, and am sort of relieved that things are winding to a close. At least, I didn't care until Christine, cradled in her husband's arms, uses her dying breath to tell her hysterical twelve-year-old son that THAT's not your real daddy, THAT guy is your real daddy. Then she expires, so I couldn't root for anyone to slap her. Raoul doesn't try to deny this; but, instead of taking care of his kid as I was expecting him to do, he says, "It's true! He's your real dad! Today, my son of twelve, you are a man. Pick who you want to go with. I'll just sit here with your mom's corpse bleeding on the ground."

 

Needless to say, I feel about ten billion times more pity and sympathy for this poor kid than I have felt for Erik at any point in the book. His mother is dead, his father is telling him that he's not his father, and this frightening stranger in a mask is crying and trying to take him home. Even at the age of twelve, that's too much to fucking handle.

 

Pierre picks Erik to go home with.

 

I tried to write something about how Pierre unmasking Erik was parallel to Christine doing it in the original story, but I couldn't concentrate because WHY WHY WHY WHY THAT MAKES NO SENSE OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK? He's a traumatized child who's just seen his mother die, and instead of going home to bury her and live with the only father he's ever known (who, by all accounts in this novel, has been nothing but loving and responsible), he decides to go with the hideous guy he DOESN'T KNOW because he feels sorry for him? Forsyth, what the hell do you think readers would have to be smoking to buy this? I--what--ARGH.

 

When the fog of scarlet outrage cleared, I also noticed that there is an enormous plot hole here; a big deal is made earlier of how this particular reporter telling the story doesn't speak French, which was demonstrated when he was helping the French messenger try to deliver Madame Giry's letter. Yet, it is also stated that Raoul doesn't speak a word of English, so either the entirety of the dialogue is being conducted in French, meaning the reporter wouldn't understand any of it to tell us about it later, or else Raoul has magically learned English in the last half hour.

 

The harping on about how Pierre's love has redeemed his father here is what really gets me.  For one thing, Forsyth has--and I know I've already said so--completely trashed Erik's redemption from the original ending by plunking him back down where he was, removing his single noble act in favor of reams and reams of pointless angst.  But even worse than that, for me, is the fact that Forsyth himself isn't providing Erik with any redemption.  Erik is not redeemed from anything; Christine dies, he takes his kid, and they build a business empire together.  Forsyth's not letting him achieve redemption; he's giving him a reward (in the form of Pierre, who's acting as a proxy for his heartless mother who refused to do this years ago) for his suffering instead, and while that's an understandable motive that a lot of writers experiment with, it doesn't have a thing to do with redemption, and no amount of the priest talking about it will change my mind.  Redemption can't be given to a character through another character's actions or emotions; the character must themselves take action that shows that they have matured or turned over a new leaf.  Pierre's love can no more redeem Erik than Christine's could have; it wasn't the fact that she loved him that redeemed him in the original novel, but the fact that he chose to let her leave with her lover and be happy rather than forcing her to bend to his own desires.  Her love and sympathy made that choice <i>possible</i> for him, yes--but she didn't do it for him, and this Erik doesn't even acknowledge the need to stop being such a selfish, immature prick, much less do anything about it.  Forsyth can talk about redemption all he wants, but he hasn't applied it to his characters.

 

Epilogue:

 

Pierre helps take over his new daddy's business. Forsyth leaves us with this statement about the two of them: "During the first World War, both men changed their name from Mulheim to another, still widely known and respected in America to this day."

 

It's THOUGHT-PROVOKING, right? Right? Phantom descendents running around, right?

 

God. Damn. That actually hurt.

 

This book took everything I detested about the Siciliano novel--complete reworking of characters without justification, ridiculous contrivances to push extremely heavy-handed morality--and magnified it a thousand times, while adding truly unfathomable feats of stupidity in its plotting in order to achieve a level of true awfulness. The only reason it's not getting a failing grade is because it's not written too badly from a technical standpoint, and because there are glimmers of enjoyment here and there, usually when Forsyth goes off on a blessed tangent and stops trying to ram his cockamamie plot down our throats.