Novels about music are rare, novels about opera rarer, few of either type are good, and fewer still last, so there was little enough reason to expect a novel as ambitious in scope and magnificent in achievement as Alexander Chee's The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The novel, like its most illustrious literary counterparts, is not about opera; rather, it takes opera as an imaginative Way Back Machine, a particle accelerator trained to investigate, at the most minute levels, matters as fundamental and multivalent as fate, fame, fortune and freedom, things not circumscribed by historical period but best viewed in a specific historical context.
Chee's first novel, Edinburgh, also used music as a springboard, but The Queen of the Night sings a different tune. Set largely in late-19th-century France, this historical novel told entirely in first person is a high-wire act perhaps only a daredevil like its protagonist, Lilliet Berne, could have ventured or landed. She bursts off the page at a palace ball at the peak of her fame, a pinnacle the reader instantly recognizes as a perilous one, from which a fall is not merely inevitable but a matter of a conspicuous conspiracy. The orchestra announces her arrival with strains of the Jewel Song from her latest success, Gounod's Faust , and the crowd cheers. "For I was their creature, Lilliet Berne, La Generale. Newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances. This voice was said to turn arias into spells, hymns into love songs."
Mere pages later, in her flight from the ball �" she realizes, among other things, that her dress is wrong �" she is intercepted by a novelist, Frederic Simonet. The writer is there to tantalize her with a diva's vanity of vanities: the prospect of an opera not merely written for her but telling her life story, encoded as only music can artfully conceal. "I should warn you, he said. My novels �" it would seem they have a way of coming true." The curse, she tells Verdi and his wife Giuseppina over dinner the next evening, is that "I fear the roles I take come true. Condemn me to repeat the fates of my characters in life." "Of course they do, my dear," Giuseppina responds. "This is why I have sung nothing since marrying."
Chee's is an ingenious plot that skillfully skirts the banalities of postmodern opera production. Productions and novels this clever have a way of outsmarting themselves, but Chee's delivers the magic in a story any conscientious reader can follow while surrendering time and again the need to fix it or even keep pace with it. The "story" constantly changes, from within and without, but always so enthrallingly that you take each version as true, and each successive one as more true. There could be no higher praise for Chee's storytelling than that it would take every word of his 550 pages to retell it. He's got it right.
I'm perhaps not the one to say whether knowledge of opera is necessary to full appreciation of this book. But I can say that opera lovers will, for once, not mind not being talked down to. And Chee can slip in an explanation of the Falcon Fach, or voice type (think the non-Puccini Maria Callas), without taking a break for a chalk talk. Verdi and Giuseppina are three-dimensional characters that reappear at critical junctures in the story. Lilliet considers Mozart's Queen of the Night outside her Fach, but the episode in which she sings the Queen's raging revenge aria, in the jewel-encrusted black gowns to end all opera costumes, is stellar.
The repertoire hangs around Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, with a bold, Callas-like late-career venture into Bizet's Carmen , where both Lilliet and Chee delve into the psychology of this still-misunderstood operatic anti-heroine. Lilliet learns Bellini's La Sonnambula from none other than Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the prima donna assoluta who is the novel's richest real-life historical character (with her friend George Sand running her a close second, in a long section in which gender fluidity is the fuel).
Lilliet's first performing career is as an equestrienne in a traveling circus, and Chee makes a sly, non-specific nod to La muette de Portici, a contemporary (to the story) opera by Auber whose prima donna is a mute represented onstage by a ballerina. But for me, the masked character at this extended ball is Lulu, the title character in Alban Berg's powerful opera of a half-century later. Like Lulu, Lilliet has many names, almost as many as there are people addressing her. Her dressmaker, Felix, who walks right off the page, calls her Jou-Jou.
But what makes Lilliet most Lulu-like is her unconscious, instinctive, almost unwitting expertise as an escape artist and, preeminently, survivor. Both characters have sub-careers as prostitutes and are equally vulnerable and impervious to men. Long before she hits the streets of Paris as a registered lady of the night, Lilliet has had her sexual initiation at the hands of a physically unsavory old man (whom Chee characterizes with genuine tenderness). And at the opening ball she is accosted by "brother dukes" whose saber-related sexual appetites she satisfies. "I'd learned long ago, for men with pleasures this specific, the rest was of no consequence to them."
There's some exceptionally good writing about sex, but the only long passage of homoeroticism from the openly gay Chee involves a Prince who loves a tenor with whom Lilliet is also, inextricably, sexually and emotionally involved, one of the novel's principal and most sinister characters. Emerging from the bath in the knowledge that she will be leaving to allow the Prince time with "her" tenor, Lilliet tells the Prince:
"It's so rare that the world allows you to be with the one you love, I said. Enjoy each other as you can. He met my eyes now at last, as if after all that scrutiny he finally understood what I was. With that he entered the dressing room. When I emerged, there was no sight of him. I left, did not look back, and there were no more good-byes."
Such as Lilliet has a true love, it's Aristafeo Cadiz, the Verdi protegee who composes or will compose Le Cirque de Monde Dechu , the opera for and about Lilliet and, she dreads, her past. Theirs is the novel's "true love" story, with its inevitable outcome of tragic misunderstanding. But it's by no means the end of Lilliet's story, whose culminating episode, involving a real-life impresario of lasting fame, it would be scene-stealing of me to divulge.
Because the novel is operatic, desperation is mostly the name of the game, extremes of everything the norm. Yet Chee evinces a keen mind for comedy as well. In the Baden-Baden scenes, the book's warmest section, Viardot-Garcia, Sand and their other guests perform an amateur, drunken Hamlet , not Shakespeare's but a jiggered version of the Bard's source material. It's as smart and funny as anything I can recall since the Fourth of July party in Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic .
Throughout there are potent reminders of Chee's own three-octave range as a writer. The passages about Lilliet's tragic childhood on the plains of Minnesota have the eerie, spare beauty of Willa Cather, or Marilynne Robinson. The scenes of war in Paris and its deprivations recall Dumas. And while there's a notable absence of the supernatural in overt ways, everything about the story is shot through with the kind of magic realism that animates One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the many passages about Lilliet's voice and muteness recall Oskar from Guenter Grass's The Tin Drum. That's brilliant company, but the best news is that Chee has found his own voice, and there's nothing derivative about this Queen. Such as it is about any one thing, it is about the thing Lilliet, and Chee, name over and over, in a common, all-too-abstract noun: freedom.
Lilliet's mother, we're told early on, is dismayed at what a "tomboy" her daughter is. But the woman Lilliet becomes, family-less, is feminine to the core, if often in uncuddly, Lulu-esque ways. Her, and the author's, love of fabulous frocks is the leaven in this unflinchingly heavy tale. But it's the indefatigable quest for freedom, to be oneself, that makes this novel gay at the core.