All Souls Trilogy, Book Two:
Shadow of Night. By Deborah Harkness. Viking. $28.95.
The second books of
trilogies are notoriously hard to write. They have to pick up in the middle of
things and end somewhere else in the middle of some other things, all while
tying back to what has come before and hinting at what will come after, but without
giving too much away or taking too much for granted in terms of readers’
memories of earlier events. Shadow of Night is not quite as striking
and brilliant as Deborah Harkness’ debut novel, A Discovery of Witches (whose title still remains unexplained as of
the end of the new novel). But there is
more than enough of the Harkness erudition, writing style, and sure-handed
plotting to make readers happy.
Or almost enough. A
Discovery of Witches ended abruptly, with a real cliffhanger in which witch
Diana Bishop and her husband, vampire Matthew Clairmont (or de Clermont), step
into the past to try to solve the mystery of a manuscript called Ashmole 782
while keeping themselves alive – something that is in doubt after Diana’s
horrifying capture and scarring by another witch and Matthew’s near-death at
the hands of fellow vampires. The two
have transgressed and branded themselves by falling in love and marrying, this
being forbidden by the Congregation, the nine-member group charged with
enforcing the Covenant under which the three supernatural species (witches,
vampires, daemons) do not intermingle in matters of procreation.
Shadow of Night picks up exactly where the first book left off, and
many readers may need to go back to the earlier volume to figure out just what
is going on, since Harkness rehashes the first novel only sparingly and
incompletely. No wonder: even in a book
of nearly 600 pages, she barely has enough space to include all the new things
that happen and all the new people they happen to, much less to go over what
has occurred already. Nevertheless, some
readers will be thrown by the abrupt start of this book, and others by its
relatively slow pace once it does get started: Harkness is a history professor,
clearly adores her subject, and wastes no time in getting into minute details
of life in the year 1590 – which does
waste time in terms of getting back to the plot.
Still, the writing is
so good, the descriptions of everyday events in the 16th century so
well done, and the characterization of famous people with whom Matthew (who is
1500 years old) is on close terms is so intriguing that readers will be swept
into the story even if it is not the story they were led to expect. Christopher Marlowe, Henry Percy, George
Chapman and other noted Elizabethans make their appearance almost at once,
their doings intermingled with those of a host of fictional characters and some
that are both fictional and nonfictional – including Matthew himself, who as
Clairmont is a fiction but as Roydon in Elizabethan times is known to
real-world history. Harkness, in fact,
does a better job of spell-weaving than does Diana. And therein lies a point worth making: the
characters around Matthew and Diana
are here often more interesting than Matthew and Diana themselves, who seem to
have undergone personality transplants.
Matthew, in particular, has changed from self-assured and urbane to
indecisive and impulsive. Diana, for her
part, has become somewhat shrewish, as when she remarks, “So far Matthew’s
hasty decisions had not worked out well”; “There were times when Matthew
behaved like an idiot – or the most arrogant man alive”; and, even more
bitingly, “Matthew was taking charge, which meant that things were about to
take their usual turn for the worse” – a statement that, for all its, umm,
witchiness, is justified in this book as it was not in the prior one.
Yet the book still
enchants, and it does move the story ahead, albeit in fits and starts. Readers will learn whether Matthew and Diana
can in fact conceive a child; they will find out the nature of Diana’s powers
(although the implementation of those powers is not entirely clear); they will
discover just what the goddess Diana took from Diana Bishop in allowing her to
save Matthew’s life; and, yes, they will find out what was in the three missing
pages of Ashmole 782 and why the book was broken. As these bits and pieces are dribbled out
here and there, the action flits back and forth between the 16th
century and the 21st, in the latter of which the Congregation is
trying to prevent Matthew and Diana from accomplishing their objectives while
the Conventicle is trying to help them succeed (or make sure they have
succeeded: language gets twisted when time travel is involved).
Shadow of Night
is somewhat overly complicated, lacking the straightforward (although highly
involved) narrative force of A Discovery
of Witches. Indeed, readers would be
well advised to start the new book at the very end, where Harkness thoughtfully
provides a part-by-part list of the characters in Shadow of Night and indicates which are “acknowledged by
historians” (although not necessarily as Harkness portrays them!). The book does indeed end right in the middle
of a set of new things, and readers exhausted by the complexities of its structure
may breathe a sigh of relief just before they start feeling frustrated by all
the things that Harkness has left hanging while exploring the 16th
century in such detail and with so much authorial enjoyment. It will be very interesting indeed to see
whether the final volume of the All Souls
Trilogy is written in the dramatic-adventure style of the first book or the
wider-ranging and more discursive one of Shadow
of Night – or perhaps in a style entirely different from that of either
Book One or Book Two. Harkness is a
remarkably skilled and entertaining writer, quite capable of turning a simple
sentence into a tension-relieving, laugh-out-loud moment: “Gallowglass returned
to Sporrengasse with two vampires and a pretzel.” If she seems to have entertained herself in Shadow of Night a bit more than strictly
necessary, after entertaining and intellectually stimulating her readers quite
thoroughly in A Discovery of Witches,
she has certainly earned the right to some sheer enjoyment of revamped (pun
intended) and reinterpreted history. In
fact, it was probably inevitable in Book Two that Harkness would indulge
herself a bit: she is a scholar of the work of John Dee (1527-1608 or 1609),
and how could she resist dwelling on the time in which Dee lived and giving him
a role in her story? In fact, Harkness
herself discovered, in the real-world Bodleian Library, a long-lost treatise on
magic that Dee once owned. In a world
only slightly different from ours, that book could have been Ashmole 782. How could Harkness not revel in that slightly different world?
Her challenge in Book Three, though, will be the usual
one encountered in the final book of any trilogy: to pull all the threads of
the earlier books together and provide a satisfactory and satisfying conclusion. And Harkness will face an additional
challenge as well: to find the right style in which to deliver the
knitting-together and summing up. The
evidence of Books One and Two is that she will succeed, and readers will be
richer (and much better informed about history) as a result.
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