All Souls Trilogy, Book Three:
The Book of Life. By Deborah Harkness. Viking. $28.95.
A sprawling conclusion to a
sprawling trilogy that spans time as well as geography, The Book of Life is a satisfying but not wholly satisfying wrapup of a series that began with a truly
outstanding novel (A Discovery of Witches)
and continued with a lesser but still highly engaging one (Shadow of Night). Deborah Harkness’ first book detailed the
discovery by historian Diana Bishop of a mysterious manuscript, Ashmole 782, at
the Bodleian Library – and the further discoveries that 1) several pages of the
book are missing and 2) the book as a whole is absolutely crucial in some
unknown way to the daemons, vampires and witches of Diana’s world, including
Diana herself (a witch, albeit initially a reluctant one). A Discovery of Witches soon became a paranormal romance between
Diana and Matthew Clairmont (or de Clermont), a dashing vampire with a highly
complex and tragic past and a thoroughly modern scientific expertise in
genetics. The romance heated up in the second book, which found Diana and
Matthew, now married, traveling in time back to 1590 to search for clues to the
mysterious manuscript’s origin, importance and disfiguring. The second volume
was an absolute delight for history lovers: Harkness, herself a historian,
thoroughly indulged her predilections in introducing a huge cast of characters
(real and imagined) and in limning the world of 16th-century Europe with
marvelous detail that non-historians could be forgiven for finding, well,
boring –or at least long-winded. The exploration of olden times was reason
enough, depending on one’s personal interests, for reveling in the second book
or becoming frustrated with the extent to which the descriptive material got in
the way of advancing the plot.
Well, second books of
trilogies do have a tendency to meander as they immerse the characters of first
books deeply into the problems that third books are meant to resolve. So the
flaws of Shadow of Night were at best
ones associated with its placement in the All
Souls Trilogy, at worst ones occasioned by Harkness’ overindulgence in a
field she knows well and quite obviously loves. Indeed, the felicities of her
historically oriented writing in the second book helped make up for some
irritating plot elements, such as unexplained personality changes in Diana and
Matthew that made them more one-dimensional and in many ways less interesting
characters in the second novel than they were in the first.
Those stylistic felicities
are largely absent in The Book of Life,
which returns to plots and counterplots with a vengeance bordering on ferocity.
The gigantic cast of characters is nearly 100% replicated for this conclusion,
as Harkness makes a valiant attempt to follow not only the main plot and main
relationship but also a whole series of subsidiary activities and
interminglings of lives. This book makes sense only when read in conjunction
with the other two – there is no value to entering Harkness’ fictional world for
the first time here, and the author makes little attempt to recount earlier
elements of the story, which in retrospect is really a single tale spanning
some 1,500 pages (similar in this way, if in few others, to J.R.R. Tolkien’s
original one-volume plan for The Lord of
the Rings). Indeed, it sometimes seems that Harkness herself has forgotten
some of the subjects introduced previously: for example, the secrets of
vampire-witch interbreeding and of the search for Ashmole 782’s missing pages,
which Diana and Matthew were at desperate pains to conceal in the first two
books, are revealed entirely too casually, to entirely too many other
characters, in the third. So what was all the fuss about? Still, Harkness by
and large pulls the Bishop and Clairmont/de Clermont families into and through
this conclusion adeptly: family trees and family connections are absolutely
crucial to the events here. Readers will welcome the return, with increasing
authorial attention, of such characters as Gallowglass (Harkness surely knows
that the gallowglasses were elite mercenary Scottish warriors, but her
character is a great deal more); Sarah, the matter-of-fact witch; and the icy
Ysabeau. And they will very definitely welcome the birth of Diana’s twins, each
of them half witch and half vampire – but, again, may wonder what all the fuss
has been about when it turns out that there are other crossbreeds in the world.
What readers may not welcome
is Harkness’ decision to make Matthew’s son Benjamin the prime evildoer of the story
– an unexpected development (although not wholly
unexpected) that would be more effective if Benjamin did not tend to speak in cartoonish-evildoer
language that is a significant step below the otherwise crisp,
well-thought-through dialogue in which Harkness generally excels. Benjamin’s
vile actions are also overdone to such a degree that some of the power of
intrafamiliar warfare is vitiated – besides which, Matthew’s dogged pursuit of
his son becomes something of a distraction from the Diana-Matthew relationship
that held the first two books together. For that matter, the frequently
shifting points of view in the third book’s narration can make the narrative
unnecessarily intricate, although Harkness apparently intends them to elucidate
rather than complicate.
The eventual resolution of
the Ashmole 782 mystery is somewhat puzzling. There is still much we do not
know at the end about the book that started it all, including just who created
it – which would seem to be an important piece of information. On the other
hand, we do find out why the book matters so much and how it fits into the
overall mythological framework within which, it turns out, the entire trilogy
takes place. The mythology itself may not satisfy all readers – the goddess to
whom Diana made a crucial promise earlier in the trilogy seemed like a dea ex machina at the time and seems to
be even more of one here. But the books’ structure and events do make sense
within the weltanschauung that
Harkness provides toward the end of The
Book of Life, and this, after all, is her world to create and explain.
Ultimately, The Book of Life proves itself a
more-than-serviceable conclusion to a remarkably cogent and very well realized
series that is part paranormal romance, part historical fiction and part
intellectual adventure. Those are a lot of parts, and it is perhaps
unreasonable to expect any author to balance them all satisfactorily and knit
them all together seamlessly at the end. Harkness is in part the victim of
expectations that she herself raised: A
Discovery of Witches was so good, so intriguing and so out of the ordinary
in its concepts and characters that it was a terribly hard act to follow.
Harkness followed it well, partly by moving it in new and admittedly sometimes
confusingly overdone directions, with Shadow
of Night. With The Book of Life,
she manages to get her entire story back on track and to bring it – and the
tale of Diana and Matthew – to a logical and satisfying conclusion. That it is
not an entirely compelling one, nor as stylishly written as some of what came
earlier in the All Souls Trilogy, is
the result in part of just how much Harkness has tried to do here – and in part
of just how high and unfair were the expectations that she created by constructing
such a marvelous story and such intriguing characters in the first place. It
will be difficult for readers of the trilogy to say farewell to Diana and
Matthew at the end of The Book of Life,
especially in light of some questions that remain unanswered and some plot
threads that are left hanging. But perhaps the not-fully-satisfactory
leave-taking has two positive elements to it: 1) A work that leaves readers
with plenty to discuss and debate afterwards is one that lives on in the
imagination in ways that perfectly buttoned-up ones do not; and 2) A followup
or companion work is certainly possible, although by no means assured – and if
Harkness does contemplate one, there seems a distinct possibility that
Gallowglass, in particular, will loom large in it.
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