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A review by showell
The Queen of Bedlam by Robert R. McCammon
3.0
This book has many of the same attributes that I really enjoyed in Speaks the Nightbird, and I suppose not surprisingly, many of the same flaws.
When he wants to, Robert McCammon can really write a great sentence.
Consider the opening line:
"'Twas said better to light a candle than to curse the dark, but in the town of New York in the summer of 1702 one might do both, for the candles were small and the dark was large."
And the closing image:
"How like a maze a fingerprint was, he thought. How like the unknown streets and alleys of a strange city. Curving and circling, ending here and going there, snaking and twisting and cut by a slash. Matthew followed the maze with his glass, deeper and deeper, deeper still. Deeper yet, toward the center of it all."
I picked those two because they were easy to find again, but there are many more lovely sentences like that in this 645-page book. Unfortunately there are also lots of sentences like "The horses were really hauling ass."
It's like two entirely different people wrote this book. I prefer the one with the lovely turns of phrase.
I have sort of the same problem with the characters.
McCammon's Colonial America is vivid, earthy, and fascinating, if at times too crude for my taste. These characters belch and fart and vomit, and for some of them, that's their good behavior. I have trouble reconciling that with the really lovely imagery.
On the other hand, I really like Matthew. He's complex, believable, human without being distressingly crude, & smart, although not necessarily street-smart.
Many of the secondary characters, however, read like crudely developed caricatures. I'm ok with that to a point. It's not possible to make everyone three-dimensional.
But while the men may or may not be fully developed, to a person, for the brief times they are allowed on stage in the story, the women are stereotypes.
You have the wealthy widow entrepreneur who's keeping her husband's business alive, but is going to be simply the money behind the business. Day-to-day operations are run by -- surprise -- one of her husband's old male friends, who may or may not be her current lover.
There's the awkwardly unfashionable but personally lovely wanna-be painter/love interest, who might bring bad luck to everyone around her or who may just be a poseur who prefers to focus on the dramatic events in her daily life.
Rounding out the female cast, there's the nymphomaniac, the redemptive prostitute, and a shadowy fourth figure who will no doubt turn out to be a criminal mastermind (or his love interest/right hand woman) in a future book.
The title character, the Queen of Bedlam, doesn't even appear until page 330. And even then, she is given only one line. Her story is that she has been so traumatized by her past history that she spends her time staring out a window and doesn't speak at all to anyone, except to ask if the king's reply has arrived yet.
At the end of the book, McCammon says something about how the Queen of Bedlam is really New York, but that doesn't actually address my fundamental problem with the way women are treated in this book. The female characters are simply not given the room to breathe that the men are.
This didn't bother me in Speaks the Nightbird, because that book does feature a living breathing vibrant woman at the heart of the story, even if 80% of the book's other population were men. But the woman at the heart of this book, the Queen of Bedlam, is so fixed in space that it highlights how underdeveloped all the women are.
My final problem with this book was that while I really wanted to finish it, I wasn't motivated to pick it up again once I put it down. Some books I can't wait for my next chance to read. This was not one of them. It took me three weeks to read it, in large part because I was content to have one or two days go by without cracking it open. And to only spend an hour or so reading it on the days that I did pick it up.
That said, the story was sufficiently compelling that I didn't want to pick up any other book in its place. So now that I've finished it, I am really having to decide whether or not to get the next in the series. I really like this Matthew guy. I'd like to know what else he's going to do. And the book did close on a strong note with one of those image-ridden sentences that I'm a total sucker for.
Still, I felt kind of the same way about Speaks the Nightbird when I finished it, and when I read the next in the series, the flaws that I forgave in Speaks the Nightbird bothered me quite a bit more. So there's that.
I don't know if I'm going to read the next in the series, but if I do, I'll be sure to tell you about it.
When he wants to, Robert McCammon can really write a great sentence.
Consider the opening line:
"'Twas said better to light a candle than to curse the dark, but in the town of New York in the summer of 1702 one might do both, for the candles were small and the dark was large."
And the closing image:
"How like a maze a fingerprint was, he thought. How like the unknown streets and alleys of a strange city. Curving and circling, ending here and going there, snaking and twisting and cut by a slash. Matthew followed the maze with his glass, deeper and deeper, deeper still. Deeper yet, toward the center of it all."
I picked those two because they were easy to find again, but there are many more lovely sentences like that in this 645-page book. Unfortunately there are also lots of sentences like "The horses were really hauling ass."
It's like two entirely different people wrote this book. I prefer the one with the lovely turns of phrase.
I have sort of the same problem with the characters.
McCammon's Colonial America is vivid, earthy, and fascinating, if at times too crude for my taste. These characters belch and fart and vomit, and for some of them, that's their good behavior. I have trouble reconciling that with the really lovely imagery.
On the other hand, I really like Matthew. He's complex, believable, human without being distressingly crude, & smart, although not necessarily street-smart.
Many of the secondary characters, however, read like crudely developed caricatures. I'm ok with that to a point. It's not possible to make everyone three-dimensional.
But while the men may or may not be fully developed, to a person, for the brief times they are allowed on stage in the story, the women are stereotypes.
You have the wealthy widow entrepreneur who's keeping her husband's business alive, but is going to be simply the money behind the business. Day-to-day operations are run by -- surprise -- one of her husband's old male friends, who may or may not be her current lover.
There's the awkwardly unfashionable but personally lovely wanna-be painter/love interest, who might bring bad luck to everyone around her or who may just be a poseur who prefers to focus on the dramatic events in her daily life.
Rounding out the female cast, there's the nymphomaniac, the redemptive prostitute, and a shadowy fourth figure who will no doubt turn out to be a criminal mastermind (or his love interest/right hand woman) in a future book.
The title character, the Queen of Bedlam, doesn't even appear until page 330. And even then, she is given only one line. Her story is that she has been so traumatized by her past history that she spends her time staring out a window and doesn't speak at all to anyone, except to ask if the king's reply has arrived yet.
At the end of the book, McCammon says something about how the Queen of Bedlam is really New York, but that doesn't actually address my fundamental problem with the way women are treated in this book. The female characters are simply not given the room to breathe that the men are.
This didn't bother me in Speaks the Nightbird, because that book does feature a living breathing vibrant woman at the heart of the story, even if 80% of the book's other population were men. But the woman at the heart of this book, the Queen of Bedlam, is so fixed in space that it highlights how underdeveloped all the women are.
My final problem with this book was that while I really wanted to finish it, I wasn't motivated to pick it up again once I put it down. Some books I can't wait for my next chance to read. This was not one of them. It took me three weeks to read it, in large part because I was content to have one or two days go by without cracking it open. And to only spend an hour or so reading it on the days that I did pick it up.
That said, the story was sufficiently compelling that I didn't want to pick up any other book in its place. So now that I've finished it, I am really having to decide whether or not to get the next in the series. I really like this Matthew guy. I'd like to know what else he's going to do. And the book did close on a strong note with one of those image-ridden sentences that I'm a total sucker for.
Still, I felt kind of the same way about Speaks the Nightbird when I finished it, and when I read the next in the series, the flaws that I forgave in Speaks the Nightbird bothered me quite a bit more. So there's that.
I don't know if I'm going to read the next in the series, but if I do, I'll be sure to tell you about it.