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loreofyupu 's review for:
The Phantom of the Opera
by Gaston Leroux
He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder than his heart, nothing half so dead: he had loved an angel and now he despised a woman!
Oh my, I enjoy melodrama to the core. There is something so gratifying about unbridled expressions of adoration and 'ghosts' giving their lives for unrequited love.
The Phantom of the Opera defied my preconceived notions about it. Where I had expected it to be a grand tragic romance, the Phantom waltzing with his lady love in the abandoned halls of the Opera House, it turned out to be a mystery and at times a horrifying one. Don't get me wrong- it was grand and tragic and romantic, but not in the expected sense. Granted, I'd never watched the musical or the movie so that might have lent to my surprise.
The story has all the juicy elements of a Gothic classic. The Paris Opera House is said to be haunted by the Opera Ghost. Rumours of this haunting drives mass hysteria among the members of the Opera. It is hard to discern fact from fiction as various people give their delirious accounts of having encountered the ghost. So the reader goes on a ghost chase with the characters to discover the root of the haunted business.
Christine Daae, a young opera singer, begins to hear a mesmerising voice from unknown sources. She later believes the voice to belong to a mysterious Angel of Music. Over several days, she is trained in singing by that voice, and her otherworldly performances elevate her to stardom in the Opera. The Angel manipulates, terrorises and even kills to ensure Christine's fame is sustained and she becomes the prima donna.
We later realise that both the Angel and the Ghost are the same person, an unloved man with an unsightly face named Erik. In the same vein as Frankenstein, society judges Erik's deformed appearance and thus perceives his soul as evil. His musical genius and other talents are overlooked. Resentful of the way he is treated, he adopts evil traits in a cruel mockery of what is expected of him and becomes the very thing he is branded as. His heart oozes with venom for a world that has always shunned him and left him as an outcast to lurk in the darkness. He commits atrocious acts of revenge against humanity, yet we can't help but pity him, because after all he's just a lonely being who wanted to be loved for himself.
If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me.
The Phantom of the Opera has several layers to peel back just like the Paris Opera House itself. A love triangle is just the surface of it; at its depths it has comedy, mystery, horror, tragedy and a social commentary. It is peppered with elements like ventriloquism and optical illusions. It is absurd and at points absolutely ridiculous, demanding a suspension of disbelief from the reader. However, the setting of the Opera House exists in real life (such that one can actually go and visit its secret passageways) and that knowledge in itself chills me to the bone. Like in any good Gothic story, the architecture plays a role as important as (if not more than) some of the characters. It seems to live and breathe, its creaks and moans singing a requiem of its own.
The prose is unbelievably delightful and the plot compelling. But it does go off on tangents, chunks of it devoted to characters and events I didn't care for, making me take so long on an apparently short read. Nonetheless, it's a thought-provoking read that's going to stay with me for long.
Oh my, I enjoy melodrama to the core. There is something so gratifying about unbridled expressions of adoration and 'ghosts' giving their lives for unrequited love.
The Phantom of the Opera defied my preconceived notions about it. Where I had expected it to be a grand tragic romance, the Phantom waltzing with his lady love in the abandoned halls of the Opera House, it turned out to be a mystery and at times a horrifying one. Don't get me wrong- it was grand and tragic and romantic, but not in the expected sense. Granted, I'd never watched the musical or the movie so that might have lent to my surprise.
The story has all the juicy elements of a Gothic classic. The Paris Opera House is said to be haunted by the Opera Ghost. Rumours of this haunting drives mass hysteria among the members of the Opera. It is hard to discern fact from fiction as various people give their delirious accounts of having encountered the ghost. So the reader goes on a ghost chase with the characters to discover the root of the haunted business.
Christine Daae, a young opera singer, begins to hear a mesmerising voice from unknown sources. She later believes the voice to belong to a mysterious Angel of Music. Over several days, she is trained in singing by that voice, and her otherworldly performances elevate her to stardom in the Opera. The Angel manipulates, terrorises and even kills to ensure Christine's fame is sustained and she becomes the prima donna.
We later realise that both the Angel and the Ghost are the same person, an unloved man with an unsightly face named Erik. In the same vein as Frankenstein, society judges Erik's deformed appearance and thus perceives his soul as evil. His musical genius and other talents are overlooked. Resentful of the way he is treated, he adopts evil traits in a cruel mockery of what is expected of him and becomes the very thing he is branded as. His heart oozes with venom for a world that has always shunned him and left him as an outcast to lurk in the darkness. He commits atrocious acts of revenge against humanity, yet we can't help but pity him, because after all he's just a lonely being who wanted to be loved for himself.
If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me.
The Phantom of the Opera has several layers to peel back just like the Paris Opera House itself. A love triangle is just the surface of it; at its depths it has comedy, mystery, horror, tragedy and a social commentary. It is peppered with elements like ventriloquism and optical illusions. It is absurd and at points absolutely ridiculous, demanding a suspension of disbelief from the reader. However, the setting of the Opera House exists in real life (such that one can actually go and visit its secret passageways) and that knowledge in itself chills me to the bone. Like in any good Gothic story, the architecture plays a role as important as (if not more than) some of the characters. It seems to live and breathe, its creaks and moans singing a requiem of its own.
The prose is unbelievably delightful and the plot compelling. But it does go off on tangents, chunks of it devoted to characters and events I didn't care for, making me take so long on an apparently short read. Nonetheless, it's a thought-provoking read that's going to stay with me for long.