The Phantom Library

Chapter 11

 

In another odd role jump, now it's Christine demanding money from the opera house manager instead of Erik, turning up to ask for her back wages so she can support her story of being wealthy. She does so only out of a desire to help Charles and make sure she isn't making his life hard because of his aunt; she doesn't consciously recognize the parallel in behavior, but the situation makes her pressingly uncomfortable anyway.

 

There's been very little identifiable Lloyd Webber influence in this novel up until this point, but it rolls in in spades with the revelation that Christine was a ballet rat, hearkening back to Lloyd Webber's choice to make Christine a dancer rather than a singer in order to provide ballet-dancing Sarah Brightman with some stage time. Liu makes it her own, however; Christine is actually not a very good ballet dancer, just mediocre enough to squeak by, frustrating her instructors and audience alike. It's poignant when, in a flashback in which she is in tears over a performance that went poorly, she wails to her "angel" that she wants to share the emotion she feels in music but that her poor, graceless dancing is not good enough to do so.

 

And speaking of the Angel, Christine's meeting with Erik in childhood is sweet and believable. Not only is she well-drawn enough as a character to make her innocent acceptance of the idea ring true, but Liu does a masterful job of also painting Erik's confusion and hesitance as well, dropping clues for the reader that Christine herself is unable to catch.

 

Poor Christine is not a singer in this version, which makes her sudden transformation into prima donna even more terrifying for her; setting her as a dancer who suddenly develops an inexplicable and superlative talent makes the event even more frightening and traumatic and really underscores the idea of Erik forcing the voice into her rather than helping her nurture something she already possessed. His method of doing so, which basically involves him telling her to do it until she does, is very reminiscent of the hypnotism-produced singing in du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby, which also featured a girl who couldn't sing at all on her own and was mentally dominated to become incredible.

 

I find it interesting that Erik leaves a yellow rose for Christine after her debut instead of the traditional red one; yellow roses traditionally symbolize friendship or joy rather than the romantic connotations of red roses, which is appropriate for this Erik, who doesn't even pretend to himself that he could ever successfully have a romantic relationship with anyone. Even more interesting, yellow roses also carried connotations of jealousy in Victorian England, just across the water from the characters; Erik may be subtly informing her of his claim on her without saying a word.

 

Of course, this is entirely lost on Christine. Ironically, she believes in her innocence that her angel will also love and protect Charles, just as he does her. And why wouldn't she? It's what an angel should do. She's completely baffled by Erik's strongly opposed reaction to her plans to marry and leave and hits the crux of the matter beautifully by saying in bewilderment, "You're an angel. He is a man. The type of love I want from [him] is the type only a man can give a woman." Christine certainly loves her angel, but it's the kind of love reserved for, well, an angel: a few parts worship, a few parts distant adoration, a few parts secure knowledge that she is being cared for. It's not a romantic love and the relationship between the two of them is all the more shattering because of it.

 

Contrary to the Lloyd Webber version of Christine's dreamy descent into the cellars, Erik just straight-up kidnaps Christine, kicking and screaming the whole way. Her devastation at the revelation of his humanity is immediate and painful, her fury and hurt palpable, and the scene is all the more powerful because of the contrast between her spirited fight against her kidnapper followed by her helpless despair once she realizes who he is and what that means.

 

Earlier, a very young Christine asked her angel if he would stay with her always, a request that he granted; seeking reciprocation, Erik now asks her the same question, but it's notable that he does it on his own terms by instead asking, "Can I keep you always?" The unmistakable shift in who's in control of the equation is underscored by that slight change in phrasing; Erik's in charge here (it's the only thing he knows how to be) and is not really understanding or counting Christine's feelings in this equation.

 

I also love this scene because of how determined a little scrapper Christine is. She is perfectly willing to physically fight Erik in order to escape, refuses to be bullied or intimidated, and at one point knees him in the groin. It is both comedic entertainment and another example of her having lost none of the spirit of the original heroine from Leroux's novel.

 

Liu chooses to invent her own torture chamber for Charles to be trapped in, but it's ingenious: a crystal cage filled with spearlike hanging shards of more crystal, all of them attuned to the slightest vibration so that any movement or noise causes random ones to crash to the ground, all of them with the potential to impale and kill him. It's not Leroux's torture chamber, but I like to think the old man would be proud of its creativity nonetheless. The fact that it relies on sound to cause harm is also nicely resonant for the Phantom.

 

All this memory of times gone by makes Christine realize, as her charade becomes harder to keep up, that her love for Charles may be undeniably real but that it can also only exist in a perfect world. Having met Erik and seen the horror and atrocities he is capable of, she knows this isn't that world, and as a result, she makes the decision to leave Charles again and return to Persia, to the "real world" as she now thinks of it. I respected this decision but was kind of annoyed by the constant yo-yoing back and forth from Paris to Persia. I think the novel needed more time spent in Paris to really draw this contrast properly and prevent the reader from feeling like this was a character waffling instead of going through a difficult journey.

 

Chapter 12

 

Back in Persia, you may join me in being horrified to discover that Senmura still isn't dead, slowly dying of brain damage and fever from her pierced brain lining while her father has to sit around and watch. Her mumblings are, of course, reminiscent again of those her dead husband made while his brain was leaking out his ears. This novel is a barrel of fun, y’all.

 

Oddly enough, Asim turns to Erik as his friend and confidant during this difficult time. This looks incomprehensible to us because there is no fucking way he doesn't know that it's actually Erik's fault, but he seems to have either forgotten or overlooked this fact; just like the two women, Asim is helpless to avoid the bizarre supernatural allure that Erik seems capable of flipping on and off like a lightswitch. Liu does an amazing job of blurring the lines between concrete and supernatural where the Phantom is concerned, so perfectly that the reader stops trying to figure out how these horrible things are happening and just believes that things this terrible can, indeed, be part of real life.

 

I suspected it, but here we have confirmed influence from Kay's 1990 novel: Erik's backstory is at least partially based on it, featuring him as the son of a mason and wife from Rouen, though in this case his father does not die before his birth. His mother's name is given as Maurelle, and, thanks to Asim's discovery through extensive research of the memoirs of a priest from the village, a very detailed account is given of the events surrounding Erik's birth and childhood, beginning with the fact that the priest and Maurelle were in love and that he castrated himself to prevent himself from giving in to temptation and abandoning his priestly duties. Maurelle is understandably upset by this and marries Juste, the mason, instead.

 

Erik's real name is also Juste (irony! or perhaps not, as he certainly thinks of himself as perpetrating a sort of twisted justice on everyone else), and things are already a terrible half-occluded mess concerning where he came from, as befits anything based on Leroux's novel. His mother tells the priest at confession of being raped by the demon Asmodeus in an open grave, which he discounts as her either being mad or trying to torment him; the idea of Erik's father as some kind of supernatural horror is something explored previously in the Lofficier short story and again gives the infant Phantom a sheen of supernatural horror above his mundane problems. There’s no way to tell what happened to Maurelle, or whether she really was just torturing a past lover she felt abandoned her, or whether she was mentally ill and perhaps whatever condition she suffered from affects Erik, too. The area is open to interpretation from the reader.

 

The priest's description of little Juste's deformity is directly out of Leroux, with a deathly pallor, no nose at all and a definite sense of the horror of seeing something dead reanimated. I'm back waving the flag of my hypnotism-mask theory furiously, because his description is much worse than Christine's, and presumably a baby about to be baptised would not have been old enough to be mind-whammying his priest yet.

 

Maurelle, it turns out, is just as calculating and clever as her offspring; they're traits he inherited from her, not out-of-the-blue developments. The priest firmly believes that she poisoned her husband (non-fatally, but certainly uncomfortably) when he had an affair, and she teaches Erik to count every second of every day, granting him not only perfect time sense but an obsessive, continuous need to please her. (This also definitely contributes to the idea that she might be mentally ill, as obsessive counting of things like seconds or heartbeats is a symptom of various conditions.) The priest is further convinced, when the rival woman turns up mysteriously dead in her room in town and the elder Juste is framed for the crime, that Maurelle could easily have done that, too.

 

One of this novel’s downsides is that it leans heavily on the idea of the mentally ill as murderously dangerous, which is a myth that horror often leans on as a genre with the result that real-life mentally ill people, who are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims rather than abusers, suffer from the stigma. It helps that Liu never directly pathologizes either Maurelle or Erik, leaving it ambiguous whether they are mentally ill or just monstrous, but there are enough suggestions that some illness is affecting them, most likely congenitally passed down from mother to son, to make most readers peg them as Those Dangerous Crazies. Of course, mentally ill people can be dangerous and violent, just like anyone else, but in the greater environment of real-world stigma and horror tropes, implying that the horrific villains’ behavior can be blamed on mental illness feeds into very unfortunate stereotypes.

 

The priest has a very interesting conversation with little Juste, in front of the gallows in town while they wait to see if his father will be convicted of murdering the woman (which, apparently, only the family and the priest know isn’t true). In trying to console him, the priest kindly tells him that he knows his father didn't do it, to which a deadpan Juste only replies, "Didn't he?" The strong implication that it was incredibly foolish of his father to anger Maurelle and that his actions caused this are a very recognizable and calculated choice to blame the victim and pave the way for Erik's later shenanigans with Christine, blaming her and Charles for inciting him with their actions. When the priest, perpetually creeped out by the kid but still trying for the sake of his vocation, points out that ignorance is not a crime, Juste is entirely serious when he says that it should be.

 

It's an interesting departure from most Phantom novels to set Maurelle as genuinely loving her hideous son, but she does, in a complex relationship that I would be happy to read an entire novel about. Even more intriguing is the fact that she and Juste mirror one another; she, too, hides a hideous secret (her forbidden love for the priest), stays constantly locked in her home, and has a superior intellect that no one else understands. It's not hard to see that Juste is unconsciously mirroring his mother, who is the center of his small universe.

 

Much to the priest's horror, it turns out that Maurelle did not kill the woman in the village - Juste did, with an airborne perfume poison. Even more chilling is the fact that he did it without apparent remorse - his only apology is "I'm sorry, it was just so easy to kill her" - and that his reasons were normal childish impulses, the desire to make his mother happy and force his father to notice him. Murder, from a very early age, is the only way Juste knows how to affect the world around him; it's the only thing that unequivocally gets everyone's attention and puts him in a position of power. The priest throws him out for the final time, shouting that he deserves his face to mirror the evil in his soul, which many years later Christine will echo in the Lloyd Webber lyrics “this haunted face holds no horror for me now / it’s in your soul that the true distortion lies”. There's no escaping some sympathy for him, however; the priest's words affect him as few others would, as he was one of the few mentors the child had growing up, and he’s devastated by the rejection.

 

Maurelle is found strangled to death shortly thereafter, a crime blamed again on her husband, and Juste disappears. There's no direct suggestion anywhere that Juste actually killed his mother, but that first confession to the priest - "I didn't mean to kill her, Father. It was an accident. It was just so easy" - might actually have been referring to her instead of the ill-fated mistress in town, meaning that Maurelle was the true murderer there and that Juste had already killed his mother before coming to see the priest one final time. The ambiguity is a really excellent tie-in to the semi-supernatural and ambiguous crimes of the adult Erik, which are not a question so much of who did it as they are of how and when he will do it again.

 

Armed with all this information, the darogha does some more field research through proxies and discovers that there was a local “madman” being kept in the same village near the time of Erik's birth, a man who was born with a developmental disease and slowly became more violent over the years; the other villagers, both vindictive and trying to prevent him from seeing things that would set him off, cut out his tongue and sewed his eyes shut (there are those eyes again). It seems likely, in light of the report that says he occasionally escaped and wandered graveyards, that Maurelle was unlucky enough to be caught by him and mistook the hideous apparition that assaulted her for a demon. Erik is therefore a composite creature, half the fiendish cunning and charm of Maurelle, half the uncontrollable and unknown condition of his anonymous father, and the reader can shudder along with Asim as he realizes that Erik's probably only going to deteriorate further over time.

 

Chapter 13

 

Asim's subsequent "defeat" of Erik and ability to force him to accompany him to the palace in Tehran seems too easy. He's not wrong when he tells Erik that he has no power anymore now that Asim knows his origins, and points out that "without your pretension to the supernatural, you are not so powerful"; it's true, but at the same time Liu's done such an amazing job of putting the fear of Erik into us as readers that we can't quite believe that the darogha has won. We're still waiting for him to end up in some kind of horribly inventive torture death, returning to that by-now-familiar state of constant, miserable anticipation of the horrors in store.

 

Liu’s historian roots show again once they arrive at the royal palace and Asim begins to deal with the shah, Nasir - Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, to be exact, possibly the most famous king of the Qajar dynasty and quite definitely the power in Persia at the time that the story is set. Asim's frustration with Nasir's indulgences, naivete, and predictable responses are a mirror of Persia's; Naser was known as the shah who most embraced Western values, and while he is credited with introducing many foreign arts, sciences, and cultural programs to Persia during his rule, he also tended toward self-indulgence and bankruptcy, things that did not endear him to his subjects for much of his reign.

 

Once he has been delivered to the shah and becomes his court architect (entirely by accident, which causes everyone some anxiety since Erik is actually not an architect and will have to learn the trade from scratch before the king notices and gets cranky about it), Erik and Asim strike up an uneasy truce. They seem resigned to one another, as if it is their fate to be together. Erik even says he won't stay in the palace if it makes him Asim's enemy, and Asim pledges not to bring up Erik's past unless forced. The uneasy friendship is similar to that seen in hints in Leroux's novel, though again the reader must occasionally deal with the idea that this is a dude who brutally forced the other dude's daughter to kill herself and yet they are somehow now best buds.

 

Chapter 14

 

Erik takes to architecture quickly; finding order out of the chaos of building is a way he can prove that the world is better with him in it. It's another expression of his art justifying his existence, though this time in much more solid and perhaps permanent form than music. He hates, however, all the praise the workers and courtiers heap on him for his excellent work, because he knows that they wouldn't say such things if they actually ever saw his face.

 

In an excellently creepy moment, Erik has a brief conversation with one of the servant girls from the harem and ruminates on how he wishes he could cut out her eyes and put his fingers in the sockets. The sexual parallel is obvious (and disturbing, holy shit), but more awful is his internal admission that this is the only way he is ever allowed to touch a woman, in torture and death.

 

The shah actually requests that he build a new harem for him shortly thereafter, and though he plays it off well, Erik has a terrible internal breakdown at the mere thought; to be so intimately involved in something that is solely feminine and filled with women is completely terrifying to him, a world in which he is absolutely and under no circumstances allowed. Given that Maurelle didn’t reject him at all, I have to wonder what missing part of his history has given him the idea that women, specifically, are forbidden to him in all ways; most versions of the story blame his problems with women on an abusive or absent mother, but Maurelle was neither.

 

The brief glimpse into Erik's point of view in this chapter also gets us some good social stratification notice, particularly in Erik's jealousy of the palace eunuchs; from his point of view, they are unfortunate and “unmanned”, but he can't even aspire to their lowest social level despite his other talents.

 

It shouldn't be a surprise that Erik outright volunteers to become the shah's personal assassin; his itching need to kill someone has gone unsatisfied for too long, and, as illustrated in the incident with the harem girl above, it's the only human contact he gets. Liu is very good at simultaneously making the readers pity Erik and making us want him to be cleansed with fire. This is a Phantom who is undeniably a monster but who still has glimmers of sympathetic and relatable moments, which makes him in many ways much more resonant and emotional than a Phantom who is only playing at being dangerous.

 

According to Erik, he never actually saw his own face until he was about twenty years old; there were no mirrors in his house, he went constantly masked, and the carnival wasn't exactly rife with opportunities to find a looking glass. His recollection includes a heart-tugging moment wherein, upon seeing himself reflected in the underground lake, he immediately stops blaming the rest of humanity for treating him poorly, because they're right. That is a monster, and his own loathing for it is no less than theirs. Only Christine, his one link to humanity, has ever been a strong enough urge for him to overcome his self-loathing and attempt to take something for himself.

 

This leaves us with even more questions than we had, even if we set aside the stretch of belief needed to believe that this kid never saw his own reflection in any surface, including water and shiny stuff, for twenty straight years. What did he think made people hate him when he was a child, then? What did Maurelle tell him was the source of everyone’s antipathy? Did he understand what people called him, and did he have a preconceived idea of what he must look like that was shattered when he finally saw the truth? We won’t find out, but all of these ideas are compelling.

 

Chapter 15

 

As the guard of the shah's harem, the darogha is granted the pejorative nickname Argus of the East. I have to assume Erik gave him this nickname, since calling him “of the East” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from the Persian perspective.

 

Erik begins at this point quietly committing suicide via eating disorder; having lost his supernatural allure to Asim and irrevocably lost all contact with Christine, he simply doesn't see any point in living any longer. He begins just not eating, his apparently originally "robust" frame dwindling down to the familiar skeletal thinness. The darogha is fully aware of what he's doing and why, but is frustrated in all attempts to convince him to stop. Their relationship is becoming more and more that of a father and son, bringing to mind the 1991 Yeston/Kopit musical or its 1990 miniseries version, with Asim almost unconsciously using Erik to replace the children he has lost. There might be something to be said for the theory that, representationally, Erik is always a child anyway, having no ability to mature or "grow up", and that Asim is responding to that automatically.

 

Of course, Christine is not so irrevocable after all, because she's actually in Tehran right now, sneaking her way in via a combination of charm and impressive lying skills (which she also views as something "given" to her, in much the same vein as her voice). Erik, already almost at death's door, simply faints when he sees her, which is ironic and tragic but not particularly surprising. Upon waking, his psychological breakdown is heart-rending, full of screaming at the darogha to stop tormenting him and begging Senmura, whom he has forgotten in his delirium that he killed, to stop wearing the disguise.

 

Christine's internal musings at the end of this chapter might be its most interesting feature; she basically admits to herself that she has chosen to return to Erik out of a sort of fatalistic self-dislike. Charles was too good for her and she would only have sullied his world, but in Erik's world, she can play the saint to a monster, a role she infinitely prefers. It's a moment of great clarity not only for Christine's character, which has been slowly becoming more jaded and sorrowful over the course of the novel, but for the dynamics of both relationships.

 

Chapter 16

 

While Erik, once he recovers, is willing to kiss Christine now and then, there's no sexual contact whatsoever despite the continuing Persian assumption that she is his wife. In fact, her attempts to get him to touch her result in attacks of violent self-loathing; despite her ostensible acceptance of him, Erik cannot surmount his mental block against touching a woman, any woman, let alone Christine, whom he views as the holiest of holies. He can't dirty her with his own uncleanliness and still retains more than a little fear that if she touches him she might simply die (after all, all other ladies he touches have, mostly because he tends to kill them), leaving them in an odd relationship limbo that they will inhabit for pretty much the rest of the book.

 

It’s hard to tell what Christine herself thinks of all this. She certainly makes overtures, but she also seems accepting of the reactions and to eventually stop pressing the issue. There’s another interesting inversion here, too; it’s usually Raoul who represents a comforting “sexless” relationship, very much in line with Gothic heroes who save their ladies from sensual danger and marry them properly, and the Phantom who is often read as representing repressed desire and darker urges. Here, Erik is absolutely and resolutely unsexual, refusing that role even when it’s offered to him, and it’s Charles with whom Christine might have had a marriage that involved sex and reproduction.

 

Chapter 17

 

Erik, unable to completely avoid being embroiled in Persian politics, has a run-in with Indian bandits in this chapter who secretly work for one of the princesses in the harem. They illustrate the punjab lasso of Phantom fame (because they actually are Punjabi!) and nearly kill him in their attempt to force him to join their cause. Erik retaliates with horrific brutality, surprising no one, and kills a man with a sitar string by first popping his eye (there it is again!), flaying skin from his face, and finally strangling him to death.

 

A very interesting facet of this book is illuminated when one of the sultanas says to Erik that "You are not a great musician, you are a great magician." Erik's musical prowess is actually downplayed in this version; he is able to pick up piano-playing with facile ease in childhood and Christine does ask him to sing for her (though he never does so that we see), but in general it's not a skill that is any more pronounced than the others he possesses. He's a genius in several areas and music happens to be one of them, but his greatest feats in it, including the creation of Christine's voice, are based on manipulation and hypnotic suggestion, not on technique. He really is far more of a magician figure than a musician, something that I don't think I've ever seen in a Phantom before.

 

Erik himself emphasizes this when, drugged by a sultana attempting to kill him, he wants to return to the city from their vacation posthaste. His powers are over humanity, not the world itself, which appears clearly to him only through the lens of his own intellect:

 

"Only to him would the mass of interlocking ornamental shapes seem clearer than crystal in his drunken state. He had always been a monster of civilization, flourishing in the order and beauty of mathematical structures... Before his blurred eyes, without the clutter of the details, the pastoral scenes were the most beautiful unhampered logarithmic, hyperbolic, Archimedean spirals. The hazy intoxicated state had cut away his learned self and left behind only the primitive. It was the monstrous instinct that delighted in perfect order and buried truths."

 

It's hard to tell from reading this review instead of the book, but pretty much any time you hear something from Erik's point of view, you just realize again that there is something seriously wrong with him. He actually applauds the sultana's nearly-successful gambit to kill him, recognizing in her a mental equal that he has never seen in a woman other than his own mother:

 

"It was a perverse irony that the woman who gave birth to him should reflect so much on the woman who would kill him. In a different way, as fiends were always able to find alternate ways of looking at things, it was a sad, beautiful, mathematic symmetry."

 

This man is a mess, y’all.

 

The sultana does not actually kill Erik, since proving that she could have is good enough for her. In another moment of enlightening feminist discussion of the culture, however, her conversation reveals that the crux of her jealousy of Christine is that she, as a woman of the harem, has no choice whatsoever in her romantic life, while Christine, who can choose whomever she wishes, wastes her choices on the horror that is Erik. The entire chapter's lovely poetry comes to a close when Christine is offended by this assessment and Erik suggests a metaphor of her as a bird that chooses to be still but knows it can fly at any time, and she admits, only to herself, that such a bird is only beautiful in flight.

 

Chapter 18

 

To Erik's credit, he has been seriously trying to avoid killing people due to Christine's presence, even though going cold turkey is seriously against his very nature and he's not having a good time with it. She's not helping, either, when she does things like stopping the caravan to dote on a diseased beggar child; Erik reveals his own self-loathing again when he demands that she stop touching the boy and calls him a "thing", clearly transferring his horror at his own childhood self onto the helpless child.

 

It is once again Asim that has to explain to Christine what's going on here, which he does with an impressive clarity of vision: her “innocence” and “goodness” are qualities that have been intentionally cultivated and protected by Erik to make her all the things that he can't be. She has been "built" by the Phantom, as surely as he builds beautiful buildings or crafts beautiful songs, to prove that he can bring beauty into the world and somehow try to balance the scales against his ugliness. Christine initially rejects the idea that Erik crafted her from childhood specifically to save him from himself, but she (and the reader) eventually can't ignore how much twisted Erik-sense that makes.

 

Tasked by the shah with building an enormous palace for him, Erik has reproduced in its ballroom the familiar torture chamber of Leroux's novel, a huge mirrored room with a crystal tree at its center. Christine doesn’t really realize that it's a horrible trap, which is one of the few instances where she doesn’t catch on to what Erik is up to, even though immediately after showing it to her he gives her a ring that he has designed to fit into the lock on any trap he builds so that she can never be caught in one. Just like the original Erik in Leroux's novel, this one gives Christine a ring and informs her that she is safe as long as she wears it; the only difference here is between the ephemeral threat of his reprisal and the very real imminent death many of his traps would cause.

 

Erik murders the sultana that he had been feuding with by luring her out of the harem in such a way that she is caught by the shah, her father, who beheads her for her defection and flagrant breaking of the rules. Interestingly, when Christine confronts him in horror (yet again, you'd think she would be used to this by now) at what he has done, he tries to explain that he was trying to do good, saying, "She was an outlaw. I delivered her to the judgment of the law. Isn't this what goodness is?" Lacking a moral compass of his own, he is incapable of understanding the difference between laws and mores, and as a result once again falls from grace.

 

Asim, who has seen the sultana grow from a little girl, also breaks with him, furious and grieving. It's interesting that this is where he freaks out, not over the death of his own daughter - possibly because he knew Senmura's death was coming when he involved her in his plans and blamed himself rather than Erik, or possibly because it didn't occur to Erik that this was going to upset him and he therefore didn't do anything to affect Asim's state of mind.

 

Chapter 19

 

Erik, who still only knows how to solve problems with murder, attempts to fake his own death by killing a guy, bashing his face in and then dressing him in his own clothes. Most of the palace believes the ruse, but Christine does not, mostly because the dead man has too much hair. Again, this is a Christine who takes matters into her own hands; after telling Erik off for daring to try to make her think he had died, she decides she will speak to the shah herself and try to get Erik released from his work, even using his secret tunnels to sneak into the shah's very chambers to leave a letter for him. This seems like fun Aladdin-style hijinks until you remember that the shah is the kind of guy who will seriously chop his own daughter’s head off in a rage when she turns up where she's not supposed to be.

 

In doing all this, Christine has finally accepted her role as the Phantom's savior. When she admits that this was what he had "created her to do", she not only accepts her own personality as largely a product of his manufacturing, but also agrees to his subconscious directives to let her save him. It's a moment of utter defeat but also of liberating triumph; she has accepted what he made of her and is now ready to make something of herself.

 

Chapter 20

 

Because we have all read Leroux's novel, we already knew the tree-ballroom was a trap. When the shah holds his first party there, it of course locks itself and starts burning everyone inside to death with intense heat from the light refracted by the crystal chandelier and ever-present mirrors. Christine, who is more in the know than everyone else, is also in a position to appreciate Erik's horrific attempts at "justice" again; the place is positioned perfectly so that the rays of burning light strike the terrified people below on their heads and faces, inflicting the same disfigurement on them that he was born with. Luckily, she is able to dive in and use her ring to turn the thing off before everyone barbecues to death, but the reminder of Erik's often senseless cruelty and drive to kill other humans is a necessary one, both for Christine, who always seems to forget it when she's in his magnetic presence, and for the reader, who has been sympathizing with his plight in the latest chapters.

 

Christine, who has been having clandestine meetings with Erik in the skeletons of the unfinished parts of the palace, manages to get him to explain some of his origins to her. Contrary to what the old Romani woman told her, he claims that he willingly ran away with the carnival and only retreated to the cages when it became too tiring for him to pretend to be a human anymore. The reader is left wondering if this is the truth, or if he’s rewriting the past to suit him, pridefully presenting himself to her as never having been vulnerable, or even not wanting to face such vulnerability himself.

 

Christine may love Erik, but she's not proud of the fact, again playing up her own mirrored self-loathing for intentionally involving herself with such an unrepentant and evil creature. "It was a selfish ruthless kind of love," she says, "a profound instinctual vanity not even the worst of prima donnas would succumb to." Again, the idea of her own pride and vanity comes into play; loving Erik has a lot to do with the fact that it allows her to always have the high ground in the relationship, no matter what she might do, and there's definitely a recognition of the idea that some of the allure of the relationship comes from being the only one willing to enter into it.

 

Chapter 21

 

When the shah refuses to see her through normal channels, Christine completes her transformation into Phantom Part II and becomes a positive ghost of the palace, using her ring and hidden passageways to sneak into his chambers to sing for him, tell him stories, and pass on advice on ruling the kingdom, actually helping the beleaguered populace. Her voice has all the hypnotic, entrancing power of Erik's, and it isn't long before the shah is in love with her and wants to make her his queen, something that becomes increasingly difficult for her to avoid. I love how active Christine is in this novel and how willing she is to take a stand for her beliefs and act to see them realized.

 

The shah, irritated that a woman keeps using the word “no” to his face, puts the darogha in charge of tracking her down, a feat since the heavy veils have prevented anyone from seeing what she looks like yet. Unfortunately for him, he's put in a difficult position once he realizes who she must be after chasing her into a hidden tunnel. He barely escapes with his life (his guards don't) from a trap that my notes have only "oh god centipede trap horrifying oh god" to say about.

 

He attempts to go to Erik instead, to try to get him to end the charade from his end by playing on his jealousy, and his incendiary remarks about Erik's wife "spending every night between the shah's thighs" certainly would piss most people off. Erik, however, does not take the bait, and illuminatingly replies, "I love Christine. If her love for me is only a lie, then I only hope to prolong that lie as long as she is willing to humor me." Not only is Erik not going to make a move when it comes to Christine banging other dudes, he's not actually all that upset about it; he's not going to have that kind of relationship with her, after all, so as long as she remains with him and loves him, she can do whatever she wants as far as he's concerned. He’s not trying to limit what Christine does as long as one of the things she does is love him; that’s all he feels he could ever ask for.

 

Incidentally, Christine is not actually sleeping with the shah despite the entire palace assuming she is, which is one of the things that is pissing him off so much.

 

Chapter 22

 

When a trap nearly catches Christine and the shah manages to perpetrate some violence on her, Erik rescues her and the shouting match that occurs behind the palace walls is pretty entertaining, including Christine's realization that "A secret passageway was a very bad place to hold a marital argument." Hee. Poignantly, Erik really does believe that Christine is in love with the shah and sleeping with him, and makes it a point to tell her that he doesn't care, she doesn't have to hide it anymore and she can do anything that makes her happy as long as he's allowed to stay with her. Not only is this an emotional scene here, it sheds light on the long-ago events at the Paris opera house; it wasn't her relationship with Charles that set him off, but rather the threat that, by marrying him, she would leave the opera house and be out of his reach forever.

 

(It’s tempting to ask if everything might have been all right if only Christine, Erik, and Charles had talked about the issue and decided that Erik could still be part of Christine’s life. Unfortunately, the fact that he’s a horrific unstoppable torture and murder machine would make that unfeasible with literally anyone; how long until he did something horrible to a member of Christine’s family? How long until he did something that she couldn’t hide from or forgive him for? It was doomed from the start.)

 

Unfortunately, it is the eleventh hour for this plot and, in the confusion of a riot in Tehran, the shah's attempts to find Christine, and Erik's sanctum being invaded by refugees, he is nearly killed by guards who wound him and then recoil in disgust at his unmasked face. Christine makes a choice here to shoot them to save him, which by her own admission "destroys" her; her innocence is permanently and irreparably lost when she kills one of the men, and, before Asim arrives to rescue them, she looks down the barrels of guns leveled at her and thinks, "Why do you hesitate?... I am a monster too. I kill." Her association with Erik has finally corrupted one of her last moral centers, and as a result the feeling that she had always been on a sort of level with him is confirmed.

 

Chapter 23

 

It is now necessary for Christine and Erik to flee Tehran before the shah finds them, and the darogha is spotlighted in this chapter, struggling with his friendship and fondness for them and his unswerving duty to his monarch. The mere fact that there is a struggle going on illustrates the depth of his relationship with Erik, as no such struggle existed when he was, for example, sending Senmura to her almost certain doom in the name of his duty. He has never questioned his royal loyalty until now. In doing so he admits that he is viewing Erik almost as a son, and that he had always longed for a child as curious and intelligent as himself and was disappointed in both Zayd and Senmura. Erik is the son he had wished he had, and again the contrast between the evil he knows him to be capable of and the emotion he provokes is vivid and puzzling.

 

He makes the final decision to help them when, encountering Christine, he sees that she's wearing Senmura's amulet, which she found still hidden away in Erik's chest. It's a moment in which he accepts that Christine and Erik are his surrogate children now, replacing the ones he has lost, and thinks of them as his evil offspring even as he saves them. In a curious way, it's also the final moment of Senmura's triumph; she could never influence her father's mind in any way when she was alive, but her one simple act long ago now finally pushes him into defying the law that he never defied for her when she was alive.

 

His final sendoff to Erik, by way of an explanation, is a simple phrase: "For every fatherless son, there exists a sonless father," which encapsulates all of the complicated knot of his emotions in one simple, poetic moment. It’s only too tragic that he never gave such devotion to his real children, who lived and died wishing for it.

 

Chapter 24

 

Finally, near the end, we have a bittersweet choice: Erik leaves Christine, for good this time. It's something that was being carefully set up ever since her return to Persia, but it comes to a head here when she insists once again that he should touch her and passionately declares that love always shares the bad with the good and that he should have shared his darkness with her from the beginning. Viewing herself as tarnished by what she has done, she thinks that surely now they’re the same and whatever he might have thought set her above him has been proven false.

 

What Christine does not understand is that this is the exact opposite of what Erik wants. He never wanted to taint her with his ugliness and evil, and having done so only says that he would never have asked for love had he know that was what it was. He needs her to be his perfect, untouchable ideal; now that she has fallen from that very high pillar because of his own actions, it's not a moment of celebration but a horrible realization that he has, finally, destroyed her as he was always afraid he would. Christine doesn't understand until too late, and he sends her back to Paris alone, mourning that he has poisoned her beyond repair.

 

Christine should not really be surprised to discover that Charles has married someone else in her absence; she's disgruntled that he isn't there waiting for her at the docks as he said he would be, but considering her adamant declarations that she wasn't coming back, not especially surprised. It's a blow to her ego, but she accepts it quickly enough; if she wasn't good enough for Charles before her fall from grace in Persia, she definitely isn't now.

 

Few versions of the Phantom story choose for Christine to accept neither suitor for her affections, leaving her to choose a third path. Like most of Liu's work, it may not be a popular choice, but it's poignant and suits her story perfectly.

 

Epilogue

 

It is now 1889 again and Asim, old, creaky and using a cane, finally locates Christine at the opera house as Madame Joyeaux and briefly tells her about giving the story to Leroux before asking about Erik's health. She explains sadly that, while she knows he lives in the opera house still because he is still sending notes and watching her performances, she has not seen or directly spoken to him in all the years she has spent there since. His gentle suggestion that she find somewhere else to go is rebuffed; she refuses to leave and intends to spend the rest of her life here, the only place she can keep trying to save him. "It is what he created me for," she tells Asim sadly, reminding him of his own words decades ago. She's done doing anything but pursuing that one single-minded goal, one at which she can never succeed. She never truly escaped Erik, much as many people can never truly escape trauma and mental harm done to them in childhood.

 

It's a quiet, haunting ending for everyone involved. The only question left is to whom the eyeball in the prologue belonged, but given who Erik is, it could honestly be anyone’s. It doesn’t matter. He continues to be a monster and always will, and Christine continues to try to save him, always failing, never able to pull herself free.

 

It’s a sad book but a very good one.