The Phantom Library

This book was published through Lulu, that perennial grandparent of self-publishing, and that means there is only so much that can be expected in terms of quality threshold… but it’s still a mess from the outside. There's no text on the spine, which led to me spending ten minutes at my Big Wall O' Phantom trying to find it, and the back cover copy is so small and blurred that I literally could not read it. Something about London, and, like, a life of solitude. 

 

But the dedication throws a little love Leroux's way, and I’m always glad to see that!

 

Prologue

 

The opening of the story, in which Erik briefly contemplates his sadness after the debacle with Christine but eventually decides to get back up, not commit suicide, and move out of Paris, is set in 1880. I was a little confused by the one-year difference from the usual projected date of the novel, but hell, it's way closer than most other things. It's in the right ballpark, and it's not 1871, so I'll take it.

 

It’s refreshing to see Erik act more like a reasonable (dare I say… redeemed?) adult than most authors paint him; he actively refuses to wallow in his grief, tries to take what he can learn from his mistakes and move on, and recalls that he's been in much worse situations in his life rather than wailing over how hard everything is.

 

Chapter 1

 

But now, the female protagonist has arrived. And her name is Melodie. And she's blind.

 

These are both bad clichés in the Phantom derivation universe. Naming characters, especially girls and women, after musical notation or concepts has been done to death, and even if it hadn’t been, it borders on cutesy even when done deftly. Setting Erik up with a blind love interest is a whole ball of unfortunate problems: from the ableism of deciding that the Phantom can only be loved by someone who can’t see how hideous he is to the secondary ableism of inventing a disabled character just so she can be an appropriate trophy for the main male one, it’s cringing all the way down. Yoshinaka’s version avoids being as awful as many of the others (I’m looking directly at you, Siciliano novel) by devoting some time and examination to Melodie’s characterization and relationship with her disability, but it’s not entirely successful. (You might think there would be an original trope-beginner to blame for this trend of blind love interests, but as far as I can tell, authors seem to believe they have all simultaneously invented it themselves.)

 

So, Melodie. She has a degenerative eye condition that has caused her sight to begin to fail, steadily worsening over the years until she now sees mostly blurs and colors and needs a cane to get around reliably. What condition this actually is remains unexplained, though I know it can't be anything that would make her eyes less "beautiful" or "limpid" so the normal suspects like corneal distrophy are out; again the disability is here as a narrative device in order to give the male character a love interest, and it’s obvious when it isn’t allowed to interfere with her desirability in any way. Melodie works as a household servant and is reasonably worried about losing her job if they find out that her sight is diminishing, so she's been hiding the condition from the family and is assisted only by Henry, an older man who, we will learn later, serves as her adopted father.

 

Yoshinaka's prose is... confusing. It's often a little bit stock and a little bit corny, with unexpected veers off into the unnecessarily overdramatic, but on the whole it's actually not too bad. It's certainly vivid when it isn't insisting on using hyperbolic or stock-romance vocabulary (I cannot get over seeing "limpid" in the year of our lord 2006), and her technical skills are good, which is often a place that authors self-publishing without an editor have problems.

 

The beginning of this book really pulled out all the stops to try to make me hate it, though. Melodie is, of course, a musical prodigy who was composing, Mozart-like, at age six, and whose gentle and sweet nature makes her beloved by everybody including the rich people she works for; and by page six, we've met David Wentworth, a wealthy nobleman who was her childhood friend and now has romantic designs on her, but who is also an alcoholic good-for-nothing who tries to rape her within a page of his introduction. It's like a game of Count the Bad Clichées, from the music genius female character whose skills are there just to make her Erik’s perfect mate to the obvious Evil Raoul analogue to the She's So Beautiful I Must Rape Her method of introducing a villain. David is such a painfully one-note villain at his introduction (he even shouts "You'll pay for this!" when she escapes) that I wouldn’t blame most readers for not making it into the next chapter.

 

Chapter 2

 

The cavalcade of clichéd nonsense continues here. Erik, who despite ostensibly being a dude on the up-and-up who now lives on an estate outside of London, still sneaks illegally into theaters to listen to the orchestra play instead of buying a goddamn seat. When he explains that he only crashes performances and pays for everything else in life, I just rolled my eyes; this isn’t his opera house and you’d think this jackass would want to support the arts, but apparently his Aesthetic is more important. 

 

He happens to notice young Melodie and her caretaker Henry when they also sneak in to watch a show, which they have apparently been doing for years (and which is more forgivable in their case, since they certainly can't afford seats and probably wouldn't be welcome in them if they could). He's noticed her a few times before, but he only becomes "intrigued" once he sees her cane on a visit and realizes that she's blind. This is just as gross as it looks because it implies that he's only interested in her because she can't see him, not because of anything about her personally, and any chance of owning up to that or acknowledging it is lost in discussion of his "muscles" and "commanding" or "intimidating aura".

 

Anyway, it's very shocking when she notices him hiding in the shadows! Apparently Erik has never heard of perceptual compensation.

 

And in case I wasn't already drowning in trite, well-traveled Phantom clichés, along comes the obligatory cute animal that Erik immediately adopts and nurses back to health in order to show what a sensitive and loving soul he has. In this case, it's a collie puppy that he names Sascha, an obvious callback to Erik's dog of the same name in Kay's 1990 novel. In addition to Kay, Binkley, Chappel, Jones, Vale Allen, and Whitehead all do this, and that’s before we get past the mid-2000s. I like animals and I’m prepared to believe that a book character likes them, too, but they’re always just shorthand for how Erik actually has hidden depths of empathetic worthiness and the animals can sense it, and then we forget all about them again.

 

After some mental begging of forgiveness from Christine, the chapter finally moves on. Thank goodness.

 

Chapter 3

 

But here things start to get interesting. Rather than remaining at the Wentworths', Melodie recognizes that rapists in positions of power rarely back off when escaped from and finds a new position at another rich family's home, serving as a piano teacher for the family's young daughter. It's a move that shows the character's ability to be sensible and realistic in taking care of herself, rather than waiting for some handsome prince to come save her from the evil David. It’s nice to see a heroine in a Phantom sequel taking action on her own behalf.

 

Of course, David stole all her previously-written compositions as a parting shot, which made me immediately assume that at some point he would either destroy it in a gloating fashion or publish it and lie about it being his (or someone else in his employ's). Bafflingly, this never happened; even if you don't care about drawing parallels to the music thievery in the 1943, 1962 and 1974 films, much of this book has to do with Melodie making her career as a composer, something David becomes aware of over the course of events. Somehow this entire trunk of music just vanishes and is never mentioned again, lost in the depths of the Sea of Forgotten Plot Points.

 

Of course, the heroine can't save herself from everything or Erik would have nothing to prove how dashing he is, so at this point a horse conveniently spooks in the street and nearly runs Melodie over, allowing Erik to make a mad dash to pull her to safety, crushing her against his manly chest. He then once again trotted out his incredible empathic link with animals to soothe the frightened horse and then castigate its driver for not taking good enough care of it, presumably to distract the reader from how clumsy and overused a meet-cute “pedestrian nearly run over by [vehicle] but is saved by love interest” always is. This book was written just a year after Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, where that particular device reached its inevitably stunningly bad conclusion. Don’t pull pages from Twilight, y’all.

 

Like so many other Eriks I've met lately, Yoshinaka's appears to be supported by some kind of endless fund of mystery money. I can't figure out where his money comes from; he mentions at the beginning that he had some "modest savings" that he used to buy a cottage when he got to the outskirts of London, but what he lives on in terms of everyday needs like food and clothes is an enigma unplumbed. He even discusses how he refuses to stoop to a life of crime any longer, so he's obviously not back to his old extortionary ways (though, hilariously, he mentions his regular concert-crashing in the same paragraph with no apparent recognition of the irony of it). Nah, he's just, you know, "well off" in some mysterious way, even though that makes no sense and he does nothing that could be construed as work or even subsistence farming for the entire run of the book.

 

The economics in this book are actually pretty interesting. Yoshinaka does a good job of presenting Melodie as a servant-class girl: she works for a living, doesn't have a lot of disposable income and generally relies on the goodwill of her employers to avoid being reduced to begging. The social dynamics of Melodie and Erik as "common people" instead of members of the glitterati is a choice that doesn't come up in later sequels much; while Melodie's peasant status recalls Christine's, Erik's is more muddled. In essence, he's a peasant who somehow lives like a noble, having apparently no need to work or end to his income when he needs it, which probably has to do with the subconscious idea that men have to be rich, or at least comfortable, in order to be romantically viable. And in a sense it's true, since Yoshinaka's vision for this novel clearly involves Erik spending all day at the piano instead of out being a stevedore or something; she wouldn't have been able to set Erik as a man consumed only by his art form and ignoring all worldly concerns if he were doing mundane things like butlering. The effect is that, while Melodie does play a convincing servant, Erik is really just a nobleman in peasant's clothing - which is ironic, as a vast portion of his imagery in the original story has to do with how far below even the lowest classes of humanity he falls.

 

To cap off all this compelling economic discussion, it is only when he realizes that Melodie intends to sell some of her compositions that it occurs to Erik that he could do that, too. Oh, yeah, this one's got his head on sensible shoulders, y’all.

 

Things don't really get better here for a while, either. Erik has a bizarre holier-than-thou contempt for everybody else in London for no apparent reason ("These heartless ninnies were so concerned with their own precious necks, they wouldn't lift a finger to save a young woman's life!"), Melodie's music is absolutely fucking brilliant even by his standards, Erik progresses into an outrageous tantrum when she tries to get him to go to a teahouse with her and tries to intimidate her with all his manliness (and dude, I know you guys are servant-class in this story, but this is still Victorian England, so please stop threatening ladies' virtues just out on the street in public), and eventually, when she convinces him to help her finish her composition, a serious discussion is had about how she will have to either sneak illegally into the theatre to work with him at that piano, or make the long travel out to his cottage to do so. Because apparently these are THE ONLY TWO PIANOS IN LONDON.

 

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, Melodie gets her first glimpse of Erik's beautiful green eyes here. Hi, Butler. I knew you'd be coming to this party.

 

Chapter 5

 

Melodie has enlisted Erik's help because her failing sight has made it too difficult for her to focus on writing music down; she gets splitting migraines if she tries for too long, and is concerned she won't be able to finish in time without a scribe to aid her. The reversed dynamic of Melodie as the composer and Erik as merely the scribe is one that I enjoy, even though Erik spoils it slightly by being too obvious in pointing out how different it is from when he was working with Christine.

 

In fact, this is the first (well, second, counting David) instance in the book of Yoshinaka deliberately inverting the characters and situations of the original novel. It's an interesting experiment, and Yoshinaka's choice to carry it throughout the novel prevents a lot of situations from looking like tired retreads of clichés and makes them more interesting reading material than they otherwise might have been.

 

I would, however, like to see more specificity in Yoshinaka's prose. Her descriptive powers are in full force when she's excited about something, but too often her descriptions of non-central doings and characters are only vague sketches. Erik hears men talking about having forgotten something (but not what, or why, or any actual dialogue from them), or Melodie speaks to the commissioners of the work and gets information but manages to do it all without an actual scene taking place. This might be a valid choice if developed stylistically, but as it is it's merely a lot of telling the reader what's happening instead of showing it.

 

In another move that screams plot point (but that is actually going to be used for one later, sort of, so yay!), Erik and Melodie have to hide in a closet when they are almost caught trespassing in the theater and Melodie has a full-scale panic attack that confuses and irritates Erik (but doesn't overly concern him - all his compassion is apparently for animals only). It's very clear to the reader that she must be a claustrophobe from her behavior, but Erik doesn't get it, which as always makes him look less like an incredible genius and more like a putz.

 

Chapter 6

 

I love that this chapter opens with a frank discussion between ladies about how fancy dresses inevitably get stained or torn at dinner parties. Modern writers often seem to have this weird idea that those beautiful beaded and crinolined and bustled monstrosities were like fairytale princess gowns, immune to life, but this was not the case. Most likely it's the glittering spectacle of period film costuming, none of which ever gets soiled or destroyed unless violence erupts, that lends us this impression, but Melodie and her boss are wryly accepting of the inevitable moment when some dude steps on the hem, sloshes wine down the front or the lady herself drops jelly into her décolletage. Nineteenth-century truths.

 

Of course, this is taking place in a scene where Melodie's employer just outright gives her an expensive fancy dress of her own out of the goodness of her heart, all of which is just a little too fairytale and heroine-centric. But it’s a cute and enjoyable little scene, and the author does make a point of letting us know that the employer’s daughter couldn’t fit into it so it isn’t as if she intentionally spent a huge amount of money on Melodie. (Come to think of it, a lot of this novel could have benefited from a more Beagle-esque fairytale quality.)

 

I spent a lot of this book wishing that it was just a romance novel on its own, not a Phantom sequel; so many of the things that don't belong in the latter would have been just fine in the former, and Yoshinaka's writing style (when not sighing in the throes of maudlin melodrama) is engaging enough that I would have preferred to see what she could come up with on her own. It’s far enough removed from the original story that there’s really no compelling reason it needs to be a sequel anyway.

 

Melodie needs this dress in order to go to the birthday party of a rich lady whose husband commissioned the piece she has been writing recently as a surprise gift. She isn't publicly admitting to having written it (a time-period appropriate understanding that ladies are not taken very seriously as professionals), but she's been pretending to be the go-between for the elusive composer, the fictitious Michael Blythe, so she merits an invitation to hear the piece performed anyway. Alas, at the last minute the pianist who is supposed to play it has her hand smashed in a carriage door, rendering her unable to perform but moments before the unveiling! Poor piano-player, sacrificed on the altar of Making Melodie Look Good and Get Noticed.

 

So of course Melodie plays it, which is important both because Erik is sitting outside thinking about how awesome she is and David is in the audience being confused as to what his ex-serving girl is even doing here. I love this chapter, however, and Yoshinaka’s writing as well, for giving David some development and backstory to explain his behavior: a rocky relationship with his father, a pattern of negative attention-seeking, jealousy of Melodie who was always considered a "better" child. It elevates him from his earlier status as irritating one-note villain to an actual character with motivations and emotions, and while I wish to god we'd gotten that before or immediately after the rape scene earlier (because let me tell you, if I weren't reading this book For Science I might have just put it down there and never found out that there was more to it), I'm still glad it exists at all. David still sucks, but now he sucks as, like, a person.

 

I also love that David's first emotional response to seeing Melodie at this party is jealousy, specifically that she was able to escape his family by getting a new job while he, as a member of it, could not. That's a powerful emotional image and one that helps add a little sympathy to David's character, which he needs to not be just a random committer of senseless cruelty. It’s also very period-appropriate for an upper-clas character like David who, feeling burdened and helpless in the family that rules his life, is jealous of a servant without having any real conception of the privileges that he enjoys and she never has.

 

I also love that, when Melodie goes out on the terrace for some air (and to give David the convenient opportunity to accost her, apparently), a statue of Apollo sits nearby, overlooking the scene. Again, it's an inverted scene wherein Erik is once again hiding behind Apollo, listening to childhood friends talking below him, but this time they are most decidedly not getting along and the situation has almost nothing in common, theme-wise, with the rooftop scene from the original story. In ancient Greek religion, Apollo is often given the epithet Panoptes meaning “all-seeing”, probably inherited from the original sun god Helios whose cult he mostly overwrote, and in several myths reports on secrets such as the abduction of Persephone to the other gods as nothing under the sun can be hidden from him, so he makes an especially effective symbol for someone hearing or seeing something others think is secret.

 

In case it wasn't already obvious, David is pretty much just Raoul in different clothes so he can be vilified. He's so much Raoul that Yoshinaka doesn't even pretend he's not, having Erik actually start upon first seeing him because the two men look so much alike (down to the unfashionably long hair of the 2004 Schumacher/Butler film, in fact, which she takes the time to describe). The visual similarity isn’t necessary to get this point across, and mostly just seems confusing, leaving the reader wondering if the two guys are related or something; a better version of this would have been perhaps to have Erik feel like David is familiar not because of what he looks like but because he has the same trappings of wealth and fashion that Raoul had. 

 

But anyway, Yoshinaka clearly wanted to have a retread of the original but recognized that Raoul was a pretty nice dude and that he’s already eloped with Christine by the end of the story, so she’s introduced a villain clone here so that we can read a similar-but-different scenario play out instead. She's done the parallel between the two men well, making it clear that this is not the original Raoul but rather an image of what he might have been, had he taken a different path or been born under just slightly different circumstances. And that's interesting, if, again, plagued by unnecessary explanation, especially in his earlier appearances.

 

Erik swears in French a bunch, but, for once, that’s okay. Not only is it reasonable - he's a Frenchman in an English-speaking country - but he actually uses more words than just merde!

 

Take note, however: Erik also has a stallion. BECAUSE HE IS A MANLY MAN AND MANLY MEN DO NOT EVER RIDE GELDINGS OR MARES, EVEN IF THEY ARE WAY WAY BETTER FOR RIDING. It's pretty funny to note that the spooked, rampaging horse from earlier was most likely a gelding or mare, whereas this manliest of stallions doesn't do so much as snort menacingly at anyone no matter how much bullshit Erik rides it through (and it is a lot of bullshit).

 

Yoshinaka decides to treat Erik's murders as the result of a sort of rage-induced fugue condition, one that he is fully aware he suffers from - a bit like Marvel's Incredible Hulk, but less green. It’s interesting, since it gives her room to experiment with Erik’s awareness of the condition and what he might do to mitigate or control it… but unfortunately it mostly feels squandered, since she doesn’t really get into it. It ends up mostly lost, an excuse to make his murders and violence “not his fault” without having to actually engage with anything. (It’s also more than a little bit ableist, as people who suffer from these sorts of disorders don’t need any more bad press than they already have about how murderers are all actually just mentally ill and liable to go off like a gun at any moment.)

 

Chapter 7

 

Quick! What other common and incredibly cliched device do Phantom novels use to sympathize Erik? We've already covered animals, musical genius, and not really being at fault for murder, so the only thing left is...

 

Yes. Adoption of poor orphaned children. In this case it's a young boy named Peter, who, while not strictly orphaned, often escapes to Erik's house rather than dealing with his abusive father (for bonus points, said father is also the original owner of Sascha, whom he beat badly, requiring Erik to tenderly nurse the dog back to health). Peter is of course bright and personable and has no behavioral problems or noticeable trauma from growing up in an abusive home, and loves Erik (who is busily teaching him to read for free) and Melodie once he meets her. Peter is one of the few annoying stock characters who won't redeem himself later; he’s not important to the story and he’s not utilized especially effectively as a tool for sympathizing Erik.

 

In this chapter, Melodie apparently decides that all rules of society are over and asks Erik if she can move in with him (the better to work on her new commission, a very complicated symphony). Erik is scandalized and shocked, as he should be; this is Victorian England, where unmarried ladies living in dudes' houses is just not okay, and furthermore she's basically asking him to feed and house her for free. Especially since no real romance has yet developed between the two of them, this plan is from the moon, which is probably why he initially refuses.

 

Sadly, while I'm on board with his refusal, I'm not on board with the scene in which it happens, which follows the pattern, again, of every bad sequel ever. Erik's just so tortured by the idea that he starts "roaring" and then physically shakes Melodie and screams in her face. "Oh, no!" the narrative seems to say. "Look at poor, tortured Erik, driven nigh unto madness by the pain of what he cannot have! Pity him!" 

 

No. Fuck that, narrative. In a book that (justifiably) sets David as a villain because he is abusive toward Melodie, how is it okay for Erik to do the same thing? Apparently because Melodie has glimpsed the depth of Erik's beautiful soul or some bullshit, which is shorthand for "there is no good reason, just go with it, please". One of the major reasons Christine rejected Erik in the first place was that he was abusive and frightening; the solution, if you want to have him in a healthy, escapist romance, is to have him have learned something and worked to become a better and safer person, not to give him a love interest who will just suffer through all that.

 

I do, however, appreciate that Melodie leaves after this conversation with her dignity instead of begging him to reconsider or throwing her arms around him in an attempt to heal his shattered soul. It’s a low bar, but she’s still a stronger character than most sequel stars. Sadly, she lost me again when, after Erik writes her a letter that basically says "I'm sorry I screamed at you and you can move in with me, but I'm warning you that even when I try to be a nice person I'm still kind of an violent asshole" she replies by writing back to say, "No, no! Be a violent asshole! I wouldn't want you to not be yourself in your own home!" Yes, you DO want that, Melodie, if you are also going to be living there! What happened to the sensible lady who moved out the last time someone physically assaulted her?

 

Yes, Henry, thank you, this plan is bonkers. Melodie is extremely irritated by his assumption that she must be sleeping with the guy or at least planning to, which is pretty ridiculous considering that she lives in Victorian England. That’s everyone’s assumption at this point.

 

I really, really wish Yoshinaka would stop telling the reader outright what she's doing. Yes, of course this situation is another inverted one from the original story, where it's Melodie moving into the Phantom's abode intentionally and of her own free will instead of Christine being kidnapped, but it really loses a lot of punch when the author sits down to say, "Did you get it?" afterward. It's not doing the story any favors and often comes off as condescending to the readers. If you have provided enough information, you need to trust the readers to figure out the subtext on their own.

 

It's obvious to everybody in the world that Melodie and Erik are going to eventually hook up, but Melodie realizes this here in a scene that involves way too much ruminating over whether or not she's in love with him. Authors in EVERY genre, can we please stop with the "Do I love him?" internal dialogue method of introducing romance? It's so very, very boring and tired. She's not attracted to him, but she is attracted to his music, so she must be attracted to him because his music is his soul. Apparently composers of beautiful music can never be irredeemable assholes, which would probably come as quite a shock to anyone who ever met Beethoven or Wagner.

 

Chapter 9

 

It is confirmed here that Melodie is in fact claustrophobic after she has a full-blown panic attack when Peter suggests that she come down into the cellar with him. Erik figures this out at last when the panicky child summons him to help get Melodie to bed, and through discussion it is revealed that her fear stems from a childhood incident in which David locked her in a closet for an entire day. Predictably, despite the fact that Melodie stresses that they were friends at the time and that David was six freaking years old, Erik immediately enters a towering glass-throwing rage. Definitely when someone is having a phobia-induced panic attack, screaming and throwing things is the perfect way to make them feel better. 

 

This is a pretty frequent phenomenon in Phantom sequels trying to sympathize him (Binkley and Whitehead did it, too); they want to make him look positive by having him violently hate and want to kill the villains, but in practice this just makes him look just as unstable and dangerous for the suffering person to be around. Not to mention that Melodie is the one having a horrible breakdown, but somehow Erik has decided to make it all about his personal feelings and not, you know, hers. (Also, the person he is screaming about wanting to murder here is a six-year-old boy. He doesn’t know about David’s adult sins. He wants to perpetrate violence upon a six-year-old who is being a jerk but has no concept of the actual harm he’s doing. It’s not sympathetic, is what I’m saying.)

 

A nice touch in this chapter, however, is the gift Erik presents to Melodie, a painting of the house and fields she currently lives in. Erik's just-unveiled and apparently unrivaled talent at painting is a tad silly, especially when it's harped upon so much, but the idea of presenting her with the means to see the world she lives in before her eyes fail completely is a sweet and poignant choice that does a lot more to make me like Erik than eight hundred puppies and children would.