Review: The Mirador

The Mirador is the third book in Sarah Monette’s fantasy series that started with Mélusine and continued in The Virtu. A few things are readily apparent when you start reading these books:

1. There is unabashed brutality.
2. There is a lot of sex, and a lot of it is between men.
3. There is a lot of cursing.

If you can accept these things, you will be introduced to characters that will walk with you long after you’ve turned the final page. It’s easy to get drawn in and easy to care about the main characters, Felix and Mildmay. Particularly Mildmay, who I find to be one of the most self-sacrificing and heart-breaking characters I’ve ever come across.

The single most impressive aspect of Sarah Monette’s writing is her strong sense of voice. The stories are told in first-person with the perspective alternating between Felix and Mildmay throughout the chapters. Felix is a wizard in the Mirador, the fortress at the heart of the city. He is a member of the elite and speaks with an accent and diction appropriate to his station. Mildmay the Fox is from the Lower City in the city of Mélusine. His language is fraught with cursing and colloquialisms that are inventive and lyrical. He’s always easy to understand, even if he’s using terms that you’ve never read before. I find myself wanting to adopt his phrases, despite their vulgarity, just for the way they sound.

The first two books establish a relationship between Felix and Mildmay that is built upon monumental, tragic miscommunication. They speak past one another and are so caught up in their own worlds and personal baggage that they wound one another to the point of exasperation. This becomes the secondary driving force behind the narrative. Will they ever reconcile? Will they ever say just one damn thing to one another that doesn’t hurt? Mélusine almost had me in tears at the end because I could see a moment of devastation coming and I just didn’t want to follow.

Felix and Mildmay are infuriating in entirely different ways, and what I wanted most from The Mirador was resolution and warm fuzzies. I wanted it in the same way I wanted the people on “Lost” to talk to one another because their non-communication makes me want to scream. And I’m not surprised, really, that I didn’t get it.

What does surprise me, though, is how unfulfilling The Mirador is compared to its predecessors. Mélusine and The Virtu each had a very strong driving central plot. There was something to accomplish. And side trips and personal relationships all developed along the way toward the goal. The Mirador really lacks this single central force. It introduces a third voice in the form of Mehitabel, an actress forced into being a spy for the Bastion, the great nemesis of the city of Mélusine. And while it is interesting to get this new voice, the addition doesn’t seem to do a whole lot as far as my sense of what’s important. The way The Virtu ended, the only real unresolved issue was the relationship between Felix and Mildmay. And yet, this isn’t the central focus of The Mirador. Nothing is the central focus. Mehitabel allows for additional intrigue that does eventually come to a head at the end of the book, but for most of the time, there doesn’t seem to be any danger. And she doesn’t know what she’s doing any more than I do.

Her adventures occur with no real direction. Felix does some theoretical magic experiments that allow him to not deal with treating his brother like a dog. And Mildmay tries to figure out how someone he once loved was ratted out and killed, so he doesn’t have to deal with his brother treating him like a dog. The many threads do come together in some tangential ways, but it is ultimately unsatisfying. I believe this is because there was no build up. And the issues that propelled me through the first books weren’t really dealt with here.

I have the sense that The Mirador is not the last book in what I am going to call Monette’s Simside series. I read some suggestion that Mélusine and The Virtu were really one large book split in two. If I accept that theory, then The Mirador is really the second book in the series, traditionally the weakest, which is meant to set up the final chapter. This feels like the case. So while I do recommend that fans of the Simside series read this, it really does have to be read as part of the series, and only in anticipation of the final resolution.

Lora Friedanthal

The Mirador, by Sarah Monette
Book 3 of the Mélusine
Published by: Ace (August 7, 2007)
ISBN-10: 044101500X
ISBN-13: 978-0441015009
Genre: Fantasy