Book Review – Midnight Never Come
Author: Marie Brennan
Cover Artist: David W. Ortega
Publisher: Orbit
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2008
Midnight Never Come is a historical fantasy, set in Elizabethan England and seasoned with a goodly portion of faerie lore. It is the third fantasy novel from the hand of Marie Brennan (pen name of Bryn Neuenschwander) and her first foray into this particular subgenre of fantasy and historical fiction.
England 1590. Queen Elizabeth is at the height of her power – she reigns supreme as the Virgin Queen, the threat of the Spanish armada has been averted, and the literary and dramatic arts are flourishing. Like so many other Renaissance courts, Elizabeth’s court is not only place of ostentatious display but also a tangled web of political intrigue and aristocratic patronage. Into these dangerous waters enters Michael Deven, a young gentleman of no fortune, as he is enrolled in the Queen’s elite bodyguard, The Gentlemen Pensioners. With ambitions of advancement Michael seeks an aristocratic patron and thus becomes embroiled in the covert operations of Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Spymaster. Walsingham has long suspected the presence of a “hidden” player in English politics and he chooses Michael to flush him or her out in the open. This assignment takes him into dangerous waters and radically revaluates his perception of the world. For Elizabeth is not the only queen in England, she has a dark double – Invidiana, the Queen of Faerie and the ruler of the Onyx Court, the shadow court that exists beneath the streets of London as a dark mirror of Elizabeth’s royal court.
Invidiana established her sovereignty of Faerie at the same time as Elizabeth ascended to the throne of England, and since then fae and mortal politics have become dangerously and deeply intertwined, often through the faerie queen’s manipulations of both fae and mortal agents. One of these is the faerie Lady Lune, who is sent to monitor Sir Francis Walsingham. Out of favour with the mistress of the Onyx Court, Lune crosses the path of Michael Deven, and together they start unravelling the secrets of two sovereigns in the hope of finding the source of Invidana’s power and break it.
With Midnight Never Come Marie Brennan has composed a very well-structured and tightly plotted novel. The story is intriguing and I found its twists hard to predict thus increasing the suspense factor. Brennan also experiments a bit with the novel’s structure: The main narrative, which takes place in 1590 alternates between Lune’s and Michael Deven’s POV. However, the chronology is broken up as Brennan intersperses flashbacks that illuminate the extent of Invidiana’s interferences in mortal politics. Brennan has furthermore structured the narrative like a play; five acts with prologue and epilogue. Each act is introduced with a short chapter and these are perhaps the most experimental aspects of the novel. Written like as stream of consciousness of indeterminate POV, these sections contains important clues to main narrative. In effect, the novel as a whole creates a rather pleasing reading experience, puzzling out the different fragments of the plot.
The structure is one of the novels strong points. Another is the basic premise of the plot: the idea of Elizabeth and Invidiana as mirrors of each other. This idea of mirroring or doubling was actually quite prominent in Tudor thinking – a fact that Brennan, who holds a degree in anthropology from Harvard, must have come across during the large amount of research, which is necessary for a piece of historical fiction. The Tudor conception of kingship was in several instances, fx legal practice, formulated in terms of doubling, i.e. what the historian Ernst Kantorowicz dubbed “The King’s Two Bodies”, which crudely put, is the distinction between the office and person of the king or queen. The metaphor of the double was especially widespread during Elizabeth’s reign, seeping into the arts where the Virgin Queen was praised through thinly veiled alter egos in poems and plays. Edmund Spenser’s famous epic poem The Faerie Queen (1590-96) was in fact written as an allegory of praise for Elizabeth. In this poem, Gloriana, the Queen of Faerie, serves as on of several alter egos for the Virgin Queen.
As this very short historical overview suggests, Midnight Never Come rests on a very solid foundation of historical sensibility. Brennan has obviously done a lot of research (her research bibliography can be found at her website, www.swantower.com/marie) and the use of historical detail is for the most part impeccable. She gets her facts right, and apart from a few heavy-handed instances (fx Walsingham engaging Deven in a Socratic dialogue about the intrigues surrounding Mary Queen of Scots by means of a chess analogy) manages to seamlessly work the historical exposition into the narrative. But what I find most impressive is the fact that Brennan has delved into the Elizabethan mindset itself for the basic premise of her story. She utilises ideas and element that were prominent in the historical period she portrays as supporting structure of the narrative. Throughout the novel, Invidiana functions as Elizabeth’s dark mirror on several different levels. As Elizabeth ages, Invidiana stays eternally young; mirroring the fact that throughout her long life Elizabeth was never portrayed as an ageing woman, in her portraits she was ever young. Invidiana is also Elizabeth’s dark double in regards to both politics and psychology as Brennan ascribes the more cruel, capricious and ruthless aspects of Elizabethan politics to the shadow queen of the Onyx Court. Using Elizabeth and Invidiana as mirror images is, as mentioned earlier, one of my favourite aspects of the novel, but I can’t help to feel that Brennan didn’t exploit this facet enough. While the faerie queen has a palpable presence in the story, Queen Elizabeth is far more elusive. Though part of the story unfolds in a place that revolves around her person, Elizabeth is for the most part curiously absent from the tale. She skirts the periphery of the narrative, and I feel that Brennan would have been able to delve deeper into the aspect of doubling and mirroring if she had given Elizabeth herself more space in the story. As it is, Brennan’s novel constructs an intriguing and complex set-up that sadly is never really filled out.
In many respects, Midnight Never Come can be likened to a teenage supermodel. Great bone structure, but no curves! Marie Brennan has laid a solid foundation of historical detail and built a great structure rooted in Elizabethan imagery, but she never really manages to fill her ornate edifice with life. Her prose is pedestrian at best and rather awkward when she attempts to work in period expression in the dialogue. The characters are mainly functional; shallow constructions that serves the plot but never really comes to life. As in the case of the characters, Brennan never really manages to infuse a semblance of life into her world, both Elizabethan and Faerie. The novel is rather low on description, which is too bad because Brennan has constructed a complex plot on the basis of a rather intriguing premise. A more thorough attention to detail (sensuous, psychological, etc.) would have added an extra layer of mimesis and characterization which could have given this narrative more depth, adding to its appeal. Midnight Never Come is an enjoyable experience, well-structured, suspenseful and with a slightly eerie feel. I was, however, slightly frustrated with the flaws since the premise has so much more potential than the finished product.
Trine D. Paulsen
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