RISKS PAY OFF IN DAZZLING NEW TALE
Beautiful Ones a fictional feast that surprises
Vancouver writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia never ceases to amaze readers.
It’s not just her skills as a writer, which are beyond reproach. It’s her willingness to risk new approaches and entirely new genres with what seems, from the outside, to be a heedlessness and a reckless joy.
Signal to Noise, her first novel, was a coming-of-age tale that captured the magic — both literal and figurative — of music for its young characters. Her second novel, Certain Dark Things, was a dystopian vampire epic and detective story. And now, with her latest release, The Beautiful Ones, Moreno- Garcia shifts again, this time to a historical, coming-of-age story with overtones of Jane Austen and allusions to 19th-century France.
And once again, it’s dazzling. The Beautiful Ones follows Antonina Beaulieu, who prefers to go by Nina, a country-raised character with a tomboyish bent and a fascination for bugs — particularly beetles.
She is also the second daughter of a well-off family, and has therefore been sent to the glamorous metropolis of Loisail to stay with her cousin for the Grand Season, attending balls and parties, in search of a husband. Her dreams — shaped by the potboilers she reads when she is not out hunting specimens — run to the romantic, in a world shaped by protocols and lucrative matches.
When she meets Hector Auvray, there is a sense that perhaps her dreams might have a chance of coming true. A stage performer, Auvray is wealthy enough to (largely) overcome doubts about his social position, and his rakish demeanour stirs Nina in decidedly unfamiliar ways.
More significantly, though, Hector is telekinetic, entertaining audiences by moving objects using only his mind. Hector being a Talent (as opposed to the upper class Beautiful Ones) is what draws Nina to him in the first place: she herself is telekinetic, and has spent her life being shunned and disciplined for her gifts. With Hector, she finds a tentative acceptance as he teaches her to control her skills.
But there’s more to Hector than Nina knows. There are secrets from the past and present that could destroy each of them, both socially and literally. The echoes of Dangerous Liaisons are just another intoxicating level of what becomes, quite quickly, a fictional feast.
The Beautiful Ones is a hauntingly lovely book, romantic and crushing by turns, touched with magic on every level. Moreno-Garcia has crafted an utterly convincing world, populated with characters both wonderful and terrible — often within the same character. One has to wonder where Moreno-Garcia will take readers next.