Roles of a lifetime
At the opening of Alexander Chee’s remarkable new novel, “The Queen of the Night,” soprano Lilliet Berne tells us: “When it began, it began as opera would begin, in a palace, at a ball, in an encounter with a stranger who ... has your fate in his hands.” This stranger is a novelist who would like to turn his novel into an opera and would like her to be the opera’s star. Lilliet notes that all singers want a role written for them: “This was your only immortality.” But Lilliet would be immortalizing not a character but a life: her life. The novel somehow tells her story, one she had hoped to escape. She notes: “Lilliet Berne was in every way my greatest performance, but almost no one knew this to be true.”
“The Queen of the Night” blurs the lines between reality and art and the boundaries of narration. For instance, Lilliet notices, after the Siege of Paris, that though her figure has returned, her complexion’s color had not; she was completely pale. She recalls a much earlier conversation with her old friend, Natalya, about the character of Amina in Bellini’s La Sonambula. Amina is a grief-stricken orphan sleepwalker, and Natalya tells Lilliet that Amina was most likely a vila: the fairy-like spirits of Slavic folklore who once lived frivolous lives. They have beautiful voices, ride horses, are strong warriors and can lure men into their world. Natalya jokes that perhaps Lilliet is also a vila. It’s a playful moment, but there’s something deeper to it: When we give people masks, to paraphrase George Orwell, their faces grow to fit them.
“The details of my roles had become the only details of my life,” Lilliet notes at the novel’s opening, and she later fittingly debuts in the role of Amina. And at the book’s end, Lilliet notes: while “waiting for an opera invented out of my life ... my whole life had become the opera.”
“The Queen of the Night” is a reinvention of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” — Chee notes this in his Acknowledgments — but it’s no one-forone retelling. In the same way Lilliet transforms herself to survive, the book takes unexpected, theatrical turns, incorporating elements of all the roles Lilliet takes. Lilliet becomes her roles, or she walks into roles she’s already living, as if they are curses, or traps.
She encounters trap after trap, in fact, and these plot turns are part of the boldness and charm, the tragedies and victories, of this novel; something about them suggests infinite possibilities playing out on various stages, the events unfolding as they are being written, a sort of postmodern, metafictional conceit superimposed on late 19th century Europe. Who, exactly, is writing this story? Near the end of the book, Lilliet muses: “People told me what my voice did to them but they did not know what I wished it could do. ... How I wished it could sing open graves, ransack Hell for my dead friends ... change the course of Fate, summoning out of my many roles a storm of Fates until they were scattered and I was free, alone with nothing less than the world shining and made whole.” Is she talking about her voice, or the act of writing itself?
Reading this book is deeply pleasurable, and its incorporation of historical detail feels seamless, with its offhand comments about Georges Bizet as a recent graduate, appearances by George Sand and Ivan Turgenev and the Empress Eugénie, to name a few. It’s not unlike reading the collected letters of poets or artists and finding them discussing their contemporaries, a jolt of delightful recognition. This aspect adds to its voyeuristic sensation, like watching a private drama unfold on a stage.
Chee plays with opposites — the phrase “victory, defeat, victory, defeat” — repeats itself, as do themes of silence and voice, action and inaction, suggesting not only life’s ambiguities but also its more nuanced power struggles, how within a small conversation, a quick glance or a phrase brimming with subtext can shift power dynamics and expectations. Deeply embedded in this book is the fact of the choices that were available to women at that time, all of them suggesting women as a sort of possession, a clipping of their wings. “Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?” Lilliet wonders. In a novel so aware of stories within stories and the way their telling can influence fate, the question is highly suggestive; in many ways, this is a story of flight.
Lilliet notes that her true love, Aristofeo, the composer, did not imagine opera “as stages filled with women and men in wigs, but a storm, a woman lost and in love singing somewhere in the dark.” This is the beauty of this book. It has all the trappings of the period: the artifice, the meticulously researched details, but at its heart is the story of a woman, lost, in love, and singing in the dark.