The Moon and the Sun (Vonda N. McIntyre)

The Moon and the Sun
Vonda N. McIntyre
Pocket Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Marie-Josephe de la Croix and her brother, Yves, have come a long way from their childhood in seventeenth-century colonial Martinique. Now, Marie-Joseph is a lady-in-waiting to a prominent courtier in King Louis XIV's entourage at Versailles, while Yves - now a Jesuit priest and natural philosopher - has just returned from a momentous expedition with a living sea monster. Sea monsters, grotesque and roughly humanoid creatures, were once more numerous on the waves, and legend claims that eating their flesh confers immortality, but it must come from a fresh kill. Until the feast, the monster is to be kept in the Fountain of Apollo on the grounds of Versailles, while Yves dissects its mate for the edification of his discipline and for the pleasure of the king. As always, Marie-Josephe is to act as his assistant, sketching Yves's findings and feeding the captive beast... but something about the living creature tugs at her. When she begins to discern images and ideas from its haunting songs, she questions everything she thought she knew about the beasts, about her own life, even about the infallibility of the king and the church's teachings.

REVIEW: First off, there's a little backstory with this particular book selection. My late father, a lifelong sci-fi fan, knew Vonda McIntyre from local fandom. When Dad was beginning his slide into dementia, the last book he wanted was this title, the last novel she published before her death, but it was very difficult to locate. It took a few years, during which Dad (as is the nature of dementia) further declined, but I finally managed to secure a hardcover copy for Xmas. Even though he could no longer read much, he was very happy to receive it. Toward the end of his life, when he could only manage to follow short audiobooks, I decided that I was going to read The Moon and the Sun in his honor... but life with a person in late-stage dementia is not conducive to deep, long stretches of reading, unfortunately, so my first attempts were set aside.
Almost one year after my father passed away, I have finally finished reading the book. I consider it a personal victory, even though, as it turns out, this book is not particularly my preferred cup of cocoa.
Set in an alternate-history France where the Sun King reigns supreme over all enemies foreign and domestic, The Moon and the Sun spares few words painting the extravagance and intricacies of courtly life in Versailles, from the sprawling palatial grounds to the complicated dance of courtly manners (barely masking the vicious backstabbing) to the wildly impractical fashions and amusements of the uppermost of the upper crust. The characters are firmly rooted in their class and time, with the church's teachings dominating both their understanding of nature and the social norms and hierarchy bent entirely toward the glorification and satisfaction of the king. This is both an interesting detail and an occasional source of frustration, as the mindsets of that class and time are very rigid things that take quite a lot of battering to even begin to flex slightly - and this is a story that cannot truly begin to move until that flex occurs. McIntyre also preserves many of the naming conventions, inserting real-life figures (which I'm far too ignorant of French history to recognize, let alone appreciate), so right out of the gate I found myself bombarded with a string of names and titles and ranks and people who blurred together on the page, their relationships - so vital to the intricate balance of courtly hierarchy - an absolute jumble in my head. I eventually had to resort to switching to an audiobook version (courtesy of Libby and my local library system); it was just plain easier to pick out the important characters with a narrator as intermediary than it was to try sorting out so many similar-scanning names. (And I'm a person who loves a nice, thick epic fantasy with a large cast; it was the similarity, not the number, of players that kept tripping me up, and the lack of time and space to properly establish them in my head before five or ten more characters barged into the narrative.)
In any event, the story mostly follows Marie-Josephe, an exceptionally sheltered young woman of minor noble birth whose intellectual passions and gifts put her at odds with societal expectations. Though every bit her brother's equal (and occasional superior) in intellect and inquisitiveness, he is encouraged to pursue his studies - within the narrow scope of thinking allowed by the pope, at least - while she has been repeatedly and harshly chastised for "unwomanly" behavior to the point where she self-censures her own thoughts more often than not. While Yves was away making a name for himself as a natural philosopher and gaining the patronage of King Louis, she was shunted off to a convent where she was forced into silence and punished for her musical compositions and studying advanced mathematics (which the nuns considered a form of spellcraft, burning her notes and correspondences). Comparatively, life at Versailles, confined as it is in so many ways, is the embodiment of pure liberty. She tries to become the ideal noblewoman, and is very happy to have risen as far as lady-in-waiting to a high-ranked family (the daughter of the king's legitimate brother and his German-born princess wife), but still yearns toward the forbidden fruits of intellectual curiosity. Yves, once her partner and champion when they were children on Martinique, has grown into someone she hardly recognizes after their years apart, far more willing to stick her in the prison society has built for highborn women (or in the veil of a nun, which he considers a perfectly acceptable solution that would also keep her free of immoral temptations of the flesh, not caring how the nuns of Martinique were even worse than high society when it came to proscribing a woman's thoughts and roles); he even seems reluctant to accept her help in the study of the sea monsters, for all that they were always partners in his studies back on Martinique. It takes a long, long time for the presence of the sea monster to begin to wear through the thick shell Marie-Josephe has built around herself and recognize that she's dealing with a person, not a mere animal... which raises a dire implication: if sea monsters are not mere beasts - placed in the world by God for the use of Man, as the church teachers her - but people with souls, then King Louis would be committing a mortal sin to consume their flesh in the pursuit of his own immortality. But how is she to convince anyone, when she's the only one who seems to understand Sherzad's songs and the images they weave? Even her own brother doesn't want to believe her, as not only would doing so defy his Biblical understanding of the world, but it would threaten King Louis's patronage of his studies. The matter is further complicated with the arrival of Pope Innocent at Versailles, in a long-awaited reconciliation between Rome and France that will create a world-spanning superpower to crush Protestant and heathen dissent; the pope already is angered by the liberal attitudes of many in the king's court, where they let mere women assist in ungodly pursuits and indulge sinful ideas, and isn't at all likely to reconsider the church's previous findings that allowed that sea monsters were not actual demons but simply natural beasts.
The whole tale is rather ponderous as it slowly takes shape, and even when it moves it tends to plod and loop and backtrack as Marie-Josephe questions her own observations and conclusions and runs into a near-impenetrable wall of skepticism on all fronts, all of which meander through the sumptuously detailed days and nights of courtly life and the power struggles among the nobility over who can most please the Sun King on his gilded and bejeweled throne. Victories are often cut short and crushed into agonizing defeats, as those with the greatest power to enact change invariably prove obstinately, even violently, opposed to doing so. The ending manages to be somewhat satisfactory, though I have to wonder if McIntyre intended to write more; there is "sequel potential", as the saying goes, in how things end. With that said, I'm not sure I would have read another book if it had existed. For all that I appreciated the deep research and faithfully reproduced details of not only the physical but the mental setting, and while there were some very imaginative ideas that were ultimately explored, I ultimately didn't find the world or that characters that pleasant to be around.
As a closing note... this one was for you, Dad. You weren't a drinker (save of root beer), so pouring one out for you seems inappropriate. Consider this me lifting one up - a book - in your memory.

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