CASSIEL'S SERVANT

Carey retells her debut novel, the darkly erotic political fantasy Kushiel’s Dart (2001), from the perspective of the protagonist’s lover, the warrior-priest Joscelin Verreuil.

Kushiel’s Dart was a first-person narrative by Phèdre, a courtesan and spy living in an alternate version of France called Terre d’Ange, who was chosen by the angel Kushiel as an “anguissette”: someone who finds physical pain and submission pleasurable. She uses all of her skills and capacities to ferret out a conspiracy against the queen of Terre d’Ange and foil an invasion. In the process, she falls in love with her bodyguard, Joscelin Verreuil, who breaks several vows he has made to the angel Cassiel—including celibacy—when he returns her affections and does his utmost to protect her against a number of threats. Now we get the opportunity to revisit these events from Joscelin’s point of view, but whether the reader will feel enriched by this is questionable. Phèdre is a unique, complicated character who uses her dark desires to disguise that she is also a fiercely intelligent and well-educated spy with a strong independent streak. As her fellow courtesan/spy Alcuin notes, she’s a paradox; as such, the first-person narration in Kushiel’s Dart helps to reveal her thought processes. But Joscelin is basically a trope character: a priest who breaks his vows for a woman and is tormented by the conflicting forces of love, loyalty, and faith. Third person makes him inscrutable and fascinating. You don’t entirely know what he’s really like in the beginning of Carey’s first book; we come to learn that he's a deeply feeling, passionate person whose attempt at stoicism ultimately fails. The first-person narration in this book makes him less mysterious and compelling, which is too bad. This is also an aggressively adjunct book that assumes you’ve read the source material, because it races by all the delicate details of the political conspiracy and how they’re ferreted out. It is somewhat fun to revisit the story, but it feels like an echo, perfunctory and lacking the poetry of the original. The additional material without Phèdre is frankly not all that interesting, either: In particular, Joscelin’s training to become a Cassiline Brother resembles practically every other fantasy novel’s sequence set in a remote school where children learn an elite skill.

For dedicated (and somewhat uncritical) fans only; others might prefer to revisit the previous work.