Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I [Hardcover]

The cover is certainly very snazzy, but it's a bit misleading: it implies a kind of evocative, lush-language'd Dunsany-esque sort of story. The which this isn't: if fantasy had space operas, that's what it'd be. Which doesn't mean there aren't moments of magical beauty--there are--but they're the leaven (and the story rises higher for them), not the meat.

Imagine that Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, was actually one of his histories--a secret history ruthlessly suppressed by the Dan-Brownian Orbis Humanis society. Imagine that Miranda's story didn't end with her marriage to Ferdinand, but began when her magician father bound her in service to the goddess Euronyme to gain immortality for himself and his family; that Prospero didn't destroy his books but transformed them into the tools of power that would grant his children dominion over the powers of the earth.

Now start the story four hundred years later, with a cool and wealthy CEO-magician finding a mysterious message written in secret phoenix-fire letters: "I have woken evil powers! Warn the family! Beware the Shadowed Ones!" This is Miranda Prospero, whose global corporation acts as intermediary between the world of myth, demons, angels, powers and principalities and an unwitting humanity which has for centuries been kept (mostly) safe from them. The corporate jet (for example) is magic-enhanced, which helps (a bit) when the dragon attacks. The adventures begin when the icily virgin Miss Prospero discovers that it's not enough to send one of her airy indentured servants (the Aerie Ones themselves would say "slaves") to investigate her father's possible disappearance--the woken power (or powers) attack her in her home, destroying part of it and stealing a potent weapon. Thus begins her world-spanning quest to find her father, and warn her estranged brothers. Monster island, gates to hell, faery revels--it's all here.

What I enjoyed most about the book was, of course, the secret world--I love how the insane Prospero family's story reveals the magical world underlying our own, and how Lamplighter interweaves both pagan and Christian mythology. In one chapter we have the teind to Hell juxtaposed with Santa Claus--and it works. I love all the supporting cast, especially Miranda's hard-boiled detective Mab, a North wind enfleshed to serve Prospero, Inc, who's lived as bond-servant in the U.S. long enough to have developed some revolutionary ideas about their master-servant relationship. Miranda I like rather less well: but as an immortal young woman, emotionally trapped as the 16-year-old bride abandoned by her fiancé at the altar, sworn to virginity as the price of her powers--and quite possibly bound as terribly as the aerie servants to serve Prospero's whims--she's clearly got a boat-load of maturing to do. Right now I don't think she deserves either of her would-be demon lovers (even if neither one is as he seems)

Fair warning: this is only the first book of a three book series. The good news? Books two and three are already written: they just need to work their way through the editing/publishing process.

Shakespeare is a very common subject for fantasy. The fact that he has some fantasy within his own plays has proven inspirational to other authors using him and his works as inspiration for their own stories. I've read and am aware of a number of these. Sarah Hoyt's trilogy involving Shakespeare's interactions with Faerie. Elizabeth Willey's trio of novels had a Prospero as a sorcerer and estranged part of a world-spanning family, creating a land instead of exile on an island. My friend Elizabeth Bear has mined this territory in the back half of her Promethean Age novels (although she is as much a fan of Kit Marlowe as Shakespeare).


Into this field has waded L. Jagi Lamplighter. Her husband is John C. Wright, whose own style and tastes range from the Golden Age trilogy, through the Orphans of Chaos trilogy, to, of all things, a sequel to a Van Vogt novel. It would be a mistake to think, though, that Lamplighter's style and sensibilities are a clone of her husband.

No, what she has created in Prospero's Lost is quite different. Modern Day, Our Earth Fantasy is very common these days, but it seems that every other book in the F/SF section is a Vampire novel, one way or another. Fantasy is in ascendancy over Science Fiction, and Vampires are leading over other types of fantasy.

Thankfully for me, Prospero's Lost is a fantasy of a different type. It might be helpfully be classified as a Secret Arcane History. In Lamplighter's universe, there is a hierarchy of arcane beings with the detail and complexity of a Gnostic universe. The novel's heroine, Miranda, tangles and meets with demons, elves, elementals, magicians, and even Santa Claus (a depiction that reminded this reader of the Narnian version as much as traditional depictions). There are references to unicorns, angels, and other beings between Man and God. The universe is a Christian universe and Protestant-Catholic theology comes into the plot, however, Lamplighter effectively populates the spaces between Demons, Man, Angels and God. Most people in this world have no idea of these beings, of course. In that sense, I wonder if Lamplighter has read the RPG Nobilis for some inspiration on the complex mythology.

The story is the growth and development of Miranda.Devoted daughter of her father, Prospero, ageless and virginal, the disappearance of her father spurs her out, in true Hero fashion, from the comfort of her home to find her diasporatic siblings, in a quest to find (and save) her father. Along the way, in a fashion that reminded me a bit of Pratt and De Camp, we have an elemental modeled along the lines of a noir detective, a modern day Circe, an aging demon hunter, hell hounds, narrow escapes, adventures and Christmas Dinner at the House of Santa Claus. Flashbacks, that help establish the characters and their motivations. And the Three Shadowed Ones and the mystery of just what happened to the patriarch of the clan.

Okay, I've gotten this far without invoking Mr. Zelazny but I will now. Lamplighter is a fan of Zelazny (she cut her teeth on the ADRPG) and although these are new characters, on a Secret History Earth, the influence of Zelazny on this novel is similar to, say, the aforementioned Elizabeth Willey novels. The author clearly has read and loved Roger's work (like her husband does) and it has flavored this work (again, like John's Orphans of Chaos). It was a conscious effort on my part to decide that the Circe-like sister to Miranda "is definitely not Fiona after all". So don't come to this book looking explicitly for Jack of Shadows or Corwin analogues, but people who devour Zelazny's oeuvre will definitely appreciate Lamplighter's sensibilities and writing.

Shakespeare didn't give us the whole story of Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel, et al. If you want to find out what really happened to the characters from The Tempest, pick up L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost. It turns out that Miranda and Ferdinand didn't get married, Ariel wasn't freed, and Prospero didn't get rid of his staff and books. Instead, Miranda found The Well at the World's End and brought back the life-preserving water for her father and her siblings.

Now, centuries later, she runs Prospero Inc, a corporation that negotiates with many of Earth's supernatural beings so they'll stay content and won't lash out at humans. If Prospero Inc wasn't on the job, we'd have a lot more hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other "natural" disasters. You didn't know about all this because it gets covered up by the Orbis Suleimani, the Circle of Solomon from which the Freemasons split off. This secret society has managed to keep most evidence of the supernatural out of our history books and to make us believe that most "legends" and "myths" are only fiction.

When we meet Miranda, she's just found a note from her father which indicates that he's in trouble, that The Shadowed Ones are trying to steal the Prosperos' magical staffs, and that she must warn her siblings. You might expect that Miranda, a CEO who has assistants, a cell phone, and flies a Lear jet, could easily take care of this with a few phone calls, text messages, emails, or an announcement on the family blog, but if that were the case, the entire plot of Prospero Lost could have been condensed into 3 pages, so... no. Not knowing the whereabouts of any of her siblings, Miranda calls her servant Mab, the Aerie spirit who inhabits a body which looks and acts like Sam Spade. While they hunt down her family and dodge Hell's minions, Miranda is forced to think about some heavy issues such as slavery, salvation, duty, insanity, loyalty, and faith.

I was attracted to Prospero Lost because of its gorgeous cover and because the description reminded me of Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles (and Kage Baker said Amber fans should like it). While it's true that both books contain an assortment of powerful and ambitious siblings who have lived for centuries and have abnormal concepts of familial bonds, the similarities end there. While the ideas in Prospero Lost are intriguing and Lamplighter's writing style is pleasant enough, the story lacks the inventiveness and style that characterizes Zelazny's work.

The first problem is that Miranda (the viewpoint character) is a prissy daddy's girl. While I admire her loyalty, I think she's boring. Other characters give her titles such as "Ice Queen" and "Maiden of Ice," which tells you that she's kind of hard to warm up to. Her brothers aren't any better: Theo is dull and sluggish, Mephisto is insane and obnoxiously silly. Their sister Logistilla is better -- she lives on a Caribbean island with animal servants who used to be her boyfriends.

The next problem is that the world-building is mostly done through flashback or dialogue, mostly as Mab interviews Miranda and a couple of her brothers. This is the way we learn about the Prosperos' ancient connections with Peter the Great, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Louis XIV, the Loch Ness Monster, the Three Musketeers, Father Christmas, the tulip craze in Holland, the East India Company, a raid on the holy relics in the Vatican, etc. Through exposition Miranda explains how characters and creatures we thought of as myth or legend are real and that much that we consider mundane is really arcane. Some of these items are clever and fit well, but many seem thrown in (sometimes in list format) simply as an attempt to add weight to the world building. Unfortunately, they interrupt the action and make the plot feel slow and plodding. There are some exciting action scenes, several of which are amusing, and a couple of which are frightening, but there are also some that are just weird and never seem to settle into the plot very well. For this reason, Prospero Lost reminded me most of Matthew Sturges's Midwinter -- gorgeous cover art and lots of cobbled-together mythology masking a thin story and weak characters.

By the end of Prospero Lost, Miranda and Mab have a long list of questions without answers. Nothing has been resolved and we realize that we must read at least the next novel, Prospero in Hell, to get any sense of accomplishment. I have Prospero in Hell on my shelf, but I'm not sure that I'll open it. I could have very easily left it alone if the most exciting part of Prospero Lost hadn't occurred at the end of the very last sentence. Also, I'm a little curious to see where Lamplighter is going with this, especially since I suspect she has Christian allegory in mind.

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