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3.0étoiles sur 5
Fun, But The Weakest of the Trilogy, Sep 7 2000
Par Un client
The Lyre of Orpheus continues the story of the characters introduced in The Rebel Angels -- Maria and Arthur Cornish, Simon Darcourt, Clement Hollier, etc. I read the Cornish Trilogy straight through, and while I very much enjoyed it, I thought Davies ran out of gas somewhere in the Lyre of Orpheus. What I liked so much about the first two books was Davies' delving into the personalities of the characters; What's Bred in the Bone deals more with Francis Cornish, but goes very deeply into the forces that shaped his life. Davies has great insight into human nature. In The Lyre of Orpheus, the characters' motivations are not well explored. For example, we learn that a character's wife has an affair that results in pregnancy, and that the man, with apparently little ado, not only forgives his wife and treats her with undiminished devotion, but also continues to regard her lover as the dear friend he had been. Well, that's great, but uncommon, and Davies makes no attempt to explain this astounding level of generosity other than to analogize it to the Arthurian legend (but that was a legend). Similarly, we learn that Simon Darcourt has taken something of a new path in his life, but for motivation we are told little more than that, after taking a walk in woods, he has decided to view his life differently. Instead of helping us to relate to these characters, Davies spends a great deal of time educating us about how to produce an opera, evidently a great love of his. Opera fans will find this great fun, but it doesn't make for a great story. Finally, the analogizing to Arthurian legend of the characters' lives that permeates the entire work as a leitmotif becomes increasingly heavyhanded as time wears on, almost to the point of self-parody. In short, it's an entertaining read, but not up to the level of the first two parts of the trilogy.
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4.0étoiles sur 5
Maria Sophia, Aoû 3 2000
In The Rebel Angels, Maria's character, provided in a first-person narrative, was so complex and interesting that I'd have been happy with a "Theotoky Trilogy"! Maria's friendship with Darcourt was well drawn and bittersweet. Perhaps a fourth of the way through Lyre, the third person omniscient narration no longer records Maria's thoughts, and Darcourt's journey of self-discovery really gets underway within the context of his Cornish text and the stories of the Hoffman opera and Maria's and Arthur's crisis. Thus, echoing "Henry's" review of this novel, I was disappointed that Maria's own journey remains "under a cloud" (as Darcourt put it), and the novel never really develops her character except as an unintended Guenevere and her final promise to "keep on trying." I'd have liked less rumination on the "magnanimous cuckold" theme--which seems strained after a while and never really reaches as deeply as possible into the pain of the Cornishes' crisis--and more development of Arthur's complex personality, perhaps Maria's research with the Portfolio (a story line pretty much dropped in Lyre), and other themes. Having said all this, however, I greatly enjoyed this novel, and the troublesome course toward the premiere of Hoffman's opera and the publication of Darcourt's life of Francis Cornish made for an erudite and pleasurable story. Davies' novels always provide a richer world than one finds in many stories, and it's a tribute to his gifts that he mixed so many rich worlds in this trilogy.
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3.0étoiles sur 5
Pretty good..., Aoû 1 2000
This is a pretty good book...it kept my attention and had enough pull to take me out of the real world for a time. Just one warning, however--do not go into this book expecting it to have very much to do with Arthurian legend!
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