Angels of Music

[igenlode]

To anyone who was interested in Kim Newman's Angels of Music crossover between Charlie's Angels, "Phantom of the Opera" and just about every pulp fiction you can think of written or set in the 19th century:

I discovered that somebody has uploaded what appears to be a pirated copy of the text of the entire novel (so far as I could check against the Google Books preview) onto fanfiction.net as a POTO/Sherlock Holmes crossover https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12890290/1/

It probably ought to be reported for gross plagiarism/breach of copyright. However, I read the whole thing through, just to make sure ;-) and can confirm that there is no Raoul in it (unless you count Anatole and/or Raoul the policeman from the Claude Rains film) and very little Christine (who is depicted in this as a feather-brain). A couple of other Leroux characters make one-sentence cameos, the Marquis de Coulteray from "La Poupée Sanglante" and Joseph Rouletabille, as do some regular characters from other Kim Newman novels.

As a book, it's a bit uneven; the Grand Guignol section is probably the most powerful, but it's very nasty. The 'Burgher Kane' one is a bit limp (though I was glad Freddy survived) and the other two are so-so. The main interest is in spotting all the cameos; it took me much longer than it should have to work out why Gilberte, narrator of the final section, sounded so vaguely familiar...

(Actually, one weird thing is that the Christine of the original three Angels, although clearly intended to be Leroux' Christine, is named in the opening chapter as 'Christine DuBois', but there is a later reference in Ch8 to the 'ultimate defection' of 'Christine Daaé' — I don't know if the continuity error is a conscious suggestion by Newman that there might have been a 'real' Christine as well, or a change introduced by the pirate for his upload.)

Comments

[erimia]

Ohhh I love Newman and I keep hearing about this story, though I haven't read it yet. It's a shame if Christine is portrayed as an airhead. Newman is known for filling his stories to the brim with references to many other works that I more often than not fail to catch, so I don't know how accurate or thorough the individual references are.

[igenlode]

I believe these may have originally been written independently at different times as separate short stories that happen to use a shared universe, and I can see them working better like that than when collected together as a novel. I think the thing about them is that they are basically shallow — Newman's most successful novels (like "The Bloody Red Baron") actually make you care about the characters they appropriate and their loyalties and betrayals. The only place where that happens here is with the Grand Guignol segment; this stuff is mostly flashy surface concept.

The idea of a Batman/Die Fledermaus crossover is very clever, for example, but I have major problems with the intended —I think— emotional kick in that story because we happen to know that in Newman's universe, vampires are real... and in fact one of the supporting characters, Geneviève Dieudonné actually is a vampire, although the protagonists never discover this. So while the idea of Professor van Helsing's vampire-sceptic wife is an amusing one and the idea of a 'prank' fits the source material, the idea that the whole story of L'Inconnue was a tragic misunderstanding didn't work for me because we are given no real alternative explanation. Other, I suppose, than a seriously unreliable narrator whose account we are supposed to doubt in retrospect — a device I tend to find profoundly unsatisfactory save when I use it myself :-(

And the other segments don't even attempt any kind of emotional depth; it's quickfire spot-the-reference Charlie's Angels stuff, with added lists of cameos. As the review I linked to says, this really isn't POTO fan-fiction: the whole Opera Ghost Agency set-up is just a shell for the action, with Erik and the Daroga shoehorned into the roles of Charlie and Bosley.

The opening story, with the idea that Christine and Trilby are actually hypnotised into being perfect female agents under Erik's mental control, is a little closer to the original material, and I imagine this was the initial crossover concept that Newman later decided to use as a framework for further stories featuring different 'Angels of Music'. But obviously there wasn't a lot of scope for the idea that your protagonists have very little free will (even in the opening, Newman has to use the 'rebellious' Irene Adler as his viewpoint character), so it gets dropped, with a brief suggestion that his experiences with Christine made Erik realise that perhaps this wasn't such a good idea after all.

[cloudsinvenice]

I think you've explained why I bounced so hard off Angels of Music despite it being so very much my sort of thing. I'd just read The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha, and I had a lot of feels about Kate Reed and Geneviève Dieudonné, but AoM didn't seem to be trying for the same kind of emotional depth or journey. It feels a bit like watching Stranger Things and going, "They've lifted that shot and that musical cue from The Terminator, nice!" the whole time...

[igenlode]

Yes, I suppose having the multiple short stories -- each with its own set of obligatory cameos -- doesn't help because it means that we get a larger cast and less time to establish each character.

I hadn't actually remembered that Kate Reed was a canon protagonist (it's fifteen years or so since I read "Anno Dracula" et al) and was surprised to find her referred to on the Web as 'vampire journalist Kate Reed' -- she definitely doesn't seem to be a vampire in this story (it would seriously change the plot), so presumably the idea is that it's set in her back continuity before she was turned?

[cloudsinvenice]

I've found this a huge help: http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/AnnoDracula.htm