Ex Libris: Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon

You know, I really tried to like Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon.

After all, when you come across paragraphs like those below, you can see Hand's love of the prose, something that the reader can feel as he or she leafs through the pages:

I felt something then that has proved to be true. You have a first city as you have a first lover, and this was mine. I had read about the traffic, the poverty, the riots; the people living in boxes, the Dupont Circle crazies and the encampments of bitter veterans at Llafayette Park.

But nothing had prepared me for the rest of it. The tropic heat and humidity, so alien to me that I felt as though my northern blood was too thin and my grey eyes too pale to bear the burning daylight. The purple-charged dusk cut by heat lightning; the faint and antique glow of marble buildings.

...

For all its petty bureaucrats and burned-out storefronts, decaying warehouses turned into discos and the first yawning caverns that would be the city's Underground: still it all had a queer febrile beauty, not haunting so much as haunted. As much as Delphi or Jerusalem or Ur, it was a consecrated place: its god had not yet come to claim it, that was all.

Unfortunately, no book can be judged by prose alone as Hand adroitly takes some risks with this story via its structure. Some parts work wonderfully but others come off as awkward and graceless.

But before anything else: the main protagonist of this tale is Katherine Sweeney Cassidy, a freshman at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine in Washington, D.C. Like all coming-of-age tales, Sweeney (as she's called) falls in with the wrong crowd. But such a lovely, tragic crowd: Oliver, the handsome Oscar Wilde-like poet, and Angelica, the strong-willed Italian beauty who is destined to be touched by ancient powers.

Hand also throws into the tale the Benandanti, an ancient secret sect running the university about to face their age-old enemy: Othiym Lunarsa, the Moon Goddess. And it is the aforementioned triumvirate (Sweeney, Angelica, and Oliver) that will be the linchpin of the battle between the sect and the goddess with the world and the new millennium as the prize.

Imagine Clive Barker and Anne Rice's love child and you'd probably get Elizabeth Hand.

Like I said before, I love Hand's use of language here, something that's comparable with Graham Joyce or Jonathan Carroll. The three characters-- Sweeney, Angelica and Oliver-- as well as some minor characters are described with such personal detail that you'd wish you had friends like these in college. Likewise, Hand paints a haunting gothic image of the university in the reader's head with its angelesque statuary, looming gargoyles and the overwhelming smell of roses in the summer. Add to this the poetry of Constantine Cavafy and T.S. Elliot scattered throughout the story and it makes a lovely read.

Hand also plays with the novel's structure by combining a first-person narrative (via Sweeney) together with the third-person. This has interesting results as the writer manages to convey a close, bitter-sweet look at Oliver and Angelica through Sweeney's eyes that the normal third-person narrative wouldn't have done justice. However, due to the limitations of the first-person narrative, Hand constantly switches to third-person in order to move the story forward. And it's in the transition where the story first stumbles.

The second stumbling-block is also another transition: the first part of the book details Sweeney's life in college with the second part about what happened after (more than 15 years). Unfortunately, it seems that Hand over-reaches herself as this doesn't work as properly as it should. I'm probably biased but I've seen Stephen King do this better in combining a past event with a current situation. However, given the story's happenstance, I'm not blaming Hand much over this.

One last nitpick: Hand introduces a Filipino character named Baby Joe in the story. At first sight, it would seem that the author did a good job presenting what would be a non-stock character in books. However, I became kind of suspicious when the guy kept swearing using only one word. I mean, how many curse words are there in any language, right?

Overall, a reviewer commented that this book is about style over substance. She would probably be right. However, if you're like me and in love with the Prose, then some things are forgiveable.

I, for one, placed Elizabeth Hand on a list of authors to watch out for after reading this book.

Geez, I'm such a prose-whore.