Round the rich canvas, traced in living lines.
I finished A Candle for D’Artagnan yesterday over lunch. It was in some ways better than the previous books in the series, but it was still long, dull and mostly pointless.
Once again, we’re in a famous historical setting with our vampire lady, Octavia Clemens. This time it’s 17th Century France, around the time leading up to the Fronde. This was also the time of the Musketeers, as one might guess from the title. Octavia moves from her home near Rome to France, supposedly to help the soon-to-be Cardinal Mazarin seem more respectable in Parisian society. I was never really clear how she helped, but I guess at least it gave her an excuse to go to France. After this setup, the story proceeded basically the same as all the others — some political intrigue, exhaustive and obsessive descriptions of period clothing, and some mushy, hyper-romantic (not to mention sort of creepily graphic) sex scenes. There’s also a subplot about a fired farmhand pestering Octavia with small bombs, tripwires for her horses, etc.
As always, the historical background of the novel was impeccable, with almost all of the main characters being real figures in history. Only Octavia and her close friends are fictional, and they have no real impact on events transpiring around them, acting more just as a reader surrogate to get us more into the action. I will say again that I really think that Yarbro should try writing just straight historical fiction, or maybe even just historical fact, instead of trying to cram all this vampire bullshit into each story.
I’ll also mention that the last few pages of the book were incredibly disappointing, and could have been replaced with the single line, “And then everybody died.”
Now I’m reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I like it a lot.