Francesca Lia Block, Ecstasia (Firebird, 2004)
Francesca Lia Block, Primavera (Firebird, 2004)
Ecstasia
Somewhere, not too far from a poisoned ocean, is the city of Elysia. It is a city of the young. When its inhabitants show signs of age, they go Under, where they have plaster casts made of their still-beautiful bodies, and then live out the rest of their days wrapped in linen so that they need not see how ugly they have become. When they die, those casts will become their sarcophagi, preserving their one-time beauty.
In Elysia, everyone is young and beautiful and eats sugar and drinks champagne and dresses up in costumes at night. Nothing grows there that is not in a hothouse. Nothing there has more substance than spun sugar.
In Elysia lives the band Ecstasia. Calliope plays keyboards in Ecstasia, and has visions. Her lover Dionisio plays bass, and drinks too much. Dionisio's childhood friend, beautiful Paul with the scarred face, writes their songs, and sings them, and plays guitar. Calliope's brother Rafe plays the drums.
Rafe is in love for the first time with a girl who floats above the earth, high on the tightrope she walks at the circus. This first blush of young love consumes him, and almost ruins him. Lily is an addict, hooked on a drug called Orpheus, which brings back the dead in visions.
Somewhere Under, where they all go sometime, is the Doctor. He makes drugs like Orpheus and Beauty and the Beast. He will give them to you, if you can convince him that you want them enough. But he was not always thus.
The four make their music, and dream of the world outside the city, of the clean desert, where they can be free of Under forever. Calliope has visions of bringing up from below the old ones. But they are all addicts, hooked on the sugar and the glitter of Elysia.
Primavera
Nearly two decades on, Ecstasia has built their paradise in the desert, made their mirage real. Calliope and Dionisio's daughter, Primavera, born Under Elysia, has grown up here, and has never known anything else. Her voice calls flowers from the earth, and they bloom for her. She is the Spring spirit of this place.
She feels smothered by it, and by her love for a man she cannot have. When a stranger comes to the oasis in the desert and offers her a motorcycle, she takes it, and flees the only home she has ever known. She heads for the darkness and the glitter of the city. She will find horror, and old family secrets, and decay. Perhaps she will also find healing, and herself.
Anyone who has read my previous two reviews of Ms. Block's books (Dangerous Angels and Girl Goddess #9) can see that I was an instant fan of her work. I fell in love with her prose style, with her numinous almost-here realities. Mia, our marvelous Book Editor, took to bribing me with Block books for review. I was terribly excited to get Ecstasia and Primavera. Among other things, I was very pleased to be reading something darker by Block. Dangerous Angels was beautiful, and the darker parts of life weren't ignored completely, but they were touched on only lightly. Girl Goddess #9 was darker, but still didn't get to the depths I wanted to see explored. I thought that these books would. So I dived in.
And was disappointed.
I was disappointed by so many things that it's hard to know where to begin. Perhaps the most far-reaching problem is that, while these books call up darkness, and refer to darkness, and show darkness, they don't actually deal with or very much explore that darkness. Some people fall into darkness, into addiction or despair, and the reasons for this are shown, but people who truly fell just die, and people who were more briefly affected get better without a lot of struggle. Horrific things happen to some of the people in these books, and they either die of it or are magically healed. They don't have to deal with any aftermath, any recovery. Kidnapped, imprisoned, emotionally scarred? Oh, get away and find your people again, and it's all better. Imprisoned and systematically raped in a whorehouse where the prostitutes are chimerical hybrids and slaves? Oh, find your true love who heals you with a touch, and escape, and get married, and it's all better. I know these books are allegories and fables, but really, they lose a lot of credibility by that. The story seems so much less real for it, and there are ways to show that healing process in keeping with the style of the story.
The names became a problem for me. There was a strong thread of names from Greek mythology running through it, and sometimes they worked very well for me, but sometimes they fell a bit flat. Calliope works well (the goddess is a Muse, patron of lyric poetry, and her name means "beautiful voice"), and even gives a clue to the identity of the Doctor, who created the drug Orpheus. And Dionisio isn't bad, but while Dionysos is God of Wine and Sacred Passions, it doesn't sit well with me to settle his name on an incipient alcoholic, or the member of the band who seems to have the hardest time with the 'sacred' part of 'sacred passion'. Elysia certainly calls up images of a paradise (being the happy afterworld of the ancient Greeks), but implies that the people there are already dead. This one might have been intentional, but perhaps a reference to the land of the lotus-eaters might have been more appropriate.
In Ecstasia, a major thrust of the book was that the old should not be exiled, but cherished. This concept is never actually demonstrated, though. The journey to bring the old ones up from Under falls between the books, and none of those elders are characters in either book, really. Ms. Block does make one minor reference to this problem in Primavera, however, when one of the characters acknowledges that the respect for elders never entirely sank in.
Speaking of that journey, I'm a bit confused as to why it doesn't appear in the books. Characters spend most of Ecstasia talking about not going Under, and having visions about leading the old ones up, and there's all this implication about it . . . and then it doesn't happen. It's years in the past at the beginning of Primavera. You're simply told in the second book that it happened and that Ecstasia are considered heroes because they did it. Why not show the heroism of the act? Why not show the transformative process that the characters would've had to go through for that particular journey to the Underworld? I think that the books really lose a lot from that omission.
Both books are riddled with song lyrics. Now, I am not the type who can set lyrics on a page to any kind of mental tune. When I was growing up reading Tolkein, the dwarves' song ended up as one of those interminable, two-note 'Wreck of the Gordon Lightfoot' ballads (to paraphrase Steven Brust). This is even worse when they're free verse lyrics, with no rhyme, not even any readily apparent scansion. Ugh. They were, honestly, hard for me to read at all, and made worse because they were stream-of-consciousness. I can see that, in a book about musicians, you need to have some lyrics of their songs; I don't think that these books needed that many, though.
I'm confused as to why the culture of Elysia, which places a premium on youth and beauty, but not on fertility, would object so strongly to homosexuality that a young man would feel he had to hide it, and even produce an apparently psychosomatic rash bad enough to leave scars. Historically and sociologically, this makes little sense to me. The more hedonistic a culture is, the more likely it is to accept open homosexuality. A brief glance at history demonstrates this.
Overall, I found the imagery in both books cloudier, less defined than in other books I've read by this author. Much of it seems as if it ought to be conveying something symbolically, but then fails to actually get it across. Not just simple imagery, either, but larger symbols, like the villains of the books. Gunn, the antagonist in Primavera, I found both less frightening and less comprehensible than the villain from Missing Angel Juan, who was also one of those external-evil-as-aspect-of-internal-fear characters.
Up to this point, I've been talking about the two books collectively. This is not an entirely accurate way to portray them, as they do have significant differences. I enjoyed Primavera a great deal more than Ecstasia. I found it to be more cleanly written, less cluttered with song lyrics and stream-of-consciousness drug trip descriptions. The plot was a little less coherent, though, and the problem I mentioned above, wherein a character recovers much too quickly and easily from horrible harm done, is more egregious.
Ecstasia seems to be an allegory for Los Angeles, the city that famously loves youth and beauty. As such, it has little resonance for me. I have intentionally removed myself from that type of society as much as possible. The use of one of my favorite myths, Orpheus and Eurydice, ought to have helped with this, but didn't. It was played out only in obsessive, addictive, harmful forms; the initiatory form of it was hinted at, but never consummated.
Primavera did a little better with the model of the Rape of Persephone. It didn't use it quite as blatantly, for one thing, and showed the journey into darkness as a genuinely necessary and transformative process. This one rang hollow in the end, though, because it failed to carry out the theme of returning to darkness, and darkness as a renewing and nurturing thing.
While discussing Francesca Lia Block in the Break Room here, Jessica said of Block's worlds that "They just usually seem to be like they're set in a shimmery soap-bubble world, reflecting ours — but, you know, smaller. And easily poppable." I agree with her completely. Sometimes, this soap-bubble quality serves the author well. Other time, it just falls flat.
I still like Ms. Block's other works, but reading these, I was left wondering what happened to the crystalline clarity I'd so admired in Dangerous Angels and Girl Goddess #9.
Other reviews of Francesca Lia Block books from
GMR:
I Was a Teenage Fairy
Echo
