Who? Catherynne M. Valente
What? "Space Opera"
Why? Come on, it's Valente's book on Eurovision. And main character is called Decibel Jones.
When? May 2018
Rating: 7/10, it's Eurovision after all.
I do love glitter though. Glitter and kitsch, and Polish commentary (Artur Orzech FTW!), and have morbid fascination with horrible attempts to sing made by people who shouldn’t do that – and it’s also an occasion to laugh at all that and drink alcohol – that brings me every year in front of my laptop. All of that made me super-excited when I’ve heard about “Space Opera”. Eurovison? In space?! Written by Valente?!? GIB. NOW.
Was I disappointed? The same way I am disappointed with every Valentes book except “Deathless”. Beautifully written but in the end without any other purpose than being beautifully written. In case of “Space opera” it was more weird and flashy in sake of weird and flashy. I do understand that – it is, in the end, an Eurovision of a novel and Eurovision is by design weird, flashy and pointless (as opposed to horrors of WW2). For me though the only value of Eurovision is making fun of how horrible it is. So, yeah, Valente managed to create literary equivalent of swedish-pop song contest and it is predictably awful.
Of course I am exaggerating.
There are some very strong elements in “Space Opera”. For one: I love the characters (by which I mean Decibel and Oort), and I was impressed by the way Valente kills one character before they even have a chance to became part of the novel and this is still a very impactful death and has a strong meaning throughout the whole thing. And I was genuinely in shock how invested I became in the fate of Decibel and Oort, to the point where I was screaming IT BETTER HAVE HAPPY ENDING. I liked the absurd of it all, I liked all the puns.
Then again maybe not.
I felt like nothing except the backstory of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros was actually thought through. That was the meat, that was good, that have emotions and drama in it. All the rest was just rather gaudy ornamentation, with no meaning, no point and it was… Would I call it boring? Maybe not. But it was… tedious at points. It was supposed to be weird and flashy but in the end fell flat on its face because it was *too absurd* and became just pointless word-salad. There was no internal logic governing the universe of Ursulas and all that other crap I wasn’t really compelled to remember, because it had no meaning to the story at all. I remember Ursulas because the name was easy and have no idea which one were they anyway.
I do not regret buying this book or reading it? Not at all, but except flashbacks parts it was mostly just meh with a hit of “oh come on, that’s plain dumb” here and there. It was fun, I’m not denying that, but too long to hold the meat on its bones with this type of absurd humor because it was to detached from the plot itself. I feel like it would be much, much better novel if about 1/3 of it, especially in the last section, was simply thrown away. I get that describing all the weird ways songs were sang in the final was supposed to show how rich, diverse and weird the universe is compared to old boring Earth but it simply wasn’t. It was just words put together, mashed into weird combinations I honesty had nothing to do with because they were too abstract.
I am conflicted because, contrary to probably all of the above, I like “Space Opera”. Maybe it is the same way I do, in a way, like the horrible music atrocity of Eurovision. Maybe, in the end, Valente was so successful in writing novel version of Eurovision that there was no way I would like it.
Maybe you should just read it yourself. Decibels story alone is worth it anyway.
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