Two women sit at a café table on the afternoon of an opening night. One is nineteen and about to sing the largest role of her life. The other has been the company’s prima donna for five seasons and has just realised she is finished. What passes between them is not a catfight and not a reconciliation. It is one woman telling another, plainly and without self-pity, that a career built on playing sixteen-year-olds ends when you stop looking sixteen, and asking her to remember that in twenty years when she is on the other side of the table. Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig is a novel about a masked man in a cellar. It is a much better novel about the women who are not him.
The Three Women of Our Strange Duet
Christine Daaé’s story is famous enough that the beats of Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig need no summary. What Craig adds, working with the Lloyd Webber estate’s blessing and inside the musical’s plot, is the company around her, and specifically three women who each represent a possible future.
Meg Giry is the friend. For most of the book she is exactly the cheerful confidante the source material requires, and then, late on, ambition arrives in her like an illness. She names it herself, on her knees on a friend’s floor, as a thing that burns and hurts and that she did not know she was capable of until she watched somebody else get what she wanted. The scene is uncomfortable in the right way. It is also honest about how ambition curdles into resentment when it has nowhere to go, and how the resentment lands on the nearest available friend rather than on any of the men actually making the decisions.
Carlotta Giudicelli is the future Christine is not thinking about. Everyone in the novel treats her as a joke, and the novel lets them, and then hands her one late conversation that retroactively reframes every tantrum. She has sung for emperors. She has spent a lifetime acquiring a skill just in time to be told nobody wants to look at her performing it. And she refuses pity, which is the only reason the scene works.
Madame Giry is the third, and the most withholding. She has kept one secret for thirty years, since she was sixteen and saw a caged child at a travelling fair, and the account she finally gives is delivered flatly, without gothic embroidery. Her whole life since has been shaped by a single act of pity, and she has never decided whether it was mercy or the beginning of everything that followed.
What Everyone Wants From Christine
Set those three against the men, and the shape of Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig becomes clear.
The teacher in the cellar wants her voice as an instrument for his composition. He says so, repeatedly, and the novel does not soften it: he needs the world to hear his music, and she is the means. The vicomte wants her, sincerely and warmly, and also wants her to stop singing, live in Burgundy, and produce an heir. His mother wants her gone. The managers want a body they can put onstage on short notice.
The cleverness of Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig is that none of these men is written as a villain of ambition. Two of them genuinely love her. The novel simply keeps stacking their requests until the pattern is visible, and then lets Christine notice it herself, without a speech. When she resigns her career it is presented as her own decision, made freely, in bed, after a nightmare, and it is one of the bleakest passages in the book precisely because everyone involved thinks it is a happy one.
There is a fourth woman worth naming, and she barely appears. Christine’s mother is dead before the first page, surviving only as a red chiffon scarf lost to the sea when Christine was sixteen and a photograph taken shortly after her wedding. Almost every important thing that happens to Christine is set in motion by somebody handing that scarf back to her, or promising to. It is a small, well-placed piece of construction, and it quietly asks what a girl with no mother and no money is supposed to do when the only people offering to take care of her all want something in return.
Craig earns the backstage half of Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig through experience rather than research. She stage-managed opera for years before she wrote novels, and the texture is unmistakable: spirit gum failing under hot lights, costumes sprayed with vodka instead of laundered, a conductor vamping to cover a missed entrance, a ghost light left burning in an empty house. The book closes with a glossary of theatre terms that is genuinely useful.
Where Our Strange Duet Overplays It
For all that, Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig is not without strain.
- The middle is a holiday. A seaside courtship followed by a country-house visit consumes a long stretch with almost nothing pushing against it.
- The lyrics are spoken aloud. Lines from the musical arrive as dialogue, and in prose they land as lyrics rather than as speech. A proposal is the worst instance.
- Christine’s will is suspended too often. She is mesmerised, compelled and puppeted more than once, which quietly undercuts a book sold on the value of her point of view.
- One long chapter resolves into a sleight of hand, aimed at the reader instead of advancing anybody’s story.
- There is no ending, only a hook for whatever comes next.
Readers who want more of Craig unbound by someone else’s canon should try The Thirteenth Child, her sharpest book on the subject of a bargain, or the more recent A Land So Wide. For the gothic mode at full strength there is Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker for a colder, angrier variety of haunting. On content: stalking and coercive control that the novel romanticises before it names, abduction, several deaths including a strangling, the public display of a disabled child, and non-explicit sexual content.
What It Leaves Behind
The masked man is the reason people will pick this up, and he is well done, more pitiable than seductive and more frightening for it. But he is also the least surprising thing here, because everyone already knows him. What lingers instead is a set of women watching a nineteen-year-old make a choice, each of them having already made the version of it available to her. The friend who found out too late how much she wanted something. The diva being retired by an audience that has moved on. The teacher who once let a child out of a cage and has been paying for it ever since. Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig was commissioned to give Christine a voice, and it does. The unexpected part is how much it has to say about everyone standing in the wings.