In the Cards: "The Stockholm Octavo"

The assassination of Sweden's Gustav III may be one of the more outrageous events of the turbulent 1790s, but it usually falls into shadow when compared to the execution of France's Louis XVI less than one year later. Indeed, outside of the realm of historians and Verdi fans, few people in day to day life realize that Sweden had a king who was shot at a masked ball at the Royal Swedish Opera. (Sadly, the original building was demolished in 1892, showing that man's desire to knock down beautiful old buildings and replace them with dubious new ones is not a new trait.)

Gustav III of Sweden met his fate in March 1792, when he was shot in the back and died days later of septicemia. Gustav had come to the throne twenty years earlier, after the death of his father, staged a coup against the reigning aristocracy, and reformed the country's political systems so completely that by the 1790s, there were two major camps vying for power-Royalists and Patriots (the latter made up of the former ruling aristocrats that believed their country was, for lack of a better term, going to hell in a handbasket). The situation had reached a boiling point by the time of Gustav's death, and it is this cauldron sedition and treachery that makes up the background of Karen Engelmann's debut novel, The Stockholm Octavo.

The plot of Verdi's Un ballo in Maschera revolves around a love-triangle of king-soprano-assassin and, to shake censors concerned about regicide in an unstable political climate, is set in Boston. The Stockholm Octavo, takes the same story and twists it a little. Instead of a sympathetic king or courtier, we have a lowly custom's officer with an interest in card games, women, and the Occult.

Emil Larsson, customs officer and card sharp, is ordered by his superiors to find a wife in order to maintain his position. To this end, he consults Sofia Sparrow, owner of an exclusive gambling salon and a seer. She lays out an octavo for Emil: a circle of eight cards that represent the people who will influence his path to happiness and love. In his quest to find the eight people represented in the cards, Emil is thrown into a dangerous world of politics, revenge, hidden loyalties, poison, and madness. We meet The Uzanne, a baroness and fan collector with a hatred for the autocratic Gustav that is so intense it borders on madness; a runaway apothecary with working knowledge of semi-poisonous soporifics, a dedicated fan maker, a Seer (based on a real soothsayer, Madame Arvidson, the Ulrica of the opera), and numerous functionaries and hangers-on.

Emil needs to find the eight people whom fate has decreed will guide him on his journey to love and contentment. His Companion, the person whose actions will shape his, is a widowed baroness with intensely anti-Gustav sentiments and a knowledge of the language of fans that makes her ruthlessness even more terrifying, in that no one takes her for anything more than a pampered woman. It is The Uzanne whom this story ultimately revolves around, and her machinations to end the reign of Gustav and restore the proper order to things. Emil himself plays only a tiny part; it is the constellation of characters moving around him, to either encourage or thwart (or both, or neither) the coming assassination. Alas for the reader, that singularly interesting premise falls flat in the telling.

There is a common rule, perhaps the golden rule, of fiction writers: Show, don't Tell. Never, ever, ever Tell if what you need to convey can be done so by Showing. Do not tell the reader "Let me tell you about X. X was born in France and grew up in a large family. When she was 18, she married the Count of S and came to live in G. She learned about the art of Z and sought out the best learning to eventually become a master of her field." Were you as bored reading that as I was typing it? This sort of writing usually doesn't make it passed the editorial stages or, if the author is absolutely unable to make a scene Showing the reader, can be made into dialogue. "I discovered the art of poisoning as a girl, and it intrigued me. Suddenly I had the power of God in my hands, to be used as I wished. Power, x. Can you imagine it? The sweet taste of secret knowledge, gleaned from years of researching ancient tomes." See, now that's fun. That's something the reader can sink their teeth into, because it adds another important aspect of a story: voice, which we'll come to in a minute.

Telling is especially bad if the author stops to tell us in minute detail what the character is wearing and how the room is set. No one cares. A brief, subtle mention of it will do.

From time to time, Engelmann falls into the trap of Telling. Not often, but enough that the discerning reader picks up on it. Her book is fast-paced, but it suffers from the narrator, Emil, pausing to tell us things that he could rather show us. This, though, is more a problem of Voice and its twin sister, Perspective, than anything else.

There are three different main perspectives in The Stockholm Octavo, and at least two minor ones. We have Emil, The Uzanne, and Johanna, the protégée and love interest. This is all very well and good, but the book itself is written in the First Person: the "I" perspective. Thus, we have Emil (who really doesn't do much besides vacillate between characters, wailing to himself) narrating the intimate thoughts and actions of events that he had no opportunity to ever see. The author uses a clever trick to get away with this: she puts a cast of characters who "witnessed" the event at the top of every chapter and passes it back as History. It works fine, but perhaps it would have been better to opt for the Third Person Omniscient, which allows the reader to get into each character's head without the narrator resorting to hearsay.

So you have an excellent premise with an unfortunate narrator and lots of awkward scenes that would have benefited from a simple change of voice.

This is not to say that The Stockholm Octavo is poorly written. Quite the opposite, in fact: it is a well-paced, well-plotted and well-told tale, with characters to love and hate. Unfortunately, there ARE technical details that keep the story from achieving that polish that comes to a truly excellent story. It reads a little like tonic water that has lost some of it's sparkle: still good, but ultimately leaving you dissatisfied.

The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmann.
Three out of five stars.