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Grand jeu: what a cop out to say you can’t describe the game and then say it isn’t music, math etc but never really paint what it is
This was the slowest book I've ever read. I would have DNF'd it if it wasn't an ARC, and if people hadn't spoken so highly of The Binding before this. It was painfully boring often, the pretentiously vague tone throughout was stifling, and with no great payoff at the end to cushion the blow. I guessed the big ~twist. Miscommunication was a heavily-used trope. Mental illness is used as a central, yet somehow very dismissed, plot point. I will say that occasionally it grabbed my attention, just enough to keep me going, but there were about three different points where I strongly felt as though the story should be wrapping up - the first of these being before the halfway mark. The Betrayals is an intricately composed story, that for all its brilliance, the writing was hard to read. I ended up having to resort to the audiobook to persevere, which revived my interest in the story. I absorbed and understood what was happening more than I did solely reading the kindle. The narrators did a really good job. I 100% recommend the audiobook for a better experience of the story. Or so I thought at first, anyway. The more we learnt about Aimé and Claire’s past, the more unsure I became. Was I just seeing things? Did I just not want Carfax, who was by far my favorite character in the book, to be dead? I hit my all-time low when Claire talked about Aimé coming home from Montverre in more dejected spirits than she had anticipated or them celebrating his and Léo’s seventy in absolute glee. Why would Claire be talking about herself in the third person? The part of this that I was the most regretful about, was that in the end there was no happy ending, per se. It leaves off incomplete but realistic, and the leaving the ending up to me is great, but not always, so I was really glad with the execution of it in this book.There are 4 POVs in this book (The Rat, The Magister Ludi, Leo and the past Leo) and I can only enjoyed 1 of them, the other 3 felt so unnecesarry or else… felt so bland and boring The decision to have Claire BE Carfax sat very strangely with me. The way it was handled felt very off. The trope of 'woman disguises herself as a man to attend something she wouldn't be able to as a woman' is as old as time, and in this scenario felt extremely trite and uninspired. Perhaps if there had been any nuance whatsoever in regards to how the narrative interacted with gender, instead of the heavy-handed mess that we got, this plot line could have worked better. It's just beautiful - written with such elegance and poise. What I love about Bridget's books is her ability to write the most magical worlds of escapism and yet anchor those worlds very much in today' Joanna Cannon The characters too played their part in disallowing the reader to ever feel close to an understanding of their nature or their motives. Mysteries abounded and every figure that featured here was cloaked in their own share of them. First off, can I just get a round of applause for the hauntingly atmospheric fantasy writing that is a Bridget Collins novel? Please, Bridget, from me, don’t ever let an editor chop your prose from a book. My word loving soul couldn’t take it.
Overall I was expecting more from this book. In terms of plot regarding the grand jeu there's not much going on since everything is abstract and we see that the characters are occupied with it, but in the end we don't really know what they are actually doing. It was a bit frustrating for me and I didn't really enjoy it. So to summarize my thoughts before this review gets even more out of hand: Yes, I loved this book. I loved the characters. I loved the world. I loved how it got me thinking. There is also an extremely clunky political atmosphere in the novel, which seems to take place in a sort of alternate 1930s Europe. The 'Party,' led by 'The Old Man,' rules over the region, and the main character Léo is a disgraced former head of cultural affairs whom the Party banishes to the grand jeu academy, his former school. The Party discriminates against Christians (no explanation here as to why) and is obsessed with nationalism and cultural unity. I cannot see how this was not a loose reimagining of the late Weimar era and the rise of the Nazi Party -- it so blatantly replaced Jewish people with Christians and the 'Old Man' was so obviously a Hitler-esque demagogue. This is some of the best fiction I've read in a while, and really good too. It's one of the few books I've read that are set in France, and is definitely one of the best.Pure magic. The kind of immersive storytelling that makes you forget your own name. I wish I had written it' - Erin Kelly Also, can we just talk about all the commentary on a women’s role in academia? So many of the snide remarks Claire experienced and the way she constantly had to prove she was better than her male peers, just so that she would be taken seriously at all, throws a lot of light on our own history. And maybe not even just history. As a girl studying a STEM subject, it’s kind of hard not to notice that there’s only a single female professor in our whole department, and that a noticeable majority of my fellow math students are guys… Of course, that’s still way better than actively being discouraged from studying at all, just because of your sex, but it just goes to show that it takes time for remnants of a system that barred women from university to fade altogether…. [For context, the first German university to allow women to study there was Heidelberg in 1895.]
A unique, unexpected and beautifully unsettling story ... gorgeously beguiling and totally addictive' Joanna Glen, author of The Other Half of Augusta Hope And let’s not forget that this had my favorite trope of all time!! If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you’ll know that “girl disguises herself as a boy to achieve something society has denied to her” just gets to me every single time. Okay, well, maybe not in Arabella of Mars, but it wasn’t really the trope’s fault in that one… 🙄 The Betrayals, though, had what is probably one of my favorite executions yet, apart from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet. At the end of the novel, Bridget Collins notes that the story, and particularly her Grand Jeu, was influenced by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Now if I'd remembered my university reading of that book, this one would have made a hell of a lot more sense. My Latin did, finally, come in handy when deciphering 'Magister Ludi' (Master/Teacher of the Game), but that's where my sense of accomplishment ended. The 'grand game' is a complex mix of music and math, philosophy, religion, and life itself, understood by the reader only in the abstract. Unlike us, the students and teachers at Montverre feel the power of the game, working to create the most intricate or clever version in competition with each other. So central is this process of creation that the game becomes more important than any character in the novel. It's so hard to write this review without any spoilers. One of the many reasons the synopsis is so confusing if it had even the tiniest bit more detail you would be spoiled.Putting that aside ... the writing is good, really good. Even through my confusion I was being drawn in and wanted to keep going. Some chapters are from Léo's perspective when he was a student; I enjoyed the changing relationship between he and another student, Carafax, although I didn't really like Léo himself. In the current timeline I appreciated the difficulties experienced by Claire being the only female there who was clearly resented by others in this male dominated field. Leo is in his second year and has been given a second chance at creation but the game, for him, is already tinged with grief and guilt. Can the glory and greatness it also promises surpass these feelings? Claire is the only female tutor in this male, academic world and has to prove that despite her gender and tragic family history she is worthy of a place in this elite world. Can she compete against the privileged males she mentors? And will these two individuals become allies or enemies, in their ambitious quests? I know it's really farfetched, and I also know there's no chance of it being true, but I just wanted to share it because it occurred to me :)So I turned out to be kinda right with Carfax and Dryden being the same in a way, but I had some mad theories. There are also chapters from a POV known only as The Rat - but these serve a high relevance and are worth paying attention to.
The novel tells the tale of elitism and a growing dystopian government prosecuting certain factions of society that aren’t the wealthy, Catholics or men. It’s infecting infrastructure, such as Montverre, with their conservative views and threatening the essence of the fantastical world within its walls. When the pieces started to be put together, the image the reader has for a while is that Claire is the sister of Carfax, Léo's schooltime love. The ever-constant comparisons between Claire and Carfax in these scenes felt extremely uncomfortable on a first read through. It seemed very... odd, to have a bisexual protagonist fall for a female character on the basis that they heavily resemble their male sibling. I don't necessarily think that a plot with that premise is inherently an issue, but the way it was handled in this narrative left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt questionable. Claire is Carfax or maybe Carfax is Claire. Claire did have a brother and he did die of suicide (at a plot convenient time I might add) but he was never at the school nor knew Leo, it was Claire pretending to be her brother to go to an all-boys school. Normally, this twist wouldn't bother me, however this one did. I think because I felt so strongly for Carfax and what they went through and their tragic ending and to find out that I had been hoodwinked and played with felt...hollow, perhaps cheapening the earlier chapters somewhat. Granted, Claire still suffered but when we are with here she doesn’t seem to be impacted by these experiences as Carfax had been.
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All in all, The Betrayals is compelling to a point but is also an interesting failure. It needed to be more precise to be more of a success. I’m not sure why Collins needed to smear the reality of the period in which the book was set, and it would have been just as — if not more — potent if the villains of the piece were actually Nazis and the grand jeu really was a form of magic incantation that they were afraid of. You may feel free to agree or disagree with John Wayne’s perception of ambiguity, but one thing remains: The Betrayals is an unclear read. And that’s a bit of a problem when you’re trying to make a point, which I think is what Bridget Collins tries and fails to do here.
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