THE GHOST THEATRE, power to the alt-Elizabethan London lovers!

THE GHOST THEATRE
MAT OSMAN
The Overlook Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wild and hallucinatory reimagining of Elizabethan London, with its bird worshippers, famed child actors, and the Queen herself; a dazzling historical novel about theatre, magic, and the dangers of all-consuming love

London, 1601—a golden city soon to erupt in flames. Shay is a messenger-girl, falconer, and fortune teller who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city’s fabled Blackfriars Theatre, where a cast of press-ganged boys perform for London’s gentry. When the pair meet, Shay falls in love with the performances—and with Nonesuch himself. As their bond deepens, they create the Ghost Theatre, an underground troupe that performs fantastical plays in the city’s hidden corners. As their fame grows the troupe fans the flames of rebellion among the city’s outcasts, and the lovers are drawn into the dark web of the Elizabethan court. Embattled, with the plague on the rise throughout the country, the Queen seeks a reading from Shay, a moment which unleashes chaos not only in Shay’s life, but across the whole of England too.

A fever-dream full of prophecy and anarchy, gutter rats and bird gods, Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre is a wild ride from the rooftops of Elizabethan London to its dark underbelly, and a luminous meditation on double lives and fluid identities and the bewitching, transformative nature of art and power, with a bittersweet love affair at its heart. Set amid the vividly rendered England of Osman’s imagination and written in rich, seductive prose, The Ghost Theatre will have readers under its spell from the very first page.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mat Osman, brother of Richard, tries his hand at fantasy noveling...outta the park, buddy, what a genre debut! Co-founder of Suede, a quintessential 90s Brit-emo-boy band, decides to write something not centered in the music culture. Great decision! Tackling the end of Elizabethan London, adding a layer of fantastical performance art to it, made this a book I approached with some trepidation. His earlier novel, The Ruins, was a powerful read set in a modern world heightened but still mudane. It was imperfect in its characters' grapplings with desire, the desire to be one's self, the desire to be valued and still free, but it was a fine read.

Here we get the thing I missed in The Ruins. Shay is a cross-dressing woman (it's safer in this world to present as a man) who falls in with young actor Nonesuch (recalling as you do that female roles in Elizabethan theaters were played by crossdressing boys) after her bird-worshipping cult is disrupted by violence. Violence, societal down to interpersonal, is the refrain of this operatic tale of escape, concealment, and ultimately discovery. Violence rules this novel. Shay, rescued from violence, and Nonesuch, accustomed to its sexual expression, decide to become performers of stories that aren't about the great and good. They tell stories like the one they've just shared in which they stave off rage and hate, but pay a price in the process. They know not to try to compete for center stage with those stories of the great and good. They take to the corners, they lurk in the shadows among those like themselves who, stunned, see themselves in the stories the Ghost Theatre duo are telling.

The power of seeing yourself in a story is hard to overstate.

Soon the pair, intimately connecting to the hoi polloi of their class, are attracting crowds. That means they're also attracting notice. The great and good, the primacy, inescapability, of whose stories drove the pair to rebel, are suddenly attentive and making them very much in fashion. They're getting noticed by the elite who never knew they were alive before.

Ask a gay person outed in heteroland, a Black person in whiteworld, a trans person anywhere, how that feels.

Passionately pursuing Truth is, I think, only safe for the young and powerless. They have little to lose. They have no kind of perspective, but this irresistible draw to honesty and truth and self-realization is the road traveled to acquire a lifetime's supply of that missing perspective. This is a subtractive, even divisive process. Shay and Nonesuch ignite passion and create magic with their Ghost Theatre. Fire metaphors for growing up, for attaining wisdom, are apt: annealed in flames of their own ignition, the entire troupe burn in the brightness of fame's flames.

When the bill comes due, the prices (plural) are high; the perspective, one is left to hope in the ending that gives no closure, they've earned will keep them safer than they are during the story.

I can't get to a fifth star because the way we move, bob, and weave in this narrative is sufficiently non-linear as to make the journey circular in affect. Has anything fundamental, or even just more than cosmetic, changed?

I'm not sure; I'm only sure I love the Aviscultans, and the Ghost Theatre, and the honest portrayal of the power of Love among the powerlessness of Others to make a life of struggle feel as though it's a Quest, a magical, important affirmation of Life.

Sadly it never really is, or not for long. That knowlege, though, is mine, not the characters'. Beautiful-sounding, complicated, and still the story's in the end slighter than it feels while you are within it.