Last Song Before Night

Written by Ilana C. Myer, Last Song Before Night tells a story about the power of music and art, where the main characters are all poets and singers. Unfortunately, it’s also marred by poor character development, cheap narrative devices, and a problematic ending.

The book aptly opens with a character hearing a piece of music, which seems curiously attached to a particular scent, bringing back some memories. In Last Song Before Night, music is more than its melody, harmony, and rhythm, more than a complex “sound”, it stimulates and mixes senses and has a strange power over the people. It’s often personified, being compared to a living, breathing entity: “in the capital of Tamryllin, music was like a dancer in the fullness of her youth wearing little to conceal her beauty, flaunting everything.”  Music is treated as a tangible item: it can be a secret, a weapon, something you can steal or even play around with when no one is watching.

For Lin, a young girl on the run who wants to be a poet, this is what music represents: a forbidden dream. Being a woman, she cannot be officially a poet, which doesn’t stop her from trying. Soon, however, she finds herself in the middle of a quest alongside another poet named Darien to bring power back to music, awakening its magical properties: they are to find a McGuffin called “the Path”, which will instill magic back into melodies.

Art can be a powerful weapon and Last Song Before Night is all about restoring this power. “I am asking that you recall what it seems all poets have let themselves forget—that the true purpose of our art is not to perform at parties, nor to win contests,” a character reminds Lin. Art can be reduced to mere entertainment, but the protagonists are looking for a way to make it politically relevant again, use it to change the world, and since this is a fantasy book the solution obviously involves magic. They believe bringing back magical power to songs will free poets from the clutches of the king, ending regulation and censorship. After all, the songs sung by poets in Tamryllin are already becoming disruptive, but they are paying dearly for this decision, being taken to dungeons and tortured.

However, this whole quest feels like an afterthought for Lin, who is much more worried about fleeing from her past, who is personified by the figure of her abusive brother, Rayen. Rayen is a villain so one-dimensional that he could be played by Sam Claflin coming directly from The Nightingale. He lies to women, manipulates them to have sex with him, treats them as objects, beats some of them, and even calls Lin his “pet”. Rayen is obsessed with showing his power over women – which translates to violence and sex – and he is going to stop at nothing until he recovers the only woman who managed to escape him – Lin – and finally teaches her a lesson.

Villains in the novel are a mixed bag. We have four main antagonists: Rayen, the abusive brother; The Court Poet, a fiend so evil that is said that “a dark spirit rides him;” and the two interesting ones, Darien’s friend Marlen, and his Lady Macbeth companion, Marilla.

Marlen is a poet like Darien, but, unlike his friend, he was trained all his life to take whatever he wants out of people, and permanently remove them out of his way if necessary. His upbringing puts a good dose of darkness in his soul, which he tries to fight unsuccessfully. He’s always dreaming that he will one day stop committing unscrupulous acts and be able to start over with a clean slate. But the rub is that Marlen may think about acting like a good man in one scene, but just a few pages later he is seen torturing a man even after he got all the information he wanted… and just because he thought the screams were intoxicating. Marlen may try to fight the darkness inside him, but deep down he enjoys the violence in an almost sexual manner.

His companion – if we can call her that – is a sadomasochist woman who reinforces the sexual aspect of Marlen’s cruelty. She feeds his violence, teasing him to beat and dominate her, but also to hurt others: “Would you have preferred to share the glory, be the shadow to his light?” she questions Marlen, referring to his relationship with Darien, trying to breed jealousy and put the two against each other. Marilla, however, gains some more facets near the end, when her behavior is shown to be the fruit of trauma and her wicked personality is softened by some of her choices.

Guiding Lin and Darien we have the old poet Valanir Ocune, who quickly becomes a Gandalf-like figure to Lin, telling her all about that land’s past, explaining how long-forgotten wrongdoings and injustices are about to resurface again. He is her mentor, but also functions as a deus ex machina, using dreams to inform Lin and Darien about what has happened and what they need to do next to escape danger. His dialogues never go beyond cliché territory, however, with the character often saying stuff like “You must work together to avert the dark that is coming.”

In Last Song Before Night, dreams are often employed as a device to show the characters’ fears and anxieties  – a cheap tactic that grows to be even more problematic as the story proceeds and these random dreams become more numerous, being the way in which far away characters can meet, connect, have conversations and even gather information. There is a scene in which Darien sleeps in a library while searching for a specific piece of information and – surprise – he has a dream that points him in the right direction.

The narrative is also structured in a way that is meant to create plot twists and surprises, purposefully withholding information so that we can’t know that something is going to happen or even that it could happen. In practice, this means that there’s this surprising and apparently absurd event and then we are thrown into a flashback to explain how that was possible. It’s basically the opposite of foreshadowing, build-up, and preparation, as the information is always given to us after the scene happened.

Talking about foreshadowing, the narrative is full of heavy-handed moments that don’t exactly foreshadow as much as scream that something big will happen. They’re empty bad omens such as “Later, Lin would think it was the heaviness of these thoughts […] that made her vulnerable to what came next,” or“As he entered the sharp line of light from the garden doors, she saw a slight stoop in his walk but knew it did not matter—would not matter to anyone in that room, who would surely tell of this night for the rest of their lives.” These “omens” ultimately fall flat because they’re only there to remind us that something big is going to happen, lest we become bored. It’s cheap “look, the next chapter is going to be good, okay, I promise” tension.

But we have some more characters to talk about. There’s Rianna, a lady who is dangerously infatuated with a poet. Her early scenes with Darien are marked by a romantic atmosphere, full of forbidden love, secret meetings under the moonlight, and hopeful plans for the future that never come to pass. When Darien travels with Lin, however, Rianna’s journey becomes a troubled one. She is to suffer the hardships of real life, being cast away from her life in the nobility, and have her general naivety shattered. However, she can be a difficult character to like: first, her privileged status makes her sound foolish and arrogant. Then, her descent is too brief to have any impact: she spends just a few weeks working like a normal person, which seems like hell to her, but acts as if it were years: “Leya the kitchen maid. Rianna Gelvan. Which was she, or was she truly either one?” Rianna asks herself, although the question rings hollow; after all, she has been Leya for barely a month. She remains naïve, then, and when that is finally punished she suddenly becomes rages incarnate – a sudden change that has some problematic consequences.

Rianna was also set to marry a guy named Ned, who is first described as a courteous, but feeble man. His change to a ferocious person happens overnight as well, in the span of just a few pages that quickly glance over a random journey he went through. Another problem is that these two side characters end up feeling out of place in the novel, since they are not in any way related to the main quest of finding the magical Path. When questioned about whether he believed in its existence or not, Ned answers: “I don’t know … and I don’t much care,” and that’s true.

It’s not only Ned that doesn’t care, though. Darien also starts his journey to find the Path just because of a dream-like experience he had, making his quest feel like a whim. Lin is put to search for the Path by her mentor figure and has no say in it. The Path is primarily Valanir Ocune’s goal, not theirs, which greatly diminishes the excitement surrounding the whole quest.

When Darien begins the journey he also steals the spotlight from Lin, who is then sidelined. All the characters start to speak only about Darien, the quest for the Path becomes linked to his name, and Lin’s role is reduced to be his sidekick. He is the one that is there to make the big sacrifices; Lin is just tagging along to help him make the right choices. Lin’s character arc is as anticlimactic as an anticlimax can get. She is used by her antagonists and by her friends, she is caught and caught again and saved by her male companions. She is a reactive character, and even retribution is robbed from her. “She did as she was bid,” the narrator says about Lin at the end, and that’s true.

The book’s ending also feels very rushed. After a brief climax, in just a few pages the characters – who were never warriors – are now suddenly preparing for battle, invading heavily guarded places with ease, defeating people with magic rituals that were never mentioned before, and so on. Some characters become leaders just because they are the main characters. Some gain titles just because they are the main characters. Few things feel earned or narratively justified.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the book falls into some orientalist stereotypes. Here, the East is described as a no man’s land that holds “dangers undreamed of elsewhere,” such as “a pirate queen who wore a necklace of snakes and sustained them on a diet of prisoners.” It’s a place where a villain can acquire a potion that can keep dead men alive, since the Far East is the only place “where such magic is made.” Bram Stoker would have been proud.

Last Song Before Night can have its heart in the right place when it comes to its discussion over the importance of art, but its story is marred by uninteresting characters and problematic story developments.

January 03, 2020.