The Witch Queen
Jan Siegel
Del Rey, 344 pages
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Jan Siegel winds up her untitled trilogy in this final volume.
In previous books in the series, Fernanda Capel discovered her power as a
witch (a legacy of the lost island of Atlantis), tried to repudiate it along
with the tragedy it brought her, and was forced by the threat of a deadly
enemy to acknowledge and embrace it once more. Now she’s living in
an uneasy balance, a witch with a soul
“as modern as a microchip” and a full complement of ancient powers.
But Fern’s hard-won peace is about to be tested. Morgus, the enemy who
dragged her outside of time and held her prisoner beneath the roots of the
gruesome Eternal Tree, didn’t die in their final confrontation, as Fern believed.
Preserved through sorcery, she has slipped back into the stream of time,
bearing a cutting of the Tree. In an ancient, ghost-haunted country
manor, she nurtures the cutting, which soon shows signs that it will bear
its terrible fruit of living heads. When it does, Morgus will understand
what she must do to conquer modern Britain--which for her, her mind still
bound to the ancient age in which she last walked the world, is still the
antique Kingdom of Logrez.
Morgus has another purpose--revenge on Fern, who dared escape and now is
the only creature on earth with, possibly, the power to oppose her.
As Morgus starts to search for Fern, Fern begins to suspect Morgus may have
survived. The two enemies stalk one another, using powerful witchcraft,
summoning up fearful spirits and stirring deadly forces. Fern, new
to her power, is weaker than Morgus; but she has something Morgus doesn’t:
allies, including the ex-wizard Ragginbone, the half-human wolf Lougarry,
the house-goblin Bradachin, her friend Gaynor Mobberly, her brother Will,
and Mabb the Goblin Queen. Meanwhile, Fern’s old
nemesis Azmordis--who has even more reason than Morgus to covet Fern’s soul--watches
and waits.
Like the two earlier books, The Witch Queen
is a feast of dark atmosphere and surreal imagery, laid forth in lovely prose.
With power and precision, Siegel evokes the magical world that hovers like
a shadow behind the world of everyday, adeptly weaving legends and myths
of diverse origins (Atlantis, the Matter of Britain) into a gorgeous supernatural
tapestry. She also draws an effective contrast between the ancient powers
Fern commands and the slick modern world she lives in--a dissonance of which
Fern is well aware, though not always able to satisfactorily resolve.
Morgus too runs up against this dissonance, though she doesn’t perceive it
for what it is, enthusiastically embracing the more sybaritic and amoral
aspects of present-day culture (designer clothing, financial fraud) but still
viewing everything through her Dark Age mindset. For all her enormous
power, she’s a fish out of water, and it’s this failure to adapt, in part,
that leads to her downfall.
Morgus is totally evil, without a shred of doubt or remorse to add dimension
to her character. In The Dragon Charmer this wasn’t
a problem, partly because of the bizarre and dreamlike setting, partly because
Morgus was seen mainly from the outside, through Fern’s viewpoint. But in
the present-day environment of The Witch Queen, where she herself has become a viewpoint character, she’s simply too rotten to be believed,
and her interior monologues--an unvarying litany of hatred, arrogance, and
sadistic malice--soon start to feel monotonous. Too, there’s a sense
of retread in the return-of-the-enemy plot structure, with its predictable
turning points and inevitable outcome (and perfunctory treatment of some
recurring characters, especially the half-human Kal, who was so powerfully
portrayed in the previous novel and who, one feels, could have played a larger
part in this one). It’s not until Morgus is out of the way that events
begin to surprise, culminating in an unexpected and effective ending.
Flaws in the earlier books were eclipsed by the originality of Siegel’s settings,
the power of her prose, and her acute sense of the terror and wonder of the
supernatural world-behind-the-world. These strengths are present in
The Witch Queen, but this time they aren’t quite enough.
It’s a disappointing finish to what is, nevertheless, a fascinatingly original
series by a gifted writer.
Copyright © 2002 Victoria Strauss
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