When I was younger, I was utterly obsessed with all things Phantom. Like many before me, my gateway was Andrew Lloyd Webber's most popular musical of all time, but it wasn't long before I was hunting down the book and the 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney. I cannot remember when I read the novel, but I must have been a teenager. Revisiting it a second time, and having forgotten most of the finer details, I was struck by how utterly weird it is. Gaston frames the tale as a detective novel, which soon morphs into a gothic horror/romance about a deformed and demented musical genius haunting the bowels of the Opera Garnier. The plot of the musical adapatation must be familiar enough to most people, though perhaps not the book itself.
In my edition's introduction by Jann Matlock, it is stated that the Opera Garnier does not encourage Phantom questions on its guided tours, nor does it sell related merch in the gift shop. This was in 2008. A current internet search reveals the opera house to have subsequently walked back on their reticence and undermined their former integrity by fully embracing the tacky pop culture tie-in. Something to be said for the inevitability of selling out for profit.
But why do I call an association with a book I've rated 5 stars as tacky? Because it surely is! The plot itself is some badly written, melodramatic French pulp designed to sensationalise impressionable readers. The love triangle between singer Christine Daae, viscount Raoul de Chagny, and the titular Angel of Music, Erik, is perhaps the weakest part of the novel, despite being its core. In fact, I'd argue this story is but a flimsy pretext in which to clothe the far more interesting character of the opera house itself.
Before Reddit and 4chan, and before the increasingly popular 'Backrooms' phenomenon, a logical evolution of urbexing, there was Gaston Leroux and his surreal depictions of the opera house's hidden world. He enthusiastically describes the building's subterranean passages leading to liminal spaces and impossible deathtraps. Is there really a lake beneath the opera house? Yes there is, but more of a flooded cistern where firemen are taught to swim in the dark. Are there corpses? Yes, the bodies of political prisoners have been found buried there. Are there hidden passages perhaps linking to the Paris catacombs where a murderous incel might conceivably make his home? Where does fact end and fiction begin? These are the questions that Leroux plays with in his novel and invites the reader to explore.
The descent into the underbelly of the opera house takes up a whole third of the book, and is clearly Gaston's main interest. To modern readers, it even reads like a classic dungeon crawl, as Raoul and his guide, the enigmatic Persian, encounter terrifying creatures straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons monster manual. There are the devil-like boilermen keeping the furnaces alive, a floating, blood red moon face followed by a swarm of sewer rats, a felt-hatted stalker with a highly classified identity (Gaston is often ridiculous), not to mention the eerie 'siren of the lake.' Raoul and the Persian traverse a seemingly endless obstacle course behind the artificial facade of the stage props, passing through trapdoors, squeezing through narrow cravasses, and eventually ending up in a highly imaginative torture chamber. The sheer absurdity of it all is a delight, and an aspect of the tale sadly muted in Webber's musical. Erik (the Phantom) is a master of illusion, and his nightmare realm, strongly evoking Dante and Virgil's descent into Hell, showcases but a fraction of his twisted ingenuity.
Highly recommended to lovers of all things liminal and phantasmagoric. If you can see beyond the silliness, there is much to discover and appreciate.
Rating: 5/5
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