The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

“Victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat” is a refrain. The rags-to-riches plot is an intentionally improbable picaresque featuring all the glorious elements of great operas of the era: love at first sight, disguise, intrigue, grief, betrayal, secrets, scheming aristocrats, a besotted tenor, dramatic escapes, grand settings, fabulous costumes, murder, fallen women, sacrifice - the follies of humans at the mercy of Fate.

“The Queen of the Night,” Alexander Chee’s salute to the music and literature of the 19th century, is also all about voice.

Whatever the author’s particular spin, the characters’ voices, especially in first-person narration, create an imagined past for the reader, and need to sing in tune.

There are other approaches, such as the vaulting ventriloquism of Sarah Waters or Peter Carey, or the postmodern voice showcased in Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion.” In “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel mastered the transparent voice subtly reflecting Tudor speech and language, without us tripping over a single “prithee” or “gadzook” - while in “The Luminaries,” Eleanor Catton reproduced a syntax and vocabulary reminiscent of Dickens. But what is assumed to be “authenticity” is a genre convention that owes more to the influence of early historical fiction than to genuine speech patterns of ancient Rome or the real pirates of the Caribbean. Many authors of popular historical novels attempt something that simply sounds a bit old-fashioned, in an attempt to create a sense of authenticity, as if that were actually possible.

Voice is everything in historical fiction, too: One of the novelist’s critical creative decisions is how to present the voices and world views of people in the past, while making them accessible for modern readers. Lilliet’s world is one of silence and sound, of risk and fragility, and the balance between vocal power and expression. She possesses a rare and delicate Falcon soprano range, named for Marie-Cornélie Falcon, whose voice famously shattered in the middle of a performance and never recovered. The narrator of “The Queen of the Night,” Lilliet Berne, is a star of the Paris Opera.

The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee