In Shakespeare, we divide comedy from tragedy by the endings, if people die, it’s a tragedy, if there’s a wedding, a comedy. The brilliance of his body of work is many of the comedies could have gone to tragedy with a couple different choices. Under the Poppy ends with a wedding, I don’t think there’s any spoiler there. In the middle there’s some murders and some deaths, this is a war story of sorts, but whether this is comedy or tragedy may lie in which character you like the best, or whether you consider The Poppy to be a character of its own.
Under the Poppy is set in a brothel in 1870s Brussels owned by Decca and Rupert. It is a brothel like no other, with a grand stage, a bawdy puppet show put on by Decca’s brother, the puckish Istvan and mute pianist Jonathan. As war threatens nearby, the army takes up occupancy in whatever buildings they can, and the Poppy becomes a boarding house for the military presence, while still running business.
This presence complicates matters for the residents. Accommodations must be made for the soldiers, a new class of people are coming through, including the mayor, and the general in command of the forces. These forces of order react as you might guess to the forces of liberality and counterculture represented in the Poppy, scandals that would have been contained in this vice district are now being witnessed by the high society of the city, and this brings unwanted attentions their way. Istvan in particular will not back down from his ever more outrageous and shocking puppet performances.
Backstage, too controversy begins to build as Decca loves Rupert, but Rupert loves Istvan. The homosexual nature of this relationship is certainly not tolerated in this society, and as it becomes more open, the politics of the house and its relationship to the city become quite complicated. The survival of the Poppy becomes doubtful as the war passes near, supplies begin to run low, the population become afraid to go out, and the residents must make decisions on how to survive, whether remaining at the Poppy is plausible, and every departure hurts.
The exploration of sex and sexuality in Under the Poppy is very well handled. We have a society that has not yet embraced the modern view, but is on the cusp of it, and I think the more modern sensibility is symbolized by Paris in the book. One of the very tricky aspects of a period piece like this is demonstrating just how attitudes differ from the modern while not looking like you are demonstrating it. Koja was very adept at making this apparent and natural to the world of the book. Often, you’ll find a character which can embody the modern take on things, but she has a cast of characters with which to accomplish the subtle shading between the liberal and conservative points of view. Sexuality itself is well handled, it would be easy to go over the line, make the kinks an overt motif, but such heavy handedness would certainly be detrimental to this book. Sexuality deserves subtlety in all its variety, but hinting is too little for a book like this. Koja understands this and gives us doses of sexuality in just the right amounts and places to make it resonate without bringing the house down.
There’s a few reasons why I wanted to read this book. First, the language was described as lush and poetic, and this it certainly was, on the level of description and metaphor, she wrote a very visual and sensual world, replete with historic sights and smells, beauty and ugliness, rooms filled with cigar smoke and fine alcohols, with gaiety and danger. Her characterization is strong, a significant challenge with the number of social classes represented in the characters of the book, and the structures of the society.
I was also interested because my main character for Inside is mute for part of the book, and I wanted to see how she handled it. In this respect I was disappointed. He was never so significant a character that it became an issue, and some opportunities were probably missed with him, at least I felt.
I did have significant issues with a couple decisions she made in the writing of this book as well. First is how deaths were handled. The first death was one of the girls in the Poppy who had consumption. We hit a point of some tension, a chapter ends, and the next thing that happens, they are talking about the poor girl who died. I felt cheated we didn’t see the death scene, we only hear about it second hand in reactions from the rest of the residents of the house. She had been a character of some significance up to that point, and then she was just gone, and people were talking of her in the past tense. Doing this once might have been permissible, but it happens again to a much more significant character and at a much more significant moment, and by much more sinister means. When I didn’t get to see this death, I very much felt something was wrong, a wrong choice was made, and from that point I was wary of being cheated again. The shock of that event didn’t register because I was feeling the shock of having not seen it happen.
The book’s biggest writing challenge, however, was maintaining the large cast of characters, and this for me was the biggest point at which the book failed. There were many point of view shifts in the way the story was told, and while each shift happened at a major section break, so no head-hopping, I felt every time that a new character was being introduced the shape of the line felt like a freeway with many on-ramps, and every time I had to get back up to speed. The effect it had was to break up the ensemble cast feeling I thought the book could have and should have had, while also making the plot feel less straightforward than it really was.
This came down to a point of view issue. It came down to a sort of ensemble over-the-shoulder third person narration, and I would have preferred a stronger through-line, which would have tightened the ensemble cast feeling. As it stood, I felt like I was being introduced to a new character every section, and couldn’t be bothered after a point with what the relationships between characters were. Limiting the points of view to only a few would have made it a much better read for me. This is not to say it wasn’t a worthy read. I certainly got a lot of what I wanted out of it, and it was a nice break from my usual horror fantasy and scifi reading habits.
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