Reviewing Kushiel’s Avatar by Jacqueline Carey
Unfortunately It Is Her Temple of Doom
As longtime followers know, I harbored some genuine excitement for the final installment of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart trilogy. The previous two books compelled and amused via their lush, sensual depiction of courtesan Phèdre’s horny alt-Renaissance adventures.
But Kushiel’s Avatar was disappointing. The first two hundred pages and the last two hundred pages of Kushiel’s Avatar provide decent entertainment, but the middle three hundred pages are challenging, and not in the fun way.
Let us not waste too much time on the plot-at-large, but rather cut straight to the problem. About a third of the way into the book, Phèdre and her buzzkill boyfriend Joscelin journey into the sandtastic and exotic land of Khebbel-im-Akkad. Somehow in Khebbel-im-Akkad it’s still mostly Babylonian times, despite the overall alt-Renaissance setting. It’s also the height of the Persian Empire, though. And yet the cultural signifiers are not drawn from Persian history, but from negative stereotypes associated with Arabs. The royal family of Khebbel-im-Akkad is, and you’ll be shocked to hear this, lousy with hospitable bearded turban-wearing guys who Don’t Respect Women.
The Akkadians are but an amuse-bouche to the unpleasantness which awaits. The purpose of the Akkadians, as with most other non-D’Angeline cultures, is to be lesser beings whose un-hot foibles chap the asses of the eternally fabulous Angel-French. The story truly goes off the rails when Phèdre and Joscelin make their way deeper into The Heart of Darkness: that is, to the Akkadian vassal state of Daršanga. After rebelling against Akkadian rule, the Daršangans were put down in a horrifying hellish act of Uncommon Brutality (funny how that only showed up in this series once we went where white European people weren’t…). The few Daršangan survivors have done some serious mental festering since then, and they’ve invented a new mad-nasty spin on Zoroastrianism all about “ill thoughts, ill words, ill deeds”.
My most devoted fans will recall my cursed history with fictional depictions of the Caucasus region. Carey’s treatment of the region ranks little better than that produced by my old nemesis, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019).
Everything and everybody in Daršanga is nasty, debased, and kind of evil, and not in a fun, dead-and-loving-it fashion. In my review of Kushiel’s Chosen, I wrote that I don’t read these books because I want to do the things Phèdre does, but because I think it’s interesting to learn what gratification someone would derive from such acts. But the acts in Kushiel’s Avatar are simply not at all gratifying. The gratuitous, gross, and grinding evil of Daršanga pitches us over the event horizon into forms of BDSM so hardcore they’re just violent. I don’t want to read detailed descriptions of sexual violence pretty much ever, for any reason.
All this miserable violence is then presented within the ornate and hoary frame of the Barbaric Harem, a place not of complex and variable context but an inherently oppressive hellhole of polygamy-horror. This bugged me because of the many pages of D’Angelines revelling in their Frankish polyamory found throughout the series prior. Can’t we get a little weird sex relativism here? And in the end this book doubles our double standards, because there’s not much sly, cool French sex either: by age thirty Phèdre has mostly given up her trade and her many lovers because it bothers Joscelin. I don’t care for him!!!
All this to say, the middle act of Kushiel’s Avatar is a repetitive tour of torture porn, a dragging slog through the abuse of women on a scale and intensity depicted nowhere else in the series. We get forcibly immersed in this terrible topos because our heroes are in among Persian and Turkic people and so may package up violence, misogyny, and the state of “Easternness” into one easy bundle.
Galling to me in particular was the manner in which the harem set-up became a method of redemption for the formerly villainous Skaldi. In Kushiel’s Dart Phèdre suffered rape and abuse at the hands of the Skaldi—got somewhat flensed at the hands of the Skaldi! In the harem of Daršanga she meets a castrated Skaldi youth who becomes her friend and ally, dies a hero, and thus by the Act of Melodrama allows Phèdre to forgive her big white neighbors. Two unhappily rivalrous forms of European white people now reconcile, thanks to the dark specter of Mid-East Barbarity! Fitting, at least, that I read this book while traveling around the European Union, whose governments live this deal over and over in repetitious convulsions of refugee-induced racial panic.
Carey created the D’Angelines’ pantheon of hot, fallen angel gods with no devil among them. Kushiel is the closest thing to Satan, but the D’Angelines love and venerate him too because even torture can be sexy. In her unwillingness to locate any real, durable source of ill thoughts, ill words, and ill deeds within the D’Angeline culture, Carey makes it necessary for her heroes to journey outside Europe and outside whiteness to discover “true evil”.
The core ideological fallibility of this series is the nature of the D’Angelines as a type of “master race”, whose cream-white, lace-white, milk-fair flesh receives slightly too much attention in every book. Though the D’Angelines may be the master race only of looking hot and having edgy sex, still to pose any group of people as possessing an inherent, genetically transmissible perfection is to make a big fucking mistake.
Fallibility, corruption, irredeemable and unsexy cruelty live in all of us. The call is always coming from inside the house. That’s what makes intimacy so dangerous: knowing all this to be true, even of the people you love and trust, and choosing to love and trust them anyway. I presumed the author of a BDSM book would know this already, but indeed that was my bad.
Ending the series on such a low note disappoints me a great deal. That’s how it goes, though. Alas, the finish of an assignation doesn’t always live up to the foreplay.
