The Phoenix by Ruth Sims – review

Title: The Phoenix
Author: Ruth Sims
Genre: Romance
Publisher: The Writer’s Collective
ISBN: 1-932133-40-2
URL: Amazon
Price: US$11.53
Other Information/warnings: m/m, violence
Summary [from the author's website]: THE PHOENIX is the story of two men whose lives are destined to cross and merge in love and separate in antagonism and fury. One of them is haunted by God and the other by a secret so terrible it could send him to the gallows.

My Review:Rich and thick in the best Victorian tradition, and cool and smooth as the best contemporary romances, The Phoenix is that rare bird: a convincing historical novel with a compelling modern sensibility. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Ruth Sims has a deft touch, conveying equally vividly her varied settings, from the stews of London and the Bowery to the grace of an English manor house and the garish opulence of New York’s nouveaux riches, from theaters to surgeries to squalid flats. She avoids the common pitfall of historical novelists, that of overemphasizing details, objects, or behaviors that would seem ordinary to her characters. The result is deliciously naturalistic; we are transported into each new setting via the details that set them apart to the characters observing them. I was particularly impressed with her theater imagery. Early in the tale, we see theaters through the wide eyes of the young protagonist, Kit, then later through the skeptical lens of Nick, an upright doctor’s son from the hinterland. When Kit and his actor friends take on the renovation of a New York theater later in the story, we get fresh details from a more experienced perspective. Sims brings us full circle, giving us yet another view of the theater through the jaded, predatory eyes of her villain. Each layer is delivered at precisely the right moment, drawing us readers deeply into that aspect of the story. (I also loved the characters’ childlike fascination with a new-fangled “shower-bath.”)

Likewise, Sims employs a Victorian device — multiple voices — that contemporary writers are taught to avoid, with energy and to good effect. This is not an omniscient-third-person narrative but rather one with a multiplicity of minor voices orbiting like satellites the voices of the two protagonists, Kit and Nick. Without over-writing, Sims gives us cadences of rich and poor, clever and dull, with subtle verbal signals. I usually find such head-hopping irritating, but then I seldom find it this well done. Sims occasionally presses a supporting character (Kit’s fellow actress Rama, or Nick’s wife Bronwyn) into service to explain their own behavior, or to illuminate the protagonists’ complicated motivations. Often it’s unnecessary to Sims’ story, but it was interesting and welcome often enough that I came to cautiously appreciate this element of the novel. Sims’ writing chops are on finer display with the voices of her two protagonists. Kit’s and Nick’s voices are internally consistent, making for very strong characters. But their voices are far from stagnant; they develop, lighten and darken, age and deepen, over the course of the novel.

In a certain twisted way, Kit St. Denys is a classic Victorian hero, starting life at the very bottom of London’s social hierarchy and rising by dint of fortune, effort, and guile to its very heights. He’s haunted by his early life, however, which tarnishes his later triumphs and provides the fulcrum for the novel’s narrative conflict. Kit’s a dashing, charming rake, unabashedly sexual in an era that demanded discretion and punished transgression. He’s also fiercely loyal to those who elevate him from his humble origins (including the theater itself) and generous to a fault. His obsession with Nick is the one character trait Sims leaves somewhat murky (and here is where the voices of secondary characters come in handy — they don’t really understand Kit’s feelings for Nick, either), which is one of the few weaknesses of the novel. That Nick somehow banishes the demons of Kit’s past is enough for Kit, but we’re left wishing for a bit more illumination. The dominant image in the novel is the phoenix, and Kit is its incarnation. The book hinges on Kit’s various transformations by various forces. His fulfillment as a character comes when he makes his final transformation, all on his own and with no audience to applaud him. For all his flaws, like his literary forbears Kit’s an easy character to love and root for, and Sims does him great justice.

If Kit reminds one of Jim Hawkins, or even Becky Sharp, then when Nick is introduced he echoes Dickens’ Pip or David Copperfield — a good man of humble origins, prodigious talent, and cautious ambition. Son of a country doctor who dreams of more sophisticated, modern training, Nick is ripe to be dazzled by the life Kit shows him. He’s a worthy foil for Kit’s ebullient nature but, hamstrung as he is by the dour morality and sexual repression of his upbringing, he is never quite able to match Kit in other ways. Kit’s story drives most of the plot, but Nick’s drives the romance. It’s his horrified reaction to one of Kit’s sexual indiscretions that separates them from much of the book and sets up the climactic final third of the novel. Nick’s bargains with his God, and his concessions to conventional mores, wore on me such that I, like Kit’s theater friends, wondered why Kit pursued Nick with such vigor and pined for him with such pathos. Their reconciliation after a long separation was too precipitous to engage me emotionally; however, Nick’s devotion to Kit at Kit’s lowest point is heartwarming, and redeemed him as far as I was concerned. Sims takes a risk having him employ the “new” science of psychology as he endeavors to heal Kit, but she pulls it off admirably, without it seeming like a deus ex machina or too convenient, by having Nick feel his way using his own intellect and a textbook or two. It’s a tribute to Sims’ talent that I never gave up on him even when he succumbed to the hypocrisy of the righteous; his very ambiguity kept me reading, and I admired how true Sims remained to the basic natures of her two main characters. I won’t give away the end of the story, but I will say that Sims’ leaves her protagonists (and her readers) very satisfied, if bittersweetly so. Nick, like Kit, is ultimately fulfilled by his own ability to name and claim his nature, and for me as a reader, he was finally worthy of love, and of Kit.

I read The Phoenix for a second time to write this review. A second read is unusual for me, but with this rich, rewarding tale, I can easily envision a third return to its pages. That is, until Ms. Sims gives us a new novel to savor.