Autumnal Conductor

Autumnal Conductor is the English debut novel of Lhuzie Fénix. Hold the fuck up. I’m part of that plurality. Is this critique the right thing to do? Well, I say it is. I was not part of writing this one; the sequel just came out, and it is a critique and not a review — and I am my own harshest critic, and I have a lot of personal feelings and transformations related to this book.

Autumnal Conductor is the English debut novel of Lhuzie Fénix and the first book in The Flower Painter series. On the surface, it has a quite simple premise: oh look, yet another retelling/repackaging of the myth of Hades and Persephone, this one — groan — trans, lesbian, feminist, and Marxist. Alright, I know what to expect, and at least it is not also Romeo and Juliet. Let’s get through this. All assumptions and expectations are challenged as names are familiar but uncanny in their resemblance. Lhuzie presents an ominous meet-cute, then has Persephone kill Hades in the opening pages—only to be slain by another death god and dragged to the underworld. Things kept escalating with every new chapter; the novel remained unpredictable from beginning to end. Our protagonist, Proserpina, remakes herself from stories and vile chthonic matter. The perspective turns to the second person for most of the book: you’re now Proserpina, stuck in the Underworld, turning page after page as you try to make your escape. The gods of this place hunt you down, and they would have their way with you if not for unexpected help — a fading shade of a mortal woman.

Proserpina is without friends or allies; she wonders why her mother and her kin are not mounting a rescue. Her savior is a meek, fading thing, whose name she does not know. Only one resource is available to Proserpina — her ichor, her divinity. Hating everything about her desperate decision, Proserpina feeds her savior her ichor, empowering her with divine puissance and restoring lost identities. And so we are introduced to King Minos Pasiphaë, a woman with such an obstinate sense of righteousness that after death she became one of the Judges of Hell. Pasiphaë understands that Proserpina does not belong in the Underworld, and will do everything to help her return home — including facing her former bosses. From then on, Autumnal Conductor becomes a series of adventuring vignettes: our goddess and her king encounter strange sites and peoples in the Underworld, trying to find something that allows their escape. As it proves too difficult for the two of them, Proserpina realizes she has to repeat the process that awakened Pasiphaë — and this time, she does not have to share her divinity with a faithful and devoted mortal, but with the greatest sinners in history.

The journey across the Underworld continues. Proserpina and Pasiphaë are joined by five other women: Mithridates Hypsicrates (a twitchy twink with a personal grudge against Persephone), Sisyphus (yes, that one, who is still alive and the “punishment” was a ramson she extorted from the gods), Cophetua (the absolute knight-slut, forever wandering in search of the divinity within each woman), Zahhak (the immortal dragon world-tyrant, coming to the Underworld to claim Proserpina for herself), and Ubu Roi (imagine lesbian Elon Musk but worse, so much worse). As the Underworld changes to keep Proserpina within itself, she has to give more of herself to her kings, having to trust in them and developing unwise feelings for such awful women.

What more can I say? You’re reading me right now and have probably followed Split/Party for a while. As such, I can guarantee: you will have the absolute best time reading Autumnal Conductor. Go pick it right now!

I rate it six sinful women sucking on your fingers as they gobble the flesh from your sapphire bones.

Alright, to the critique!

Perhaps the biggest fault of Autumnal Conductor lay in its boldest ambition: to be living mythology. The stories it is in dialogue with did not stop being told millennia ago, and continue to change and be shared these days. Unfortunately, rather than treat them as something shared and diverged across the peoples of three continents, myth is “dead”. It has a canon body buried, but it is free use public domain IP

The novel is in a constant struggle with the double duty of telling a story in conversation with other stories while avoiding the expectations set by the same stories in pop culture. The result is mixed. A little knowledge is dangerous, and a reader can often trick themselves they already know something and not pay attention to the narrative in front of them; or they may dismiss something more challenging as a reference to myths you are unfamiliar with.

The character that suffers the most from it is Minos. Most people know just enough to see everything we learn about Minos Pasiphaë to see a reference. Between her martyr complex and stand-offish personality, it becomes easier for the reader to believe what is not being said is a mythological reference they don’t get rather than Minos’ shutting off Proserpina and the others. As such, the turn of Minos can surprise many a reader during the last third of the book.

However, when it works, it works great. The text lays the groundwork, but you can get much more subtext if you can place characters in their mythic and historic context. Mithridates and Proserpina’s complicated relationship, where Mithridates cannot help but be curious and grateful despite hating the goddess in principle, benefits the most from this approach. The role of Proserpina is made quite obvious in the text, stated plainly early on (“Proserpina, The Manager”), but you can predict later reveals if you know she is a goddess imported to Rome to replace plebeian gods with the Good Daughter of the State. The conflicting feelings of Mithridates are only heightened if you remember what Proserpina represents — and that the infamous Poison King Mithridates was such an enemy of the Roman State that she did Roman 9/11.

But those are minor extra tidbits. Where it truly shines is in the character of Sisyphus. It is, other than Hades and Proserpina, the more recognizable character in the novel. However, most people only know of Sisyphus’ punishment. Why was that their fate? Autumnal Conductor’s Sisyphus is a bastard of a woman, a complete asshole; and while everything you learn makes clear what she has done and can do, that extra bit of familiarity of what mythic Sisyphus was capable of will only intensify the shivers down your spine.

All that said, Autumnal Conductor is a book that you will enjoy and get more of if you approach it on its own terms than if you read it with an encyclopedia of Greek mythology by your side.

As Proserpina is confronted with the horrors and wonders in the Underworld, the novel becomes increasingly about plurality. Gods, in The Flower Painter, exist on many levels, one with every story, myth, memory, or body. All their embodiments are true, and reflect them. So there are many Proserpinas, and in turn, many facets of her bloom within, alongside facets of other gods internalised in her that are also those gods, and of course, the alter that is our main perspective through the book — you.

It is impossible to escape these dizzying and repetitive attempts at sharing plurality with you. A third person rebuilds your body, herds the many facets of Proserpina, and ultimately dies so you can exist. You are consistently reminded of the chorus, making their displeasure known as you. Your enemy becomes integrated in your system and you must confront him within. You meet parts of you that were once you and have become something else.

Tying plurality with divinity, Autumnal Conductor pulls every trick to make you feel like a goddess reading it. Playing with tense, voice, and person. It is extremely effective, although that makes the book a challenging read. It is the plural experience, distilled raw, with no dressing up, presenting the suffering and joys of such a way of being without comment or censure.

This may not be the book that makes you plural, but it sure tries to teach you to read it as if you are plural.

So where is the Marxism in all of this? Well, it is quite subtle across Autumnal Conductor compared to the sequel. The reason it is mostly subtext is our protagonist. Proserpina, as we are introduced to her, is an awful entity. She is the middle manager of heavens, seeing that the mortal realms exist in a manner pleasing to the gods. This divine McKinsey consultant has no qualms about exploiting and abusing mortals, painting over material reality with a more pleasant color. The initial conflict with the gods of the Underworld is incited by their arrival alongside the asphodel flower — an ugly, drab flower, but yet, one whose roots provide bitter flour. In the author’s indigenous language, the asphodel’s name is a word shared between the flower, games, and bread.

That’s right: Proserpina sees these assholes arriving with games and bread for all and the first thing she does is to murder them for it.

From the very beginning of the novel, Proserpina sticks to her role in liberalism — and it gets her killed. It all goes downhill from there. She is not serving her role, so the other gods in heaven forget about her. Stuck in the Underworld, she undergoes slow changes, becoming her own person and rejecting parts of the liberal creed. But it is not enough: she keeps trying to impose her will upon the locals, she damages the material base of the Underworld, she empowers tyrants while ignoring the vast masses of historical humanity, etc. She is eventually confronted with a revelation that finally forced her to tear the mask of the middle manager: she was not the only Flower Painter and the universe can be what we make of it — and is being twisted into something vile by the same systems she spent her existence promoting.

Proserpina comes from the experience of Autumnal Conductor a changed goddess. It is, unfortunately, too little, too late; her actions have advanced liberalism and ensured her doom. Hell, perhaps the doom of all of us.

If there is a thing that does not work for me, it is “female protagonist” books where the woman has no agency at all. Quite curious how I did not have that issue with Autumnal Conductor, when the entire thing is about how Proserpina has no agency.

That may be the sauce, right? It is very concerned with agency and what agency even looks like. So it is not just having a woman going around having things happen to or at her. We are Proserpina surrendering our agency, and we experience and share the effects of that within our chorus.

Proserpina is introduced as a figure of power and decision, a goddess overseeing mortal masses. She is brutal in combat and impossible to kill. And yet, her power does not give her agency — the first pebble rolls here. Autumnal Conductor questions if gods can even have agency, or they are merely stories and roles embodied; whatever the answer, it is established early on that Proserpina cannot escape the Underworld alone.

The novel then becomes an exercise in agency. Every person Proserpina meets, she compromises and gives up a bit more of her agency, becoming more submissive. This is problematized: the submission to Sisyphus is still on her terms for her purposes, never diminishing Proserpina; surrendering to Zahhak includes long-lasting transformations that are imposed on her, a rerouting of her goals, and diminishing her self.

That is, ultimately, the crux of the issue. As a goddess, only by surrendering agency can she be free enough to have any agency worth a damn. As the Flower Painter and the manager of heavens, the “agency” she has is unwelcome and comes at the expense of the others. Proserpina had to do much of she did; not just for pragmatic reasons, but because, as a character and a person, she needed to learn that what people want and feel has to affect the things she does and wants. Of course, the challenge is to do that while becoming a grander version of yourself rather than becoming a diminished, beaten bottom that is only an extension of someone else’s will.

The tragedy of agency was that Proserpina did not learn to do that in a way that would allow Proserpina to still be herself.

The sex scenes in this book are phenomenal. Imagine my surprise when I discovered my ace sisters wrote not just such intriguing intimacy, but that they also wrote it so hot. And the horniness and eroticism are not restricted to the “actual” sex. We learn of Proserpina’s claspers in one chapter, and it has nothing on the sensuality of the controlled murder and torture Proserpina uses to free Mithridates from her eternal punishment in the following one.

I cannot wait to write for this series; assemble all of my bones so I can do it!

— your goddess waiting oblation, Lizzie