Given the context, the comparison I’m about to make might seem like a strange one. Bear with me. As the saying goes, patience is a virtue, and patience is most definitely a virtue when discussing Owen King’s The Curator.
LCD Soundsystem’s third album, This Is Happening, begins with one of the best Side 1/Track 1 combinations ever, a song called “Dance Yrself Clean.” For just over the first three minutes, the song exists in a very narrow scope, with a handful of elements: vocals, a minimal drumbeat, and a tinny melody. And then, just over three minutes in, another beat comes in out of nowhere, suggesting an entirely new sonic palette and dramatically expanding the scope of what’s possible in the scope. It’s Dorothy seeing Oz in color; it’s Jeremy Irons stepping through a door into a hidden world in Steven Soderbergh’s film Kafka.
Owen King’s The Curator has a moment like that, when a bunch of seemingly disparate elements all line up and the true nature of the story being told comes into focus. It’s not quite halfway through the book, and it suddenly makes the novel’s true nature—and, to an extent, the magic trick being played by its author—that much clearer.
The plot centers around a young woman named Dora, and sometimes called D, who takes over the operation of a museum in a city undergoing political turmoil. King helpfully points out the origin of that turmoil via a series of chapters titled “Events Leading to the Overthrow of the Crown’s Government,” which detail the ways in which public sentiment turned against an aristocratic government. The city is known as “the Fairest,” and as for when and where this novel is set, well…that’s where things get a bit more complex.
There are aspects of the political situation in the city that call to mind some historical periods in our world’s history—there’s more than a little of the Reign of Terror in the current situation in the city, where revolutionary sentiment is curdling into something far bleaker. (That said, the world of The Curator is more technologically advanced than that.) Periodically, King’s characters allude to places like Russia, Constantinople, and London—but the city in which this novel is set is in none of these places, and seems to be quite far from some of them.
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The Curator
There’s also the matter of multiple moons. And the semi-divine status that cats have in the city. This novel is set in a world that’s pretty clearly not our world, but seems close to it. The closest point of comparison I can make would be to John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting—though that novel made it a bit more clear where its history separates from our own. King shares with Ford a penchant for throwing his readers in at the deep end; it can be difficult to keep track of the city’s past and present, as well as the warring revolutionary factions and what, precisely, is going on at the building adjacent to the museum Dora is operating.
And then, helpfully, Dora spells out exactly what’s going on there to another character. That’s the moment I alluded to at the start of this review—the point at which King puts his cards on the table and shows you the nature of the structure that he’s been building the whole time.
That doesn’t mean that a full reveal comes less than halfway through The Curator, however. Instead, having laid out the basic elements, King can start focusing on the next tier of mysteries, which include—but are not limited to—the question of what happened to her beloved brother, a would-be revolutionary who died years earlier. It’s in tracking his last days that brought Dora to her current role; she’d hoped to investigate the Society for Psykical Research, but instead ends up running the National Museum of the Worker.
There’s a sense of instability and fragility to the connections here. Dora is able to gain access to certain things in the city by virtue of her lover Robert, an idealist who’s part of the revolutionary faction. She comes from a working-class background to his more aristocratic one, however, and the tension that this produces in their relationship comes into the foreground in unexpected places.
For all of the precise ways in which The Curator’s second half pays off things set up (and, it turns out, foreshadowed) in its first, there were a few aspects about it where I felt myself wanting to linger. There’s the Morgue Ship, for instance, an uncanny vessel that provides one of the first clues that, strange setting aside, this isn’t a work of strict realism. King also writes memorable villains, and there’s a moment when the novel’s true antagonist thinks back on their history that suggests that King could probably write an entire novel focusing solely on that character.
And there is a handful of ephemera from this world that gets worked into the text, from agit-prop signage to the work of a playwright named Aloys Lumm, who crops up in a number of unexpected places within the narrative. All of this helps make this world feel more fully lived in, and some of these found texts play interesting roles in the novel.
Then again, there’s the old adage about leaving an audience wanting more, which works out well for writers and musicians alike. The Curator is a satisfying novel on multiple levels, and it’s one I hope to revisit soon. And if King decides to revisit this world as well, I’ll be curious to see what deft narrative tricks he’ll bring with him next time.
The Curator is published by Scribner.
Read an excerpt here.
Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).
