The Opera Singer's Duel: A Comedy in Three Parts

Paris, 1690s. A woman in breeches disarms a nobleman and depos its him in a public fountain. The nobleman's father turns out to run the Paris Opera. She has six days to learn to sing or face trial for assault. She decides to spend her last coin on wine and worry about opera later. This is already going extremely well.
 
 
 
 The Wrong Question
 
 Julie d'Aubigny is not a woman who makes good decisions. She makes committed decisions — fully, athletically, with excellent technique — and the distinction matters more than you'd think. When a young nobleman insults her honor in a Paris public square and she disarms him with a flourish and deposits him in a nearby fountain, she's not acting rashly. She's acting precisely. The fountain was, as she'll later explain to a judge, "structural opportunism, not malice."
 
 The problem is that the young nobleman's father runs the Paris Opera.
 
 The Opera Singer's Duel opens at exactly this moment — Julie standing in the anteroom of the Palais de Justice, sword confiscated, wrists unshackled just long enough for the Comte to offer her a deal: audition for the Opera in one week, succeed, and no trial. Refuse, or fail, and face arrest for assault.
 
 Julie considers her options: leave Paris immediately (she's done it before), face the consequences (which would almost certainly involve hanging), or hope that the Comte has a sense of humor. She notes that he does, in fact, seem amused.
 
 Opera, she thinks.  How difficult can it be?
 
 This, she will learn, is the wrong question to ask.
 
 
 
 Enter Lisette
 
 Julie spends her last coin on wine in a tavern where questions aren't asked and the authorities rarely venture. This is where she meets Lisette — a woman in her thirties who used to sing at the Opera before the director, a man named Deschamps, decided she was "too old and too difficult" and threw her out.
 
 Lisette has watched everything that happened in the public square. She has a proposition.
 
 I'll train you. Six days of intensive work. I'll teach you enough to survive that audition. Maybe even impress them, if you're not completely hopeless.
 
 Julie waits. There's always a price.
 
 The price, it turns out, is revenge. Lisette doesn't want money. She wants to watch Deschamps choke on his own bile when the woman who threw a nobleman into a fountain walks into his opera house and sings him into the ground. Julie is the weapon. Lisette is providing the edge.
 
 "Thank you, Lisette, for using me as a weapon in your personal vendetta," Julie says.
 
 "Better," says Lisette. "Much better."
 
 
 
 Six Days of Suffering
 
 What follows is one of the funniest extended sequences in GA Thompson's catalog — a week-by-week training montage in which Julie, who has been breathing wrong her entire life, learns to breathe correctly. Then to sing. Then to sing in Italian. Then to sing in Italian without sounding like she's issuing agricultural instructions.
 
 Day One is breathing. Just breathing. Three hours of it. By the end, Julie's head is swimming, her ribs hurt, and she is seriously reconsidering whether prison might be preferable.
 
 Day Two is Italian. "It's 'ah-MO-ray,' not 'AM-or-ay.'" Lisette throws up her hands in a gesture that seems to encompass all of Julie's failings, musical and otherwise.
 
 The comedy here is precise — Thompson understands that the funniest moments come not from pratfalls but from character: two women with completely incompatible temperaments locked in a shared project, both too stubborn to quit, both starting to suspect this might actually work.
 
 
 
 What Makes This Different
 
 The Opera Singer's Duel is subtitled "A Comedy in Three Parts," and it earns that designation — but it doesn't mistake comedy for weightlessness. Julie d'Aubigny is a real historical figure: a seventeenth-century French opera singer and swordswoman who actually did duel men who insulted her, actually did perform on stages across Europe, and actually did live a life so improbable that fiction has to work to keep up with it. Thompson uses her as the basis for a protagonist who is simultaneously anarchic and principled, reckless and precise, always moving and slowly — very slowly, against her own best instincts — starting to stay.
 
 Lisette is Thompson's invention, and she's one of the best characters in the book: a woman who has lost something she built and is using her grief as fuel, who sees in Julie not just a weapon but a reflection of the artist she once was. Their relationship is combative, funny, and — without either of them quite admitting it — genuinely tender.
 
 The Paris Opera itself becomes a third character: a world of extraordinary beauty and petty politics, where genius and self-importance occupy the same cramped backstage corridors, and where a woman who fights with a sword is only marginally more disruptive than a woman who fights for the right to sing her own way.
 
 
 
 The Oscar Wilde Epigraph Earns Its Place
 
 Thompson opens with Wilde: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." It's a choice that signals exactly what kind of novel this is — not a farce, not a parody of period fiction, but a comedy that takes its characters seriously enough to let them surprise you.
 
 Julie lies constantly, to others and to herself, about what she wants and why she's staying. Lisette lies about her motives until she can't anymore. The Comte lies about why he really made the deal he made. Deschamps' various deceptions are practically operatic in their elaboration.
 
 And underneath all the lying, there is something surprisingly true: a story about what happens when a person who has spent her entire life running finally encounters something worth stopping for.
 
 It's funny. It's sharp. The dedication — "To Deschamps, who would absolutely turn this dedication into an opera. With parrots." — tells you everything you need to know about the tone and the writer both.
 
 
 
 Who Should Read This Book
 
 If you've ever loved historical comedy done with precision — Patrick O'Brian's ear for period voice, Susanna Clarke's commitment to the absurd as a serious mode, any novel that understands that wit and warmth are not opposites — The Opera Singer's Duel belongs on your shelf.
 
 If you've read GA Thompson's crime fiction and wondered what he does when he's not writing about forensic anthropology and institutional failure, the answer is: this. A comedy about swords and singing and a woman who breathes wrong and a city that runs on scandal and a director who has it coming.
 
 The Paris Opera is waiting. Julie has six days. She spent her last coin on wine.
 
 She's going to be fine.
 
 
 
 The Opera Singer's Duel is published by Brin Raven Publishing. GA Thompson is also the author of the Maya Quintana crime series (The Bone Reader, The Bone Keeper), the Torres & Morales Investigation series (La Chingasa, Desert Roses), and Shadow Wars: The Forging of American Intelligence. Learn more at  brinraven.com .