Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant
Gwyneth Jones
472 pages
published in 2008
So about halfway through Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant, when the heroine is rotting away in prison on an alien world, forgotten by everybody, it looked like the novel was going to be a science fiction adaption of The Count of Monte Cristo. It wouldn’t have been the first; The Stars My Destination just being the most famous example of such an adaptation. But while the imprisonment of Bibi, Spirit‘s protagonist does consciously echo Dumas’ famous novel, including having an older mentor imprisoned with her who leaves her a fortune, it changes its mind almost instantly and doesn’t become a revenge story after all.
Which is for the best, as Bibi is no Edmond Dantès. Whereas the latter was unknowingly framed for a political crime for those he thought his friends, only discovering the truth years into his imprisonment, Bibi was just collatoral damage, not for the first time either. She had started live as Gwibiwr, the probable daughter of a (Welsh?) chieftan of the White Rock clans who’d long lived in rebellion against the one world government, a rebellion now crushed. Bibi herself is taken into the entourage of Lady Nef and becomes a minor servant, young enough to have lost most of her memories of before. She was therefore a victim of politics long before she was left ot rot in an alien prison for being part of a conspiracy against an emperor who hadn’t yet taken the throne when she had last been on Earth. And unlike Dantès, the people on which she could’ve had her revenge were mostly innocent bystanders as well.