The Accidental Empressby Allison PatakiHoward Books (Simon & Schuster), 2015Allison Pataki's new novel is about Duchess Elisabeth (“Sisi”) of Bavaria, who traveled to the Habsburg court in 1853 in order to wait upon her older sister Helene when Helene became betrothed to the young Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph, who ended up preferring Sisi to his intended bride and wed her instead, a move that rankled his strong-willed and domineering mother Archduchess Sophie. Thus in The Accidental Empress Sisi finally gets the lush and lovingly-detailed English-language novel her dedicated partisans have always thought she deserved. Pataki, whose debut novel The Traitor's Wife was widely praised, does more than enough period research to give her new book a rich and inviting atmosphere. Readers will likely be entranced.That they'll also be in large part deceived is a risk they'd run in any but the most boringly dutiful historical novels. The Accidental Empress comes with an author interview at the end, and it also has a reading group guide that might help to clarify some things, but the book's deceptions begin early – in fact, in the title, since there was nothing “accidental” about Sisi (she was a cousin of the emperor, raised in one of the dozen Potemkin-royalties specifically designed to provide potential mates for each other's shoppers)(even the switch from Helene to Sisi was a popular – and thoroughly artificial – gesture for which breeding-houses were always well-prepared, especially since Queen Victoria pulled it herself in 1840), and since Sisi was hardly an empress, since she held what little power she had solely by virtue of being her husband's wife. The idea of a pretty young woman (Sisi was famously beautiful, as she knew better than anybody, since she spent six or seven hours of every single day of her life primping and preening in front of a mirror) suddenly, unpredictably catching the fancy of the ruler of a vast empire is called a “fairly tale”-type story for good reason, since fairy tales are the only place where such a thing ever happens.Beyond that, any allure the Habsburgs may have as romantic stalking-horses is fairly mysterious, and to some extent Pataki is to be congratulated for her intrepid attempt to infuse a little bright imagination into the most airless and darkly-draped parlor in all of European royalty. She does this mainly by painting Franz Joseph as an attractive figure somewhat reluctantly trapped in an imperial gilded cage by the twin forces of tradition and his termagant mother – in other words, as the exact polar opposite of what he was. At one point about a quarter of the way through the novel, Pataki has Franz Joseph and Sisi suddenly gallop away from the emperor's guard and find themselves in a secluded glen on the flanks of a mountain. The moment when Sisi drinks fresh spring water from Franz Joseph's cupped hands has a genuine erotic tingle, but it dissipates immediately when an old couple stumble across the pair, immediately recognize the emperor, fawn and cavort, and then exit stage left leaving Franz melancholy and Sisi suddenly appreciative:

She conceded that she could not truly know what it must have felt like for Franz – being recognized and pursued everywhere he went.To be so instantaneously known and gawked at by every commoner he passed. To be set apart from every person who saw him, a living icon, aware of his own frailty, and yet, invested with all the love, praise, pain and suffering of every citizen. The burdens her cousin must have shouldered suddenly overwhelmed her. She was about to say so when Franz spoke, interrupting her thoughts.“Mother has always made known to me the importance of my bearing. That there ought to be a certain distance between the ruler and the subject. A ruler ought to inspire awe, and fear even.”

That the scene works infinitely better than one in which Franz Joseph himself peremptorily ordered the old couple to buzz off - or, more likely, turned them over to his guards as possible anarchists (the Habsburg never lived who couldn't spot a brace of anarchists before lunch – and justifiably so, since they were more hated than any royalty in human history, except by novelists) – can't be denied, but any reader hoping the somewhat tired Oedipal note will fade quickly are doomed to be disappointed. Nearly two hundred pages later, after Sisi is married and installed as brood-mare, there's a scene where she accuses her imperious mother-in-law of planting spies among her ladies-in-waiting, and the psychic background hasn't changed a bit:

“Spies? Goodness, child, who do you think I am, the tsarina of Russia? I have no spies.”“Fine, gossips. Whom you happen to reward with money and favors. Call them whatever you like.” Sisi shrugged, smiling at her husband, who sat opposite her.“You would paint me as a monster.” Sophie turned her gaze on her son. “Franz, you let your wife assail your mother like this? When all I've ever done is help you both?”“Mother, please. Elisabeth, darling.” Franz sighed, lifting a soft-boiled egg and depositing it into a small silver eggcup. “We've just come from mass where we prayed for our child. Can we behave in a civil manner?”

The silver-eggcup world of the Habsburbs gradually brings out Sisi's inner rebel in Pataki's telling, and she concludes The Accidental Empress early enough in her subject's life to raise the possibility of a sequel covering events up until the end of Sisi's life in 1898 (she was assassinated, naturally). That Sisi's life grew progressively more bitter is something readers will already know from Rebecca West's short, passionate summary:

How great she was! In her early pictures she wears the same look of fiery sullenness we see in the young Napoleon: she knows that within her there is a spring of life and she is afraid that the world will not let it flow forth and do its fructifying work. In her later pictures she wears a look that was never on the face of Napoleon. The world had not let the spring flow forth and it had tuned to bitterness. But she was not without achievements of the finest sort, of a sort, indeed, that Napoleon never equalled.

And if that passage also demonstrates this particular inbred Bavarian gold-digger's ability to inspire enthusiasm far in excess of what she merits, then Allison Pataki is in some pretty exalted company.