I made a serious mistake in not reviewing this right away, so here’s the vibes:

In this last book of the Cornish Trilogy, we are back in the setting of the first book, The Rebel Angels, about a year later after it ended. The main characters: Maria Theotoky, Arthur Cornish, and Simon Darcourt are the board of the Cornish Foundation, started with substantial funds from Francis Cornish’s death. They decide to sponsor a grumpy, misanthropic, yet genius graduate student, Hulda Shnakenburg, to finish an unfinished opera. Hijinks ensue with a campy cast of characters that seem as theatrical and larger-than-life as written characters could be.

The story of the development of the opera titled “Arthur of Britan, AKA the Magnanimous Cuckold” is nested within the comings and goings of Arthur, Maria, and Simon, creating a house of mirrors. Everything reflects off everything else and makes it larger or more bizarre, or funnels into recursive themes and bizarre refractions within this book, but also with the others of the trilogy. 

I did think there was some pieces that didn’t age super well, like a rather intense relationship between a supervisor and the doctorate student, and some parts I couldn’t tell-- like one pregnant woman derisively mocking another for not drinking during pregnancy-- if they were “of the time”, satire, misogyny on the part of the author, or a mix of all three. Overall, the book continues the mastery of the first two books and made me laugh repeatedly, but I just didn’t like it as much as the first two.