Foul Lady Fortune

“Or maybe she was lying to herself. Maybe she had chosen to kill because she didn’t know how else to prove her worth. More than anything in the world, Rosalind Lang wanted redemption, and if this was how she got it, then so be it.”

Rosalind is contemplating her most recent assassination of a Russian mobster. Throughout the novel, she makes it clear that her principal motivation is redemption. However, the action she uses to accomplish that goal is telling. Rosalind wants to eradicate her past failures and does so by killing the people most closely associated with those failures. Murder is an odd means of achieving salvation. What she really wants is to kill her past self.

“Her cells had been altered to knit together against any wound; they had not been altered to withstand a whole system collapse. Working with the only weapon that could kill her was a way of reminding herself that she was not immortal, no matter what the Nationalists said.”

Rosalind makes an odd choice of a favored murder weapon. It implies a level of self-loathing and potential self-destruction. She literally wears the means to kill herself in her hairpins. At one point in the novel, she scratches herself with a pin and almost dies until the correct antidote is administered. Lady Fortune works daily with chemicals that could kill her. Perhaps she unconsciously hopes that one day they will.

“This is an age of consumption, time speeding by on American flavors and jazz, French literature and a sea of lost cosmopolitan love. If you are not careful, you will be swallowed.”

This comment is made by an anonymous man in a bar. He’s about to become the chemical poisoner’s next victim. The random observation indicates that even people on the street can’t help but notice the deterioration of their own native culture. Long before the Japanese arrived, the Chinese were already suffering from an identity crisis because of their attachment to Western luxuries.