Review: Peaces

Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel Peaces begins when lovers Otto and Xavier Shin embark on a not-quite-honeymoon (they’ve decided against marriage but have agreed to share a surname) on board the Lucky Day, a steam train owned by Xavier’s eccentric millionaire aunt. Expecting a relaxing and luxurious holiday, they instead enter a zone where nothing is quite as it seems. Their fellow passenger, the reclusive Ava Kapoor, must prove her own sanity by the age of thirty or lose a vast inheritance. A man named Přem who is apparently invisible to Ava, and may or may not have figured in Otto’s past too, hovers obtrusively over the narrative. One of the train’s carriages plays host to an apparently little-visited bazaar. A preternaturally incisive mongoose finds love. At one point, I’m pretty sure, Otto finds himself fleeing from someone dressed in a diver’s suit.

The train journey turning strange is a familiar motif in speculative fiction. Think of the Gothic protagonist disembarking a forebodingly empty train at a forebodingly empty station (a trope recently updated in T.J. Klune’s rather unGothic The House in the Cerulean Sea); the divine steam trains that run across the city of Palimpsest in Catherynne M. Valente’s novel of that name; the mummy rampaging through a space-bound Orient Express in the prosaically-titled Doctor Who episode Mummy on the Orient Express (a text which also plays with selective invisibility, albeit with considerably less subtlety and attention to metaphoric resonance). Crucially, despite the modern or science-fictional settings of the texts in which they appear, these trains are distinctly old-fashioned, even opulent; even Klune’s, the most prosaic of the ones I’ve listed here, has manually-operated sliding carriage doors and a chatty attendant. No overcrowded, utilitarian Network Rail trains here.

This opulence, this nostalgia for the Age of Steam (which in fact its contemporaries experienced as noisy, dirty and dangerous) is, I think, inextricably bound up with the imaginative work these texts are doing. One steps aboard a vehicle that has appeared, as if by magic, out of a past that never existed, and is whisked away into a transitional realm where one’s needs are privileged to a greater extent than they are in the real world. So, Klune’s protagonist Linus finds love and found family, and gains importance through his self-assigned status as bureaucratic protector of that family; Valente’s train-obsessed Sei becomes inextricably bound to Palimpsest’s engines; the Doctor and Clara enter a facsimile of 30s privilege underpinned by the labour of servants and AI; and Oyeyemi’s lovers essentially spend the length of the novel in a world containing only four or five people, including them. The fantasy of the steam train is, then, essentially a fantasy of wealth; no-one, after all, dreams of travelling in the uncomfortable, roofless third-class carriages of the early Victorian era. It’s no coincidence that Xavier comes from a dynasty of millionaires.

This is why, I think, my response to Peaces boils down to: “pleasant read, not so memorable”. Otto, Xavier, Ava and Přem exist in an airless bubble of privilege and steampunk retro-nostalgia; in this context, their crises of identity and ontological speculation feel just a little…academic. To put it another way: the novel is a puzzle box of sorts, one that perhaps has no solution. Is Ava lying when she claims not to see Přem, and if so, why? When Otto ran into the burning house that haunts his memory, was the man he spotted in the flames real or a product of his imagination? These are the questions the narrative teases us with, and although they are intriguing ones – keeping the reader pleasingly off-kilter – there’s no sense that their answers are ultimately very important. The circumstances of the novel are too removed from the circumstances and concerns of everyday reality for the text to be truly destabilising of our expectations of narrative in the way that I think Oyeyemi is going for.

That’s a shame, because that work of destabilisation, making familiar stories and tropes mean different things to what they mean in their original contexts – tying those familiar stories to political currents in the real world – is something Oyeyemi is very good at, and it’s what continues to draw me to her work. Whimsical though it is, Peaces lacks the incisive playfulness of Mr Fox, the menacing ontological uncertainty of The Icarus Girl; lyrical though it is, it misses the fairytale resonance of Boy, Snow, Bird (acknowledging the transphobia of that novel). I enjoyed spending time with it; I liked its strangeness, its slipstream sensibilities, the intellectual challenge it poses the reader. But it feels, ultimately, inessential, and that’s not something I’m used to getting from an Oyeyemi novel.

Review: The Angel of the Crows

Is steampunk dead? It’s a question that’s been rattling around in genre circles for a good ten years, ever since the aesthetic began to make its way out of the subculture and into the mainstream, popping up on haute couture catwalks, in blockbuster films and in music videos by major artists. (Typing “steampunk” into Etsy returns more than 250,000 results.) The problem is clearly not one of waning interest, but rather the opposite: smeared across the world’s media, permeating the world’s markets, have the signs and signifiers of steampunk – cogs, gears, steam engines, bustles, corsets and pocket watches – been emptied of their meaning, aestheticised in the purest sense? Has steampunk lost its (probably already very dubious) punk credentials?

For me, the answer is: indubitably yes. In some cases. Including that of Katherine Addison’s Sherlock-wingfic-turned-respectable-SFF-novel The Angel of the Crows, which transplants Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories into a fantastical version of Victorian London in which werewolves, vampires and ghosts stalk the streets alongside Jack the Ripper. Addison’s Sherlock figure – here named Crow – is an angel, in a world where such beings must remain within specific buildings to retain their identities and individualities; Crow has got around this rule by salvaging a piece of banister from his original residence, and as a result has a somewhat seedy reputation among other angels (it surely doesn’t help that he has taken the rather grandiose title “the Angel of London”). Watson – dubbed J.H. Doyle here for what I suspect are copyright reasons – remains a retired army doctor, except that the wounds the war has left them with are metaphysical rather than material: an encounter with a fallen angel has turned them into an (unregistered, illegal). hellhound. Predictably enough, Crow and Doyle move in together, largely because they are the only people who can tolerate each other, and Doyle becomes drawn into Crow’s hobby-slash-occupation of solving intricate and unusual crimes.

The plots here are all pretty familiar, notwithstanding the supernatural elements: Addison takes us on a Greatest Hits tour of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, from A Study in Scarlet to “The Speckled Band”, leaving motivations, clues and occasionally entire narratives intact. This is an episodic novel, with a vague overarching structure binding it all together: those looking for tight, efficient plotting should probably go elsewhere. The major innovation that Addison has made here is in introducing queer representation (as opposed to the blatant queerbaiting that went on in her source text, the BBC TV series Sherlock): Doyle, as I’ve already intimated, is some flavour of genderqueer, and Crow is vaguely transmasculine. It’s difficult to be definitive about their identities, because Addison herself isn’t: the novel is narrated in the first person by Doyle, no pronoun is ever used to refer to them, they live as a man but explicitly refer to themself as “not a man”; similarly, the masc-presenting Crow tells Doyle that angels are “all female…Insofar as it makes sense to apply gender to asexual beings”, but that “human beings give [angels]…gender”. Electra Pritchett suggests here, pretty compellingly, that Addison is confusing concepts of gender, sex and sexuality, which is one reason why it’s so difficult to make out how to read Crow and Doyle.

Does this queering of these two canonical characters, then, put the punk into Addison’s steampunk setting? Well…not for me: partly because of Addison’s somewhat clumsy handling of their queerness (probably we could argue that the confusion around their transness has to do with the limited vocabulary a Victorian person would have had available to express these concepts, but frankly…this is a novel with hellhounds and angels in it, it’s not THAT committed to historical accuracy), and partly because she doesn’t do a whole lot with it. There is, for example, no real examination of traditional gender roles in Victorian society. And pretty much everything else about this novel is fairly, hmm, unremarkable given the setting and its genre. Crow and Doyle are comfortably middle-class, if occasionally strapped for cash. They do run across the spectre of Victorian colonial imperialism at least once, but not in a way that significantly disturbs the structure or mood of the text. Addison attempts nothing particularly notable with her prose or her plots; generally, the novel isn’t creating any form of productive tension for the reader to rub up against.

The result is, to be fair, a thoroughly enjoyable one: I am not immune to the aesthetic pleasures of steampunk, that warm immersion in a romanticised past, in the comfortingly familiar promises of fog-shrouded London streets where all manner of creatures may lurk. I would happily read a sequel, or two, or five; and seeing queerness represented in this sort of story is always a small joy, even if it is awkwardly done. But throughout my reading of The Angel of the Crows, and beyond, I found myself wondering what the purpose of it all was; what Addison was trying to say. This is steampunk without its bite, steampunk as consolatory, familiar, a sanitised bourgeois fantasy of what was in reality a profoundly oppressive age. This is steampunk-as-zombie: not dead, but not truly alive either.

Review: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

This review contains spoilers.

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow It’s 1888. Russian ships are squaring up to the Japanese navy, and Great Britain is contemplating whether to intervene. Against this alt-historical backdrop, clairvoyant and Japanese nobleman Mori, his lover Thaniel (a translator for the British Foreign Office) and their adopted daughter Six travel to Tokyo to investigate reports of ghosts appearing in the British consulate there.

Natasha Pulley’s The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is the sequel to her well-received The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which, in the interests of full transparency, I should mention I have not read (although it exists in my house and I expect I will get round to reading it at some point). As I was gathering my thoughts on what I wanted to say about it, I stumbled upon this essay about the novel’s titular character, Takika Pepperharrow – technically Mori’s wife (theirs being a marriage of convenience) and something of an antagonist throughout the novel. The writer argues that the novel fails Pepperharrow by having her long and complex history with Mori conclude in an act of self-sacrifice that benefits both him and Thaniel; that, in other words, Pulley kills off a nuanced female character in service to the narrative arcs of two male ones.

It’s hard to argue with this conclusion. Well, in fact it’s impossible: that is precisely what happens in The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. And, look, gender is something I’m very interested in as a reader: I’ve deliberately stopped engaging with litfic novels that treat female characters with contempt; I track the number of books I read by female and non-binary authors. And yet, this wasn’t an aspect of the narrative that particularly stuck out to me, and I’m interested in why that is.

Partly, I suspect, it’s because its representation of other groups traditionally marginalised by Western literary culture is interesting and thoughtful. Thaniel and Mori are a gay couple in a historical period that is generally depicted as being hostile to queer relationships (Pulley portrays homosexuality as being marginally more acceptable in Meiji-era Japan than in Victorian England; I have no idea whether that’s an accurate portrayal); Six is clearly autistic, again in a context where the concept of neurodiversity does not really exist. As Pulley explains in an afterword, the speech of her Japanese characters is rendered in informal English in a bid to represent the formality registers they’re using in their own language. (Whether or not this is a successful or a desirable approach is debatable – I’ve talked before about the importance of not representing the past as simply a reskinned version of the present – but it’s clearly been thought about, and that’s something I can respect.) And it’s also good to see a steampunk story set in a non-Western country that it doesn’t attempt to exoticise.

There’s something lulling, as well, about Pulley’s prose, which is plangent, straightforward and clear; the sort of prose that tells you, in a wistful “what are we going to do about humanity” sort of way, exactly what to think about the events of the story:

… it was just as dangerous to teach a little girl that one foot wrong would mean a lunatic and a dungeon. It made it sound inevitable, whereas if you were brought up safe in the knowledge that people were supposed to be good, you approached the bad ones with a healthy fury that might just see you out of the dungeon.

Finally, the quality of Mori and Thaniel’s relationship makes the novel faintly addictive: although they’re both adults, their inability to communicate their feelings for each other for fear of rejection feels much more YA. Thus Thaniel spends much of the novel convinced that Mori doesn’t love him and just keeps him around because he’s entertaining (?); by the end, we discover that Mori is similarly convinced that Thaniel has been staying with him because he gets a free room out of the arrangement. It’s a little eyeroll-y written down like that, but the romantic tension generated by this set-up acts as an effective hook: certainly I was convinced that Thaniel was mistaken and desperate for him to realise it.

My point here is that the many sweet and charming things I found in The Lost Future of Pepperharrow for me outweighed the undoubtedly problematic way in which it treats its titular character. That’s partly for reasons of textual technique – the accessible prose, the rom-com love story – but it’s also partly because of my own preferences and interests as a reader (I’m marginally more interested in LGBT+ rep than in female rep at this point in time). I mean; this is quite obvious; we are all postmodernists now. But it’s interesting nonetheless, to interrogate what makes my reading of a particular text different to someone else’s, and to think about why that might be.

I don’t, however, want to over-egg how much I enjoyed The Lost Future of Pepperharrow: ultimately, for me, its sweetness made it too easy and unchallenging a read. I liked it while I was reading it; I appreciated its setting and its treatment of marginalised identities; but it’s not a novel I think about very much. It was fine. Your reading may vary.

Review: Winterkeep

Published in January this year, Kristin Cashore’s Winterkeep marks her return to the acclaimed Graceling Realms series, a run of high fantasy YA novels dealing with themes of parental abuse, coercive control and personal agency. This latest outing is a departure in terms of tone, setting and structure, and although on the whole I enjoyed it, that enjoyment was despite its many quirks rather than because of them.

The people of the Graceling Realms have recently discovered a new continent, the land of Torla, and have opened up trade with the nearest nation on that continent, Winterkeep. When a delegation from the Monsean Queen Bitterblue (who we saw struggling with the legacy of her monstrous father Leck in Bitterblue, the previous novel in the series) goes missing, Bitterblue and her retinue go themselves to Winterkeep to find out what’s going on. Their story is interwoven with that of the young woman Lovisa, daughter of two powerful Winterkeep politicians, who is slowly waking up to the emotional harm her parents have done to her and her younger brothers.

It’s hard to summarise beyond that simply because there’s so much going on here. This is the first Graceling Realms novel to feature multiple points of view: whereas previous outings in the series focused narrowly on the emotional journey of a single character, allowing Cashore to explore their coming-of-ages in great depth, Winterkeep takes a broader approach, attempting to draw its conclusions from multiple examples. It also, somewhat jarringly, introduces environmental concerns: Torla, in stark contrast to the other Graceling Realms, is in the middle of an industrial revolution, and the fuel that powers their economy is toxic and dangerous to use and to produce. There are discussions of two-party politics, arms manufacturing, capitalism; there’s boarding school drama, murder, arson, imprisonment, court politicking and romantic intrigue; there are telepathic blue foxes, sentient sea-creatures and a massive gentle tentacled being with POV chapters.

This kitchen-sink approach is a poor fit with Cashore’s strengths as a writer. Generally, what’s enjoyable and valuable about the first three novels is the way they use tropes such as mind control and absolute monarchy to literalise the concerns about agency, privacy and consent that many modern teens face as they grow up, focusing those concerns through a single viewpoint character. In Winterkeep, that close focus is diffused: agency, privacy and consent all remain key themes, but they’re not literalised in the same way (there is telepathy in Winterkeep, but it’s somewhat sidelined in favour of more mundane forms of emotional abuse), and the introduction of a more political dimension to the text detracts from the clarity and depth with which Cashore’s other novels discuss them. And Cashore is not good on the politics. Her takes on two-party systems of government, environmental degradation and capitalism are basic, shallow, uninteresting; and she is unable in this volume to resolve the series’ increasingly inconsistent position on democracy. One of Bitterblue’s contingency plans for Monsea, should she die in Winterkeep, is for the country to transition into a republic; by this we are to understand that she is a just and progressive ruler. And yet by the end of Winterkeep she is discussing future children with her love interest, talking of teaching them to rule justly (instead of, for instance, abdicating her throne in favour of the republic she has already planned for). By this we are to understand that she has achieved a desirable romantic dream. Herein lies the problem: Cashore is fundamentally most interested in her characters’ personal lives, and so introducing an ill-thought-through political dimension creates tensions and fractures that the text is not set up to address.

The pleasures of the earlier novels are, however, not entirely absent from Winterkeep. Their fundamental good-heartedness about what their characters deserve from life remains: Bitterblue and Lovisa come through different kinds of abuse to find understanding, support and love. We care about them. We care about their ability to process and make it past what has happened to them. Ultimately it’s this that kept me reading despite the novel’s messiness, despite my initial scepticism about the telepathic foxes and the move from cod-medieval fantasy into quasi-steampunk: despite everything, Cashore’s love and concern for her characters is what shines through.

Review: Mister Monday

This review contains spoilers.

Garth Nix’s novel Mister Monday – the first in the Keys to the Kingdom series, which consists of seven books that are, yes, all named after days of the week – is one of those children’s books that, like Alice in Wonderland and much of Roald Dahl’s work, presents us with an exaggerated and apparently nonsensical view of the adult world in order to address concerns about growing up and becoming part of it. The novel’s prologue tells us about a sentient Will whose seven trustees, unwilling to execute it, have divided up into seven pieces which they have placed under constant guard; one of those pieces, however, has escaped, and is busy running around trying to be fulfilled. Back in our world, or a version of it, schoolboy Arthur Penhaligon collapses from a severe asthma attack and is handed a Key, a powerful magical artefact, by the titular Mister Monday, one of the Will’s trustees. Monday expects Arthur to die pretty much immediately, so he can then reclaim the Key while also having technically fulfilled the terms of the Will; but, thanks to the Will’s own intervention, Arthur survives, and enters the vast interdimensional House to which Monday and the other trustees belong in search of a cure for a plague that is threatening his hometown.

The House as we encounter it in Mister Monday (it takes different forms as the series goes on) is steampunk in aesthetic and bafflingly bureaucratic. There are thousands of ranks, with House denizens taking centuries to work their way up from some lowly position to a slightly higher one; there’s a decade-long queue to get an audience with Mister Monday; pretty much everyone is operating under arcane laws and restrictions that neither Arthur nor the reader have any hope of interpreting. In one scene we see a street full of people rushing about moving written documents for no reason that is ever explained (at least in this novel). It all strongly resembles a child’s idea of what an office looks like: a rigid Victorian hierarchy, uncomfortable and unfamiliar clothes, an impenetrable system of rules and regulations, an apparently arbitrary obsession with paperwork. In other words, the House appears to make little sense because office norms make little sense to children.

Which makes it significant that Nix’s child protagonist must eventually successfully navigate the House – both in order to stop the plague in our world and because Mister Monday’s actions have made him heir to the House and its environs. It’s notable that Arthur’s success in the House – which involves defeating and dethroning Mister Monday, and taking his place – directly enables his success in undoing the effects of the plague: having navigated the topsy-turvy adult world of the House, he’s able to take his first steps towards independent agency, and thus adulthood, in our world. In a particularly neat touch, both Arthur’s (deceased) birth parents and his adoptive mother Emily were instrumental in devising a cure for a flu epidemic a decade or so before the time in which the novel takes place; in effecting the cure for this new plague, Arthur is taking on his parents’ mantle, in another symbolic step towards adulthood.

So, in Mister Monday, Garth Nix is using portal fantasy to explore childhood anxieties about adulthood and agency, by having his young protagonist gain power over a distorted, fun-house version of an adult workplace – thus rendering the things that seem arbitrary about adult life more legible and therefore less sinister. Children’s literature is traditionally geared towards helping the implied child-reader become good members of the adult social order, and Mister Monday is no exception: Arthur may be a long way off true adulthood yet, but by the end of the novel he’s taken a significant step in its direction.

Review: How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?

N. K. Jemisin’s short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? is named for a 2013 essay of hers in which she discusses the lack of Black representation in SFF media. In that essay, she writes:

I wasn’t any more interested in all-black futures than I was in all-white futures. I just wanted fantasies of exploration and enchantment that didn’t slap me in the face with you don’t belong here messages. I just wanted to be able to relax and dream.

Her novels exemplify this pluralistic, fantastical outlook: the Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy is a story about colonialism and brutal oppression set in a multi-racial world where queerness is a run-of-the-mill reality; her standalone novel The Killing Moon features an Ancient Egypt analogue whose inhabitants practice dream-magic; in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the first novel in the Inheritance trilogy, we find an incestuous divine threesome and, again, some fairly complex racial politics. These are novels that imagine new social possibilities, or that, in the case of the Broken Earth trilogy, are about the fight to reimagine how society works, to redefine who gets to be thought human.

The stories collected in How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, then, are impressively diverse in terms of setting, tone and genre. We have steampunk set in a newly-free Haiti (“The Effluent Engine”); a far-future, alien-overlord dystopia (“Walking Awake”); a generation ship story with an all-Muslim cast of characters (“The Brides of Heaven”); a story of the Fair Folk in early-20th-century Alabama (“Red Dirt Witch”). There are even a couple of stories – “The Narcomancer” and “Stone Hunger” – set in worlds familiar from Jemisin’s later novels. What these stories do have in common, with each other and with the novels, is an ecstatic sense of the potential for change, brought about through revolution and protest; through connection with another being or society; or simply through a new understanding of the world and our place in it. Thus the Black heroine of “The Effluent Engine”, Jessaline Dumonde, tells her mixed-race romantic interest Eugenie, stuck in racist New Orleans, of a Haiti in which one’s ambition need not be limited by one’s race, gender or even sexual orientation. And in “On the Banks of the River Lex”, in which gods and anthropomorphic personifications linger apathetically in New York after the extinction of humanity, Death finds hope and the promise of new purpose in the burgeoning intelligence of an octopus.

Such change, though, rarely comes in these stories without a price. The opening story, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”, stands as a sort of manifesto for the whole collection in this respect. A response to Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, it describes a utopian city, Um-Helat, organised around principles of mutual respect and support. Um-Helat’s prosperity and joy is perpetually threatened by transmissions from our own world, a place where “the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root”. Those who have been “tainted” by such transmissions – who have begun to believe in that notion – are summarily, humanely executed, lest the rot spread. This is a theme picked up on again and again in the collection: that pacifism is not enough in the face of oppressive structural violence, that tolerance is not a virtue to be extended to the intolerant. The heroines of both “Red Dirt Witch” and “Walking Awake” sacrifice themselves in order to bring about change – in one case killing an innocent bystander in the process. And when, in “The Effluent Engine”, privileged, sheltered Eugenie objects to her scientific prowess being used violently, Jessaline counters with the atrocities the French commander Rochambeau inflicted on the Haitians in the aftermath of their last failed rebellion. Eugenie’s mannered, Christian pacifism is made to seem ridiculous in the face of such atrocities: the oppressors, after all, did not obey such niceties.

This is not to portray How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? as a bleak read. There are stories that are horrible and uncomfortable or that end badly, but as a whole the collection is suffused with optimism, with vitality, with “exploration and enchantment”. Change may be difficult, but it is also wonderful: it exposes us to wonders, it allows us to build a more joyful world, a more joyful future, for everyone. In Jemisin’s own words in her introduction to the collection, “There’s the future over there. Let’s all go.”

Review: The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon & Co.

The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon & Co. is a Sunday serial that ran alongside Shaenon K. Garrity’s daily webcomic Narbonic (2000-2006). As the title suggests, it takes the webcomic’s central characters, mad scientist Helen Narbon, IT guy Dave, murderous intern Mell and Helen’s sworn archnemesis Professor Madblood, and drops them into a vaguely steampunk-Victorian milieu. Helen, Dave and Mell set off for the Moon in a contraption of Helen’s devising, only to be captured by a fishy race of aliens from Venus, who also have Madblood in their clutches. Can the gang escape the Venusians and get their holiday back on track…?

I’ve struggled to write satisfyingly about Narbonic, to get anything interesting out of the text, and I think the reason for that is: it’s not actually very good. This is particularly obvious in this steampunk serial, which being relatively short and, um, steampunk is on home ground for me, more so than the main run is anyway. As a deliberately pulpy text, plotted on the fly, it suffers from steampunk’s core pitfall: that of prioritising a British imperial worldview that’s upper-class, white and (more or less) straight. The space-exploration trope is pretty classically imperial-colonialist: imperial agents explore other worlds in order to make them legible to Westernised values of Reason and Science; and then scheme against the people they find there for personal gain. At one point we even meet a race of Italian-speaking female clones, referred to at least once as “Amazons”, who demand endless sex from Madblood as the only man they’ve seen for quite some time…which, yeesh.

Yes, these tropes are being deployed knowingly, parodically even (the lead characters in this adventure are, after all, almost parodies of their modern-day selves). But that knowingness doesn’t include critique; there is no coherent statement here other than, I guess “steampunk is aesthetically cool”. Which, to be fair, it is. But in this consumerist age I think we need to be wary of aesthetics; to ask, “What is being sold here?”; to distinguish between harmful ideology dressed up in flim-flam and work that is imaginatively generative, that deploys its aesthetics for meaningful effect. Narbonic and its associated serials are fun, and they’re not trying to be anything more than that; but I think it’s ok to hold our fun to higher standards.

Review: Clockwork Boys

T. Kingfisher’s Clockwork Boys follows a ragtag band of adventurers on a suicide mission: the Dowager, ruler of the unnamed city from which they hail, is sending them – three criminals and a sheltered scholar – to Anuket City, the source of the massive, murderous clockwork automatons ravaging the countryside and threatening war. A company of soldiers has been destroyed trying to make this journey, and all of the Dowager’s career spies in the city are dead. This journey is not a safe proposition.

Our party, then, consists of Slate, a forger and creative accountant; Brenner, an assassin who was once Slate’s lover; Caliban, a paladin who committed mass murder while possessed by a demon; and Learned Edmund, the aforementioned scholar and a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist.

Clockwork Boys isn’t, despite its title and cover art, steampunk; its setting is more the sort of cod-medieval society you’d encounter in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Kingfisher’s stated aim is to deconstruct the assumptions of such settings, particularly the RPG trope of the moody paladin, as she writes in her acknowledgements at the end of the novel. And, indeed, there are plenty of acts of subversion here: the fact that the party’s led by a woman with comparatively little martial skill; the depiction of the physical effects of a day’s riding on people who aren’t trained to it (spoiler: it’s quite painful); the general scurrilousness and disunity of the party as a whole.

It’s all reasonably entertaining, but it also feels somewhat recycled. Kingfisher says in her acknowledgements that she started writing it during NaNoWriMo in 2006, and it definitely reads like a NaNoWriMo novel: a magpie concoction of influences, ideas grabbed from everywhere in a mad rush to reach word count. The world doesn’t hang together terribly well; the narrative’s episodic, moving from set piece to set piece in a way that doesn’t feel purposefully planned. It doesn’t help that Clockwork Boys is not actually a full novel: it ends abruptly, leaving the narrative to be taken up by the sequel The Wonder Engine. (This is a practice that annoys me more than I can say. If you are selling me a novel, it needs to be a full work; I should be able to read and judge it standalone.)

Plus, well – the heroic fantasy tropes Kingfisher is writing about by and large aren’t mainstream any more, and in fact are so old-fashioned that the techniques used to undermine them have themselves become tropes (in particular the idea of criminals taking on heroic quests). Clockwork Boys is a reasonably fun read, but it’s not doing anything subversive or new, and there’s little to make it stand out from more immersive rogue quest novels like Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls. My stance on it is, in a nutshell: if you do pick it up it’s okay; but there’s no compelling reason to pick it up when you could be reading something better.

Review: The Lie Tree

As Frances Hardinge’s seventh novel The Lie Tree opens, fourteen-year-old Faith and her family are approaching the fictional island of Vane, having suddenly left their home in Kent on the wings of scandal – Faith’s father the Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, a renowned naturalist, has been accused of fabricating his most famous finds. But Vane society is no kinder than that of the mainland, and the Sunderlys find themselves beset by gossip, rumours, secrets and lies. And when Erasmus Sunderly dies mysteriously, Faith finds among his papers an account of a miraculous plant, the Mendacity Tree. Whisper a lie to the Mendacity Tree (which thrives in darkness and shrinks from the light), and make as many people as possible believe that lie, and it will produce a fruit that gives the eater knowledge – the bigger the lie, the deeper and more consequential the knowledge.

There are several literary contexts The Lie Tree could be placed in (the Victorian novel is one; I also considered reading it alongside Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst, with which it has some striking similarities), but I think it’s most productively read as a work of children’s literature. Specifically, it’s a subversion of moralistic children’s stories in which young girls and women learn to be good, wise, patient and kind; to trust in God and other sources of paternal authority; in short, to conform to the restrictive gender roles British society traditionally assigns to women. I’m thinking of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden; Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (which is, however, American, not British).

Like many of Hardinge’s heroines, Faith is not good. She has a passion for secrets: for listening at doors, stealing furtive glances at paperwork, sneaking out at night. She’s also clever, having read her way through much of her father’s library and having acquired by herself a working knowledge of Ancient Greek.

These are traits that, at various points in the narrative, she actively seeks to suppress in herself, thanks to social conditioning that tells her that girls do not sneak around collecting secrets, they cannot have intelligent conversations about science without showing off or embarrassing people. Girls are good and quiet and dutiful and uncomplaining; they place the good of others (usually men) above their own. But it’s Faith’s cleverness, her unladylike boldness and her propensity for seeking out information that the adults around her would prefer to keep secret that allows her eventually to work out why her father died; in this text, then, those traits are coded as desirable, and the social pressures that encourage her to suppress them are shown as restrictive and wrong-headed.

One of the important things the novel does, then, is signal the bankruptcy of patriarchal authority. The Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, for example, far from being a shining example of Christian love and honesty, is cold and abusive to his family and lies to the entire scientific community because he is unable to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution. Doctor Jacklers, the island’s resident physician and a craniometrist, claims that intelligence is tied to brain size and thus that women are less intelligent than men – having smaller skulls on average. Faith experiences a profound sense of betrayal on this pronouncement: science itself is telling her that she is lesser. We, knowing Doctor Jacklers’ theory to be incorrect, can see this as a denouncement of the scientific establishment – not science itself – as another source of self-righteous patriarchal authority.

And then there’s the Mendacity Tree itself, which, as Erasmus Sunderly himself acknowledges, has strong resemblances to the Christian Tree of Knowledge. The Mendacity Tree, though, is clearly an unwholesome thing in its distaste for light, the opium-like effects its fruits induce in their eaters, and in its overall air of menace, its uncanny reactions to Faith’s visits. If it is the Tree of Knowledge, then that says some fairly unpalatable things about Christianity itself, and again about the social and patriarchal authority it exerts upon Victorian society.

If The Lie Tree describes ways in which Victorian society is oppressive and wrong-headed, then it also presents strategies for resistance and survival. For instance, Faith despises her mother Myrtle for her focus on keeping up appearances, and her flirtations with various men on the island, after Erasmus’ death; but towards the end of the novel we discover that Myrtle’s aim has all along been to protect her family from the ruin and reputational loss that would follow if Erasmus was found to have died by suicide. She’s simply been using the few tools that society has given her to achieve that. There are other women, too, in these pages who have found ways to exist in the cracks: the brilliant and frail scientist who uses her dilettante husband as cover; the lesbians who must keep their relationship secret. These are imperfect acts of resistance, but they demonstrate to Faith that resistance is possible, even desirable – that society’s expectations of her and of all women are not reasonable or viable.

The Lie Tree, then, critiques a tradition of children’s literature that aims to initiate young girls and women into an oppressive social order by undermining that social order and showing that resistance to it is desirable. Instead of asking readers to accept arbitrary pronouncements from holders of patriarchal authority, it encourages them to think for themselves, to seek out knowledge and to be willing to change their minds; skills we could all benefit from in the times that lie ahead.

Review: Rotherweird

For me, Andrew Caldecott’s first novel Rotherweird suffered from a mismatch of expectations. The cover and jacket copy (including a quote from MR Carey describing it as “Baroque, Byzantine and beautiful”) suggest a cross between Gormenghast and Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s weird and wonderful Edge Chronicles; something Gothic and menacing with a strong sense of place and alterity.

It is not like that.

The titular Rotherweird is a town tucked away in rural England, a medieval enclave hostile to outsiders, history before 1800 and modern technology. Thanks to a decree dating back to the Elizabethan period, it has no MP or bishop, only a mayor; to all intents and purposes, Rotherweird and the valley in which it sits are a realm apart. The story opens as Jonah Oblong, an outsider, takes a post as history teacher at Rotherweird School; as a mysterious set of beads is sold to an antiques shop in the town; and as another outsider, Sir Veronal Slickstone, takes up residence in the long-empty Slickstone Hall that sits at the heart of the town. The tale that unfolds from there reveals the history of the town and its connection to the little universe known as Long Acre, which can be reached from a couple of places in Rotherweird and which is filled with strange and dangerous biological hybrids.

Despite the Gothickry of its subject matter, the book’s actual tone is quite – light; it lacks the steadying sonorousness of Mervyn Peake’s work, which for me meant that the Dickensian exaggeration applied to the characters – most evident in their names, but also in the exaggerated mannerisms of personages like parkouring lady scientist Vixen Valourhand – tipped over into irrelevance. Put simply, I couldn’t find a reason to care about any of these thinly-drawn people in their middle-England bubble.

Actually I think this insular Englishness is a key part of why I bounced off Rotherweird so hard. With its Dickensian references (decoupled from the things that make Dickens great, his anger and his sense of social justice), its medieval architecture and its folk customs drained of religious content – a May morning coracle race down the River Rother; a midsummer pageant that plays host to the novel’s denouement – the novel is conjuring a myth of Merrie England that is exclusively white, straight and cis. Sure, there are some extremely sinister happenings in the town’s past and its present, but its seclusion from the outside world reads very much like a strategy on the author’s part to avoid dealing with anything that’s actually relevant to modern life. I just didn’t find anything for me in Rotherweird, and its total lack of atmosphere meant there was nothing to make up for its irrelevance. It’s not, like, an actively bad book; I didn’t find it offensive, or anything, so your mileage may very much vary. It just – wasn’t for me.