A lively, flapperish adventure through 1920s America in all its diversity, plus ghosts
There’s something terribly satisfying about finding a long, engaging series. Not silly-long, like Wheel of Time, but long enough that things can get really gnarly. Kate Elliott knows what I’m talking about, as does Robin Hobb. On these very pages I’ve praised Chris Wooding’s Tales of the Ketty Jay, and now I’m pleased to be back again to tell you about Libba Bray’s Diviners quartet.
Do you like flappers? Do you like ghosts? Do you like thoughtful meditations on 1920s America, balancing gracefully on the knife edge between admiration for the optimistic spirit of a young nation and clear-sighted acknowledgment of the dark past on which that nation was founded, and continues to perpetuate as it looks towards the future? Sure you do, or else you wouldn't have got past the tagline at the top!
This quartet opens with 17-year-old girl, Evie O’Neill, a good Christian white girl raised in the heartland of Zenith, Ohio—the only surviving child of a respectable family who never really got over the death of their golden boy in World War I. Evie has a knack—a party trick, really—by which she can read objects, and uncover secrets from them. When she uncovers an awkward secret at a party, her family ships her off to live with her uncle, who runs a museum of the occult in New York. The plan is to keep her tucked out of sight just until things blow over in Zenith, but Evie, a party girl through and through, is thrilled at this opportunity to live a glamorous big-city life. In short order she is having a grand old time, cultivating friendships with philosophy-reading museum assistants, muckraking reporters, Harlem poets, showgirls, street thieves and union agitators alike. When the cops come to her uncle’s museum to consult with him on an occult-flavoured murder, she even manages to get herself invited to come along to the scene of the murder, and just like that our flapperish ghostly whodunnit is off to the races in Book 1, The Diviners.
The second book, Lair of Dreams, also opens with mysterious deaths, but in this case they are not obviously murders, but instead are related to a mysterious sleeping sickness. People go to sleep, and are enticed by some entity to dream something that starts out sweetly and turns into horrors. They do not wake up.
Although both The Diviners and Lair of Dreams tell self-contained stories, they are united by two threads: one occult and one mundane. The first is a repeated image a man in a stovepipe hat, lurking in the background of these deadly occurrences, who seems to be connected with the release of these supernatural horrors upon the mundane world. Yet the mundane world is itself up to no good, because a government agency, Project Buffalo, seems to be also involved in everything: from the death of Evie’s brother during the war, to mysterious disappearances in immigrant communities; to, oddly, other knacks that her friends turn out to possess. Some have the ability to walk in dreams, or to turn unnoticeable, or to heal, to see the future. These knacks are what define the titual Diviners of this series, in fact—so actually the occult and the mundane are intertwined in sinister ways. These twisty interweavings define the structure of the last two books of the series—Before the Devil Breaks You and The King of Crows.
What makes this series work so well is the way Bray never loses track of the larger plot structure even as each book-sized story plays out. Thus, we get hints of Project Buffalo and the man in the stovepipe hat from the very beginning, and we meet side characters that in the early stages seem to have no other role in the main storyline than to round out a rather sprawling dramatis personnae. In some cases those appearances are only the briefest flash on the page before they come into their own in later books. For example, Ling Chan, a half-Irish half-Chinese girl who can walk in dreams, appears only momentarily in The Diviners, but becomes a central character in Lair of Dreams, where the mystery of the sleeping sickness makes dream-walking a valuable skill. Bill Johnson appears only as a blind beggar with a gambling problem at the start, but his character arc in later books is rich and important.
In other cases, the characters are fully introduced in The Diviners, but their contributions to the first book’s plot are secondary. In this way, we meet Memphis Campbell, a black poet in Harlem, and his little brother Isaiah. Theta Knight is a dancer with the Zigfield follies, living with her dearest friend Henry DuBois in the same building as Evie and her uncle. Downstairs from them is Mabel Rose, the daughter of a society lady and a Jewish progressive agitator. (I suppose I should mention Jericho Jones, the mightily forgettable Jericho Jones, who is so dull that Bray literally drops him in a hole in the ground for the climax of The Diviners to get him out of the way. He’s very strong and broody and is kind of a cyborg.) All of their stories have a chance to shine because this series uses its ensemble cast so effectively across the entire stretch of narrative. Nothing feels rushed. Everyone gets their moment in the sun, even if that moment doesn’t come until Book 4.
In addition to the long-form pacing, this series excels at characterization and effortless diversity. We’ve got white people, Black people (both big-city northern and rural southern), Chinese immigrants (both newly arrived and nth-generation), Russian immigrants, native Americans, Irish, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, gay, straight, lesbian, ace. You name it, it’s there, unforced and natural because America in the 1920s was a diverse place, no matter what conservative critics might try to claim in their evocations of artificial nostalgia. And beyond diversity of people, we have a dizzying diversity of settings too, again taking advantage of every flavour of 1920s America. Not just the wealthy white flappers in New York, but the Harlem Renaissance, Chinatown, queer nightlife, glitzy showgirls, eugenics movements, Vaudeville. Outside New York, too, we have Midwestern small towns, the Deep South, hell, we even get a travelling jazz band and a circus. There are acrobats! Lions!
This book is a cornucopia of peoples and places and cultures and attitudes, richly researched, skillfully plotted and paced, sensitively told, and full of wit and humor and a joyful revelry of 1920s slang. Sure, at times the prose can get a bit purple; at times the sweeping meditations on ~*America!*~ can be a bit overblown; and as I’ve mentioned before Jericho Jones is a bit of a snore. But I can’t hold that against these books. They have so much to offer, and work so well, on so many levels, that the occasional clunker is a mere drop in an ocean of otherwise chewy, deep, captivating period fantasy.
(Oh, and I can’t end without mentioning that January LaVoy does a fabulous job on the audiobook narration.)
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Highlights
• Flappers and ghosts
• Thoughtful meditations on the cultural foundations of America, both good and bad
• Balanced ensemble cast
• A slightly purplish tinge in some meditative bits
Nerd coefficient: 8, well worth your time and attention
References
Bray, Libba. The Diviners. [Little, Brown, and Company, 2012]
Bray, Libba. Lair of Dreams. [Little, Brown, and Company, 2015]
Bray, Libba. Before the Devil Breaks you. [Atom, 2017]
Bray, Libba. The King of Crows. [Atom, 2020]
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative
