A promising vision, thwarted by an attempt to maintain strict historical accuracy
Dark City Rising is a story that piles up all my catnip features high and deep: Dark Academia, 18th century Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Scottish Enlightenment, hidden magical libraries, secret societies, and plucky medical professors fight back by reading minds and shooting fire from their hands.
It sounds absolutely amazing, right? It should have been! All the pieces were there. But alas, it was not—and I think it struggled in large part because of the earnest, rigorous research into the historical underpinnings of the characters and philosophies that scaffolded the story.
The plot is as follows: William Cullen, a professor at Glasgow University, is secretly exploring a new field of study: the use of phlogiston to manipulate matter. He takes under his wing young Joseph Black, a medical student, and together they start making substantial advances in their joint studies. However, Cullen is a bit of an iconoclast: He is an atheist, and he rejects the teachings of Herman Boerhaave, the ‘father of physiology’, under whom all the best medical men (except Cullen) have done their training. So Cullen is locked out of the very best positions, at the University of Edinburgh, and young Joseph Black eventually succumbs to family pressure and transfers to Edinburgh to finish his training.
At Edinburgh, Black discovers that the university is largely governed by a secret society, called the Dark Chymists, who employ sigil-based magic and wield vast powers in the city. Yet those powers aren’t quite enough to allow them to win their ongoing a power struggle with the Edinburgh town council to determine control of the college of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. They are very anti-Cullen, and engage in some recreational murder whenever anyone starts suggesting that Cullen might be a good addition to Edinburgh’s faculty. Young Joseph Black, as Cullen’s student, has to balance his loyalty to his old mentor with the need to keep the Dark Chymists happy if he wants to progress in his career at Edinburgh, but things get tricky as the body count mounts.
Given this set-up, it seems like the shape of an excellent plot might be in order. Glasgow vs. Edinburgh, phlogisten vs. sigils, town vs. gown, Cullen vs Dark Chymists, religion vs. science---so many dichotomous tensions are put into play in ways that echo each other very promisingly.
Unfortunately, none of this promise is realized effectively. First, there’s the order of in which information is presented to the reader, which withholds critical details early, and only provides them long after a confused reader has stumblingly inferred the shape of things from context. For example, the exact status of the Dark Chymists, and their power play with the town council, needed to be laid out much earlier. They are the primary antagonist to Cullen’s ambitions, they have their fingers in every decision taken by Edinburgh University. Vast amounts of academic intrigue and politicking are informed by their agenda. But throughout the first half of the book, they lurk with a vague kind of menace, which, while atmospheric, is not enough to justify their role. In Chapter 28 I was writing peevish marginal notes complaining about the lack of detail; in Chapter 32 the notes got even more peevish, and by the time we learn about the shape of the power struggle between the chymists and the town council, in Chapter 45, when a very short bit of exposition reveals all, my notes are fuming about how this was a couple of hundred pages too late to be useful. Even now, after having finished the book, I can’t figure out why the Dark Chymists are so anti-Cullen to begin with, since he keeps his phlogiston studies secret for most of the book.
The role of women in the book is also irritatingly tokenistic in a way that I would not have expected from such a modern book. Cullen’s wife is one of two female characters with any role to play. That role is to help Cullen investigate a mysterious assassin by cultivating a relationship with the assassin’s wife. The fact that I can’t even describe these women’s importance to the plot without situating them in terms of their husbands is the first problem; and the second is that none of this subplot ends up being relevant to anything. It feels infuriatingly as if Jarvis was aware of the lack of women as her book took shape, and tried to shoehorn some in, without having any idea how to integrate them properly into the main plot. The result is so unsatisfactory that it draws attention to the pointlessness of this feeble gesture, to worse effect than if the women had been absent entirely.
Of course, the reason this story was so hard to integrate women into is that it is based entirely on real people, and records of the power struggles between professors in the medical colleges of Glasgow and Edinburgh university lean pretty dude-heavy. William Cullen was a real man; Joseph Black was a real man (indeed, there is a building at the University of Glasgow named for him); various characters in Edinburgh—Rutherford, Monro, and others—they were all real people. And becaues they were all real people, Jarvis took excruciating care to fit the events of the book into the historical shape of their real careers. But people’s careers do not follow neat paths. Black and Cullen and Rutherford and Monro did not have Jarvis’s plot needs in place when they applied for a position in chemistry or decided to change institutions. They were just living their lives, criss-crossing up and down the Central Belt of Scotland: Cullen starts at Glasgow, where he teaches Joseph Black, who then moves to Edinburgh, where he gets his first job, before moving back to Glasgow, crossing paths with Cullen, who is making a move to Edinburgh for himself now. By forcing the book's plot to reflect these decisions, we end up with a kind of sprawling, awkward game of musical chairs, in which decisions and motivations don’t make much sense. At one point there was a historical gap of about 10 years between two events that Jarvis uses in the plot, and so for the space of those 10 years the Dark Chymists just . . . go away. I have never before seen a better argument supporting the tendency of authors of historical fiction to fiddle around with timelines of events than this book, in which Jarvis didn’t.
So, in sum, we’re left with an unsatisfying realization of a brilliant, imaginative vision. I would love to read the book that Jarvis’s ideas could have produced. But this book is not that.
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The Math
Highlights:
• Excessive faithfulness to historical timelines• Unrealized promise of a brilliant Dark Academia premise
• Infuriatingly tokenistic women
Nerd coefficient: 5/10 problematic, but has redeeming qualities
Reference: Jarvis, C. L. Dark City Rising [Pewter Lynx Press, 2024].
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
