An innovative and intriguing post-apocalyptic fantasy exploring the power of words
Our narrator does not have a name. This is somewhat unusual, but this is an unusual world. Our narrator and main character is a courier. In this society, clawing back from the apocalypse of what seems to be our own modern one, things are different. Many things, places, and ideas are no longer known or not defined. The courier “delivers” a word to express a thing, an action, an idea and make it firm into the world. In a very real way, in this brave new world, it makes it real and defined. Our courier protagonist without a name, though, in the course of being asked to deliver a new concept, soon runs afoul of powers who want to define the world for their own ends and power.
The courier's story is the story of Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song.
Imagine a world where the concept of something doesn’t have a name until a committee of people decide to define it, that it needs a name. Gob. Gibbous. Velocity. Tedium. They perform divinations to come up with and find these words, and then it is the task of people like the courier, our protagonist, to deliver them. Only people with the right talent to hold a word in their heads can deliver a word; there is a nuance here. So, for example, if you wanted to punish a courier such as our protagonist, you might have her deliver unpleasant words, words whose communication is a nasty experience. Bruise. Trouble. Muck. Bleary. Toil.
And therein the story gets going. The novel takes a good while to actually move forward on the plot, since it has a lot of worldbuilding and a lot of things that the reader needs to at least be exposed to, if not quite understand and completely comprehend. In some ways that’s okay, because our characters themselves are in a story, a myth, a passion play, and they know it. We are hit pretty hard and quickly with just how strange and different this world is. There are ghosts, but not quite as you might expect them to be. There are monsters in this world too, created by people, and again the circumstances of what a monster is and where it comes from are not all entirely clear. This is a story that often runs on myth and the sharing of stories.
And the whole concept of named and nameless things. The nameless things and people outside the borders of what has been named and known are a nebulous threat and a problem for the named, for the unstable society of the committees trying to push back the boundaries of the undefined and unnamed, to name and categorize people, places and, of course, words. While our protagonist doesn’t see it, a clever reader can notice immediately the abuse an ambitious committee or its leader might put in such power, should they turn their minds to it. And so we have a world and an overarching metaplot to lay down our nameless courier’s own personal-plot.
Once we get the story in motion, it proceeds relatively straightforward, or at least it seems deceptively so. Our unnamed protagonist’s drive and desire is to reunite with her long lost sister, Ticket. Just where Ticket is, what she has been doing, and how this all connects with the machinations of a committee member seeking power, therein lies the tale. But that’s the ultimate backbone of the plot, and this is, as I said, more myth and shared story than an actual plot of events.
Post-apocalypse stories are extremely common, of course, but the idea of such a break as to how the universe actually works is somewhat less common. I’ve mentioned the roleplaying game Apocalypse World before in this space and it works very well here. The world broke, and now the rules are somewhat different. It’s clear that in the world of Apocalypse World, the Psychic Maelstrom did not exist before civilization fell, but now it is a fact of life. In the world of The Naming Song, now words have to be divined before they can be used, and the nameless and ghosts and the consequences of the Silence have to be dealt with.
In a fictional vein, I am reminded somewhat of Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East. In that series and ‘verse, the start of a nuclear war is stopped by the actions of a supercomputer which changes the laws of reality. As a result, nuclear weapons no longer work (but one has been turned into a demon), the supercomputer is a distant God, and magic indisputably now works. There is science and trying to recapture the knowledge of the ancients, but the world is now fundamentally different. So, too, S. M. Stirling’s The Change novels start with the laws of the universe around Earth altering, to very drastic results. That series takes a while to reveal that magic now works in the world (a sort of shamanistic magic), and not all characters believe or accept it, but it is now there, a fact of life. And as the timeline of the novel goes on, and there are no more characters who remember the Change itself, the world becomes very different very quickly.
One other way to think about this novel and its world is to consider the works of Matthew Hughes. Hughes’s work is very much the heir to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, but a number of his stories and novels take place “before” the switchover to the magic-laden next world. One of the novels, The Spiral Labyrinth, has its protagonist temporarily get catapulted into the next world, where science is gone and magic rules, and we the reader, as well as the protagonist, now have to deal with a world whose operating system is now very different and not at all intuitively so.
The Naming Song short-circuits and accelerates this process of adaptation to the new operating rules of the universe by having the Silence, its own version of the Change, be so complete and so full that there is really no continuity of society and social structures from our modern world and the world that we get here. As a result, we wind up with a world where some things are used and barely understood, such as the trains themselves. It’s mentioned that not every aspect of the trains that make up such a big part of the novel are completely comprehended, which is, to forgive the pun, no way to run a railroad.
This makes the novel an interesting case of a world and a society that on reductionist terms and from first principles probably does not hold up under scrutiny. A world where the Silence happened probably can’t and doesn’t recover from such a calamity and civilization; it simply falls into irreversible anarchy. When you don’t even have the name for some basic concepts and ideas, how do you keep a train moving, or start one in the first place? Or guns? Or basic farming? So believing that humanity and society could be rebuilt from such a tremendous shock is definitely a “gimmie” in the novel, and it is an important one, given how, even hundreds of years later, society and the world are still evolving and changing.
This is a story about that liminality, of the borders between the defined and the undefined, and the consequences of trying to define things, and the fear of not defining them, of the borders between the known and the unknown, all told through the lens of a nameless courier in a very different future world. It’s a highwire act that I am not sure always succeeds, but there is no lack of its ambition and reach.
The heart of the book, in a story about stories and the way they can and do change the world, is that of “Hand and Moon.” We get glimpses, allusions and references to it throughout the book; it is a fundamental story to the people of this world, and in some ways, it is their monomyth (in the Campbellian sense). It is a story about naming, and love; and the heart of the book is when the Black Square players put on a performance of this story, even as the forces of tyranny come down upon them and everyone. It is no strange thing to have a performance of a story be the central axis of a story, but that is ultimately what this novel is. The Story of Hand and Moon sets the template of this world, and this performance, and how the players change it, ultimately changes the world. And thus The Naming Song is a story about the creation of stories and how the creation of stories and changing the way we tell them can create and change the world. Berry has created a world where that is most literally true, but like most SFF, it’s a theme to be applied to our place and time. The novel’s storytelling style, dreamlike and full of imagery and magic, lends itself ultimately in service to that theme.
Highlights:
- A unique and intriguing future post-apocalypse world.
- A compelling and well explored theme of liminality.
- Strong and vivid, mythic storytelling. A Passion Play.
Reference: Berry, Jedediah. The Naming Song [Tor Books, 2024].
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.