Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Book Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

 A familiar, soothing balm for the soul (if the soul doesn't mind the odd bit of murder thrown in for good measure).

In every story I have read by T. Kingfisher, there is a character of a certain... well, character. She is invariably female, often older, not always the protagonist, and has about her a particular spirit that is immediately discerned - when you meet her, you know her in a heartbeat. Her situation, her backstory, her motivations may change book to book, but her fundamental substance is entirely similar, and if you had them all meet up in some sort of extra-narrative liminal space, they'd all get on like a house on fire and probably organise a trans-universe insurrection so nobody gets imperilled for the plot anymore.

In case it wasn't obvious, I love her, this character. I don't think I'd keep reading the books if I didn't, because she's so integral to all of them. But she is ubiquitous and... well... isn't this a problem? Doesn't that mean the books get a bit samey?

Which is what I want to talk about here, in regards to A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher's latest novel. But first, the boring bit - I should at least tell you what the book is about before I go on a wild tangent about her wider canon. The story follows two women, one, Cordelia, fourteen years old and desperately alone, abused and isolated by her mother; the other, Hester, middle aged and comfortable, living a wealthy life in the manor house of her loving if daft bachelor brother. They come into contact when Cordelia's mother, basically a professional mistress, decided that Hester's brother Samuel is a prime target for marriage and a comfortable life, from which she can set Cordelia up for success and her own advantageous betrothal. No one else in the story, save the hapless Samuel, wants this to happen and does their level best to thwart it at every turn, in spite of the quite present danger. Because Evangeline is a sorceress, and a powerful one at that, who can hold someone prisoner in their own body, turning them to her will while they watch, powerless.

It is a story about power and powerlessness, and suffering, and surviving. It's about helping those in need, recognising cruelty in the world, and the lengths people will go to in harming those around them when they get in the way of their wants and desires. And it focuses very intently on the experience of being the victim of that, using the titular sorcery to emphasise it for anyone at the back who may not have been listening the first time.

So yep, it's a jolly one...

Except, it's T. Kingfisher, so actually it kind of is, despite the murders, mutilations and intense emotional and physical abuse. 

And this is what we come back to in the familiarity of a T. Kingfisher fairytale story, and its likewise familiar characters. The moment we meet Hester, this book's designated no-nonsense woman, we know it's all going to be, approximately, ok in the end. She, like her many brethren (sistren?), is so solidly practical, so absolutely sensible, that she acts as anathema to all the crazy shit going on around her. Sure, someone's been stabbed in a melodramatic fashion, but Hester is going to be reasonable about it all. Stolid, even. It's hard to maintain horror in the face of such down-to-earth pragmatism as The Character always has.

And for me, this is the crux of what T. Kingfisher does so well in her fairytale-retelling-style books in particular - she uses the sense of the familiar, and the intensely mundane, as a contrast to the darkness and grimness that goes with certain types of story, butting up against horror as they do. I would not call them cosy fiction, because they are nothing of the sort, full of, variously, moulds and murderers and abusers. But there is comfort there nonetheless. If anything, the darkness allows the creation of the comfort because it gives The Character something to stand in contrast against - she is a source of security because she exists in opposition to the fantastical (and less fantastical) evils of the world. She says "no more", and rolls up her sleeves and tells them to get lost because she has stuff to be getting on with thankyouverymuch.

But, to come back to our question earlier, doesn't this risk them all running together and feeling samey? Yes. It absolutely does. And, sometimes, they rather do. I am reasonably sure I have mixed up some of what happens in Nettle and Bone, Thornhedge and The Seventh Bride, now that I've put them down and read other things in between. It's what has held me back from nominating those books for something like a Hugo Award - they hold themselves back from the greatest heights of memorable and thrilling and engaging and [insert positive adjectives here to suit], because they set themselves up, and set up the reader, to fit so neatly into so many expectations. But, on the flip side, they do what they do with that comfort and those expectations so incredibly well, that I will never stop seeking them out to read. The ceiling may be a little low, but the bar is very high and so very, very consistent. You know, when you pick one up, that you will receive the experience you expect, and enjoy it, be pulled along by it, be unable to put it down. Often, that is all I want.

For this particular installment, I think it also exists right at the top of the "fairytale retellings" tier of T. Kingfisher works, ahead of Nettle and Bone pretty clearly. The way it uses the magic within the setting to talk about abuse and manipulation is done extremely well, and the two viewpoint characters offer excellent foils for one another, without totally outshining the relatively large cast of secondary characters. There are genuinely chucklesome moments, some really quite horrifying imagery, unexpected geese and a slightly nonsense strategem to solve a problem. It is intensely well-crafted within the space it has set up for itself, even as that space constrains it.

If it has any flaw aside from that, it's perhaps its slightly dated attitude to men - one I am predominantly used to encountering amongst women Of A Certain Age. Most (not all, but most) of the men in the story are slightly daft, hapless but well-meaning lumps who must be directed around the plot by the competent women who hold little official power but clearly actually do everything because those silly men, couldn't possible organise anything could they? Got to let them think they're in charge, poor dears, but we'd be lost if they were actually doing the planning. On the face of it, of course, this is a mildly droll inversion of patriarchy, right? Haha hoho, isn't it funny that the women are actually the competent ones? But as soon as you examine it any more closely than that, it starts to feel a little... off. The implications that one can spin out of its assumptions aren't pleasant, and it has the same lumping-together-ness that is half of the problem of the good ol' fashioned misogyny, tying one's usefulness as a person to innate characteristics of sex. It's something I observe in people the age of... let's say my mother and upwards, and ends up being what traps them into endless life admin and the mothering of the grown ass men around them, while also being rather insulting and infantilising to the perfectly competent men who then aren't being trusted to boil and egg or put away their own socks.

But at the same time, I know, in real life, women who are like this, to a greater or lesser extent, and they are also women I am rather fond of, in spite of it all. They are women who have had to be competent in that way, because of the men who likely merited the inception of the attitude they have held onto. They just haven't quite seen that it's not everyone around them anymore. T. Kingfisher alone is not responsible for the state of shifting feminist attitudes to men, and I'd be rather unfair to pin that on her and her alone. It's just a little niggle, a vibe I see in the world and sigh a little inside to replicated in characters of whom I am also rather fond.

And so I can overlook it, for the sake of reliable comforts of the rest of the story, done with the characteristic wryness and dryness that makes her narrative voice an eternal delight. All the characters speak with their own voices (even if their accents, so to speak, are the same as the characters of her other works), and have enough about them to feel real and realised, and with genuine relationships binding them to each other, of friendship and more. The setting doesn't get anymore time than it needs, but enough to feel like a world this story and these people absolutely could exist within. All in all, it's very well put together, and retains the heart, the down-to-earth-despite-the-literal-magic core that I hope for and expect whenever I pick up one of T. Kingfisher's books. I will absolutely be rereading this in the future, on a day when I need something soothing for the soul, but with some real darkness in it to make the comfort all the more present.

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The Math

Highlights: the usual no-nonsense T. Kingfisher older woman character we know and love; funny and distinctive tone of voice to narrative and dialogue; well explored themes of abuse and manipulation

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call [Titan Books, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social