Working forwards and backwards in time to tell the story of a city and the demon who loved/loves it.
It seems Nghi Vo possibly likes to play around with the scale of her stories. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the small becomes the large; items spiral out to become stories. In her new novel (a short one, but she assures us, definitely a novel), she plays something of the reverse trick. Or possibly both at the same time. The story follows a demon, Vitrine, in the city she has helped shape for many years, a city that welcomed her as a refugee from her original, fallen home. She has curated it, whispered in the ear of its leaders, artists, librarians and pirates, sculpting it like a gardener with a well-tended hedge. And then, right at the start of the story, it is destroyed. Angels sweep in, unexplained, and put it to fire and the sword. All her work is gone. The story is of the aftermath, her memories and gried sweeping her up, telling stories of the large, spiralling down into the smallness of one single existence - her own - while reciprocally telling that grander scale through the moments of its individuals, day by day and year by year.
If it brings to mind anything - I'm not sure it truly does; it's a singular book in many ways - it is The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. At the simplest level, they are both stories of the soul of a city, told through a chorus of its inhabitants. The difference, however, is a big one. Where for Tchaikovsky the story of the city is the purpose in and of itself (and a very well executed one), for Vo here, the story of the city is only a half of what's going on. The rest is the story of Vitrine herself, and her care at that macro scale, using the humans that inhabit her city - and she is fiercely possessive of it, even after its downfall - as tools to shape it, things that can be discarded, that will pass even as the city endures, not stories or ends themselves. Vitrine lives outside of the scale of human life, and so the story must expand outwards, beyond those boundaries, to attempt to contain her.
This presents itself both subtly and unsubtly throughout. One of the most pleasing reflexes of it is the offhand remarks about how long Vitrine takes applying herself to a given task - stretched out into the days, weeks or months as debris falls and bodies rot around her in the aftermath. We observe the story through Vitrine's scale, experiencing events in a way that feels natural because it is natural to her, but then are jarred into awareness by these little comments, slipped around the edges, reminding us that nothing about her sits naturally with us, however it may feel in the moment. This is someone who can remain sat in one place for months, who can wait out a river. Vo manages to marry an extremely human and an extremely extra-human sense of wonder and scale throughout, with Vitrine's emotional reactions - intense, moving ones - lending accessibility to the broader scope of the story.
Where Tchaikovsky gives us the full view of his city by using multiple viewpoints, seeing it differently through each new set of eyes, Vo does is by using the same eyes, but seeing those people. There's a continuity that brings - Vitrine has been there and can keep on seeing, so can pull herself out of the "now", because she too experienced the "then". She can see change on a scale inaccessible to a mortal.
Even if it were only that, even if it were just a story of one demon's grief of her lost city, and the back and forward tale of its past and future circling around its apocalypse, it would be interesting enough. The prose is lovely, often bringing up moments of beautiful description, especially of colour and texture. You get a sense of the city as a physical place, as well as a cultural one, and for the complex mass of people moving within it. The beauty slips in even in the darker, more visceral moments of death and destruction and dismemberment. It is a lovely thing to read, just to exist in its descriptions and flowing use of language, just to be embedded within Vitrine's perspective on the world, swinging between abject sorrow, rage and a sort of wry humour about herself and the people she has experienced in her city.
For example:
Like comets who found the earth too cruel
or:
She was a thing that had been pared down by pain until there was only a sliver of her left, and everything she had regained, from the top of her dark head to her gleaming black eyes, to her sharp white teeth to her brown skin hectic with a madder blush, she had made herself.
For a story so concerned with the grander scale, it is one profoundly unafraid of the physical, and it is enriched by it.
But it is not only that - the city, at the start of the book, is destroyed by angels, but not all of those angels escape unscathed by the angry demon who tries to stop them. One, cursed by Vitrine, returns. Keeps returning. And so, as well as the story of her city, it is the story of these two immortal beings, tied together by a cataclysm that was almost beyond human terms of reference, that they both lived through (though no unscathed). Theirs is a complex relationship outside of the usual human frame of reference, and one that takes the whole book to develop, not reaching its climax (no, not like that) until the very end of the story.
I want to stress here, it's not a simple enemies to lovers type of romance story. Whatever they are moment to moment, neither Vitrine nor the unnamed angel (she is not particularly interested in small talk with him) exist on a human level, with human emotions on a human scale. Whatever they experience with, through and around each other somewhat defies description. It is just that - experience. It is a string of captured moments that become something more, but evade categorisation.
Which makes it rather hard to review. I don't, honestly, quite know what I think ultimately passes between these two characters, by the end of the story. It feels profound. It feels intense. But I don't think I entirely understand it. Instead, it sits in my head, making me wonder, making me chew at it, considering. I want to reread it, to ponder it again. It is the good sort of incomprehension, of a thing that may be currently evading me, but is graspable, and will be worth the time spent in reaching for it.
What I do know, even without that understanding, is that Vo has done a fantastic job in capturing a sense of two beings beyond the scale of human lives, who nonetheless interact with them. Vitrine and the angel feel different to one another, and yet also similar, tied to the same outsideness, that immunity to mortal scale, that makes them both alien and compelling to the reader. The holy is a rare sight in SFF - even more so than the religious - but there is something of it here, in the unknowable actions of powers beyond mortal control, seeking to reckon with one another in rules that are never stated, with powers that exist within a framework of intuition, not hard logic. They are as they are, and do as they do, and exist together, in this space for a little time, as we observe them, but cannot grasp them. The scene early on, in which Vitrine witnesses the destruction of her city, is powerful for its distance, its cold incomprehensibility. It's awful. But it also has the feeling of something so utterly beyond human power that nudges into the sort of boundaries quite apart from "magic" in the commonly used modern sense. If it is magic, it is at a scale beyond the individual, and thus its grandeur.
Wholly different from her other work, there is nonetheless an extremely distinctive feel of Vo here throughout, the deftness of her descriptions, the fierceness of her protagonist. It is a beautiful, sad, evocative story, that manages to compress something enormous and otherworldly into something graspable and personified, in a way that seems quite unique. It is thoughtful, provocative, and full of depth, and a story I think will reward multiple reads, and intensive discussion. I enjoyed it immensely.
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The Math
Highlights: beautiful prose, unusual framing, a complexity that keeps on giving the more you think about it
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10
Reference: Nghi Vo, The City in Glass [Tordotcom, 2024].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
