A very British, very brutal take on dark academia that takes it back to its more critical roots.
Caveat: this review was written in October 2024, and I believe before the final editing pass. I doubt it will make an actual difference to anything, but just in case.
So… dark academia. Where to start with it? At the beginning,
I suppose.
I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in a
good number of years now, but I remember loving it. It’s dark in the truest
sense, complex, vicious and incredibly cutting about institutions, class, power
and hierarchy. This is dark academia as a tool for critiquing the setting,
although, as with all satire, there were inevitably people who missed the
point, even when it came out.
Cards on the table – I went to the University of Cambridge,
where I studied classics. My background was not wealthy, though I had some
advantages that helped me on the route to university, but there was enough in
the perspective of The Secret History’s protagonist that felt real and
personal to me, that I was always either going to love or loathe it. For all
that my university experience was pretty positive, there was enough in what I
saw that connected to what Tartt discusses, what she critiques, that the book
made a special little place in my heart right from the off. If this is where
dark academia had stayed, this thoughtful place that understood and heavily
satirised the trappings of power, privilege and education, and what they mean
for the lives of the people in the system, what they mean for aspirations, and
how class is so deeply interwoven through all of it, it would have been a damn
good subgenre.
Alas, much of modern dark academia feels more about style
than substance – it’s the allure of the tweed jacket and the terrible teens
swapping Shakespeare quotes because they’re just better than everyone
else, and the feeling of being part of that crowd because you, the reader, by
dint of reading this sort of book, are also better than everyone else,
and part of this special intellectual club. The extent to which the point is
being missed is frankly astounding.
The new novel from Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, is
also billed as dark academia in much of the marketing, but where many of the
more recent entries have strayed from its origins, here, Tesh has dug both
hands deep into the thorniest parts of what Tartt was getting at and yanked. The Secret History is a fundamentally
American story, and this… this is a deeply, deeply English one. It is so
utterly suffused with English notions of class, education, history and legacy,
I almost wonder how some of it made it through the US editors. This is a story
that includes a specific song sung at the University of Cambridge about how
we’d rather go to Oxford, our longstanding historical nemesis, than one of the
colleges of Cambridge, St. John’s*. Why John’s is loathed is a matter long
lost in the annals of history, but knowing the song is one of the many
shibboleths of Oxbridge culture, another way of saying “here I am, I know the
secret knowledge, I am one of us”. Wait… I swear we were just talking about
exactly that…
Set in a posh English boarding school that offers, among the
usual curriculum, lessons in the three modern branches of magic, The
Incandescent follows the long-suffering Dr. Walden, director of magic,
deputy head, and person responsible for much of the smooth running of the
school. Walden, alumna of the school, Oxford graduate, PhD and one of the best
magicians of her age, is a complex figure with her roots deep into the various
education systems of England and beyond. She’s well placed to charm and soothe the
wealthy parents of her privileged pupils, as well as to advocate for those few
whose places at the school are charity rather than spending, those whose magic
is so strong they have to be somewhere where they can be trained into safety.
Already, we have a point of difference – where many of the
novels in dark academia follow the young, teenagers, university students,
Walden is 37, jaded and somewhat tired. She looks on her young charges with a
great deal of fondness, but also a healthy dose of exasperation – she does not
take teenagehood and its tribulations as seriously as teens do, because she’s
been there, done that, and seen a number of years of them come up under her
tuition. This is academia with an already weathered eye, an awareness that none
of it is truly that special, all things come around again and again.
Particularly, what comes around again here is a longstanding
threat to the school from a demon that lives just on the other side of the
borderline of reality, known affectionately as Old Faithful. Incursions have
happened throughout the years, with disastrous consequences, and things seem
poised for another one under Walden’s watchful gazy. That alone might be the
story of some novels – a looming threat, a skilled guardian with the right
companions, putting down the big bad once and for all. But Tesh takes it in a
rather different direction – the enemy here is a subtler one, and the true
problems the characters face do not fully realise until much later on.
If you’ve read Some Desperate Glory, her Hugo winning
novel, you’ll know Tesh isn’t averse to changing the rules of the game late on.
The effect here is rather subtler, but has some markings of the same hand at
work in it – we learn enough about the system, the parameters of the story to start
to feel comfortable, and then we learn that actually, we’ve been focussing on
the wrong things entirely. Time to pivot and reassess our view, and re-examine
the knowledge the book has given us.
That moment, that pivot, is key to the success of both
books. Though they focus on rather different issues at play, both are stories
that want the reader to really interrogate the systems at work in their worlds,
and do so by forcing them out of complacency. They let you think you know what
this is, that you know the rules, and then boom, no you don’t. In that moment
of uncertainty, you have to think about what the story’s doing. You are
forced to do the work, and to look under the rug at what might be lurking,
unexamined.
The answer, in The Incadescent, is a complex cocktail
of privilege and class, a dash of very British racism, and the long, rotten
tail of tradition and legacy that seems like an unavoidable mould upon
educational institutions. It’s there right from the start, but it’s only once
the story lurches that you truly confront it in all its nastiness.
And, following on from that, I felt likewise drawn into an
interrogation of both the dark academia novel and its longstanding cousin, the
school story. Before Harry Potter seized the cultural attention, there
were plenty of others, including plenty of magical ones – I have fond memories
of watching The Worst Witch, and though I never read the books, there
were many who did. They too are full of children who are in some way Special.
Sometimes they are special because of their magic, but many of them are also
from longstanding families, wealthy, with societal cache and legacies running
deep into the past, alumnae of the institutions that the current crop of
children attend. Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley were not innovations, and owe
their debts to many a character before them.
It is easy, especially as a child, not to look too closely
at this idea of specialness, of this small, select, often secret group of
people, being taught things normal people aren’t allowed to or cannot know. The
idea that they’re better always floats just below the surface.
Tesh confronts that. The story examines the rot in the
system, while acknowledging the good – there’s always something good or
wanted in there, at least for someone, else the system never would have ended
up perpetuated – and forcing the reader to confront all the nasty foundations
upon which these stories are built. Here, the privilege is obvious – that this
is a posh boarding school, with all the attendant issues, is front and centre,
returned to again and again. You cannot forget it, nor can you forget the
position that puts some of the students in.
On the one hand, you have a ward of the school, a magical
prodigy, whose talents likely caused the death of her parents at a young age.
Black, not well-off and alone in the world. The school, the lessons to help her
control the magic that brought her to the attention of the authorities, are her
world, but she is a step apart from so many of her fellows. She knows this –
it’s acknowledged in conversations with Walden, her hesitance about her place
in the world going forwards.
And then in contrast, a legacy boy. He has talent, yes, but
also charm, and both make him lazy. He is someone for whom the world lines
itself up nicely, smooths the path, whether because of money, connections, or
simply the confidence of coming from that sort of background. Critically, his
charm is palpable to the reader. Walden doesn’t hate him – though she
acknowledges as an adult she might find him insufferable (we’ll come back to
this in a moment) – and I found I never could. He genuinely is charming,
as many people in his sort of situation are. The contrast between these two, as
well as their interplay with their teachers, the school, and their classmates is a well balanced look
at how education systems perpetuate the existing inequalities of English
society, locking into place the old class and money hierarchies that stretch
back deep into history.
I say English, not British, because I think a lot of what
this book does is rooted in a particularly English sort of superiority complex.
Which isn’t to say equivalents or similar versions aren’t available across the
UK, but just that the one this particularly focuses on is a particularly subset
of the type.
But it’s not all about the kids. Because we have Walden as
our main viewpoint character, we have access to a world within the school
outside of the sphere of interest and influence of the children. This is a book
about teaching, about the various structures around keeping a school of this
sort going, as much as it is about all the rest. But it also means we have
access to adult relationships. While not dispassionate ones, there’s something
so much more alluring about the interpersonal stuff – romantic and otherwise –
of a 37 year old than the high drama ones more likely in books with teenage
protagonists. 37 year olds just do relationships differently to teens. The
priorities, the focus, the modes of interaction are just a whole other thing.
This, too, is something the book does fantastically. We see
Walden interacting with various members of staff – we get her friendships, her
rivalries, her flirtations, and indeed her romances. We see her as a whole,
rounded person, someone who had a life before the story began, with people in
it. Where teens can feel a fresh slate, ready to make the relationships that
will kickstart them into the world, Walden is someone with failures behind her,
someone who has loved, lost and learned. It makes her jaded, but it also makes
her so, so interesting to read, and so very human.
She also has relatably tragic taste in men (and very
acceptable taste in women).
Good bi rep in a non-romance book is a rare and wondrous
thing. Good bi rep that acknowledges compulsory heterosexuality and that
bi women can be totally ok with being attracted to men, and not just diet
lesbians with bad habits? Chef’s kiss.
Because, coming back to the charming boy – there is an adult
version of him in the story. He is bad news. Walden knows he’s terrible. But he
is, also… well, he’s charming. He’s charming in a way that is so palpable on
the page. I got it. I didn’t blame her. And while this is great for bi rep in
general, it swings us right back to those points about privilege and power and
charm. This is what the adult product of that upbringing looks like. He moves
so easily through the world, and some of us even like him, while knowing what
he is, where he’s come from.
Dark academia works because there is an undeniable
allure to some of what those broken systems create. Not for everyone, of
course. Some people will inevitably see right through the charming man and send
him on his way. But some people will… I don’t want to say “fall for it”,
because you can do it with eyes open too. You can see the smiling face of all
that corruption and kiss it anyway, knowing what’s underneath, because it is
a good smile, and it is a remarkably good kisser and well… it’s just a
kiss, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s only… it’s just…
And so the system has you too.
Tesh’s characters here are never just characters. They are
so totally embedded in their places in the world, that every interaction is
laden down with meaning. The hot man is never just a cigar.
When I stop to think about this book, I inevitably circle
back, again and again, to class. People joke that British people see the whole
world through its lens, and at least speaking for myself, I cannot deny it. And
as an SFF reader in the current environment, where so much is dominated by
US-authored stories, it’s not something I see in fiction as much or in the same
way as I experience it in the world around me. It makes me hungry for stories
that acknowledge this scaffolding that sits around a large part of my
worldview. It sometimes exasperates me when stories don’t recognise it,
especially stories set in the UK, or places that feel like the UK, or when they
fail to convey its nuances. It isn’t the only lens – gender, race and sexuality
too have their parts to play – but to cut it out of the story fails to capture
the world. So when we come to a genre like dark academia, one so steeped in all
the trappings that for me, an English person, are laced with class markers… to
have it missing? That’s half the story untold.
Tesh does not leave that half untold. It is there, written
large, in every word on every page. This is a story that understands how class
is the underpinning, the bedrock, upon which these sorts of institutions thrive
and survive. Money is important, but class is everything. Even the people who
think they know better cannot escape it.
And it is precisely that awareness, and the very evident flawed immersion in exactly that environment, that makes the protagonist and the story work so, so well. If The Incandescent is dark academia, it is an entry into the genre that knows its roots, and chooses to take that original sense of knowing critique, of the view of the rot that you can only get from right in the very innards of the beast. It acknowledges the allure, the good, the draws – Walden, whatever else she is, is a dedicated, passionate educator committed to her students and the subject she teaches them, and one who loves the place she first came to her passion – it understands why we would kiss the charming man. But it tells us, in the end, that the rot is there under the smile, and that it cannot be ignored.
* Sung to the tune of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain”, it runs thus:
“Oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.
Oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.
Oh I’d rather be at Oxford, rather be at Oxford, rather be at Oxford than St.
John’s”.
Truly, an artwork for the ages.
--
The Math
Highlights: a very British criticism of class, dark academia with teeth and claws intact, top tier bi rep
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10
Reference: Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, [Tordotcom, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social