To stay sane, we must go mad
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| Cover design by Rachael Lancaster |
Natasha Pulley is back, reverting to fantasy after her brief, not-entirely-successful foray into science fiction that was The Mars House. This time she sets her tale in Achaean Crete, mostly in the city of Thebes, in a time whose key events straddle the Trojan War. This is not just ancient Greece, but even earlier. It is the era of those mythical gestes of gods and heroes and wonders which the ancient Greeks themselves related as tales of the distant past.
I’ve said earlier that Pulley’s books tend to run to form:
Delicately drawn queer relationships, exquisite images evoking the unknowability of (super)natural forces, an unmoored approach to time, and plots focusing on conquest and colonialism that usually involve Britain at one end or the other.
This book features all of those – even Britain, as we’ll see!
The narrator is a soldier named Phaidros, brought up in Thebes, a military society whose most recent events of notice were the victory at Troy (conquest and colonialism ✓). The Thebes that Pulley constructs for us both evokes traditional elements we associate with Greek myths – wine, bronze weapons, chariots – but also reminds us that Greece was not a monolith. Phaidros has nothing but contempt for Athenians, for example, with their singing and poetry and ridiculous tales with happy endings, when everyone knows that it's not a proper story unless everyone murders everyone else by the end. Theban knights like Phaidros do not drink wine – drunken loss of control is illegal in Thebes – and even singing itself is proscribed except for very specific ritual purposes. Order and obedience are valued above all. Duty is honour, the knights intone. Obedience is strength. As training for the youngest knights who have not yet seen combat, patrols regularly ride out at night to murder slaves they catch abroad without explicit permission to be out on their own.
This kind of ruthlessly ordered society could be presented as a dystopia, but it doesn’t feel that way, except after the fact, upon reflection -- such as when writing a review, for example. Part of it could be because the weight of history allows Pulley to create something that is richer and less stereotypically Greek than you might expect. The unknowability of (super)natural forces (✓) appears around every corner: Clockwork marvels bedeck city gates and palace towers, working in ways that do not seem to be purely mechanical. Witches wander the streets in red robes, dealing in medicine and magic, with tattoos on their fingers, hands, wrists, to mark every life saved at their hands. The knights of Thebes call themselves the Sown, in memory of the legend that they were born from planted dragons’ teeth, and hold themselves accountable to a rigid code of honour and behaviour in recognition of that heritage. All this we see through Phaidros’s eyes, and he is too invested in the status quo to query its injustices. Indeed, his concerns are much more self-centred, focused entirely on atoning for (or simply punishing himself for) errors in his past. These errors, he believes, have left him cursed by a god whose aspect he failed to protect at a key moment when he was young and dumb and grieving the loss of his commander -- a death that was also his own fault. Now he is older, going deaf, and subject to flashbacks that bring him back to moments in the Trojan War (unmoored from time ✓).
The summer of the main events of this book, it seems that Phaidros's curse is coming home to roost. Certainly he convinces himself, characteristically, that the troubles are his fault. Thebes is labouring under a crippling drought, with famine looming ever closer – or, indeed, already present. The people of Thebes, those with less status than the knights and subject to shorter rations, are already selling everything, selling themselves into slavery, to afford food. In the midst of this slow-moving crisis, the queen of Thebes arranges a last-ditch sacrificial offering to the gods. But it is interrupted by a odd . . . meteor strike? Something crashes down from the heavens, at any rate, and in its wake people begin to go mad. They sing and dance, which is, recall, illegal and obscene in Thebes. Vines sprout and grow, impossibly lush in the famine-bringing drought. People take to wearing masks, which may ward off madness, but may also trigger other, weirder changes in their minds and bodies. And in the center of that upheaval is a strange, blue-eyed witch named Dionysus, whom Phaidros is convinced is the same person who was at the centre of his youthful failure to protect a child in his charge.
What follows is, at its strongest, a meditation on order and madness and ways of thought. What does it do to a person to live a life so strictly constrained to rational control that both wine and song are punishable by imprisonment? Is this Theban way of life missing some key component of humanity represented by a god missing from their pantheon? The people murmur that this must be so, but royal decree makes such murmurings a crime. But if it is not this new god, then what is responsible for the events of this terrible summer? And if there is a new god, then what is it about singing, drunkenness, masks, and madness, that unite them under one single divinity?
Phaidros approaches this puzzle with a metaphor related to the concept of blue. Ancient Greek famously did not use the term ‘blue’ the way English does. Seas are not blue, but wine-dark, for example, and skies are described not as blue, but as bronze. Descriptors do not focus on hue, but on lustre, or whatever other quality it is that makes the sea like wine, the sky like bronze. But Phaidros, in his younger years, made his way to the Tin Islands, rainy northern islands which may well be Britain (Britain ✓). There, the locals explain to him the concept of blueness, which is at first utterly alien to him. He works at it over time, gathering shells and ceramic sherds and other objects, asking the Tin Islanders to group them, label them, to show him which ones are ‘blue’. Through this exercise he learns to recognize the meaning of 'blue', but also something more abstract: the metacognitive fact that some ways of understanding the world require an observer to learn to perceive in novel ways orthogonal to existing habits. Now, years later, Phaidros is convinced that the domain of this possible new god in Thebes is like ‘blue’. He himself cannot recognize yet what combines madness and masks and music, but he is certain that there is such a category, if he can only fit his mind around it.
Conceptually, this book is quite brilliant. Narratively, however, it needed another round of developmental editing. The arc of Phaidros and Dionysus’s relationship is built around that unfortunate trope of argh just TALK to each other, already. It's done with a certain degree of nuance, to be sure (delicately drawn queer relationships ✓), but the shape of the thing is unmistakeable. There’s a bit of a mushy middle in which people go back and forth a lot between locations, without actually doing much of anything. And while meditation on blue is wonderful the first time round, it gets a bit overused as it keeps appearing in scene after scene. And by the end, I still wasn’t sure how the various categories of madness that Dionysus distinguishes actually map onto the madness we see in Thebes.
Still, it’s a return to form for Pulley after her unfortunate paddle in the unfriendly waters of SF. It features her real strengths, with the incredibly evocative imagery—of vines, of masks, of wild revelry--forming an unforgettable mental picture. Phaidros’s own journey, through shame, and grief, and regret, is particularly affecting. This is one of those books that might not be perfectly satisfying in the moment, but it lingers in your mind, and what lingers are not the bits that didn’t quite work, but the bits that did work, exquisitely.
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Highlights
Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws
Pre-classical Greece
Gods, masks, madness, and music
Queer love, featuring Pulley's characteristically unbalanced power dynamics
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.
References:
Pulley, Natasha. The Hymn to Dionysus. [Gollancz 2025].
