Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

 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

Book Review: Gorse by Sam K. Horton

A deeply atmospheric tale set amidst the Cornish moors of the 18th century

Some books are heavy on plot, some on worldbuilding, some on character, some on vibe. Gorse, the debut novel of Cornish author Sam K. Horton, leads instead with atmosphere, and a sense of place so sharp it cuts.

Set in a small village in the moors in the late 18th century, this is a story that could be nowhere else but Cornwall. Every part of it, every word, every plant, every folkloric motif draws from its location, whether real or invented. It is a story full of flowers, trees and bogs, of smells on the air and weather, of sensation. Even after only a few pages it is a story that has deeply, thoroughly immersed you in its location, because that's where its magic is, and comes from... both in a metaphorical sense and a rather more literal one.

We follow Pel, the Keeper of the High Moor, a man charged with maintaining balance between the human world and the unseen world of the fey, along with his partially estranged ward Nancy. They both can see the spirits, sprites and fairies that infest the countryside, giving help and harm to the people around them, while remaining invisible to nearly all. They mediate, give charms and spells to those in need, bind things that threaten, and work to keep the world ticking over and in good order. But there are murders happening, sinister deaths that leave a burnt handprint on the victims' neck, and the vicar is starting to cast blame at those who he claims believe in devils. Tensions are high, and more and more people turn from the old traditions towards the church. The balance is no longer being maintained, and Pel's pride, his wounded ego, are holding him back from offering the help the village sorely needs. We watch as events unfold, as a promise of doom begins to build like storm clouds over this community, and the events that ensue.

Much like the sense of place, a lingering feeling of doom building up suffuses every page. It becomes very quickly apparent that Gorse is not a cheery novel, and that it takes its mode of fantasy from the old sort of folkloric tales, replete with death and vengeance, and bloody prices and sacrifices required for what is owed. This is not a story that glamorises magic, or the people who practice it, nor is it one where its magic can be systemised and categorised—there is nothing of D&D in this fantasy, only the raw stuff of old legends, where the logic of intuitive sense holds sway. It is a story about grim survival in the face of horrifying things, of forces beyond control except by those willing to pay the price. But it is also, very deeply, a story about people, and about a war between two ways of seeing the world, one that will allow peaceful co-existence, and another that demands no path but its own.

And that it does immensely well—the mythic quality of it all shines through on every page, and maintains a remarkably clear atmosphere throughout. But there is a catch to it. With that palpable doom, with the elevated tone of the mythic, comes distance. Horton's prose keeps its characters at arm's length, even when we are deeply invested in their point of view, in their feelings about a situation. We watch someone go through awful grief, and yet that grief fails to touch us, because the story always keeps us outside of the situation: an observer, not a passenger. It's a double-edged sword. Without this feeling of distance, without the dispassionate narrative voice, the story simply would not have the folkloric vibes it so painstakingly maintains. But that choice comes at a cost, and it is felt most painfully in moments of intense character emotion. It seems, in this story at least, you cannot have both.

And it is a shame, because both Nancy and Pel, as close as we get to them, are incredibly compelling characters to watch. They both have their burdens, their angers and their passions, and we see both of them go through some really quite emotive situations. But where another writer—a Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance—could twist this into sorrow that genuinely provokes tears, Horton never quite manages to stick the knife in, emotionally speaking, and it feels like a story that would merit it and feel the better for it. Sometimes, you—or at least I—like a good sweet sorrow type of story, where the sadness is so exquisitely crafted it is transformed into something wonderful and nearly addictive. There are moments here where I desperately wanted that. I saw a character reach that point, but because I felt kept outside of their mind, outside of their experience, I could never quite connect enough to them and what they were going through, what they were feeling, for the sorrow to hit just right. For Nancy, this means seeing someone—someone whose determination and goodness make her very easy to like—go through tragedy, heartbreak and rage, and not feel quite connected to it. Sad, frustrating, but still an arc whose narrative beats make sense to us, show us what sort of story it is. For Pel the struggle is greater, because he is such an interesting and difficult character. We spend much of the story watching his ego, his need for control, and his superiority get in the way of him making the right decisions, or indeed meaning he feels that he's the only one who can make those decisions, even when they impact the people around him. He's frankly insufferable at times, and it is very easy to sympathise with Nancy's irritation and fights with him. But we get glimmers, especially in moments of interaction with her, that there's a lot more going on under the surface with him. And because we are denied access to the fullness of his interiority, we are likewise denied an emotional connection to what drives him to be as he is, which makes the character so much less. I wanted, at so many points, to like him. We can see he is trying to do good, to help the world, to do his duty. But he gets himself in the way of his solutions so often that it would be rewarding to have access to the emotional narrative that drives all of that. As I say, we get glimmers. There are little moments that do give us pieces of it. It's enough that you know it's there. But just not quite enough to sink your teeth into.

There is, too, an issue with the tone of the book. The sense of incoming doom mentioned above is constant, from very early on, and it is increasingly easy to become numb to it. There's no narrative respite, so our capacity to appreciate the doom lessens as we grow accustomed. Had there been brief interludes—and they would only need to be brief—I think I would have appreciated that cold sense of impending disaster all the more, because it would keep biting me afresh.

But... both of these, problems though they might be, are also fitting. That doom, that detached tone, all feed into a coldness in the novel that is so absolutely fitting to both the story it is trying to tell and the place it is trying to evoke. Everything here comes back to place. You cannot escape it. To read it is to feel the chill of the wind and the rain, and I was intensely glad this was an autumn release, one I read just as the temperature here in the UK is taking a dip into chill, and I could hold a cup of tea close for comfort while reading. The brittle wintriness of the landscape of the Cornish moor escapes off the page and into the reader with ease.

And so too the folklore. Some of the aspects of the story were familiar to me—the giants Gog and Magog loom large (wahey) over English tales beyond just Cornwall, but some were either entirely new or close but not exactly the thing that I knew from my own upbringing elsewhere in England. At one point, Nancy sings:

See-saw, Margery Daw,

And here, I think, I know this one. But then she follows it with:

Sold her bed and lay on the straw.
Sold her bed and lay upon hay.
And Pisky came and carried her away.

Whereas the rhyme in my memory has her receiving only a penny a day for the slow speed of her work. But this is the traditional Cornish version, apparently. It is not English folklore, because folklore like this cannot be genericised in that way. It is tied to a place, and a place as experienced by one person, or one community, and it is the greatest strength of the story—this understanding that the magical and the mythic can be so intimately bound up in the living world, and thus to the particularities of a place.

We see occasional intrusions of myth from outside—though there are no coasts or mines on the moor here, buccas and spriggans visit—but those externalities are consciously rebuffed in favour of the people and magics of this place. Which is not to say it's a story where only those of a particular location are able to enact its magic, which is a less pleasant direction these types of stories can sometimes go in. Pel, we are told, journeyed here from elsewhere and became the Keeper because it was the way he could prove himself the best at what he did. People, it seems, do not need to be tied to their locations, just the magic—it is enough to know it, to make yourself familiar with it, in order to be able to wield it. I have more time for this as a thesis on folkloric magic. He brought some of where he came from with him, but blended it with the place he came, and so, even in a story that is so utterly rooted in a singular location, there is an understanding that these types of stories, these mythologies, have always been as transitory as the people who tell them.

Ultimately, I found it a successful book. I was willing to be carried away, to see with clear eyes a moor covered in gorse and heather, dotted with tors and the dangers of bog and marsh. I wanted to feel its wind and rain, and be a little afraid of its dangers along with the characters. And it achieves that atmosphere absolutely perfectly. Where it suffers is in the closer, more human work, and I am, ultimately, willing to forgive it that (even though it's often the thing I care most about in stories) because its delivery of atmosphere, of this bottling of a place and time, is so exquisite and unusual in its intensity. I don't think I've read anything quite like it in a number of years. It brings to mind perhaps, most clearly, Sarah Perry's work—the creeping winter chill of Melmoth or the open bleakness of The Essex Serpent. The landscape is different, but some of the intent is the same. And all three are books best savoured in the cold weather, with something warm to comfort you from them.

Highlights: atmosphere in heaps and spades, sadness and doom, intimate folklore and feeling of a specific place and time

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Horton, Sam K. Gorse [Solaris, 2024].

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

Review: For Love of Magic by Simon Green

A myth about understanding why we love myths—a metamyth, if you will

Fantasy is a genre built on myth. That is what J. R. R. Tolkien was quite explicitly doing with The Lord of the Rings, and in traditional Western fantasy the myths of Western Europe are reinterpreted in any number of ways. In non-Western fantastic literature, the same is done to the mythologies of a variety of other cultures. Here, that concern is made more explicit than most fantasy, of any tradition, in Simon Green’s novella For Love of Magic.

For Love of Magic starts off with what appears to be a fairly standard urban fantasy setup: a magical painting has begun to cause problems in a museum in London, and His Majesty’s government calls in the freelance magic hunter to solve the problem. This opening scene alone is inventive, if not the most original, by virtue of it involving our esteemed magic hunter literally walking into the painting and forcing what’s on the other end into a shape that is more amenable to the non-magical world.

But that is only the opening salvo of a barrage of interesting magical set-pieces. Our protagonist is rapidly sucked into a war that has lasted for eons, between those who want to see magic gone and those who want a better coexistence between the magical and the mundane. This war has suddenly escalated: the opponents of magic have now found a way to travel through time, trying to erase that which made magic meaningful—to erase myth, to erase heroism and whimsy. Our protagonists simply cannot allow that.

It is here that For Love of Magic begins to really shine, as it sets out to interrogate the meaning of myth. That is why you find yourself sent back in time to Roman Britain, where you meet Boudica, as well as King Arthur and Robin Hood, among other figures of British mythology, not quite as you remember them, because time has done a number on how we perceive them. These were men and women, all too human, as Green stresses, who have become something else as time marched inexorably on, becoming the heroes, myths, and legends of British culture, and those of its former colonies.

Green is willing to show heroism become a burden, not so much literally as metaphorically through the incursions of the time travelers. These are people who have become special in a time when their Lord-knows-how-many generations of their descendants have passed on, with their own long lines of descendants likewise. They have become pawns in a war far more literal than what we call ‘culture wars,’ a conflict that truly deserves that title over the role of magic in human society. They are burdened with the vicious arguments of their progeny, but unlike the cold and silent statues of our day, be they in Bristol or Charlottesville, these heroes get to speak back and fight back.

The action in this slim little volume is well depicted, never bogged down in the minutiae that can tank a good action sequence. Green’s writing is brisk when it needs to be in these dynamic scenes, and tender when it needs to be among some of the character moments, be they concerned with romance or with the gravity of the situation. It is a style, indeed a combination, that feels properly heroic, with the gravitas that such a story naturally needs. Green never lets the story feel puny.

If anything, I’m disappointed this book wasn’t longer. There are many more British legends he could have gone with. The last one he depicts, while written by a British author (although not within Britain), struck me as a very odd choice for this sort of book, and some of the setting of that story is brought to Britain in a way that feels odd. Indeed, it’s a format that could have made for a much longer book, and part of me really wants to read that book (I can think of at least one British literary legend in the public domain that wasn’t in it, and frankly I was surprised that this figure was omitted). I don’t know whether Green is planning any sequels, but he really should be, for there are so many directions this story could go. There are other British myths, but also myths of other countries (his Wikipedia page mentions he studied American literature in university, in addition to British literature). Indeed, I daresay this novel could set up a whole shared universe like that of the late Eric Flint’s 1632 series.

For Love of Magic is a book that is not particularly original in a number of elements, but makes up for all of that in its bold use of intertextuality and its investment in understanding why its audience reads stories like this. It is fantasy that doesn’t just crib from mythology, but engages with and even probes these stories for why they became myths. It is a fantasy that is in many ways more self-aware than its contemporaries, and is all the better for it. Now only if Green could write another one…

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Reference: Green, Simon. For Love of Magic [Baen, 2023].

Microreview: The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, by Jas Treadwell

A masterclass in rendering magic from the mundane, with the help of lively typography and footnotes

 

Cover design and illustration by Natalie Chen

This book is one of the most entertaining tales I have read in a very, very long time—and made so solely by the narrative voice. I know it’s traditional in reviews to begin with a quick description of plot or premise, but I also like to start with the things a book does best, and in this book, that is the narrative voice. And when I say ‘narrative voice’, I don’t mean the breezy, sarcastic, quippy cynicsm that so often passes for any ‘narrative voice’ that manages to evince more personality than a default prose.¹ No, our narrator here is an educated, prickly, effusive fellow, who cannot write a sentence without using both italics and CAPITALS to emphasize his point, which he makes in long, involved, verbose profusions of loquacity that surely, in a less confident pen, would pall; but in a storyteller with as much to say as the necromantic historian (as our narrator terms himself, for he holds the power in his words to RAISE THE DEAD) serves to hold the reader’s attention in a sort of dizzied fascination; for whomst amongst ust can resist such a waterfall of vocabulary?

He holds strong opinions about literature, history, grammar. He flatters his reader in the main text, and picks fights in the footnotes.² He is repeatedly fascinated by the modern technology of chapter breaks, and their magical capacity to jump over time and space: ‘We thumb our nose at those unities proclaimed by old Aristotle,’ he explains, ‘for any law of art held in disdain by the GENIUS OF SHAKESPEAR, compels no obedience of ours’ (pg. 35). He makes extreme use of footnotes to hold forth his views on the cruelty of Job’s God, or the social currents among books; to explain a literary allusion that he fears his reader might have missed (‘… the fire which burns hottest, is soonest exhausted, and now no body remembers Werter and his sorrows. – Hence our foot-note. – You understand, reader, we ornament our pages thus, for your sake, not our own’ (pg 223).) He serves notice that a particular element of the story is going to prove important, and then when, later, its importance emerges, to remind his reader that such an eventuality was indeed foreshadowed back on pg. 159.

But, you may be asking yourself, what is this story, which contains such foreshadowing, such allusive richness, such bold disregard for Aristotelian unity?

Well, we have our titular Mr Thomas Peach: educated, gentlemanly, and moderate in his tastes; master of a small household, consisting of himself, his ailing wife, a housekeeper, a stableboy, and a housemaid. In every respect he has built a life for himself that is above reproach, attracts no notice, and fits harmlessly into the retiring country life of rural 18th century Somersetshire. Such seclusion is vitally necessary for the comfort of his poor wife, who can bear no disturbance, no noise, no visitors, no conversation with any but himself. So very retiring and secluded is his poor wife, that many wonder whether she exists at all, or is there some deeper mystery at hand? (Yes, there is some deeper mystery at hand, but it’s not all that mysterious. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure, within a few chapters, even without the narrator’s rhetorical winks, nudges, and elbows to your ribs.)

But, for all that Mr Peach is our purported hero, the real thrust of the story is carried by an entirely separate set of characters, whose dramas he interacts with more as witness than as participant. Chief among them is Miss Clarissa Riddle, an orphan, who has been raised by a wealthy gentleman, ‘in imitation of the most exquisite pattern of feminine virtue which history, philosophy, or literature affords’ (pg 53). In this case, that pattern is the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (hence Miss Riddle’s name), and if you have ever read much 18th century fiction blathering on about female virtue, you’ll not be surprised to learn that Miss Riddle begins to resent her treatment. Violently.

Various eventualities eventuate: Accusations of madness; a rather unfortunate hysteria about marauding ‘gypsies’; secret societies and subterfuge; disinheritance; assassins; schemes and plots for the acquisition of money; unwanted marriages; murder; arson; surprisingly skillful blank verse—actually, this all sounds rather lively as I list these plot elements here. But they’re also all rather mundane, which, given the rhetorical nudges and hints and suggestions and eventual revelation that—I promise you, this is not a spoiler---our Mr Peach is a sorcerer, seems unsatisfying.

Indeed, the most striking part of the book, is that there is an entirely mundane explanation for just about every event that occurs. Our faithful narrator attempts to dissuade us from such a mindset. ‘Reader,’ he says, in response to a skepticism he attributes to us, ‘We beg you, be neither intemperate, nor hasty in your judgement. Remain patient—as we have urged you—And, observe’ (pg. 186). Yet, faithful and patient as I was, I could not help but observe that the only events that seem unassailably supernatural occur solely in the presence of Mr Peach. And, as a friend tells him, these may well be the imaginings of a grieving mind. The other occurances, as occult as they may seem in our narrator’s eyes, can be interpreted equally well as the rather hotheaded, passionate imaginings of some hotheaded, passionate people. It is perhaps not an accident that young Jem, the stable boy, in falling victim to the romantic charms of Goethe, illustrates how easy it is to import the fanciful imaginings of one’s fiction into the mundanity of one’s life.

I wonder whether that is, at its heart, what Jas Treadwell is doing with this book. Was it magic? Was it mundane? Does it matter? Our opinionated, prolix, and larger-than-life narrator repeatedly presents himself as a sorcerer of sorts—a necromantic historian, you may recall. Whatever magic Thomas Peach is capable of working, or imagining himself to be working, it is no less enchanting than the magic of skillful storytelling, however mundane the story may be.

---

1 I mean no offense to any breezy, sarcastic, quippy cynicism. I enjoy that too. But it is rather common, you must admit.^↩
2 Regarding whether a river can flow ‘above’ a town: ‘My learned sir, if you have stood on the bank of some gentle stream, and observed the effortless and unhurried windings of its passage between yourself and those far-off hills, whence it descends; and have never felt the water’ss seduction, which seems irresistibly to lead you towards those sylvan heights!—then, sir, your soul is no better than a dry and shrivelled nut, and we leave you to the satisfactions of your quibbles and cavils. – You shall die, sir, and come to dust, as we shall; but we think our existence will have been worth the living. – Good day, sir’ (pgs 411-412).^↩

—

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 9/10 very high quality/standout in its category

• Narrative voice bulging with personality and opinion
  

• Murder, arson, alarums and excursions and REVENGE
  

• Lively typography
  

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:  

Treadwell, Jas. The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach [Hodder and Stoughton, 2021].

 

Review: The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson

The sequel to HMRC unfortunately lacks the punch of its predecessor, but promises good things for what follows next.

It was always going to be difficult, coming after Her Majesty's Royal Coven. Not just because it was a pretty solid book (although it was), but because of how it ended things - it left us in a position with no Niamh as a viewpoint character, and, at least for me, she was one of the most useful viewpoints we had. Maybe not the best, maybe not the most sympathetic, but the most useful - she was a voice of insight into what the eponymous HMRC itself was doing, while being outside enough to be involved in all the action, the bridge between the worlds of the story. Leonie may be the more sympathetic, more morally laudable one, setting up a coven for minority witches who feel the government backed stuff is full of problems, or maybe Theo, about whom all the trouble of the first story revolves, and who feels often to be the true heroine of events. But Niamh is involved in everything, talks to everyone, has a reason to be involved on all sides and so is the great facilitator of the story, all while being still plenty sympathetic enough, with her heart in the right place and sufficiently strong morals that you're on her side, even if she's not all the way up the scale. In purely story logistical terms, she's critical.

So, when you cut out one of the most important voices of your first book, how does the sequel work? You have to replace her. And Dawson does do that... but none of the replacements are really satisfactory.

Most prominently, Ciara, Niamh's evil twin, is inserted into the story and she's really just... not as good. She's less sympathetic (though not completely without her pull - she's hardly had an easy life, as we soon discover), less involved, less knowledgeable (being in a coma for a decade will do that), and just less pulled together. She's someone the story feels like it happens to, for the most part, rather than someone who really has much deliberate effect on the turn of events. I'd say the majority of the chapters are told from her perspective, and by the end it definitely began to feel claustrophobic for it, just because she's so walled off, so hidden from so much of what's going on with everyone else, it's hard to feel like what she sees and does is totally connected to the rest of them.

Is this deliberate? I think so. It fits in very well with the progression of her emotional narrative for us to feel that way. But is it fun? Not really. It works, but even as it achieves what I'm sure Dawson set out for it to achieve, it undercuts a lot of what made the first book good - it was a fast-paced, easy, character driven romp.

It also has the problem that Ciara is spending much of the story hiding herself, pretending to be her twin. And so the audience has information that most of the characters in the story lack, and that can be hard to manage without it getting awfully grating, awfully quickly. Obviously Ciara knows, so we're not alone with the information, but after a while, the frustration of other characters acting in ways that don't help, due to information they don't have and we do... builds. It's inevitable.

And it's magnified by the other problem - the lack of Niamh is partially solved by spreading the viewpoints out to a wider pool. We have more characters, sometimes one offs, whose perspective we get on the story, which of course means more people who don't know what's really going on. The widening of the POV net also necessitates a shallowing of each character's depth, however, even with the additional bulk of pages The Shadow Cabinet has compared to HMRC. I don't object to some of the characters from the first book who fulfilled more of a side role in the story getting pulled in to give their POV now, and in some cases welcome it - Luke, a non-magical character, is an extremely useful view of things to have - but it's not quite done enough to leave the reader feeling satisfied. They're not quite main characters, even still.

That being said, one of the main strengths of the book is Theo's perspective in her own chapters. Theo, teenaged, scared, constantly alert to things that may throw her personal situation back into disarray, is one of the few parts of the story where the lack of knowledge of Ciara's role works. Because Theo suspects. She's smart, strongly magical, and has the opportunity to really see differences, and so the suspicion she has forms a great piece of character work on her dynamic with Niamh, and how she relates to the world, and how that in turn relates back to her history. She's also a very compelling view of a teenager - simultaneously entirely plausible, with very teenaged concerns and slips of judgment, but still very accessible to an adult reader. Her chapters and her role in the events of the story were by far the most enjoyable part for me, and I hope we get even more from her going forward.

Outside of characters, much of what was strong about the first book does remain - the world building has all the hallmarks of good urban fantasy, and blends very well with the real world, picking and choosing which bits to retain and which to change. Much like the first, Dawson is interested in being true to the societal and political realities of Britain to tell her story, whether that's transphobia, racism, class dynamics or Anglo-Irish tensions, but in this it heads more into the directly political, in sometimes interesting ways. We see and interact with the mundane Prime Minister in this, and Dawson has chosen not to make him a direct pastiche of any particular figure, but rather have him take characteristics of several recent Tory PMs (there's definitely some David Cameron in there, but also some Boris Johnson too)... I have to wonder if this is because the story was written when we were so busy chucking one and getting another that she could have no certainty who'd be in charge by the time the book hit publication.

But she also engages a little deeper than that - there's a government aide with strong Dominic Cummings vibes (which gets interesting quickly), and a witch who opens us up to a view that, in witch society, with its strong notes of female... if not supremacy then at least casual disdain for men... even there, we have some people open to accepting "tradwife" style ideologies. With a witchy aesthetic overlay, of course. When this blends with the wider story themes around patriarchy and power dynamics, and the need for some people to see themselves as inherently superior, it lends her whole witch society another layer of realistic complexity that was part of what made the first book work so well for me.

Because this is not, fundamentally, one of those "what if women were the powerful ones" simple stories, like The Power or a hundred others. Juno Dawson acknowledges that even though her siloed witch community may be powerful and may have their own, separate ideologies and prejudices and histories, they are not immune to the power structures endemic in the world around them, and nor are they so inherently "better" that they can choose to rise above them simply by being smart enough, kind enough or in tune with nature enough. They are people living in a complex, intersecting world, full of intersecting identities, problems and relationships, and all parts of that touch all others, for better and for worse.

This, truly, is the strength of the story. Taking the elements of a fairly standard urban fantasy idea and infusing them with something richer at their foundation, to make the whole that much sturdier, deeper and more interesting. In the first book, this was accompanied by the pacey storytelling, the interesting characters and a general surprise and delight to find it doing what it was doing, when it may not have been expected.

However, in book two, the delight has worn off a little. We come in expecting what we had before, and so our bar is that bit higher. And, alas, it has very much succumbed to second in a trilogy syndrome - a lot of the plot feels like filler, like a way of joining us from the first to the inevitable last, and scene-setting for something greater moving in the background. There's an ongoing thread of the plot around the tripartite satanic background enemy, but it remains in that background as other pieces move around it, giving it the necessary time to build up for the climax. Character elements too are clearly being manoeuvred into place, and so the payoff at the end of the story feels... subdued. We're still clearly waiting for the real ending.

But... but. Especially in the final section of the book, some of those bits of scene-setting are genuinely tantalising. Enough to make book two all better? No, not really. But enough to make me think book three may manage to be just as special as book one? Well... I'm certainly hopeful.

--

The Math

Highlights: returning to an interesting world with genuine richness and complexity, getting more depth on some interesting minor characters from book one, Theo is great

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Juno Dawson, The Shadow Cabinet, [Harper Voyager, 2023]

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