Series Review: The Amberlough Dossier, by Lara Elena Donnelly

A clear-eyed, relevant exploration of the tragic humanity of flawed people, flawed countries, and how impotence does not excuse wrongdoing

I picked up Amberlough, the first of Lara Elena Donnelly’s rich, thoughtful, and distressingly still-relevant trilogy of politics and style, because of the style alone. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘Moulin-rouge-flavoured nightclubs with art-nouveau style, queer flamboyance, and a 1930s-bohemianism! Sounds like fantastic fun! Sign me up!’

And it was fantastic. The absinthe flowed, the nightclub performers danced and bantered and exuded fae-like glamours over their bewitched spectators. What is more, Amberlough city has a functional streetcar system, further adding to its already stratospheric base level of extreme sexiness. But was this series fun? Not really. Because fucking fascism always has to ruin everything.

This series is beautifully constructed in three parts: the fascist take-over, the resistance, and the aftermath. But where other writers might turn this into an inspiring, rah-rah tale of the RISING TO THE CHALLENGE and RESTORATION OF JUSTICE and EVERYMAN HEROES WILL TRIUMPH AGAINST EVIL THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION, this series is decidedly more restrained. Everything is complicated. Everyone is complicated. There is hope for a better future, yes, but the flaws and constraints and uncountable opportunities to make the wrong choice temper that hope in a way that feels both realistic and depressingly relevant.

The story revolves around an interconnected ensemble of key players, who expand and contract in number throughout the series. In Book 1, Amberlough, we have Aristide Makricosta, a wildly popular, glamorous, (ageing) nightclub performer, who has, through a series of disagreeable compromises, entirely remade himself from a country boy of dubious ethnicity to the ne plus ultra of Amberlough nightlife. Cyril DePaul is a government agent who is simultaneously sleeping with Aristide and investigating him (not very effectively) for drug smuggling. Needless to say, this relationship necessitates a certain divide between work life and personal life. Finally, we have Cordelia Lehane, a stripper who works with Aristide at the nightclub. 

When the story begins, the nation of Gedda ---  a loose confederation of different regions, much like the UK --- is preparing for an election in which the governing party, a regionalist faction that favours backing off to let each region govern itself, is facing off against the rapidly strengthening One State Party or OSP. The OSP stands not only for a unified government, but a unified people, a unified culture, a unified ethnicity, a unified morality. People like Aristide, who work the wrong jobs, love the wrong type of people, and walk around with the wrong skin colour and shape of nose, face a rough future if the Ospies take over. And the Ospies have a good chance of it: When Cyril is sent to investigate the possibility of election fraud, they lose no time in finding his weak points and manipulating him to aid their efforts in rising to power.

In Book 2, Armistice, the action shifts to a different country of Porachis. Porachis has a subcontinental flavour, but it’s a subcontinent where British colonialism didn’t happen, and where Bollywood, not Hollywood, defines the international standard of film studio glamour. There, Cyril’s sister, Lilian DePaul, is working in the Geddan diplomatic office. Like Cyril, she is serving the Ospies, and like Cyril, they are enforcing her compliance --- in her case, by threatening her son. Yet Lilian is hardly a downtrodden victim here. She is very good at her job, highly respected in Porachis, and maintains access to her family’s inherited wealth. She may not like the Ospies, but she is doing well under their rule. Aristide, too, is making the best of matters. He has fled Gedda to land on his feet in the Porachin film industry, where he gains international acclaim and spends his time sleeping with handsome men much younger than him, drinking too much, and generally living the life of glorious public dissipation that often betokens internal emptiness and despair. Only Cordelia is suffering under Ospie rule, and only Cordelia has been doing anything about it.

In Book 3, Amnesty, the Ospies are gone, and Cordelia is a hero. Hooray! But that doesn’t mean everything is all right again. Are the heroes of the resistance the right people to lead a country once they’ve overthrown the government? Aristide and Lilian have returned home to Amberlough --- but how can you pick up the threads of your old life, when you and your home and all the people you once knew and loved have changed so much? And how can you build a future when the misdeeds of the past --- arms-dealing, drug-smuggling, collaboration with the enemy --- are brought into the open for some long-delayed justice? What value is there in justice, if it cannot bring back the dead, and serves only to hurt the living?

These books are profoundly melancholy, because they identify so precisely all the complications inherent in a story that a simpler book would present as a rousing, heartening, rallying cry to resist oppression and build a better world. Cyril and Lilian’s collaboration with the Ospies seems utterly unforgivable from the outside, the weak actions of weak people (especially Cyril --- oh, especially Cyril!) but when we see the story from inside their heads, it’s brutally clear why they act as they do. Aristide’s collapse into dissipation and despair is distressing --- but what would you do if you had clawed your way from the dregs of society into a moment of glittering triumph, only to have everything you’d built, and everyone you loved, ripped away from under you?

The set dressing of this story --- Art Deco Europe --- gives the rise of the Ospies a classic Nazi odour. But the book has more universal applicability than that. The publication dates (2017, 2018, and 2019) makes one suspect that a great deal of this series was inspired by living through the rise of the far right and the first Trump administration (although the parallels break down a bit now, during the second Trump administration, largely because the Ospies have much less interest in destroying science and medicine and general government function than MAGA). The agitations of regions wanting to break away from the central government give Brexit referendum vibes, or Scottish or Catalan independence. The complex relationships between certain regions within Gedda and other countries outside Gedda have a distinct whiff of Northern Ireland. And that’s not even leaving Europe! The reality is that every complex society will have its agitators against central authority, and authoritarian assholes are always lurking, eager to assume control. The central themes of this series, the flawed actors, the flawed governments, the flawed cultures, the flawed movements, are not specific to one point of time. They are universally, tragically, perpetually relevant. 

And what is worse, it remains unclear how much power any individual actually has to change anything. Would the Ospies still have come to power if Cyril hadn’t been coerced to aid them? Probably! Would there have been a resistance to bring them down if Cordelia hadn’t gotten involved? Maybe! Will Lilian be able to affect the form of the new government once the Ospies are gone? Who knows? This series is full of sympathetic, flawed humans, committing tragically understandable misdeeds, with no guarantee that anything they do matters. It is bleak. It is grim. It is complicated.

And yet: there is hope. The Ospies come to power, but they can be overthrown, and although we don’t know if Amberlough will find its way to a just future --- with or without Lilian’s involvement --- there is a path in that direction. People and society are complicated. The world of Amberlough is complicated. But so is ours; and it is a comfort to see these complications acknowledged on the page, without losing sight of the possibility of hope. 

--

The Math

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

Highlights:

• Complex people, complex setting, complex themes
• Glamour and style
• Melancholy
• Streetcars 

References:  

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amberlough. [Tor 2017].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Armistice. [Tor 2018].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amnesty. [Tor 2019].

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 or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Book Review: Villain, by Natalie Zina Walschots

Everything's connected, and it's all fucked up.

Six years ago, Hench appeared, the first book in this very fine exploration of the nuances of villainy, and the dangers of knee-jerk support for institutions we are instructed to regard as the good guys. How much of superhero vs. supervillain is good vs evil, and how much is merely antagonist against antagonist? Even if we flip the good/evil spectrum, how many of the superheros are actually baddies, and how many of them are mere victims of the self-serving machinations of their institutional overseers?

Villain picks up where Hench left off, with our narrator, Anna Tromedlov fully embodying her new name of The Auditor. She has become Leviathan's right-hand woman; she runs the organization in his name while he plays dead, and drives policy when he returns to the job. As Leviathon’s team continues its conflict with the Draft – the institution that controls and organizes superhero activities -- her relationship with him develops along lines that would be tedious and predictable if they weren't so gosh-dang thematically grounded: What types of intimacy can define relationships, and how do they interact with institutional control? This book refuses to offer any easy answers. It’s all kind of fucked up. And, to misquote Tolstoy, exploring the domains and degrees of fucked-up-edness is where all the fun lies.

Let’s take the question of intimacy. Nemeses are very explicitly presented as if their mutual hatred behaves exactly like love. After any superhero’s death, the funeral events traditionally include a Night Service, during which the venue is left symbolically locked and unguarded at night. This allows villains to symbolically break in so that they may pay their own respects. Everyone recognizes that nemeses, like allies, need to mourn. And the Auditor does mourn: I wish we had more time, she thinks during Supercollider’s Night Service. I could have hated you so much longer.  She feels hollowed out by his loss: A deep sense of loss sloshed around in my chest. Without Supercollidor to focus on, there was a great void left behind, a huge volume of hatred without a focal point. Replace 'hate' with 'love' and this could be the ending of any tragic romance. 

The Auditor is not the only one to feel this way. Leviathan is utterly undone by the loss of Supercollidor, spending the first several chapters of the book, Achilles-like, sulking in his office. During the Night Service itself, Doc Proton, a token hero left behind to guard the venue, can be soothed only by the intervention of Decay, his own nemesis, into whose arms he collapses in tears. Later, Leviathan explains the nature of this intimacy during a conversation about the combativeness developing between the Auditor and an ex-hero, named Decoherence. ‘The greatest divisions are a single degree from perfect understanding,’ he says. ‘She could be the great hatred of your life.’ And he says it with a degree of jealousy, because he recognizes that the intimacy between nemeses can be a genuine obstacle to the more conventional romance he wants to pursue with the Auditor. After all, he himself was not able to consider such a thing until now, after Supercollidor is dead.

But what does this kind of intimacy entail? Leviathon is not the best romantic partner, in ways that could be a reflection on types of coercive control in domestic relationships, but which I myself find much more interesting to interpret in light of his role as the boss of a vast institution. Don’t date your coworkers, and definitely don’t date your manager, amirite? 

Personal/institutional power relations are the other thematic pole of this book. To what extent do individuals have power over their own lives in a world controlled, surveilled, and manipulated by institutions? The Draft kidnaps any child with supernatural ability, and indeed will disappear non-supers as well, if they have useful skills. The deeper you are enmeshed, the less control you have, until eventually people become indistinguishable from the forces they serve. We see this process in action everywhere. ‘Mom’ – an aspiring leader of the Draft – has no private life outside of work, and no weaknesses that Leviathan's team can exploit to interfere with his quest for institutional power. The auditor of the Draft, who aspires (and fails pathetically) at being the Auditor’s nemesis , tells her at one point, ‘This isn’t about work. This is about you…’ to which the Auditor reflects, I wasn’t sure I even made such a distinction anymore.

The role of chosen names is a really lovely detail that ties into the nuances of this point further. Decoherence has adopted her new name after leaving the Draft – and her Draft identity of Quantum Entanglement – behind. A team of young heroes include Thundersnow, whose name arouses repeated comment, to which she always replies simply 'I’m Canadian'. A new teammate of Thundersnow's is transferred over from a previous team of fascistic bullies, among whom he bore the name Riot Shield. (A wealth of commentary on how purportedly good institutions like to whitewash appalling violence in that detail alone!) Now, to distance himself from that previous role, he calls himself simply Shield: pure protection, no fascism involved.

But how much of this nomenclatural flexibility represents actual control over one’s individual life, and how much is merely window-dressing for the deeper control that institution exert over everyone in their power? Thundersnow never says actually, call me Susan. She can choose her name, yes, but only as long as it fits the theme of superhero names, consistent with the role the Draft has chosen for her. The reason Decoherence is still involved in this whole mess is because she recognizes that the heroes of the Draft are victims as much as they are perpetrators of evil, and wants to persuade them that they can just leave (more on that in a moment).

Even the Auditor herself shows that this phenomenon is not restricted to Draft-affiliated individuals. When she attempts to make contact with her best friend from civilian life, she has to go back to calling herself Anna, and has to work through some Feelings at realizing that this name no longer fits. Only her institutional name is an accurate description of the person she is now.

At the Night Service, Decay warns the Auditor of the danger of dissolving oneself into one’s role. Her face is not known yet, he tells her. She is not a symbol of Leviathan's institution yet. She can still walk away. She can still detach herself, live her own life, be her own person. She refuses this path – only to be offered it later, by Mom. Except this time the opportunity is no longer a genuine personal choice. Mom shows her a spreadsheet, in which all the damage she has done acting for Leviathan is weighed against the future good she could do if she leaves . She doesn’t even need to join the Draft, Mom says – she can join an NGO and live an independent life, doing good to balance the scales she has so badly tilted during her time working for Leviathan. Like the names, though, this offer does not represent genuine autonomy. The very existence of the spreadsheet shows that any future good works a hypothetical ex-Auditor might carry out will always be under scrutiny and evaluation by the Draft. It’s just a more palatable version of the Draft’s desire to control every individual’s behaviour. 

A third invitation to leave comes from Decoherence – not as a representative of villains, like Decay, or as a representative of heroes, like Mom. Decoherence has no use for any of those: ‘Fuck all of them,’ Decoherence says. ‘Leviathan and the Draft are just opposite ends of the same fucking spectrum.’ Decoherence wants to be truly, properly independent, and she wants the Auditor to join her. Although Leviathan sees her as a prospective nemesis to the Auditor, Decoherence and the Auditor dance around the friendlier side of that spectrum in most of their interactions.

Love, hate, intimacy, control, institutions, autonomy – it’s all interconnected. It’s all fucked up. This book does not shy away from exploring how, and why, and it does not propose any solutions. To the very last sentence, all it can offer is the opportunity to understand the problem. 

--

The Math

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

Highlights:

• Squishy, nuanced exploration of themes
• Pretty awesome superhero vs. supervillain spectacle
• Messed up romance

Reference: Walschots, Natalie Zina. Villain. [William Morrow, 2026].

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 or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Book Review: Rainmaker, Rainmaker, by Kevin B. Hillstrom

A creepy, evocative Dust Bowl tale of con-men and folklore 

cover painting by William Holbrook Beard, 1885

Remember high school English class? Remember MAN VS. MAN, MAN VS. NATURE, MAN VS. GOD, etc? In my high school lit class, we did not use A03-style tags. These categories were mutually exclusive: if this then not that, certainly not both, let alone all of the above! But Rainmaker, Rainmaker, rises above such artificial categorization. It is all of these, and more. It's a skillfully written, deeply unsettling book that risks, I fear, being lost in the maelstrom of traditionally-published books that bear the advantage of professional marketing and word-of-mouth and established writer reputations. 

Unless I can change that here, today. Because this creepy story of folklore and con-men and Dust Bowl desperation does not deserve to be overlooked amidst the unnavigable volume of 21st century publishing.

MAN VS NATURE: Greenheart, 1936. A once prospering farming town on the great plains of USA is now crumbling under the destruction of the Dust Bowl. Storms bring blinding, choking, unbreathable dust that leaves behind dead bodies, drowned on dry land, their lungs choked with dirt. There is no water; crops will not grow; starving rabbits infest the land and eat everything that grows. 

MAN VS MAN: Into this slow, scrabbling decline, a stranger comes to town: Gideon Starling. He brings with him wealth, glamour, impossible tales of exotic travels. He has been everywhere, done everything. And he promises that he can make it rain in Greenheart. 

He hires our narrator, a teenager named Will Thorpe, pays him handsomely, and asks of him nothing more than his company. Oh, and also, everything he knows about everyone in town. Basic information, nothing huge: what do people say, what do they think, who do they like, who do they hate? Gideon makes friends; he sows hope. But not everyone is as dazzled by his worldly charisma, and fault lines develop.

MAN VS GOD: Who is Gideon Starling? What makes him so unnaturally compelling? Why does the reader find him disturbing -- well before Will starts having doubts -- and mistrust him so deeply that she finds herself putting the book down and avoiding picking it up again without proper mental preparation? Because I want to be very clear here: for all his charisma in the town of Greenheart, for all his sinister vibes, on the page Gideon Starling is no sexy shadow daddy. He's creepy as hell. The events of the first half or more of the book correspond to a straightforward enough bit of literary fiction about con men preying upon desperate people in an evocative setting; but the mood and tone make it clear that something much more disquieting is going on.

Properly exploring that last A03-style tag would bring me into the realm of spoilers, but playing properly coy would make it impossible for me to remark upon some of the most lasting and successful elements of the book. I'm not going to be shy about pointing out that the cover image, a 19th century painting by William Holbrook Beard of a fox-king receiving tribute from his woodland prey subjects, is less metaphorical than it first appears. I'm going to remind people of that awful realization that Julia experiences in The Magicians that a Trickster-fox is everyone's favourite bit of folklore until he actually works his mischief on you, at which point you realize that some types of mischief are not cute and quirky, but absolutely fucking awful. And I'm going to remark what a brilliant concept it is to have creatures from folklore falling into their own portal fantasy, ending up trapped in a world where their magic doesn't work and they must scrabble to survive. 

Just as the farmers were betrayed by nature, finding themselves trapped in someplace weird and terrifying, where everything they thought was true and reliable -- the rain, the wind -- no longer works as it should, so too are these creatures trapped in the wrong world, unable to return to the home they knew. Just as those displaced Dust Bowl farmers become itinerant wanderers, seeking to find a new place, to make a new life, so too must these creatures find-- or make -- or ruthlessly carve -- a new niche for themselves. Some are more successful than others; some make allies, some exploit enemies. Some betray the innocent. The best stories have layers, and the layers that make up this tale -- the unearthliness of the Dust Bowl, which drowns its victims without water; the unexpected cruel humanity of these trapped, homesick creatures of myth and legend -- make a compelling narrative.

Hillstrom is not the only writer to have recently observed the otherworldly potential of the Dust Bowl as a setting. Last year's excellent The Antidote, by Karen Russell, told a very different type of story that built on many of the same components as Rainmaker Rainmaker: the brutality of the jackrabbit drives, the terrible dust storms, the role of Works Progress Administration photographers as key sources of documentary evidence. They're wonderfully evocative narrative tools, and the fact that two such different books have come out so close to each other makes me wonder -- why only two? Why do writers not use this setting more often? It's fantastic!

There are a few issues this book that could have been tightened up. Some revelations rely on a rather tired trope of meeting someone who just happens to have some very esoteric knowledge conveniently stored in his home library. Others rely on essentially tying the hero to a chair and monologuing at him. But where some tropes are deployed in conventional ways, other issues of pacing are nonstandard, but thereby effective and novel. A leisurely epilogue might feel like an oddly slow fade-out, but it has the effect of properly acknowledging that people's lives can extend beyond the main events of a book. Learning how these characters grow and move apart and experience joys and successes and griefs and utterly mundane disappointments does a lot to make them more real than when they were merely actors in a fantastical story.

Give this book a read, friends! There is gold to be found in the roiling tumult of self-published, indie-published, small-press-published books that struggle for visibility in the shadows of the big names. It is my privilege to dive therein and come out with treasures to share with you. This is one such treasure. Please come and have a gander at it.

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 8: Well worth your time and attention

Highlights:

• Evocative Dust Bowl setting
• Folklore
• Con men

References: 

Hillstrom, Kevin B., Rainmaker, Rainmaker [2026].

Russel, Karen., The Antidote. [Knopf 2025].

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 or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Book Review: A Fire Beneath the World, by Jas Treadwell

Demons and castles and the French Revolution

A few years ago, I wrote approvingly of Jas Treadwell’s most excellent novel The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach. The best part, I reported, was the delightful, opinionated, quarrelsome narrator, who lost no opportunity to make the most of the tools available to him, be they typographical—footnotes, capitalization, emphatic formatting—or more structural explorations of post-Aristotelian non-unities of time and place. Now, in the equally excellent sequel, A Fire Beneath the World, our narrator returns, and he is not alone.

Where Thomas Peach was set entirely in England, this tale turns its eye to revolutionary France. It splits its focus between English characters, familiar to us already from Thomas Peach, and a new set of French faces. Our friend the English narrator (as I call him in my head) handles the former, and the much more straightforward French narrator (as I call them in my head) handles the latter.

This split in narrators is a structural mirror of one of the more charming themes of the book: the attempt to split people into one of two types. Our English narrator ruminates upon this at some length, quickly dismissing the easy binary of men vs. women as utterly uninteresting and unfit for purpose, and instead landing upon (he asserts) a far more foundational, undeniable, and universal division—namely, whether or not a person supports the French monarchy or the French revolutionaries. Obviously. Clearly. I see no problems with this fundamental universal binary.

The English portion of the tale does its best to support this philosophy. On the one hand we have Miss Arabella Farthingay, a pro-revolutionary poet who is invited to appear in front of the National Assembly in Paris to declaim her verses in their honour. Orbiting around her is a mysterious swashbuckling rescuer of persecuted French aristocrats, known as Forget-Me-Not, a hero lauded across English society with appalling doggerel, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the 1934 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.

As our English narrator relates Miss Farthingay's story, the action eventually shifts to France, and our English narrator is not happy about that. You see, he does not speak French very well, and so unless the French people speak slowly and clearly, he has difficulty following a lot of conversations. And furthermore, he doesn’t much care for the French, actually. French druids, for example, built their stone monuments in straight lines rather than circles like Stonehenge, which is obviously very bad and inferior to English druids, who well understood the principle of the curved line. Modern French people are just as bad, inexplicably devoted to the swearing and keeping of oaths as a matter of honour. Good solid Englishmen know that a serviceable lie is an indispensable component of an orderly nation’s government and commerce. (I don’t quite know why this anti-French bigotry is so funny to me. Is it because it’s based on such absurd pettiness? Is it because it’s over two centuries out of date, and so its teeth are drawn? Is it even possible to draw the teeth of bigotry? Evidently yes. This was hilarious.)

The other half of the tale focuses on French characters, and for that we get a French narrator. This narrator has a great deal less personality than our English narrator, but does, at least, speak French, and so we can understand all the French conversations spoken by the French people. (The French narrator does not, however, speak English, so some degree of linguistic confusion is an unavoidable component no matter who’s telling the story.) We follow here the (mis)adventures of three adventurers: a young woman, who seeks to leave her small town and see the world; a scoundrel, who follows demonic guidance in return for escape from prison; and an ex-valet, whose previous employer was also not averse to more than a little demonic shenanigans of his own.

Our French characters both support and contradict the English narrator’s claims about the Great Division of people. In support: they defy traditional gender divisions. The young woman is so large and strong that she can believably threaten to squash the skulls of men who betray her. The ex-valet is so dainty and beautiful that he is frequently mistaken for a woman; and looming throughout the narrative is a mysteriously powerful government official who is addressed both as Monsieur and Madame in different circumstances. Clearly, the distinction between men and women is pretty useless as a way of splitting the world in two, exactly as our English narrator has asserted.

But in contradiction to the second half of the English narrator’s Great Division, we find that—in France at least—a great many of the French people do not actually care much one way or the other about the state of the revolutionary government. For some, the sheer weight of living crushes out any political opinions: denouncements and disappearances weaken the labour force; but the availability of labour to bring in the harvest is a moot point, because the endless rain is rotting grain in the fields. In the teeth of starvation, what does it matter who writes the laws and collects taxes you can’t pay?

Even among those who can manage the luxury of political identities, many adhere not to the monarchy, or to the revolutionaries way off in Paris, but to their own Breton brethren on the coast of France. Our English narrator’s great division of mankind falls apart utterly when it is put to the test in the country to which it applies most directly.

Knowing the English narrator’s opinion of the French, I suspect he would probably dismiss this failure to adhere to his principles as even more evidence of the deficiencies of French character. However, since he does not speak French well enough to ask the French people themselves about their political opinions, he remains blissfully ignorant of this counterexample. As, in fact, he remains ignorant of all of the French components of the plot. In the climactic pages of the book, revelation after revelation emerges that he lacks the background to understand, leaving him spouting indignant protestations of bafflement into (he imagines) our sympathetic, equally baffled ear.

But we are not baffled. Our view of the tale has not been divided—not by gender, not by language, not by political opinion, not by nationality. We have seen all of it, and the result is a delight. I can think of no better words to end this review with than our English narrator’s own footnote. It refers to the previous book, The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, in its original place in the text, but it applies equally well here:

You must take matters into your own hands. Seek out the book-sellers and the circulating libraries—hunt high and low—And find [this] volume for yourself.—Find it, and read it. We dare say, the effort will reward the toil.

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

Highlights:

• Two narrators, both alike in dignity (well, not really)
• French Revolution
• Demons

Reference: Treadwell, Jas. A Fire Beneath the World [Hodder and Stoughton, 2024].

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.

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 3: Assassin's Fate

Why couldn’t the dragons just fly the ring to Clerres?

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

OK, I’m going to confess something. I’ve been calling this whole project a “reread,” but in fact, I’ve never actually read this last trilogy. So I didn’t know what was coming when I wrote the last two posts, and I feel VERY SILLY now that I’ve gotten to the end about my ignorant comments blithely asserting that Hobb was mellowing in her cruelty, softening her blows, pulling her punches.

She wasn’t. She was just taking a deep breath before this last book. Be aware: I'm going to abuse italics. I'm very worked up about this.

And although I’ve seen the kinds of blows she can land, still—this book seems the worst, because it was all unnecessary. In the Farseer trilogy, Fitz getting tortured to death in Regal’s dungeons was part of the path to extract himself from his identity as a Farseer bastard, freeing him up to do things like find Verity and help him build his Skill-dragon to defend the Six Duchies from the Red Ship raiders. In the Liveship trilogy, Vivacia had to become a slaver so that she’d get taken by Kennit, which would send her (and Paragon) on the path to recovering their draconic roots, thereby enabling them to guide the serpents to their spawning grounds and start a new nest of dragons. In Tawny Man, the Fool getting flayed alive in the Pale Lady’s ice cave was necessary to bring the other dragons back from extinction. These were horrible things that happened, yes, but they served a purpose. They made the world better.

What did we accomplish here in this book? Yes, we rescued Bee (although, honestly, she was doing a pretty awesome job of rescuing herself), but that’s personal. The Farseer line is doing just fine without her: Nettle’s got a baby, Elliania’s got a baby. On the large scale, rescuing Bee is a good thing for Fitz to do as a father, but it’s a very small story for a Robin Hobb trilogy.

But wait! you might say. What about the destruction of Clerres? you might say. That’s a huge thing! That’s incredible! That’s an amazing improvement in the world at large! you might say.

Yes. But Fitz and the Fool didn’t do it. First of all, it was Bee who burned the archives, and second of all, it was the dragons who finished the job. Fitz and the Fool didn’t even need to go to Clerres! For that matter, the Fool didn’t even need to go to Fitz! He could have sicced the dragons on Clerres, left poor Fitz out of it, and everything could have ended happily. Properly happily. Not whatever this together-forever White Prophet and Catalyst nonsense is. Clerres would be rubble, Fitz would be Tom Badgerlock, raising his little daughter Bee and meeting his grandbaby, and the Fool would be…

Well, probably dead. But as I consult my feelings about this book, I find that I don’t really care about the Fool as a character on his own. We have a good few chapters at the end when he’s trying to be a father to Bee, because they both think Fitz is dead and he’s all she has left, and everything about that attempted relationship just falls flat. The Fool on his own is not an interesting person. He only works with Fitz.

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s actually a masterful bit of character work. By seeing how grim and lonely and empty the Fool’s life will be without Fitz—denied even by his own child (for a given value of “his own”), bereft of purpose—it is satisfying to see him come to his end, united forever with Fitz (and Nighteyes) in the Skill-wolf.

But I still don’t like him. I cannot forgive him for the misery he brought. The unnecessary misery. In the previous sub-serieses of this saga, it was possible to argue that there was no other way to bring about the events that had to happen.  But here, after all we’ve endured, the dragons rock up and just… tweet it out destroy Clerres to the bedrock, and it’s hard to ignore that big smoking sign trumpeting THIS WAS THE OTHER WAY.

Yes, fine, we’ve had 15 books so far establishing that Fitz will do whatever the Fool asks him, and the Fool loves Fitz and their relationship is complicated and deep and there are layers, and I get it. And also, yes, fine, the Fool was desperate and dying and going to the only person who could help him, the person who knew more of him than he had ever revealed to anyone else who breathed. He wasn’t thinking straight, so it’s understandable he wouldn’t think to ask why the eagles dragons couldn’t just fly the ring their vengeance to Mordor Clerres.

And, yes, we’ve had 15 books in which these sorts of character motivations have been key supporting elements of the plot, resulting in a united, coherent through-line of motivation to justify the troubles. But notice my phrasing there: the character arcs supported the plot. They united with the plot to produce motivation. They were not the sole load-bearing components. Until now.

It’s a cruel author who gives us dragons, shows how the dragons can easily right the most hideous wrongs—and then chucks Fitz into the meatgrinder anyway.

All throughout the book, I was taking notes for a very different write-up. I had all sorts of thoughts about the differences between identities that are assigned to you versus identities you take on yourself. Gender, of course: Fitz trusts the Fool, but not Amber. But also not just gender. Is Bee the Destroyer or the Unexpected Son? Is Beloved or the Pale Lady the true White Prophet? Are liveships liveships, or dragons?

But I don’t have the heart. I am disheartened. Hobb has stolen my heart, enchanted my heart, and then crushed it in her claws. I knew she had it in her. I just didn’t think she would do it to me.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Fate [Del Rey, 2017].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 2: Fool's Quest

Loose threads are tied off. Also, throuple.

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

This installation – the penultimate in the entire saga! – is the beginning of the wrapping-up. To be sure, there’s still a LOT of plot to get through when we reach the last page: little Bee is still lost, Fitz thinks she’s dead and is feeling pretty suicidal about it, and the Fool’s homeland of Clerres is about to get an almighty ass-kicking of a regime change, to be brought about by a (small) coalition of foreign powers.¹ And yet there’s a lot going on here that feels like it’s gathering in the loose ends of a dozen books to tie them all off.

First, we have Fitz’s reintroduction at court in Buckkeep as himself. Remember, he’s spent most of his adult life pretending that Fitzchivalry Farseer, the Witted Bastard, actually did die in Evil Prince Regal’s dungeons way back in Royal Assassin. Fitz? What Fitz? No Fitz here, no no, just Tom Badgerlock, one-time man-at-arms to Lord Golden, mentor to King Dutiful, and now the sort of master-caretaker of the estate at Withywoods. Not the Lord of Withywoods, let’s be clear, because that was given to Burrich, and upon Burrich’s death inherited by Molly. Fitz then married Molly, but upon her death the estate went to Nettle. Fitz was never entitled to any part of it, and remains there solely on Molly’s sufferance. 

Let me step aside here and mention how much I appreciated this detail about inheritance. It would be so easy to adopt a kind of knee-jerk assumption of male dominance in an otherwise entirely medieval-flavoured fantasy book, which would let Fitz remain the lord of Withywoods after Molly’s death. Or perhaps one of his stepsons might inherit the property. But no: Nettle is the oldest daughter, so Nettle inherits, which means that, as legal owner of Withywoods, she can kick Fitz out for any reason she pleases. And she’s not a jerk about it, but likewise she is willing to pull this string on him if it seems necessary. And when it comes to Bee, Nettle worries that it might be: Fitz is so paralysed by Molly’s death that she worries he is incapable of giving Nettle the care she needs. He does not want to give up custody of Bee to Nettle, and Nettle does not want to kick Fitz out of Withywoods, but if that’s the only way to force him to give her custody of Bee – even Fitz has the sense to recognize that he cannot look after a little girl if he has nowhere to live and no source of income – she will do it without hesitation. 

It’s more of that same trend I mentioned noticing in the previous book: the travails that assail our characters are exactly the same troubles that we see in modern life. A custody battle over a child is brutally common in our own world, and the shape of that looming conflict in this book invokes the identical stress points: neglect, income, and where the child will live. And Nettle has the power to hold her own. Indeed, it was pretty clear that she was going to win that battle before the Clerres people came, rampaged through Withywoods, and stole Bee away. It sucks for Fitz, and we know from Bee’s perspective that she does not want to go away, but it’s really hard not to see Nettle’s point. When we’re invited to view this custody battle between them from modern eyes – which it’s hard not to do, given how familiar the shape of the custody battle is – it’s hard not to notice that Fitz is neglecting Bee. Also don’t forget that he’s the kind of guy that will stab to death a dying beggar in the street for giving his daughter a hug. This kind of murderous impetuosity is not the behaviour of a well-regulated father.

So: Nettle’s exercise of female power introduces a bit of modern social sensibility into the Six Duchies. It would be a bit of a break from how that society worked in previous books, except that we've been seeing social change happening from the top, first through Kettricken's years of ruling as Dutiful's regent, which started back in the Farseer trilogy, and then from the introduction Elliania as Queen, which we got in Tawny Man. Elliania, recall, comes from the strictly matriarchal society of the Outislands. So far, she’s only had sons – fine for the Six Duchies, who inherit by the male line, but catastrophic for her family line back home. She needs a female child, and there isn’t any prospect of her creating one out of her own body. But Nettle is a Farseer, a relative of Elliania’s husband² and by extension now a member of her own family. And when Nettle becomes pregnant by her own lover, Elliania is thrilled! A possible female child borne into her line, to take up the responsibilities back in the Outislands! Except in order to take up those responsibilities, the child must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, Nettle must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, her relationship to Fitz must be acknowledged, which means Fitz can no longer be Tom Badgerlock, but must instead step into the light once more, and take up the role he has been denied for half a century. 

So Elliania makes it happen, entirely on her own authority. It’s a lovely scene. Court is assembled, Starling is summoned, and she tells Fitz’s story, his true story. Starling, who chafed so bitterly at being forced to keep silent all those decades ago, when her dearest wish as a professional minstrel was to bear witness to one of the most historic events ever to occur in the Six Duchies, is finally invited before the entire court to reveal what she knows. 

And thus the first loose thread is tied up. Fitz will not die in obscurity. Whatever happens in the next, last book, his story and identity are now known and acknowledged, his line will continue, and his life will be remembered for what he truly did, not the calumny that was the official story for half a century.

Of course, Hobb can’t give us any unalloyed joy, because on the heels of this celebration, news finally reaches Buckkeep about the raid on Withywoods and Bee’s abduction. But because Fitz is also finally learning to hold his goldang horses when it comes to tearing off in a rage to unleash some whoopass on people who have wronged him, he responds carefully. Methodically. He investigates. He asks questions. He gathers information. When the time comes to act fast, he springs into action – and indeed, the fact that he is only a couple of hours too late to intercept the kidnappers before they take Bee through a Skill portal is only bad luck. He almost made it. He is fast when he needs to be, and the rest of the time he makes the preparations that are needed. He has – dare I say it? – matured!

Not that this maturity does him much good, because he sees no sign of Bee on the other side of the portal, and so – in a bit of characteristic dumbassery (he does not grow out of that) – decides to forget all those hours and days and (in one case) weeks that he himself has lost in a Skill portal, and instead concludes immediately that Bee is lost forever. Dead. Gone. Alas! Nothing to do but join up with the Fool and bring vengeance marching down south to Clerres. It’s a great hook for Book 3. 

But first, on the way there, he must tie up another loose thread. Remember the Rain Wild Chronicles? Remember the very new baby Elderling city of Kelsingra that was just coming to life with the return of the dragons? Remember Malta and Reyn’s baby boy who was so sickly and ill-formed and needed Tintaglia’s touch to fix his heart and let his body grow? The path to Clerres leads through Kelsingra, and so Fitz and the Fool take us on a brief tour of that city to show us how it’s getting on. It’s always fun to meet familiar characters through someone else’s eyes. We see a city with a nominal King and Queen of the Elderlings (Malta and Reyn) being run like a Bingtown Trader’s council, because that’s who Malta and Reyn are: traders. We see that sweet, dopey Rapskal has entirely lost that portion of himself, and is now an absolute asshole of a General who is – nevertheless – extremely good at his job. 

And we see that baby Ephron, Malta and Reyn’s son, is a young man now, but still struggling with his health. All the Elderling children are. The whole city is struggling, because the physical changes wrought by dragons are not being properly overseen, and children are deformed and dying. Once upon a time, Elderlings could use the Skill. Once upon a time, the Skill was more widespread than just the Farseer line. Once upon a time, perhaps, the changes that dragons wrought in their Elderlings could be maintained, guided, adjusted, to mitigate the damage that would result from unsupervised changes. But now those lineages have split. Bingtown and Rain Wilders traders came from Jamaillia, not the Six Duchies, and had no tradition of the Skill. But they are the core of the reborn Elderlings, and they are suffering.

And then Fitz arrives. And he can heal their children. He can set right those meandering, damaging, wild changes that kill slowly and painfully. He – or the knowledge of Skill-healing that he can teach -- could be the salvation of Kelsingra. Another loose thread tied up!

I’d love to have a third loose end here, but I don’t just yet. Fitz teases us with the potential to bond to another animal with the Wit – a very nice horse and a raven are teased as potential partners – but can’t quite take the plunge. So for my third point here, I want to remark on parenthood. Fitz is constantly put in positions where he is almost but not quite a parent. Nettle is unmistakeably his child, but he never meets her until she has been claimed and raised by Burrich. Hod, the fosterling he takes in, could be an adoptive child to him, but actually Hod and Fitz’s relationship never does all that much in these books besides serve as a source of anxiety and responsibility. Dutiful, like Nettle, is the child of Fitz’s body, but there is never any hope of him being acknowledged as anything other than Verity’s son. And then we have Bee – lovely Bee, born the entirely legitimate, acknowledged daughter of Fitz and Molly.

Until, we learn here, that the Fool was somehow in on things too. Back at the end of Tawny Man, when Fitz and the Fool did their body swap, part of the Fool remained in Fitz, and so helped engender Bee.³

Poor Fitz. He just wants a kid to call his own. But when you are the Fool’s Catalyst, every relationship will always be some kind of a throuple.

¹Yes, I know, all right? I know. But this is fantasy. <sup>↩

2</sup>The precise nature of the relationship is complicated. If we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of King Verity, who was occupying Fitz’s body during Dutiful’s conception, then Nettle would be Elliania’s first cousin once removed by marriage. However, if we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of Fitz, since it was Fitz’s body that conceived him, then Nettle is Elliania’s half-sister-in-law. <sup>↩

3</sup>For those keeping track at home, that’s a full two third of Fitz’s biological children who are conceived during a magical body swap.^↩

--

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Fool's Quest [Del Ray, 2015]. 

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool Book 1: Fool's Assassin

In which Robin Hobb, believe it or not, is merciful

Cover illustration (c) Alejandro Colucci

And so, my friends, we come to the beginning of the end: the first book of the last trilogy of this magnificent saga. Do you feel a bit of melancholy? A twinge of guilt at joining with Hobb to inflict her narrative malice upon poor Fitz? Remember the end of Tawny Man? He was done! He was reunited with his beloved Molly, installed in Withywoods, settled with an estate, a family, released from Farseer demands upon him. It was all over!

Hah, not so fast, I thought, cackling in anticipation as I settled down to read this. Except there is a hint of mellowing in Hobb's approach here. More than a bit. We actually saw the start of this process in the Rain Wild Chronicles, where familiar torments of misery and despair are not quite so tormented as they have been in the past. For all that there was cannibalistic torture and the disintegration of self and identity in the memory-drowning addictions of dead civilizations, nevertheless the Rain Wild Chronicles lacked something of the keen edge of the previous trilogies. And that — not blunting, but let's say softening — of edge continues here.

We open with Fitz happily ensconced in Withywoods. Nettle is established as skillmaster at Buckkeep, the other stepchildren are grown and on the verge of departure. Fitz and Molly are the beloved and established Lord and Lady of Withywoods. They host Winterfest celebrations, they welcome guests; Fitz administers the estate, Molly runs the house. It is delightful. It is peaceful. It is . . . doomed?

Well, so I thought, foolishly imagining I knew what Robin Hobb had in mind. But there are many, many hundreds of pages of peace and plenty and prosperity that elapse before doom befalls. And although there are worries included in those pages, they are decidedly mundane and expected. Some mysterious visitors. A bit of light murder. A baffling, uninterpretable message. Molly is slightly unwell and needs to go to bed. And that’s it.

And between each of these events, YEARS pass! YEARS! Years more of Fitz's domestic tranquility pass domestically tranquilly elapse between plot points. He ponders the passage of time, the process of ageing. He has late night text message Skill conversations with Chade. Molly starts showing signs of dementia, claiming that she is pregnant. Fitz doesn't believe her: she is well past menopause, and the claimed pregnancy continues past nine months, twelve months, twenty-four months. Fitz and Nettle have hard conversations about how to handle Molly's mental state. And, yes, it's distressing that Molly's losing her marbles a bit, but this particular type of hardship is not the unique misery that Hobb tends to inflict. These unhappinesses are real things that happens to real people all the time. Ageing and eldercare and dementia is hardly comparable to getting tortured to death in a dungeon by your uncle-usurper-of-the-throne!

Eventually, a bit of magic separates these real-world cares from our world, but in so doing they render Fitz's life better, not worse. Molly was pregnant, it turns out, with a real child. An odd child, to be sure — slow in developing in utero, and freakishly small after birth, to the point that other people don't believe that the little girl, named Bee, will live. But Bee does live, and although she continues slow to grow and slow to talk, and hesitant around Fitz because his wild Skilling distresses her, she is the joy of his life. And so more years pass of domestic tranquility. A far cry from being forcibly separated from your loved ones, watching from afar as your father-figure marries your beloved and raises your daughter as his own. WHAT IS GOING ON?

And then! And then! Molly dies! Oh no, disaster! She dies — peacefully, painlessly, in her garden, with her little girl next to her, of some entirely natural heart-attack type of thing. Not great for little Bee to see her mother die, but as far as deaths in a Hobb book go, this is nowhere near being flayed alive. Even Fitz's misery is lessened, because he has around him his daughter Nettle, his devoted staff of household retainers, and little Bee. Again, the worst thing Hobb can inflect on Fitz and Bee — widowhood, single parenting an orphan — is nothing worse than people in our world must endure all the time. It's not even in the same ballpark as getting your leg chomped by a sea serpent, leaving a rotting gangrenous stump behind.

And Bee! She is small, and has a speech impediment for the first part of her life, and her peers bully her, and the tutor that Fitz arranges for her is snotty to her when he discovers she is not as stupid as people say she is. And what does he do to punish her? He makes her write lines! Which Fitz immediately puts a stop to the instant he hears about her treatment. Bee never even has to work on her penmanship, let alone get beaten to unconsciousness, almost thrown off a tower, and suffer permanent damage to her ability to Skill.

Even the basic PASSAGE OF TIME is softened. We've already seen Molly having a much-wanted and beloved baby well past menopause. But Fitz gets even more. He doesn't even show his age! Due to an over-enthusiastic Skill healing he enjoyed back in Golden Fool, which keeps him looking young and virile, his appearance tops out at 35 at most. Just look at the cover art! Alejandro Colucci's brief almost certainly included the instructions, 'More DILF than GILF.'

Ok, so, sure, at the end the Fool reappears and in a tragic misunderstand Fitz stabs him, and must leave Bee so he can rush the Fool to Buckkeep for Skill-healing. And then the Fool's people, who it turns out have been torturing him for years, murdering his friends, and chasing him to recapture him for more torture, invade Withywoods, kill people, fog their minds, and abduct Bee in Fitz's absence. Like, yes, that's all bad. That's the kind of thing I expect in a Robin Hobb book. 

But here’s the thing: I expect it to happen well before page 600 in a sub-700 page novel. Hobb is entirely capable of squeezing a lot of unhappiness into 80 pages. She makes a good showing of it here! But even she can’t make them rough enough to bring the average for this book back up to expected Hobbian mean. The mathematics of misery simply don’t allow it.

Is it a relief? A disappointment? I’m not sure. It’s not what I expected when I first read this book. I think a lot of the misery might have been self-inflected, as I perpetually braced for the never-dropping other shoe throughout the first half thousand pages. Come back next month to see whether book 2, Fool’s Quest, regresses to the mean.

——

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Fool's Assassin [Del Ray, 2014]. 

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 4: Blood of Dragons

 Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced

I don’t want to call Blood of Dragons a shallow book, but something about it reveals the structural skeleton of Hobb’s method more clearly than her other books. It is . . . gaunt, perhaps. Not quite as rich and lush as it might be. Some people like that kind of thing; but when you’ve been with Hobb for this many thousand pages, when you’ve grown to like the shapely, well-developed muscles of plot and callipygous curves of character overlaid on top of her structural skeleton, then it can be a bit disconcerting to see the bones underneath, no matter how beautifully articulated they might be. Oh dear, you think, I wish this poor half-starved creature had been fed a bit more before publication.

This impression comes through most strongly in the character arc of Selden, the youngest Vestrit child who became Tintaglia’s Elderling back in the Liveship Traders. He’s been popping up occasionally in between then and now, travelling around in an attempt to better the plight of these dragons. We saw him very briefly through Fitz’s eyes back in the Tawny Man trilogy, when he came with a delegation of Bingtowners to beg aid of the rumoured Six Duchies dragons. Fitz was impressed then at how Elderlingish he looked. Now, Selden's made his way to Chalced, and discovered to his misfortune that appearances which read ‘Elderling’ in other parts of the world read in Chalced as ‘all scaley and draconic’.

The thing, is, it is not safe to be scaley and draconic in this part of the world. Slave-keeping Chalced has a pretty permissive approach about putting people in cages, especially people who are weird looking. After all, if your caged prisoner looks weird you can charge a high admission price to gawp at them. But on top of that, recall that the Duke of Chalced is dying and will pay anything for dragon body parts to preserve his life. And since it’s proving difficult to harvest those body parts from real dragons, a scaley prisoner offers another revenue stream: cut off bits of him and sell them to the Duke. Sure, this guy is not a real dragon, but he’s dragonish! Just look at the scales! So Selden, already caged up as a carnival sideshow, gets sold to the Duke of Chalced. 

Throughout the rest of the book, set firmly in the Rain Wilds, we return intermittently for brief scenes surrounding Selden’s plight, which, in a return to Hobb’s form, goes from bad to worse. First, he’s in a cage, starved and deprived of clothes and blankets, the better to show off his scales to viewers. Then people start cutting bits off of him to feed to the Duke of Chalced. Before the end the Duke is drinking Selden’s blood direct from his veins, vampire-like. And to top it all off, he’s got some bronchitis-pneumonia-type illness, so he spends a lot of time feverish and coughing. 

It’s this last detail, the pneumonia, which, of all that Hobb inflicts upon her characters, feels gratuitous. Sure, Fitz was literally tortured to death in a Evil Prince Regal’s dungeon, but that revealed a lot of important detail about how the Wit operates. Sure, Kennit’s leg rotted off from gangrene following a sea-serpent bite, but it was also really important for his character arc, as well as the development of Wintrow and Etta. Sure, the Fool got flayed alive, but that was necessary to drive home the importance of his role as the White Prophet, Fitz as his catalyst, and the lore of the Rooster Crown. 

But Selden’s pneumonia? What the point of that, beyond just making him suffer? 

This pneumonia is the bony rib of Hobb’s gaunt story structure showing through. Hobb just plain likes whump. Usually she manages to connect these components to enough of the rest of the story/character/worldbuilding that it is well-clothed in narrative flesh. In contrast to his pneumonia, Selden’s cannibalistic dismemberment is one of those well-fleshed bits of whump. It’s all part of the Duke of Chalced’s attempt to ward off his death, which is the same motivation that caused him to send agents into the Rain Wilds in previous books, suborning Sedric into accompanying Alise, forcing Hest to follow her, thereby forcing a resolution of the whole domestic drama surrounding those three. The outrage of being hunted for their meat further serves as the motivation for the dragons to rise up and attack Chalced at the end of this book, rescuing Selden from the human version of that same fate. So the cannibalism component of Selden’s treatment is rock-solidly embedded in the rest of this series.

The pneumonia, though? That’s a bit of a harder sell. There’s a gesture at using it to connect Selden to the Duke’s daughter, Chassim, who’s been trying to carry off her own Chalced feminist revolution. Her attempts at writing seditious poetry and distributing it among the women of Chalced are uncovered, and she’s imprisoned by her father, and tasked with looking after Selden. So his pneumonia works as an excuse to put them in a room together. If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t need looking after. When the dragons come to burn everything down at the end, Chassim has earned his trust and as a result gets put in charge of the new transitional government. It’s tidy, I guess. But it’s thin. The connections are limited to the very proximate plot surrounding the events, rather than developing those far-reaching tendrils of interconnectedness that we see in the best parts of Hobb's work. 

Part of the limited interconnectedness problem springs from the simple fact that  Chalced itself is underdeveloped. I don’t have a sense of who Chassim is, what her life is, or what life in Chalced is under the dying Duke. Without this, I have no investment in removing (or preserving) the Duke, and no stake in who gets put in charge after the Duke is gone. And because I’ve spent so many thousands of pages in this world already, I know that it’s reasonable to expect to know these things. Throughout these series, we’ve seen the internal workings of the Six Duchies, the Mountain Kingdom, Jamaillia, Bingtown, the Pirate Isles, the Outislands, and the Rain Wilds, and we’ve been given a feel for them as real places. Even very brief sequences, such as the bit in the Mountain Kingdom at the end of Assassin’s Apprentice, can be effective illustrations of the life and culture and people of these places. Done well, these sequences can reveal how the different nations work, both internally as nations, and internationally as networks, bound by ties of trade and allegiance and marriage and shared heritage and fiercely defended independence. 

But throughout all of this worldbuilding, Chalced has only ever been those assholes over there. The slave-trading assholes. They are the Nation of Hats. Sooner or later there is always war with Chalced, people intone, and that’s been enough to explain whatever Chalced does. So now, with a chunk of the plot taking place in Chalced proper, with narrative POVs encompassing key political actors, you’d think this would be the chance for this nation to get the same treatment that the rest of the nations have gotten.

And I think that’s Hobb’s intention here, in setting so much of the plot so far from the Rain Wilds. But in this particular case, it doesn’t work. It feels too stretched, like skin over bone. Yes, the Duke is brutal and court life is unsafe and precarious, full of backstabbings and betrayals. But that’s not new. We’ve already seen competent, intelligent agents of Chalced in action in the Rain Wilds, and we’ve learned that they behave as ruthlessly and cruelly as they do to protect his loved ones back home. That right there shows just as clearly – and more economically -- what the Duke is capable of than any number of on-page executions. Moving the narrative to Chalced down not show us more; it show us merely more of the same. Structurally, yes, it’s absolutely time for us to see Chalced from the inside. The skeleton of that narrative purpose is absolutely clear. But the skeleton is all that's clear, because the rest of it is not fleshed out.

Selden’s pneumonia is a rib. Chalced’s cruelty is a collarbone. Hobb has constructed a good story. But without the rest of the flesh of narrative and character and plot and theme and worldbuilding, the bones are showing through.

-- 

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Blood of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2013].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: The Hymn to Dionysus, by Natasha Pulley

 To stay sane, we must go mad

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, who 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 unites 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.

—

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].

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 2: Dragon Haven

To build a new society, you must understand what worked (and didn’t) about the old

Dragon Haven is, at its heart, a meditation on self-determination, both on the level of the individual, and society more broadly. (In fact, both Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are organized around that idea, but I wanted to talk about other things last month, so we’re going to pretend that this theme is specific to this book.) When last we left our little band of adventurers, Alise had accomplished her heart’s dream, to accompany dragons in a quest for the lost dragon city of Kelsingra. She embodies the ideal of this book's thematic messaging: someone who rejects a role thrust upon her, creates her own role in the world, and thrives therein. At pivotal moments throughout this series, she will encounter people who compare the new self she has constructed to the old self she left behind. Although the comparison is complicated, in a Hobbian way, overall it turns out as well as is possible in the Rain Wilds. Alise is no longer the cultured society lady that she was at the start of the book: her hair and skin are roughened, and the man she comes to love is coarse and dirty. Nor does she grow into an elegant Elderling, the way the other dragon keepers start to do; and there are moments of tension that emerge as a result, a growing us-vs.-them sprouting between the dragon keepers and the still-humans. In every external metric, her transformation is a downward one. She loses money, power, even whatever physical charms she ever had. Her scholarship of those lost wonders is no longer valuable in a world with dragons and Elderlings returned, and Elderling cities rediscovered, with memory devices sharing their secrets with anyone and everyone who passes by. And yet, internally, she is happy and she is loved. And she has the strength of character to recognize those things as paramount. This is as close to a happy ending as you’ll get in a Hobb book.

The dragon keepers themselves have a less straightforward trajectory. They have no difficulties casting off their old life. Indeed, their old life cast them off first, by assigning them this one-way mission to take the dragons away. But people are people, and although they revel in the opportunity to build a new kind of life among themselves, nevertheless they reproduce, in microcosm, the same societal tensions that plague every society. Thymara, young and naive, basks at first in the feeling of having friends and peers, released from the strictures of a society that thinks she should have died as an infant. The other, older dragon keepers, clock immediately that this freedom from social constraint means that they can start getting down with each other. Back in the cities, people as heavily marked as them were allowed to reproduce, but here there’s no such constraint. Jerd, a young woman, sleeps around with most of the young men, before eventually settling down with Greft, the oldest and most cynical of the keepers. It’s made reasonably clear that this decision is not about personal preference or connection, but instead is because she becomes pregnant with (probably) his child. It’s not quite a life of hedonistic abandon, since the dragons keep them working pretty hard to feed and care for them, but it’s a lot more freedom than they’ve known.

But sex comes with consequences, and those consequences lay bare the problems inherent in building a new society. We’ve already talked about why they kill babies back in Trehaug. Jerd’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage is one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a society can get to that point. At every stage, I found myself nodding along: yes, I agree with Thymara that Jerd’s behaviour has directly resulted in her inability to pull her share of the work. Yes, I agree with Bellin that the work of caring for a sick pregnant woman falls on other people, and if you don’t have a committed partner willing to take on that task, then you are imposing it on other people who didn’t agree to be liable for it. Yes, if you die in childbirth and leave behind an infant who must be cared for, you have deprived the group of your labour, and left them with only a burden. There are reasons why casual unprotected sex outside of committed relationships is discouraged, and it’s not (only) thoughtless puritanical conservatism.

But what is the solution? So far, societies have tried constraining women’s sexual agency (Bingtown) or murdering babies (Rain Wilds). Neither seems like a good solution. These dragon keepers are not going to arrive at a better one on their own, but they have a much better understanding now of why the rules that they want to break so freely were put there in the first place.

Or rather, some of them do. Greft, Jerd’s cynical paramour, seems to think he has a much better understanding of human nature than the rest of them. In fact, his ideas about how society should be—based on power and enforced hierarchies—are fed to him by a Chalced spy who’s snuck into the expedition, and even that little detail is a beautiful example of the macrocosm rendered small into this group of explorers. Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced, even if that war means a single Chalced spy stirring up discord in the Rain Wilders.

Hobb uses Greft’s adoption of these odious Chalced ideas as a means to have her say in a conversation that will be depressingly familiar to fantasy fans over the age of, say 25: namely, the need for “realism” in one’s worldbuilding. But in this conversation, “realism” somehow has less to do with complications of exchange rates and currency devaluation and tariffs (unless you’re Daniel Abraham or Seth Dickinson), and more to do with the insistence that it’s more “realistic” to write a world in which women should be childbearing machines and settle down with men to protect them from sexual violence perpetrated by other men. I’ve had to wade through this Disc Horse myself in my own family, multiple times. Hobb, in her turn, allows it to play out between Thymara, who’d rather not choose a man, thanks very much, and Greft, who insists that she must. She represents the argument faithfully enough, but at the very end of that conversation, she does something very satisfying. Thymara says that she will not choose any man, and walks away. And in her mind, her dragon Sintara says, Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet.

In other words, Hobb ends the conversation by reminding her readers, We’re in a world with DRAGONS. Who cares about your stinking “realism”? It’s an elegant way of integrating the meta-discourse into the dialogue of her book, and I enjoyed the smackdown immensely.

Oh, yes, dragons! We’ve got dragons too! And like the humans, the dragons are working on building their own society. Because unlike their forbears, who were ruthlessly individualistic, these dragons require some degree of social cohesion to survive. Not all of them have the memories that a dragon needs to be properly draconic; some seem properly half-witted. Heeby, Rapskal’s dragon, seems more like a beloved pet in Rapskal’s care than the magnificent, overpowering marvel that a true dragon should be. And yet it is Heeby who manages to recover the power of flight first. The dragon who recovers what all the rest of them aspire to is the one who is willing to let go her thoughts of what she should be, and instead make use of what she has: Rapskal’s clumsy, good-hearted, unfailing encouragement. Yes, it’s undignified to run around flapping her wings, trying and failing over and over again. Yes, OG dragons did not do anything as pathetic as failure. But—in a choice reminiscent of what we saw with the Liveship Traders—these dragons cannot have it all. They need to choose which element of dragonhood they will preserve. Sintara chooses dignity, and stays earthbound in the mud. Heeby releases dignity, and flies.

And then there is Relpda, who is more animal even than Heeby at the start of the book. She’s the one that Sedric targets when he eventually builds up the courage to steal scales and blood in his wildly foolish and politically unwise agreement to provide dragon parts for the Duke of Chalced. To Sedric, all the dragons are mere beasts. He cannot even hear their voices as anything other than animal noises. But he drinks some of Relpda’s blood, more out of curiosity than any other reason, and so forces a connection with her. She did not consent to this act of blood-sharing, but the connection is forged nonetheless, and what follows is one of the most beautiful elements of the story. In contact with Sedric’s mind, Relpda awakens. And their relationship—which is the beginning of Sedric’s redemption arc—deepens during a deadly flood of the river, in which she saves his life (multiple times). Why? he wonders. Why would she save someone who had so wronged her? And she responds, Less lonely. You make sense of the world. To me.

That thought is so enlightening. What must it be like to be a stunted, half-conscious dragon? Sintara is frustrated and furious because she knows what she should be. Relpda didn’t know even that. But she knew she was lonely. And then along comes Sedric, and wrongs her in a way that is the worst possible way a human can wrong a dragon. And yet, in his presence, she is no longer lonely.

It’s the same setup that allowed Hest to ensnare Sedric in his net: Sedric was lonely. Hest made him not lonely, even though he is unkind and cruel. But where Hest takes advantage of that power dynamic and uses it to control Sedric, Sedric does not do anything like that to Relpda. Perhaps it’s because even a half-awakening dragon is immune to mere human manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Sedric’s deeply buried but still present decency manages to struggle to the front. Whatever the reason, the two of them develop together, and forge a new kind of relationship, one built not on domination but understanding and gratitude and genuine affection. This new society will not be like the old, either the purely human, or the human-dragon partnerships of the past. OG Dragons could never. But these ones can, and must. And do.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Dragon Haven [Harper Voyager, 2010].

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, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social