TV Review: A.A.R.O.

Come for the Paranormal Mystery of the Week, stay for the animist theodicy

To the Western viewer, likely acquainted with The X Files, Fringe, Supernatural and Evil, a show like A.A.R.O. may at first feel like another iteration of the "whodunit, but make it spooky" genre. And the limited series that's been released on Netflix goes for that vibe in its initial episodes: this is a world where people can vanish into thin air, leaving just their empty clothes and bucketfuls of blood; where breaking the shrine of a fox spirit causes a wave of mass faintings; where pieces of an airplane that's been missing for years suddenly fall to the ground out of nowhere; where a shadowy terrorist faction can't succeed at planting bombs across Tokyo because a clairvoyant keeps frustrating their plans.

So far, so standard. But as we gradually get to meet the protagonists, a jaded misanthrope who can cite the classics of Japanese mythology from memory and a wide-eyed newbie with a keen nose for asking the right questions, we discover that the plot lurking under the surface is far more alarming than the occasional unexplained anomaly. It's not just that the monsters and curses from Japanese folklore happen to be real; it's that someone has declared war on the entire spiritual realm and has been extending tentacles at every level of Japanese society. This is a world where someone has been buying mummified mermaids to harvest their flesh; where someone has been running experiments with a spell that causes unending hunger; where someone has created a sound frequency that induces suicide; where someone is scheming to put heaven and hell under new management. What begins as a series of seemingly unconnected cases for a clandestine government agency to investigate turns out to lead to a potentially world-ending conspiracy whose best chance of succeeding is the fact that humans are the worst.

That's a fortunate thing for the viewer's enjoyment, because on the purely police investigation side of the story, A.A.R.O. just isn't very well written. The quiet pleasures of meticulously following the clues and formulating logical deductions are eschewed for impossibly lucky guesses, unprompted confessions, frequent instances of literal deus ex machina, and a tsunami of melodrama that would make Candy Candy blush. Also, the plot plays an increasingly ludicrous game of "guess who's possessing whom" that abuses the bait-and-switch trick with regard to the true identity of the villain four times, including one time it does reveal the actual villain, but still tries to pretend there's a further bigger villain behind. No, this detective/mystery show doesn't stand out because of its detectives or its mysteries. It stands out because of the ideological conflict it dramatizes on the nature of evil and the redeemability of humankind in an era when we've become almost godlike with technology we're too immature for.

It's worth highlighting once more the non-Western nature of this story, because the dynamic between mortals and the supernatural is very unlike what we're used to seeing in Western fantasy. Over here, we're still under the Miltonian spell, conceiving of spiritual power as flowing in a vertical direction, which makes humans either the helpless playthings of omnipotent overlords or the blasphemous rebels who seek to punish heaven for being too harsh on this world. But in the animist mindset, spiritual power flows horizontally, because humans are no less capable than the gods of influencing events in heaven, and if anyone seeks to punish heaven, it's for being too permissive with this world. With enough discipline and study, a determined human may turn into a worthy adversary for the gods.

A.A.R.O. thus twists the formula of the paranormal procedural: this time Earth isn't a means for spiritual factions to play out their eternal battles in; it's an end in itself, where all the spirits are responsible for protecting humans, even as humans grow more and more self-conceited, cruel and treacherous. Instead of fighting demonic incarnations of evil on behalf of humans, the protagonists of A.A.R.O. fight the demonic extremes that human hubris can reach. Instead of treating the gods the way, say, the Greek epics do, as capricious tyrants to fear or to pacify, in A.A.R.O. the gods are long-suffering, overworked benefactors who can only do so much in the face of human self-destructiveness. Whereas a story like God of War treats the quest to dethrone the gods as heroic liberation, A.A.R.O. treats the quest to dethrone the gods as a sad consequence of ignorance.

A case could be made that treating the Shintō gods as the preferrable status quo gives the show a conservative bent, and it would be hard to argue against that interpretation. The story clearly leans toward blaming human hubris for the problems in the world. However, it knows to avoid the extremes of anti-humanism and binary morality. The two protagonists constantly argue for opposite sides about the worth of humans, and a key reason why the good guys (somewhat) win in the end is because a god chose to trust a human. One villain is so strongly convinced that their cause is just that they can fool another character whose superpower is to cast detect evil. Moreover, a spell that reduces a god to human status isn't treated as a profanation every time. A former god reflects on this turn of events with admirable equanimity: yes, dying as a human is horrible, but living as a human can be full of wonders.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Nigerian spirits do a heist at the British Museum, but struggle to deliver on the promises of that brilliant conceit

Cover illustration by Jim Tierny

This book is a welcome breath of fresh air into the pantheon of stories about gods and humans. No longer are we revisiting the familiar names from Norse mythology and Greek mythology, perpetually retold and reused and recycled, with genuinely fresh takes few and far between. Instead, Wole Talabi is presenting us with a pantheon that many Western readers, or readers from the Global North, will find unfamiliar: that of the orishas, or the divine spirits from Yoruba mythology. The titular Shigidi is a very minor orisha, whose responsibilities involve sitting on a sleeper’s chest to engender nightmares, and eventually suffocate the life out of the victim.

It’s not a very nice job, and Shigidi’s physical form matches that valence: he is small, squat, and ugly. But he doesn’t really have any control over it. He works for the Orisha Spirit Company—has, in fact, been created solely for the position he now holds—and he must navigate the familiar corporate challenges of unfriendly supervisors, reductions in human prayers which cut into the company’s bottom line, and competitors in the field who have their own plans for the victim he’s been sent to nightmare-suffocate. One such competitor is a succubus, Nneoma, but after a heated exchange of views they decide to team up and go freelance. This puts the team in the perfect position to take a job from Shigidi’s erstwhile boss: namely, to make their way into the British Museum and retrieve the titular MacGuffin, the Brass Head of Obalufon.

So: we have an erotic (because succubus) heist, featuring Yoruba gods stealing back their cultural artifacts from the British Museum, with a bonus commentary on modern corporate drudgery. This is so awesome on so many levels. The opportunities to do brilliant things with this narrative conceit are boundless.

And so many of them were missed.

I really, really don’t want to write the rest of this review. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was. It could have been so much better than it was. And I think, on the whole, that each missed opportunity is reasonably small, so if you think the conceit sounds awesome, then maybe you should stop reading right now, buy this book, and enjoy it. Maybe you won’t be bothered by the things that bothered me, and that would be ideal.

But if you are curious, or perhaps you’ve already read this book and were dissatisfied, read on, and perhaps what comes next will resonate with you, as I try to articulate why this book disappointed me.

First, the narrative does the thing where the timeline jumps around. So we start in medias res, with Shigidi bleeding out in the back of a cab, his arm ripped off, blood everywhere, monsters chasing them—clearly something has gone badly wrong. Nneoma tells him she loves him. Fade to black. OK, cool—I’m engaged, I want to know how they got into such a fix.

But the remainder of the timeline jumping around just didn’t work—to the point that after the second or third hop, I started looking at the copyright page and the acknowledgements to see if I’d somehow missed a Book 1 in this series. Things that hadn’t happened yet were being referred to and briefly summarized, as if I was expected to remember them from a previous book. Then, when those events finally take place, twenty or fifty pages later, they feel redundant and pointless, because I had already gotten that ‘remember when this happened?’ summary earlier in the book.

One case in point is the events surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s decision to team up and go freelance. We hear about that as a done deal from the past, before the narrative jumps backward and shows us how it happened. In principle, this could be useful for elaborating on another component of the narrative—not the specific plot-based events, perhaps, but certainly the character arc surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship. A continuing thread involves Shigidi trying to get Nneoma to admit to loving him, which she is unwilling to do for backstory reasons. This plays out in various conversations, one of which, infuriatingly, takes place during an extremely time-constrained heist. Priorities, people! But the point is: the whole question around Nneoma's admission of love doesn’t matter. We already know that Nneoma’s going to eventually say that she loves him. It happened on page 3! It was resolved before we knew it was important! So there’s no tension or uncertainty surrounding that plot arc, which means all the jumping forward and backward serves no purpose, except to make me wonder whether I picked up Book 2 by mistake.

Next, let’s talk about Shigidi himself. He’s created to be a small, ugly, minor god, and physically he is small and ugly. He doesn’t like his job, he doesn’t like his appearance; he’s miserable in all aspects of his life. There is such richness here to explore, from divine work-life balance; self-perception (what is ‘ugly’ when you are divine?); body-image and views of beauty. For example, one component of Shigidi’s ‘ugliness’ is scarification marks. Scarification, Wikipedia tells us, is the act of scratching or cutting patterns into one’s skin, after which follow-up treatment, such as repeated irritation, or packing clay or ash into the wound, ensures that the healing process leaves visible scars in the pattern of the original wounds. It is a deliberate, culturally significant procedure in many parts of the world, and if you click through to the Wikipedia entry, you can see that the results of this undoubtedly painful procedure can, in fact, be quite beautiful. To be sure, Westerners don’t particularly care for the practice, and so Christian missionaries in Africa spoke against the procedure, and colonial governments straight-out criminalized it. So, in sum, scarification and its relationship to beauty—especially in the context of orishas—raises some very deep questions! Why does Shigidi consider his own scarification ugly? What is his relationship with the culture whose patterns are etched into his body, that he thinks so poorly of them? What is beauty to an orisha, and why do specifically Western human beauty standards apply to him?

We never find out. Shigidi is ugly, doesn’t like being ugly, and pretty much the first thing he does after meeting Nneoma is allow her to remake his body into something super hot and muscled and glistening and abs-full. Through the power of sex-magic, to be sure, because Nneoma is a succubus, so there’s a certain amount of orgasmic potency to his transformation. That’s fine, I guess. Talabi wanted to write an erotic thriller, and this is one way to do that. But by doing that, he disregards all of the really interesting issues implied in Shigidi’s self-image as a corporate drudge. Shigidi was ugly. That lasted less than 40 pages. Then he becomes hot. Next.

OK, next: let’s talk a bit about Shigidi’s status as a corporate drone. This was so promising. I love the idea of a pantheon of gods operating according to bureaucratic norms. The idea of audits of prayer-income, overbearing supervisors, board meetings devolving into chaos as gods try to smite each other—it’s delightful.

But in this book it doesn’t quite work with the cosmology of the spirit world. Because it seems that the Orisha Spirit Company has been in existence for a long time. Shigidi was created to fill a role in that company; he was literally created to be a worker drone. Since records of Shigidi predate human corporate bureaucracy, and the Orisha Spirit Company predates Shigidi, then that means that the gods decided to organize themselves according to a human cultural construct before human culture constructed it. Or, conceivably, humans got the ideas of corporate infrastructure from the gods—which is again, a delightful world-building conceit—but if so, then shouldn’t the idea of board meetings and progress reports have originated in Nigeria? (I mean, maybe they did! People with business degrees, please weigh in! But my impression is that the daily grind was imported to, not exported from, West Africa.) There are ways of making the whole corporate-gods shtick really sing, but this book doesn’t do it. It just invokes the idea as kind of a gag, and ignores all the world-building implications.

Moving on from Shigidi and his employers, let’s discuss Nneoma. As I've mentioned, she’s a succubus. I’m not a huge fan of the phenomenon of succubi (especially in the absence of incubi), because I think they’re based in a deeply misogynistic perspective that sexuality in women is inherently dangerous and bad; and also that men cannot be expected to control their sexual appetites. But I went to a panel at Worldcon in which Wole Talabi made a really interesting case for Nneoma: in the same way that Shigidi must kill people for the Orisha Spirit Company, because that was the role he was created to fill, Nneoma must kill people (through sex) because that is how she is designed to live. It’s not her fault; her deadliness to mortals is also not something she enjoys. Rather, it’s a necessity. So for different reasons, these two represent a complicated relation with mortals, in which malice and deadliness are entirely disconnected. That was neat. I was on board with that.

But this book doesn’t follow through on any of those promises. Because Nneoma, as written, absolutely loves fucking people to death, and also enjoys engendering pointless jealousy in men too, just for kicks. And, remember, Shigidi is an ugly miserable corporate drone for less than 40 pages before he gets orgasmically turned into a thirst machine and sets up as a freelancer. And even though I can’t complain about a book being super sex-oriented when one of its characters is a literal succubus, I can complain when the erotic bits are so clunkily written that they’re not even hot.

Clunkily written? Oh, yes. Let’s talk about the writing style. It’s, as I implied, clunky. For example, after descriptions of women’s nipples in a nightclub we get, ‘Shadowy people-shapes gyrated sensually against each other.’ Sensually?  Oh, good, thanks for specifying. Do the sexually attractive sexy people do sex sexily together? Or this: ‘Her flowing red dress was loose and flowed over her body’s [sic] where it encountered her curves.’ The typo I can forgive, but the repetition of ‘flowing’ and ‘flowed’ is a real clanger. (Don’t worry—it’s not all male gaze. We get lots of descriptions of Shigidi’s muscles too.)

And then there’s this approach to prepositions: ‘… the words of a man with whom he was completely in love with and for whom, in the moments when they lay together, he’d sworn he would do anything for.’

‘With whom he was in love with’? ‘For whom...he would do anything for?’ Yikes. I myself think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with preposition stranding (‘who(m) he was in love with’), but if you’re going for the more self-consciously formal pied-piping construction (‘with whom he was in love’), you’ve got to remember to leave out the final preposition. Getting smacked with that kind of sloppiness in the face, twice in quick succession, really ate up a lot of my goodwill about the writing style.

I recognize that a lot of these problems are specific to me. Writing style is an incredibly personal judgment, and if Talabi’s style works for you, then you’ll probably enjoy the eroticism as well. And although I really wanted the book to dig into the corporate commentary and the world-building, perhaps you’re on board more for the British Museum heist—which, as far as heists go, is lively and fast-paced (except for the bit where Shigidi and Nneoma pause to talk about their feelings, despite the inconveniently brief window of opportunity rapidly closing around them).  And there are some stunning images evoked in this book as scenes dissolve into other scenes.

I think this book achieves a lot of what it set out to do. But the things that it could have done and didn’t do unfortunately happened to be exactly the things that I was most interested in; and so I put it down feeling annoyed and disappointed. But that was me. Maybe you’ll be different.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Brilliant conceit
  
• Heisting the British museum
  
• Clunky writing
  
• Full of missed opportunities to explore things that Clara, specifically, wanted to see explored
  
• Disappointingly traditional use of succubus as main character
  

Reference: Talabi, Wole. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon [Gollancz 2023/Daw 2023].

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.

Book Review: So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

A YA, Jamaican-inspired, dragon-filled fantasy dealing with friendship, family, and cultural clashes. 

The premise of Kamilah Cole’s YA fantasy So Let Them Burn had my attention as soon as I read the description: Jamaican-inspired; dragons; sisters. As a Jamaican-born, old school nerd who devoured Anne McCaffery as a teen, this story seemed tailor made for me. But I have been disappointed by seemingly perfect stories before. Fortunately, So Let Them Burn is an enjoyable page-turner filled with likeable characters and engaging Jamaican references.

The island nation of San Irie had been struggling under the suffocating and violent colonialist rule of the oppressive Langlish Empire. So Let Them Burn opens five years after San Irie’s defeat of the Langlish. The island is now free but still reeling from the devastation of war and wary of the nearby Langlish Empire which still seeks to re-conquer them. The Langlish forces are made up of fearsome dragons and their psychically bonded human dragon riders. The people of San Irie (Iryans) have powerful weapons of their own. They can summon the spirits of their ancestors to help them fight and their military forces use drakes—semi-sentient airships which can defeat dragons. But the biggest weapon is the protagonist Faron, the Childe Empyrean, a teenaged girl who has been granted the power to summon the three Iryan gods: Irie, Mala, and Obie. The novel focuses on Faron, the rebellious, sharp-tongued, reluctant hero who would prefer to footrace and play rather than walk around in her Empyrean robes.

There is a lot of backstory in the set up for the novel but it’s neatly woven into the adventure so it doesn’t slow the rapid pace of the book. During the great war, the Langlish forces killed and maimed thousands while trying to destroy the temples and cities in a quest for something mysterious. Ironically, their defeat was partly brought about by the military commander’s son, Reeve, who became a traitor to aid the Iryan fighters. By stealing his father’s military secrets, he gave the Iryans the boost they need to fully defeat the Langlish. But Reeve’s betrayal comes at a high price for him. He must now live in exile, hated by the people he helped save (because he represents the murderous race who attacked the island) and despised by his home country who views him as a traitor. His only allies are Faron’s strong but kind sister Elara; Aveline, the young queen of the island; and a few of the locals who take him into their household as a foster child.  

All of this happens before the book begins. At times, it feels like we are joining the adventure midway because of the complicated but fascinating set up. The history is so interesting that I wish we had some of that backstory on the page, even if just in a prologue. The passing references to Faron becoming the nation’s savior at age twelve or Reeve betraying his parents to help the Iryans, are worth more than a footnote. When the novel begins, those twelve year-old heroes are now seventeen, looking back on their past choices with more tiredness than pride.

The main plot of the book starts with the Iryan queen’s peace summit on San Irie attended by various nations including the enemy Langlish. In violation of the intent of the summit, the Langlish bring dragons, who are parked on a nearby isle. When one of the dragons gets loose, Faron’s sister Elara unexpectedly bonds with it and with the dragon’s lead rider, Signey. Faron is able to draw on an unknown astral power to control the chaos. However, the dragon’s psychic bonding with Elara is irreversible, so the Langlish commander proposes that Elara move to Langley to learn dragon riding. No Iryan has ever bonded with a dragon and the turn of events means Elara must leave her home country and live with the enemy. Knowing the situation is probably a scheme by the Langlish, the young queen Aveline decides to use Elara as a spy, which Elara readily accepts. However, Faron is furious about her sister’s departure and reluctantly decides to work with Reeve (who she dislikes) to find a way to free Elara from the bond. While Reeve wears himself out in research, Faron secretly connects with a sinister force to get what she needs. Meanwhile Elara gradually builds a friendship with her dragon, her fellow riders, and particularly her co-rider Signey to whom she grows attracted.

So Let Them Burn delves unexpectedly into toxic love.  Reeve’s cruel parents go to terrible extremes to save the son who ultimately turns against them. Faron’s love for her sister is unrelentingly intense. Both Elara and Reeve are victims of oppressive acts of love that have been forced on them with devastating results.

The ensuing adventure is a page-turner that’s hard to put down, especially with the appealing references to elements of Jamaican culture including patois, dancehall music, and food like breadfruit, saltfish, and guinep. However, I miss the days when a YA fantasy novel would tell a complete story and leave just enough room for a sequel. So Let Them Burn is the opening act of a larger story. But the addictive pace, likeable characters, and appealing references to nuances of Jamaican culture ultimately make this journey worthwhile.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Jamaican-inspired references
• Toxic family relationships
• Page turning, dragon-riding fun

Reference: Kamilah Cole, So Let Them Burn [Little Brown Book Group, 2024]

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.  

 

Microreview: Gods of the Wyrdwood, by RJ Barker

A weak execution of a perfectly adequate idea

RJ Barker has a thing for ineffable, dangerous natural environments. In his first trilogy, The Wounded Kingdom, the setting—the Tired Lands—is blighted by magic, which has stolen life from the land and left a blasted waste in its wake. In his second trilogy, The Tide Child, he invents a deliciously toxic nautical world, where the land hides horrifying perils, while ships built from the very bones of massive sea beasts poison the sailors who crew them. In his most recent novel, the first book of his newest trilogy, he has decided to take a different approach. In Gods of the Wyrdwood, Barker has created a vibrant, magical forest, featuring incomprehensibly (and, to be honest, incoherently—more on that later) vast trees, inhabited by an excellent array of creatures. Yet this time, these creatures are not malevolent. They can be deadly, yes, but there is a difference between danger and malice. This world is constructed of a web of magical connections; if you respect the web, you can live in harmony with it. If you blunder through it in ignorance of all but your own goals, you’re in for a rough (and shortened) life. The ecology of the titular Wyrdwood shows all of Barker’s characteristic inventiveness in worldbuilding, and is the best part of this book.

Outside the forest, all is not well with the world. The seasons have been set askew, replacing the warmth of summer with an unforgiving coldness; toxic bluevein poisons the fields at the edge of the forest; and the wide variety of small religions, each dedicated to one of the previously recognized infinity of gods, have been brutally suppressed in favor of the one Tarl-an-Gig. This would-be monodeity is served by priests, the Rai, whose powers come from a semi-sentient entity—a cowl—that endows them with strength, longevity, and magical powers by feeding on the life force around them. Unsurprisingly, there’s a certain degree of human sacrifice that goes along with such a governmental system, which is not ideal. Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be much murmuring or popular uprising. People seem pretty happy to go along with their new overlords.

In this world we have two plot threads. The first centers on Cahan, an exile who was bought up in one of the mini-priesthoods and endowed with a cowl of his own. He lost everything, though, when Tarl-an-Gig took over, and now he lives on the edge of the wood, in an uneasy alliance with the neighboring town of Harn. The second thread centers on Venn, the child of Kivrin, the secular leader of the main city of Harnspire. Venn is a trion—a third gender in this world, using ‘they’ pronouns—and of particular interest because there is a prophecy concerning what will happen when a trion takes a cowl. The problem is that the process of becoming encowled is not always successful, and failure entails an unpleasant death full of screaming. Nevertheless, the benefits of fulfilling the prophecy are so enticing that Venn’s mother, in an act of extraordinary heartlessness, has been kidnapping and forcing every trion in her power—including Venn—to try to take a cowl. Cahan’s and Venn’s plot threads intersect, and what follows quickly organizes itself into a fairly standard process of self-discovery, family-finding, and conflict between the evil overlords and the virtuous nature-respecters, with the fate of the world at stake.

The problem, unfortunately, is that none of these elements are done particularly well at any level of the narrative. At the broad level, structurally, the pacing feels choppy and uncertain. Cahan’s story begins in at least three separate places, where an interaction between him and the local village leader forces him to undertake tasks that he doesn’t particularly want to do. Each task does set the scene for later developments, but they don’t lead naturally into one another. In between them, Cahan returns to his farm and resets, returns to the status quo, as if the previous events had not happened. It feels as if Barker came up with several perfectly serviceable inciting incidents, but when he couldn’t decide between them to figure out how to get his book started, he ended up cramming them all in.

Kivrin is initially set up as an antagonist of sorts, but she keeps getting outflanked by the Rai leadership, and because she does love Venn (despite setting them up for an agonizing death), she waffles and has doubts about pursuing her antagonistic plot points. And then Barker decides to tack onto her a history of domestic violence, which serves absolutely no purpose that I can figure out, as it is revealed far too late to illuminate anything about her actions or motivations. If I had to guess, I’d say that Barker is trying to rehabilitate her character by making her sympathetic when she and the Rai stop seeing eye to eye. ‘See? She’s a victim too!’ Except she’s not a victim of the Rai; her traumatic past is entirely unrelated to the actions she’s undertaking on her own initiative. It’s as if Barker can’t quite envision a world in which there might be three factions, all mutually opposed, so the instant one party stops aligning with the baddies, they must be forced into being a goodie, however clumsily.

One level down, at the level of description, we have the massive, enormous, mind-bendingly huge cloudtrees, so wide at the base that it takes most of a morning to walk past one of them. Their staggering size is repeatedly emphasized —Barker has definitely heard the phrase ‘sense of wonder’ and decided to run with it— but the details about the scale simply don’t work.

Bear with me here. I’m going to get into Higher Mathematics. Actually, quite a lot of the rest of this review is going to involve math, both with respect to tree biology and then moving on to grammatical complaints as well. It may tax the patience of the most forbearing reader, when really the point I want to make is that there were a lot of irritating things about the description and writing style of this book that badly interfered with my enjoyment of the plot. If you don’t want to slog through it all, that’s fine. Skip to the nice tree picture down below.

Still with me? Great! Let’s go. Suppose that ‘most of a morning’ is, oh, three hours. At a relatively sedate pace of 2 mph, that makes a typical cloudtree six miles in diameter.  It’s made perfectly clear that the branches are to scale with the rest of the tree, so I don’t see how cloudtrees can possibly grow anywhere near each other. Think about any forest you’ve been in: Even in the densest copse, the trees are typically a few tree-diameters apart from each other, aren’t they? They need to leave room for the branches. So, extrapolating to our six-mile wide tree, what we have is less a ‘wood’ and more a situation where you need a full day to walk from the start of one tree to the start of the next.

Now let’s do a little bit more mathematics. Trees' height-diameter ratios tend to be measured in meters/centimeters—i.e., it’s common for the the height to be on the order of 100 times the diameter. In what follows, I'm going to keep the units constant, for clarity. So at a very conservative ratio of just 10:1, that means a typical cloudtree with a diameter of six miles is 60 miles tall. Sixty miles! Forget clouds—at sixty miles, the top of the tree is poking up at the Karman line, one rough indicator for the boundary between atmosphere and space. An alternative boundary, the top of the ionosphere, occurs at 600 miles of altitude, still well within the reach of cloudtrees if they have a height-to-diameter ratio of a perfectly typical 100:1. This is higher than auroras and satellites.

On its own, this is not a problem: magical giant forest trees can be as high as they like. The problem is that, when a tree falls in this book, it’s treated as a major economic event, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harvest the wood, and all sorts of politicking about whether and who should be notified when evidence of a treefall is discovered. But let’s consider the volume of such a massive thing. Since trees taper at the top, we can use the volume of a cone as a rough approximation: πr²h/3. Popping in three miles for r (half the diameter) and our conservative sixty miles for h, we’re left with 565 cubic miles. That is over twice the size of Deimos, the smaller of Mars’s moons. When something this big crashes to earth, we’re not going to be worrying about the economic and political implications of spreading the news to people in the town a few days away. If we survive the shock wave, we’re going to be more concerned with picking our way through the blasted wasteland left over after an extinction-level event.

I get that the trees are supposed to be big. But I think Barker over-egged the pudding here.

Next, I’d like to pick nits with the sentence-level writing. And, because I can sense the hackles rising and the knives being sharpened, let me hasten to preface my criticism with this: Of course an author should use language freely and expressively to get their point across. Dialect, emotion, pacing, or any of a thousand reasons might lead an author to disregard conventions of writing in favor of narrative effect.

And yet. Sometimes, narrative effects can be overused. Not everything. Must be…Portentous. And Meaningful. And in this case, I’m left wondering: did fully punctuated clauses ever do something to Barker? Did they hurt him? Why does he flee from them, into the welcoming arms of sentence fragments and comma splices?

For example: Here we have early-Scrooge-like stinginess with main verbs, combined with a late-Scrooge-like profligacy with periods, in a pretty characteristic sequence of fragments:

A light.

A small fire beneath the bridge.

Growing.

Billowing outwards, flames following the pit around, igniting the chemicals from the tanners’ pits. The crack of sap jars burning in the heat. The force of the exploding bottles throwing the makeshift bridge into the air, spilling soldier into the fire below to be impaled as they burned. Screams of fury replaced by screams of pain. Cahan raised his arm in front of his face. Fire hot on his skin. The Rai army backing away from the furious heat.

A exultation within him. Cowl writhing beneath his skin… (loc. 8605)

Because I don’t want my reviews to become sidetracked further into Higher Mathematics, I’ll skip over the bit where I invite the reader to calculate the fragment:sentence ratio in this excerpt, and simply jump to the end: it’s 12:1. In that sequence I’ve just quoted, there are 12 periods, and only one full sentence (Cahan raised his arm in front of his face). Yes, in the heat of battle these sorts of stylistic decisions can be used effectively, but I can’t emphasize enough that this is everywhere. Battle, introspection, dialogue, strolling through the woods—if there’s a page, I can guarantee that Barker put a sentence fragment—or twelve—on it. Again. Over-egging the pudding.

Now, where does he get all these eggs to throw into his pudding of stylistic effect? Where did all these periods come from? Well, given Barker’s propensity to comma splices, I’d argue that they were donated from bits like this:

She sat back, there were still smears of white clay she wore during the day on her skin, it made her face look odd, strangely shaped. (loc. 7739)

Again, I’m not going to say authors should never use comma splices. But I will go out on a limb and suggest that when they use comma splices like Barker does, they give the impression that the writer is not intentionally breaking a rule for stylistic effect as much as blithely walking past it without realizing it’s there.

And then there’s the dialogue. Oh, dear god, the dialogue. Stylistic effect is one thing, but the dialogue becomes downright obfuscatory. I challenge you, dear reader, to figure out who is saying what in an exchange like this, between Rai Galderin (he/him), who is reporting back on an expedition to Venn’s mother Kivrin (she/her):

‘The trion,’ whispered Rai Galderin as he closed with her, ‘will not talk about what happened, and what they do say is not the truth.’ She nodded. ‘Venn walked out of the forest unharmed, while Vanhu, Kyik, and Sorha died. It seems, unlikely.’

‘The false Cowl-Rai?’ Galderin glanced back at the trion standing behind them, not looking at her. ‘Venn says they were badly hurt and they escaped, that he is probably dead. I left a Hetton behind to find the truth of it.’

‘You do not believe them?’ Galderin’s face creased into something dark, something cruel.

‘The details, I think they are true. But they do not tell everything.’ Galderin scratched his cheek. ‘I can find out, if you wish.’ She ignored that, instead stared at her child.

As far as I can tell, the attributions should be something like this, with Galderin in red, and Kivrin in blue:

‘The trion,’ whispered Rai Galderin as he closed with her, ‘will not talk about what happened, and what they do say is not the truth.’ She nodded. ‘Venn walked out of the forest unharmed, while Vanhu, Kyik, and Sorha died. It seems, unlikely.’

‘The false Cowl-Rai?’ Galderin glanced back at the trion standing behind them, not looking at her. ‘Venn says they were badly hurt and they escaped, that he is probably dead. I left a Hetton behind to find the truth of it.’

‘You do not believe them?’ Galderin’s face creased into something dark, something cruel.

‘The details, I think they are true. But they do not tell everything.’ Galderin scratched his cheek. ‘I can find out, if you wish.’ She ignored that, instead stared at her child.

Do you see how confusing this is? Do you see how after the speeches that I think must belong to Kivrin, we have a Galderin-action in exactly the place where a speech tag would go? And after Galderin’s final utterance, we have an action by Kivrin? This is everywhere in the book: a character who speaks on the next paragraph does an action immediately following the previous speaker’s words. Dialogue is perpetually being misattributed—except when it’s done the expected way, so I can’t even learn a different convention of speech-attribution, because it’s so inconsistent. Usually I can figure out from context who is saying what, but it’s a constant cognitive load that makes the writing opaque, rather than transparent. Say what you like for narrative and stylistic freedom, but when the writing is interfering with the story, you’ve got a problem.

a nice tree that is not interfering
with satellite orbits or extinctioning
whole ecosystems when it falls over

Welcome back! I’m bringing you back here because I want everyone to see my final point about the trions. Did you notice how Venn is repeatedly referred to as ‘the trion’ in the passage quoted above? (Maybe not, if you took the shortcut here. No worries. Venn is repeatedly referred to as ‘the trion.’ There—now you’re caught up.)  Barker loves to use his epithets—‘the monk,’ ‘the forester,’ ‘the weaver,’ ‘the leoric’ [leader]. This is fine. Not my favorite stylistic choice, but fine. But the thing about ‘the trion’ is that, in-world, it is the equivalent of ‘the man’ or ‘the woman.’ It is not an occupation or a position in society; it is a gender. And for all that Barker loves epithets, he doesn’t use ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’ nearly as often as he uses ‘the trion.’ For that matter, he doesn’t even use ‘the weaver’ or ‘the monk’ as often as he uses ‘the trion’ (Yes, I counted: Between locations 7299 and 8513 in the Kindle version, we have 33 uses of ‘the trion’ and only 28 uses of every other epithet combined, including things like ‘the man’ for a character who does not have any other name provided.)

In other words, Venn is repeatedly, perpetually, unendingly referred to solely with respect to their gender—exactly like those incredibly sexist narratives from the 1960s that referred to female characters only as 'the girl' even when they did bother to give her a name. What’s more, Venn’s entire existence in this story actually is predicated on their gender, because they’re the only trion who’s managed to take a cowl without dying (sort of). Venn’s role in this story is to be a trion. And that’s a problem: Just because you’ve introduced non-binary genders in your books doesn’t mean you’ve fixed sexism.

I wanted to like this book so much more than I did. Barker’s Tide Child trilogy was genuinely brilliant and surprising, and I was so excited when I saw that he had a new book out. It will be hard to come back from this level of disappointment.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 5/10, problematic, but has redeeming qualities

• Great magical creatures and forest ecology

• Upsettingly large trees 

• Distressing punctuation and writing mechanics

• Modernized sexism applied to non-binary genders

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.

Reference:  Barker, R. J. Gods of the Wyrdwood [Orbit, 2023].

Nanoreviews: Let the Mountains be my Grave, The Book Eaters

Let The Mountains be my Grave by Francesca Tacchi (Neon Hemlock)

Let the Mountains be my Grave is a short novella - possibly the shortest so far from Neon Hemlock's novella range - and it spends every second of its brief length going as hard as possible, with intense and powerful effect. Set in Italy in 1944, we follow Veleno, a partisan resistance fighter with little interest in ideology or thinking about a future he doesn't expect he'll see as he fights against Nazi occupation in his homeland. But Veleno has a gift: his village still has a connection to Angita, an ancient goddess of healing (snake style!) and he has a token from her which lets him heal his comrades. When Veleno's commander sends him, his irrepressibly idealist communist lover Rame, and two mysterious women on a mission to intercept a vitally important convoy, Veleno is forced to think about what his powers and  his fight mean in a wider context, and attempt to defeat a sinister and seemingly invincible enemy.

Veleno is a fascinating main character: he has little curiosity about the origins of his magic and disdains characters like Irma, his comrade on the mission, whose background is in academic research, but his deep connection to his country and his willingness to go to an early, pointless grave in its honour gives the story its core drive. Because it's not a long story, we don't get a whole lot of time to get to know the other characters, but love interest Rame immediately won me over with his impulsiveness and his delightful communist one-liners ("That was almost better than the first five-year plan", he exclaims after landing from a skydive), and the villainous Nazi who serves as the book's main antagonist - whose reveal I won't spoil - is satisfyingly unpleasant and archetypal. I could easily have spent more time in this setting - the combination of ancient, nearly-forgotten gods and the bleak realities of occupied World War 2-era Italy is a great one - but this small book delivers on its own terms, with a kick of romance and a tentatively hopeful close to round things out.

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean (Tor, 2022)

Arturo has already written about his experience with The Book Eaters, and particularly the way the story takes on patriarchy, gendered oppression, and abuse. I agree with everything he's written, and I also didn't want to let this one pass without commenting on it as well.

The Book Eaters is the split story of Devon, a rare daughter born to a family of near human bibliovores called (you got it) Book Eaters. Devon has a secluded and somewhat-coddled upbringing within her old fashioned and isolated family, and is prepared for the compulsory arranged marriages that all book eater women have to go through to try and ensure the survival of their species. But we don't initially meet Devon as a young princess, dutifully eating her way through fairy tales - because book eaters absorb aspects the texts they eat, though not in the same way as reading - with rare forbidden raids on her uncle's library. When we meet Devon, she's a single mother in our world, trying to feed her son. Except, her son doesn't eat books, he eats minds, and the one Book Eater family who used to create drugs to help the often-ravenous Mind Eaters have all either died or disappeared. 

Devon's desperate, miserable choices in that opening chapter set us up to expect as much urban fantasy thriller as gothic horror in The Book Eaters, and as the narratives converge, it's fascinating to see how the different genres of Devon's past and present get closer to each other. Devon's younger self is a far more inactive protagonist, trying to survive and cling to points of happiness in a highly controlled world, while her older self grasps at agency whilst being pushed into ever more high-stakes situations. The genre shifts, and the changes in Devon's character, are also neatly paralleled by the experiences of her mind eater son, Cai, who takes on facets of the people he eats and has become an extremely precocious and changeable five-year-old as a result. There's a little bit of speculation, in the form of an epigraph of an in-universe book, about why Book Eaters and Mind Eaters are the same species and their spiritual purpose, but the characters themselves don't think about any of this. For Devon and Cai, the fact that they are hungry and that those hungers change them is just a fact of life, to be managed as best as possible - ideally, with the freedom to make their own choices.

The thriller element does win out over the other genres in the end, and the last part of The Book Eaters is action right to the end. I was impressed by how long Dean kept me guessing beyond the point where I thought all the information about how past-Devon became present-Devon had been revealed, and there's a few interesting twists which make the eventual climax all the more thrilling. Really good stuff.

Interview: A.K. Larkwood, author of The Unspoken Name

A.K. Larkwood's debut fantasy novel, The Unspoken Name, is already garnering rave reviews ahead of it's February release. A novel that offers Gods who may not have your best interests at heart, a sacrifice who becomes an assassin, witty dialog, complex relationships, and characters who have to deal with escaping their own destinies, this is the kind of story that pulls you right in from the first chapter. If that didn't get your attention, when Tor announced the deal with Larkwood last May, her quote was “The Unspoken Name grew out of my long-standing curiosity about villains’ sidekicks: what might it take to stay loyal to a boss who is clearly bad news? What do you owe to someone who saves your life, and what do they owe to you?” Consider my attention grabbed and owned!

The good news is that there is a lengthy excerpt available at Tor.com. The better news is that this is the first book in a series, so you'll get to spend more time in this world. I realize now, I am forcing you to choose between reading this interview first, or reading the excerpt first.

A.K. Larkwood lives in England with her wife and their cat. She's worked in media relations, higher education, and is now studying law. She was kind enough to answer my questions about what inspired her to write this series, her unique approach to developing magic systems, the joy of writing Csorwe and Tal's relationship, her favorite fantasy reads, and more.

Let's get to the interview!

A.K. Larkwood (photo credit Vicki Bailey / VHB Photography) 

NOAF: The Unspoken Name has some classic fantasy adventure trappings - old magics, watchful gods, assassins, warring wizards, and such. How did you know what classic fantasy elements to keep, which to ditch, and which to reinvent entirely?

A.K.L.: There was definitely a tension between my deep and abiding love of classic swords-and-sorcery, and my eagerness to do something new.

Before working on The Unspoken Name, I’d had the idea that a fantasy setting should be almost independent of its story, a place with predictable rules in which you could run a tabletop RPG if you so chose. I’d shelved a project which ran on desperately conventional lines, in a vaguely Medieval European setting. I was always looking up the origins of different plants to avoid the classic "why are there potatoes in Lord of the Rings" trap, which I saw at the time as an anachronistic gaffe. I’d had to rewrite a scene I really loved because, as it turns out, sunflowers didn’t arrive in Europe until the 16th century.

This all seemed really important and meaningful at the time for reasons which are now opaque to me - why should an invented world share the geography, botany and colonial history of our world, unless that’s something you want to meaningfully engage with?

In this book I wanted to rethink the idea of anachronism, to resist the idea of a fantasy setting as a fully-realised simulation, with a defined “tech level” and a little snowglobe of geopolitics. Plausibility is not a bad thing, but there are sometimes more interesting questions for a fantasy writer to ask than “could things happen like this in the real world?”

NOAF: How did you get the idea for The Unspoken Name?

A.K.L.: I could probably come up with a different answer for this for every day of the week! But one of the first things I figured out was how magic was going to work. I’m not always keen on a defined “magic system” in which everything is known and casting a spell is a reliable transaction, but I do see that if you're going to give some characters access to vast cosmic power you need to find ways to make that a huge problem for them.

I’d been struck by the way divine magic works in Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon. Interlacing magic with religion makes it feel less artificial, more embedded in the world, and gives you an opportunity to draw interesting contrasts between different cultures and practices. But it still left me with the problem of how to set limits on what you can actually do with magic.

The solution I eventually came up with is that a mage draws power from their patron deity, with whom they have a more-or-less personal relationship. I liked the idea of the major constraint on your magical power being emotional rather than technical, based on your lifelong dealings with this inhuman immortal being who may or may not have your best interests at heart.

NOAF: I am so intrigued by Csorwe's culture, and what she is expected to do in her life. How did you develop Csorwe's character and the culture she grows up in?

A.K.L.: I have to admit I’m not a very systematic worldbuilder. New facets of the world arise from a combination of what's needed for the story, and what feels intuitively like a good flavour. In the case of Csorwe’s upbringing at the House of Silence, the narrative called for a religious community with a commitment to sacrifice, and the aesthetic hook was that sense of austerity and isolation, things buried in the snow, the immense bleakness of the boreal forest.

After the initial concept I tend to develop setting as I go along, through characters’ experience. The House of Silence came into being through Csorwe’s eyes, and the details I invented are the things she would care about. So while in real life it’s probably the case that environment shapes personality, the reverse is true for me here. With another protagonist, it would have turned out very different.


NOAF: Without giving us too many spoilers, can you tell us which parts of the book were the most fun for you to write? What was the hardest scene to write?

A.K.L.: My favourite parts to write were any interactions between Csorwe and her colleague/rival Tal. I’m really interested in writing co-worker dynamics because they can be as complicated and hierarchical as family relationships - you don't have a lot of choice about these people being in your life, but you're all bound by a certain amount of common experience and in the end you're probably going to have to find a way to co-exist.

Csorwe and Tal feel they have a licence to be as nasty as possible to each other and nobody stops them, because they both work for a wizard whose approach to Human Resources… falls short of best practice.

Without spoiling it, one of the hardest parts to write was an interrogation scene. It’s supposed to be tense and unsettling, so I didn't want to pull the punch, but I’m really tired of reading voyeuristic depictions of women suffering as passive objects. So that was a challenge - trying to focus in on the character in a way that feels like we’re with her rather than looking in from outside.

NOAF: How different is the finished book from your early drafts? Did any of your early ideas change drastically?

A.K.L.: Definitely - the core dynamic between Csorwe and the wizard was there from the start but almost all the other characters have been developed beyond recognition.

Early drafts also included some vague background homophobia, I think from the same uninformed ideas about anachronism which had me frantically googling the global distribution of Helianthus back in 2012. I had no actual desire to write about anyone’s guilt or fear regarding their sexual orientation! But so many of the books I'd read that bothered to include queer characters at all did include some sad wrangling with the topic, so it somehow felt formally necessary. Realising there was no real reason to do any of that was very freeing.

NOAF: The Unspoken Name is the first in a trilogy. I'm always interested in how authors decide at which scene one book should end, and if the next book should pick up immediately afterward, or a few months or years afterward. How did you go about making those decisions?

A.K.L.: I wanted The Unspoken Name to stand alone as one story, so - without giving away too much about the ending - I aimed to tie up the loose ends as much as possible. I’m revising the sequel at the moment, and hope to build on that to tell another story that's complete in itself. It does start a few years after the events of Unspoken - the idea is to give it space to stand on its own, to be able to come at the characters from a fresh perspective.

NOAF: Did you read a lot of fantasy fiction growing up? Which books had an influence on the stories you are telling now?

A.K.L.: I’ve always been a sci-fi and fantasy fan. I used to think I was going to have to grow out of books about demons and witches someday, because my family aren’t SFF nerds and I didn’t really know these books existed for adults! I’m glad to have been wrong about that.

There are obviously dozens of influences I could name, but in terms of sheer technical impact the winner might be Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, which I read from age 8-12 or so.

These are, of course, adventure stories about talking mice with swords. There are dozens of them and they're all pretty identical - you can be sure there will be an epic journey, a prophetic riddle, an extravagantly evil supervillain, a lavishly-described feast - but it does mean that if that's your thing, you'll never be disappointed. Jacques’ storytelling craft is tremendous. I would have read a hundred of these books. I had a recurring dream about finding a new shelf of new Redwall books at the library. They hit me at just the moment when I was trying to write stories for the first time, and made my tiny brain explode with the sheer possibilities: I learned about using multiple narrative points of view, fleshing out the antagonists, and putting in a giant talking snake that eats people.

They're also a good example of how a book can be formative in what it doesn't give you. I was both enchanted and unsatisfied by the Redwall antagonists. I loved the baddies and I loved how often we got to see what was going on in their heads, but I remember thinking even then that it was weird how the rats and stoats were almost always evil (in fairness, this does get subverted somewhat in the later books). I’ve always been interested in the trappings of “villainy” and the kinds of characters who are pigeonholed as villainous - what their actual motivations and loyalties might actually be. My writings from around that time are full of plucky young goblins and demons who turn against the dark schemes of their bosses, so in some ways I’ve been writing the same book for 20 years.

(I met Brian Jacques when I was about 10 and, of course, piped up are you going to do more female villains???? proving that I’ve always been this person. He was very nice about it.)

NOAF: What have you read (or watched, or listened to) lately that you really enjoyed?

A.K.L.: I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune, which was a breath of fresh air in every sense - bracing and revitalising. It’s a novella about an exiled empress who devises a painstaking revenge, seen through the eyes of her loyal maidservant. It’s really remarkable to me for packing a novel’s amount of punch while also perfectly occupying the novella form.

NOAF: What kind of science fiction and/or fantasy is your favorite to read?

A.K.L.: I’m open to anything, but it’s especially easy to sell me on a fantasy book where the main character has a job that doesn’t map easily to a Dungeons and Dragons class - cook, detective, journalist, lawyer, musician… To name some recent favourites, Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead features a professional caver, Claire Bartlett’s We Rule The Night is about pilots, and the protagonist of Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey is the keeper of the palace animals. I think my favourite mundane profession made lively is in the video game Return of the Obra Dinn, which tells a fascinating fantasy-horror story through the eyes of an insurance adjuster. I’d love to see more of that.

NOAF: Thanks for joining us!

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

Microreview [Book/Stage]: The Half-God of Rainfall by Inua Ellams

Unexpected journeys in godhood and sports

The Half-God of Rainfall has been an exercise in the unexpected for me, though perhaps it shouldn't have been. First, I'd been rather dense in picking up that this book, by poet and playwright Inua Ellams, is in fact a story in verse. On that discovery, I had the standard concerns about whether I was really qualified to read this book I'd committed to review, or whether daring to have an opinion on some words that sometimes rhyme is inherently beyond me as a prose reviewer. Then I calmed down and opened it up. Lots of pages later, I get to the last line and think "Cool, now time to review something new and interesting that expands my horizons beyond the world of prose". However! No sooner do I start starting said horizon-expanding review when a google search teaches me that The Half God of Rainfall is not just a poem by a playwright, but a poem that is about to be staged in London. In the spirit of "why broaden one horizon when you can broaden two", what follows is therefore my thoughts not just on The Half-God of Rainfall in its written form, but of the performance that brought it to life in the Kiln Theatre, Kilburn in May 2019.

The Half-God of Rainfall is a story of ancient deities and their impact on the lives of mortals, told through a distinctly modern lens. Its hero is Demi (Kwame Odoom), the child of Zeus and a mortal woman. His mother, Modupe (Rakie Ayola), was given the protection of Osún, the Òrisà of rivers, only to have that protection fail due to a contest between the Òrisà's God of Thunder and Zeus, with a mortal of the winner's choice as a prize. Demi, half-god of rainfall, is born immediately from his mother's rape and grows up knowing both her love and grief, and his own uncontrollable powers. We meet him by the side of a basketball court, barred from play because of his tendency to literally flood the land when he cries, at the moment he turns his ability to "make it rain" from a literal ability into a figurative one and begins his rise to the top of world-class basketball - and attracts the notice of both the Òrisà and the Greek pantheon.

The language of Half-God is gorgeous, full of rhyme and flow that demands to be "voiced", even if you're just talking in your own head on a packed train carriage. On the page, it's subtle and fluid, and the transformation and feeling of "discovery" as each of those rhymes and lyrical moments appears in sound is one that I delighted in. Running through this is an exploration of dialect and narrative mode, from lines of dialogue that feel lifted from classical translations or myth retellings to more modern vernacular, like the exploration of "Nigerian tongues round American accents" on the children's basketball court. It makes for a rich reading experience that translates as well as you'd expect to stage, where it falls on just two actors to play out this range of voices and to differentiate the revolving set of gods and mortals of these various pantheons for the audience's benefit.

Demi's journey from crying child to vengeful young man happens quickly, and it feels like his character gains most going from page to stage, allowing us to follow as he goes from from excited child to confident, self-assured demigod to an inevitable path to hubris and downfall. Of course, it's inherently a bit absurd to watch a tall adult man play a child on stage, and like Philip Hamilton, the other major example I've recently seen, our amusement at Demi's character is abruptly cut short when we realise he's grown up to match his actor's physicality, and we have to start taking his ambitions and their possible destructive results seriously. Because Kwame Odoom doubles as other characters, most notably Sàngó, Òrisà of thunder, who is definitely not powerless (although he spends much of the story claiming he is), the ability to sell Demi's youthful journey is even more impressive.

While the title is ostensibly about her son, it's Demi's mother Modupe who (intentionally) steals the show. Unlike the older myths it riffs off, where women are included simply to be owned and use by men and to suffer without agency, this narrative galvanises her as a woman whose life has been shaped by male violence and impunity, but never taken from her. Despite all their powers and schemes, the male characters all ultimately end up as fuel for her arc, rather than the other way around. It's interesting to contrast the text, which puts her at the head of a chorus of similarly wronged women who were assaulted at the hands of Zeus or other men who used their power to take what they wanted from the women around them, and the stage show, which with just a single woman centres far more explicitly on Modupe's individual rage. It's reflective of Modupe's relative isolation throughout the entire play: because of the way the character doubling falls out, Rakie Ayola plays a lot of secondary characters at the point they intersect with Demi, as well as being the Zeus and the Osún to Odoom's Sàngó. It means that, at pivotal moments where Modupe interacts with these characters, she's in fact alone on the stage, her protectors and her attackers all embodied within the same actor and our reactions to them all seen through the lens of her telling. It's powerful stuff which puts her firmly in charge of her own story as far as the audience is concerned, even while she grapples with the higher powers who act on her life in the narrative itself.

In poetic form, Half God of Rainfall took very little time to put me under its spell; on stage, it takes a little longer, with deceptively light-hearted initial scenes at the start; it's not until the gods take to the stage that the production really gets to show off its actors' talents and the versatility of its storytelling mode. Once you're hooked, however, it's a riveting and immersive experience, with production values to match - an abstract but depth-y lighting backdrop sets the scene for both mortal and godly realms, and a stage which resembles the cracked earth of the original basketball court becomes something more by the end. The non-linear narrative is easy to follow, although the time period between Demi's birth and the moment on the court is a bit blink-and-you-miss-it in both mediums. That said, criticising an epic poem for starting in media res and not quite explaining all the facts about getting there would be a serious misunderstanding of the genre, and the emotional facts are sort of all we need to know about Demi and Modupe's relationship before his rise as the Rainman.

The inevitable constraints of time and space are such that, for most of you reading this, it's not going to be possible to check out the Kiln's staging of this fascinating work - though if North London is in your radius before May 17, I urge you to check it out! - but for me it was an unusual opportunity to experience a text that already pushed me out of my comfort zone in a new way. Anyone interested in explorations of myth and epic form with a focus that goes beyond the well-trodden world of European legend would be well served by checking out Ellams' work, and if you ever get a chance to see it staged? Even better.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 Expanding my horizons, and the horizons of epic poetry in general, in the best possible way

Penalties: -1 Gods exist outside of time, but this stage production does not... sorry, future review readers.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10


POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Ellams, Inua. The Half-God of Rainfall [Harper Collins, 2019].