Review: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, by H. G. Parry

 A familiar remix of familiar ideas, with not quite enough of anything fresh or novel

I follow a lot of writers on social media, and one particular message that they often promulgate goes something like this:

Don’t be afraid to do something that’s been done before. Tropes are tools, not poison! Even if [other writer] did it first, YOU haven’t done it yet! The fact that it’s YOURS is all we need to make it special and new. Give us YOUR take on [trope]. Every new voice is valuable.

I’ve always enjoyed this perspective. It’s so fundamentally encouraging to shy new writers, an open-armed invitation to join a club, not to self-reject one’s work just because it doesn’t feel fresh. New voices are always fresh, even if they are offering familiar old stories. (If nothing else, the endless parade of retellings of myths and fairy tales is evidence enough of SFF’s (excessively?) high tolerance for familiarity.)

The problem is that, sometimes, even a new voice telling an old story is not enough to make that story fresh. And such was the impression I got from The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. The scholar in question is one Clover Hill, a young woman who has grown up on a farm in northern England in the early 20th century, and had her life reasonably well planned out, in unthreatening but not terribly exciting detail. Then WWI hits, and her brother comes back from the front lines terribly damaged—not, as so many young men were, by the shells and the gas and the guns and bayonets, but because there was a supernatural element to the carnage. As Clover learns from her brother's comrade who brings him home, our world is overlaid with a world of magic, hidden but mighty, governed by old families who derive their power from intricate deals struck with the world of faerie next door.

One such magic-user was on the front lines of the fighting, and in all the carnage summoned a faerie. Something went wrong: the faerie was not contained, and a hideous curse struck down as many or more soldiers as any human-made weapon. Clover’s brother is unusual only because he mostly survived. But only mostly; he is not well, and he will not recover without help. So through perseverance and connections Clover manages to force her way into a spot at the school where all magic-users are trained, determined to learn the skills she needs to save her brother.

The  problem, though, is that the world of magic-dom was spooked by this catastrophic release of uncontrolled faerie magic, and so the teaching of faerie magic has been banned. All doors to faerie are closed and locked. Clover has no hope of learning to save her brother, unless she can find her own way to an open faerie door—which, if you’ve paid attention to the title of the book, is not an impossible task.

If you’ve spent much time reading fantasy books in the last 20 years, you’ll recognize a lot of these elements. A non-magical outsider goes to magic school where she must fight for a place among an entrenched magical aristocracy who don’t want her there. Harry Potter, anyone? Babel?  She finds a home and a core cohort of friends (The Secret History), but learns that there are dark secrets and hidden evils, and to save what she loves, she must destroy it (Scholomance). There’s even a tree that beats up people who get too close to the restricted section of the library. There is a Whomping Willow, for dog’s sake. The faeries, too, with their binding bargains peppered with dangerous loopholes, whose otherworldly weirdness is beyond human comprehension, give a lot of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell vibes, mixed with Lords and Ladies by Sir Terry Pratchett, or Lud in the Mist by Hope Mirrlees.

And, in principle, I’d be all over this. I’ve written before how I love me some faerie bargains. And this particular trope is freshened by being intertwined with another trope, in which faerie land becomes a metaphor for colonisation (hello, Under The Pendulum Sun!). Unfortunately, ‘Colonialism Bad Actually’ is a very low-hanging bit of low-hanging fruit to signal who the baddies are in your story—especially if those baddies in question have already been signalled to be baddies by being wildly misogynistic (snoooore).

And furthermore, using colonialism for faeries strikes me as problematic. One element that makes faeries (in general) work really well (for me) is their inhuman blue-and-orange morality. The idea that there are these sentient creatures whose values and morals are so wildly askew from human understandings of virtue is really, really compelling in fantasy storytelling. But if these creatures are also metaphorically equated with colonised people, we’re left with a deeply unfortunate implication that colonised people are inhuman and incomprehensible. To be fair, perhaps Parry picked up on this, because she eventually gives the faerie antagonists an entirely humanly comprehensible motivation for their actions, but in doing that, she betrays the blue-and-orange morality that makes faeries so compelling as a plot device in the first place. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds: colonised people are still incomprehensibly inhuman and other, and they don’t even have a satisfyingly weird value system.

The plot itself is fine. The pacing is good, and Parry decides to do a time-jump in the middle, rather than use the structural device of back-and-forth intertwining timelines, which I appreciated. Mixing timelines has always been rather frustrating to me, since one is always less interesting than the other. I find the secondary characters quite well drawn, too, with compelling motivations, and the development and collapse of that sparkling cohort of best friends in school felt very real. I had one group of friends in high school that I’ve fallen out of touch with; and another in college who I likewise haven’t spoken to in decades. The collapse of these close-knit bonds that feel unbreakable in youth, and the awkward groping back together after a decade of separation, landed very precisely in my feels, exactly as Parry intended. But for all that, the plot itself didn’t feel very exciting. There are some developments that could have led to very fun twists, and didn’t; and Clover’s angst about her desire to pursue this new life among the patriarchal upper-class colonisers felt forced and in places inconsistent. And I’d already seen the same thing done much more effectively in Babel.

I guess that’s the thing. This book had a lot of familiar elements in it, but the way they were combined didn’t make them into anything fresh or new. It was not more than the sum of its parts. It was exactly the sum of its parts—and each of its parts could also be found doing its bit more effectively in a different book. If you want faeries, (re)read Susanna Clarke and Terry Pratchett; if you want dark academia, (re)read Donna Tartt; or go for R. F. Kuang if you want it mixed with magic and colonialism. And if you want to read something by H. G. Parry that is genuinely fresh and novel, allow me to recommend The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.

Highlights

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

• Faerie bargains

• Secret magic school

• Colonialism is Bad, Actually

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:

Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell [Tor 2006].

Kuang, R. F. Babel [Harper Voyager, 2022].

Mirrlees, Hope. Lud in the Mist [Knopf, 1927/Orien Publishing Co, 2018].

Ng, Jeanette. Under the Pendulum Sun [Angry Robot, 2017].

Novik, Naomi. A Deadly Education [Scholomance 1] [Del Ray, 2020].

Novik, Naomi. The Last Graduate [Scholomance 2] [Del Ray, 2021].

Novik, Naomi. The Golden Enclaves [Scholomance 3] [Del Ray, 2022].

Parry, H. G. The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door [Orbit, 2024].

Parry, H. G. The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep [Orbit, 2019].

Pratchett, Terry. Lords and Ladies [Harper Collins, 1992 / Harper 2013].

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History [Knopf, 1992].

Interview: H.G. Parry, author of A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians

In Western Europe, it is the Age of Enlightenment.  In the Caribbean,  a slave rebellion is brewing. Now, add magic!  Enter H.G. Parry's newest novel,  A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, published in June from Redhook. In this sprawling historical fantasy, magic is used to keep powerful people in power, and to keep the powerless in chains. But what happens when the status quo goes out the window? With lots of banter and a fast moving plot, Parry forces her characters to ask questions and face situations that will change their world forever.

Something I love about novels like this one, is that a) they entertain me, b) they give me my fantasy fix, and c) they send me down wikipedia rabbit holes because I want to know who all of these people really were and what actually happened. If you like that kind of experience too, you're in luck, as Declaration is the first in an expected duology.

Based in Wellington, New Zealand, Parry grew up reading and loving classics such as Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, Jane Austen's works, and everything Dickensian. (If fact, if Dickens is your thing, may I recommend Parry's The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep? I loved it!)    Her short fiction has also appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, and various anthologies.  You can learn more about her at her website hgparry.com or by following on her twitter, where she is @hg_parry.

Parry was kind enough to answer my questions about the research she did for this new novel, how she created the magic system for the story, respectfully writing a Black enslaved character, doing world building through dialog, and more.

Let's get to the interview!

NOAF: Your newest novel A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians involves the politics of the late 18th century - the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, what was happening in Western Europe, and what was happening in the Americas at that time, among other historical events. Why did you choose that particular moment in history, and what was your research process like?

H.G.P.: It was really the other way around—this book grew because I started getting obsessively interested in late eighteenth-century politics, particularly around the French Revolution and the abolition of the British slave trade, and frankly I didn't know what else to do about it! It's a truly fascinating time--a time of radical ideas and radical science and radical politics, of brilliant rhetoric spilling over into revolution and war, of unprecedented social change and upheaval. There's a real feeling of the old order passing away, and being on the brink of an exciting new world. And from a writerly point of view, it's full of people trying to change things for the better, and having to make difficult choices about how to bring about those changes. It's irrestistable.

In terms of research, I started with biographies—you can probably tell of whom when you read the book, because most of them became major characters. I was very fortunate to be travelling through England and Paris at various times when I was writing this book, so I could visit a lot of museums and historical sites for those plot-lines in person. (I came very close to getting accidentally locked in William Wilberforce's house overnight, which would have been peak research. A guard came and found me in the library on closing time.) But most of it was just hours of reading. I was working at a university, so I could raid the library and online resources for anything that interested me—books, contemporary accounts, old newspapers, parliamentary records, all the good stuff. I also read a lot of historical fiction and watched a lot of period dramas, mostly for fun, but also to see what other authors had made of the same material. Since these "other authors" include Charles Dickens, Hilary Mantel, and Susanna Clarke, this was probably more terrifying than helpful, but it was very helpful!

NOAF: History, intrigue, global conversations, and magic? What fun! Talk us through the magic system of your alternate history. What kinds of things can people do with their magic? Is it something you are born with, or do you have to learn how to do it? Can anyone do magic, or only certain people?

H.G.P.: In this version of the world, everyone has the potential to be born with magical gifts—they might be able to conjure fire and water, or manipulate the weather, or summon shadows to do their bidding. They occur naturally, but they can be refined and developed with study and practice. In Europe and Great Britain, these abilities are only allowed to be practiced by the Aristocracy and are policed by the Knights Templar, who lock Commoner magicians into bracelets that limit their magic. As the book starts, certain reformers have begun to argue that magic should be available to everyone, regardless of birth, which is where things start to get heated…

NOAF: I'm a fan of worldbuilding through dialog and witty banter, and I hear A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians has both! Do you have any tips for writing effective dialog? Is banter and fun dialog as fun to write as it is to read?

H.G.P.: The very early version of this book actually started out almost entirely in dialogue, on purpose, like a stage play. It isn't quite that now, but still, there is definitely dialogue! And banter! And parliamentary debates and arguments and long fire-lit discussions about principles! One of my favourite things about the eighteenth century is the utter delight it takes in words and wit and rhetoric, and I really wanted to bring that to the page.

The only tip I can think of is to remember that dialogue is always doing double-duty as character development—the characters need to be revealing themselves not just by what they say, but what words they choose, the pattern of their sentences, the way they choose to direct the conversation. That, and to watch the gap between what characters say and what they mean. Even if characters aren't lying on purpose, they're rarely being completely honest with themselves or with each other, and that's where the tension and the poignancy lies.

Banter: oh, probably far, far more fun to write than to read! If it was up to me the characters would just drink tea and exchange witty barbs and never get any plot done.

NOAF: One of your main characters, Fina, is a slave on a sugar plantation. Writing about slavery can be delicate. What can you tell us about how you developed Fina's character and her worldview?

H.G.P.: It's very, very delicate, and it should be. With anything that draws on difficult history, you want to do justice to the experiences of the people who really lived through it without exploiting those experiences, and that's a difficult balance. Writing Fina is a little bit different to researching and writing a purely historical novel, because you also need to balance how that experience would be shaped and changed by the fantastical elements of the book. A lot of Fina's life and perspective is drawn from those of men and women at the time who provided first-hand accounts of their enslavement, as well as from what we know about women who fought in uprisings and particularly during the Haitian revolution—I was very interested in Mary Prince, the first enslaved woman to publish her memoirs in Britain, though she was born a few decades later than Fina. At the same time, she's the only major character without a direct historical counterpart, partly because her plotline is very dependent on the magic system, partly because I wanted her to be a person who might have been overlooked by our history, but who turns out to be crucial to this one.

In Fina's world, slave-owners force the people they enslave to take an alchemical compound that keeps them powerless to move except to obey orders. Fina becomes immune to the spellbinding as she grows and comes into magic of her own, and if this is discovered she would be killed. Until she can escape, she hides it, which means essentially pretending to be locked in her own body all day, every day, without a single involuntary movement or expression. So she's very driven by her anger and her determination to save the others who were enslaved with her; she's also very used to concealing her feelings and even disassociating from them in order to survive, and she's increasingly growing to understand and take possession of her power.

NOAF: What was your favorite scene in A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians to write? What was the first scene you wrote?

H.G.P.: Honestly, I've loved writing so much of this book, mostly because of the relationships between the central characters. I love writing Wilberforce and Pitt talking about anything at all, I love writing Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, I love writing Fina and Toussaint L'Ouverture. All the magical politics and parliamentary proceedings were an absolute joy. If I had to choose, though—there's a very intense confrontation between Robespierre and Camille towards the end of the book, and it was one of those glorious scenes that just wrote themselves and barely needed to be touched afterwards.

The very first scene is probably now going to be in Book Two, so I can't spoil it! But it was Pitt and Wilberforce, and it was about the duel Pitt historically fought in 1801, because he was an idiot.

NOAF: This is book one in the Shadow Histories. What's next for these characters? Should readers plan for a trilogy, or something longer?

H.G.P.: Shorter, actually: it's a duology. Without spoilers, this book covers the period around the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution; the second book revolves around the rise of Bonaparte and the Napoleonic Wars. It also starts to veer from the path of our own history, because magic tends to do that.

NOAF: What are some of your hobbies? What do you like to do to unwind?

H.G.P.: I'm the boring kind of writer who writes one project as an exciting break from writing another and thinks this counts as a hobby, so: writing! Also reading! Aside from that, I watch far too many BBC period dramas, draw, hang out with my rabbit sidekicks, and (pre-lockdown) love travelling to other countries. I've also raised many families on the Sims.

NOAF: Thank you so much!

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]: The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep offers readers a look at a Wellington New Zealand where a man’s ability to bring characters from books into the real world threatens the entire city.

Rob Sutherland has a secret. Or more properly, his brother, Doctor Charles Sutherland, noted expert on Charles Dickens, has an ability that he, and his parents know, but no one, including his would be fiancee Lydia, does: Charlie can, by reading a book, bring the character into the real world as a living and breathing person. It’s an ability he’s tried to suppress and dampen down for years, but when the titular Uriah Heep escapes from a copy of David Copperfield, his escape leads Rob, and Charley to learn that there are more literary creations than he himself read out hiding in Wellington...and that someone has a plan for them, and the city, in The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H G, Parry

Our point of view of the novel focuses on and almost exclusively keeps on Rob, rather than Charlie. Given some revelations regarding Charlie, both through the limited bits from Charlie’s pen and from what Rob can see and what he tells us, and what he learns himself, this is a good choice for narrative momentum, mystery and driving the reader to find out just what Charlie’s deal is, and who is the real antagonist in the situation. The brotherly dynamic between Rob and his brother Charlie is a strong one, with Charlie’s brilliance but lack of social skills in comparison to his more socially adept brother, who does not share his special ability, doesn’t quite understand or appreciate it, but finds himself dealing with its ramifications throughout the novel

I should be clear and up front about something: I may be a somewhat biased reviewer in a regard, but not in the way that you might think. You see, good reader, I am a relation but not a direct descendant of Charles Dickens, so that a novel where his literary creation escapes into the real world was and is always one I would be extremely interested in. I’ve read and been interested in Dickens' work from a young age. His work has always been part of my life.

I can happily report that this novel is extremely literate and considerate with the work of Dickens, what it means and where it comes from. The novel feels like the author’s own coming to terms with Dickens' work in a real and palpable way, as well as Victoriana and Edwardiana in a real and palpable way.

In point of fact, I would say that people not at least moderately interested in Dickens might not find the book to their liking. Dickens’ writing, his life and what he means are central to the book and what the book explores in the course of the plot and the two central characters.In addition, many of the literary characters we meet who have come out of their books are all from the same stratum and time period. There is a temporal unity to the book in terms of who we meet that you don’t get in, say, John Myers Myers Silverlock, which is another book replete with meeting embodied literary characters. In that work, the characters run the gamut of (admittedly only Western) literature whereas this novel’s range of sources of characters is a little narrower and more focused. The author clearly has an abiding love of these characters and exploring them, and brings them to life, but I had hoped for a wider range for her to have drawn upon.

The worldbuilding that the author brings to the novel is another highlight of the book. Literary characters in the real world is not a unique idea, but it is definitely one that Parry has decided to make her own and put her own spin on the concept. The author has a lot of invention and ideas on how literary characters drawn into the modern world might act and work and handle themselves, as well as the different ways those characters might manifest themselves off of the page. The author clearly has taken palpable and readable delight in her set of literary characters that Rob and Charles discover, and must deal with, even as the mysterious villain lurks just off of the page, planting their scheme. It is this invention that helped propel me as a reader through the book. The plot takes a backseat, really to character interactions and invention and how they all bounce off of each other, especially with their individual agendas, goals, and plans. The novel sings and resonates more on that than any particular overarching plot. Possibly my favorite, although she does not get a lot of screen time, is a certain White Witch whose powers don't quite work in the real world as she might like.

That said, I  think I should mention is that the novel suffers from a couple of flaws I found that unfortunately knocked it down for me. It’s relatively sedate plotting and pace make this not a ripping page turner that you might be looking for in a book. It’s a studied and measured book in terms of pacing and plotting. It doesn’t quite go to the point that the plot is so thin as that said plot needs a slow pace and march to fill the book, but the book is definitely not overstuffed with plot and action, given its size. As mentioned above, the worldbuilding sometimes shines through a bit much for that to occur. In addition, there are a couple of gear shifts in genre tone throughout the book and the transition between them (and to explain in further detail would be highly spoilery) don’t always come off as well as I might have liked.  There is roughness in those shifts that leads to a bit of an unevenness at several points.I attribute this probably to debut novel roughness, and look forward to what the author can do with her clear and abiding talents with this novel under her belt.

Despite these flaws for me, the worldbuilding and the secondary characters, and the strong thematic and literary focus on Dickens made me enjoy the novel. One additional positive note is that it is a nicely contained story, with a proper and solid ending that makes it a complete literary experience rather than something open ended. So if you are looking for a quasi urban fantasy where the love of Dickens and his work are an asset to reading, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep is for you.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a vividly embodied relationship between the narrator and his brother.
+1 for excellent invention in terms of the literary characters

Penalties: -1 Pacing issues in the book made it a sometimes too stately read
-1 Readers who aren’t into Victoriana or especially Dickens will have less to go on to hook into, here, especially in terms of the literary characters met.
-1 for some somewhat uneven gear shifting of genre throughout the book

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

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Parry, H G,  The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep [Redhook, 2019]