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25 May 2005
The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston
By the time Vector readers see this review, many will have read other reviews, will have read the book, will have seen Steph Swainston in action. Most readers won't need me to tell them to buy the book. Its glowing blue and gold cover, its seductive price (how did we get to the point where a hardback costs only £3 more than a paperback?) will have done the trick. After that, word of mouth should do the rest. But I can consider here what it is that Swainston has done that is so impressive. Just when we were all settling complacently into a sense that we knew what was happening in British sf and fantasy, Steph Swainston arrived to knock us off our perch. Swainston offers something very different to what we thought British fantasy was doing: while the whole of our critical world seems to be discussing the merging of genres, access to the mainstream, playing with the borders of fantasy, along comes The Year of Our War, a book which is about as solidly grounded in genre as it is possible to get, and which, far from being hackneyed is breathtaking. The book opens in the middle of the world, and the middle of the war. Swainston has blithely skipped over the traditional first book in which the invader looms, the armies mobilise, the hero grows to manhood. We arrive when the war is two thousand years old. Humans are marginal figures, those of real interest are the winged, but non-flying Awians. There is an Emperor on the throne who has lived the entire period and who maintains the balance of power by drawing a line between the 'religious'--the war against the insects--over which he has complete control, and the 'secular'--the rule of the domains--in which he takes little part. Supporting the Emperor is a circle of honest-to-god superheroes, known as the Castle, who win their place by beating one of the fifty incumbents and are rewarded with immortality-until-challenge. Only one of the original circle of heroes is left, and he--Lightening--remains burdened both by what he has achieved and perhaps by the bildungsroman narrative that as an immortal he can never quite complete. The novel begins with the report of a battle. The Fourlands is involved in a never ending war against invading insects who are the ultimate enemy, impossible to share land with, impossible to communicate with. Their invasion of the land scorches the earth. They deal death with razor claws and eat their way through vast armies. The natives of the Fourlands, humans, humanoid winged Awians and Rhydanne, can hold them back only as long as they stand and fight together in a war of attrition gloomily like the First World War. United the prospects look gloomy, divided the inhabitants of the Fourlands don't stand a chance. In this context, the death of a strong local King and the ascension of his weak brother is the worst of catastrophes. As a chink in the Empire's defences opens, each of the kingdoms turns to secure its own and the Empire, held by its own code of non-interference in local politics, is powerless. The stage is set for court intrigues, missing heirs, and maybe a prophecy or two. Instead Swainston takes a long and very hard look at the tensions of a society with four species (maybe more), mortals and immortals living side by side, and an economy which has been subverted both by the needs of the war effort and the political machinations of the emperor for two thousand years. The immediate story is of Jant (known as Comet), Awian-Rhydanne mixed breed messenger of the King, ex-street kid, present junkie, riven with insecurities and profoundly in awe and in love (in a non-sexual sense I think) with the oldest of the circle Lightening, as well as in deepest thrall to Genya, a full-blood Rhydanne, and yet still in love with his Awian wife. In a search for escape, Jant has found the Shift. The New Weird, with which Swainston has been associated, if it is identified by any one element, is linked by a fondness for the baroque. While the Frameworld of the Fourlands is described with intense mimesis, in which Swainston uses Jant's wings and her own experience as a hang glider to describe a vivid cartography of the land which puts the average mapped fantasy to shame, the Shift is a baroque fantasy world in which Whorses offer rides for free, fibre-toothed tigers stalk the street stroked by small children and the Tine nurse their gardens of living flesh. Jant's story is his desire to be one of the Gods. Having got there, he is consumed with the feeling he is a fraud. Yet it is Jant who controls the Homeric narrative: with his wings he can sail above the war, creating for us the landscape, seeing the battles, understanding the way the world works. What Jant sees is the intensely political nature of the Castle. His telling of the tale demonstrates the link between the failure of an immortal marriage and the prosecution of the war. This is a very political novel, but in the manner of Olympus, rather than the street politics of London; as such, much of what is at stake comes back to honour, rather than survival. Steph Swainston has taken the possibilities of full otherworld fantasy, of the quest, of the grand battles and made of them something intense, complexly moral, and vibrantly characterised and she has done this in the oldest possible way; by creating an entire world in breadth and depth, and then offering us just one sliver of that history and geography. [First published in Vector 236 July/August 2004] |
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