The Next Shelf

Tag: Dark academia

  • Blood Over Bright Haven – M.L. Wang

    Blood Over Bright Haven – M.L. Wang

    headphones denoting an audiobook review

    Audiobook narrated by Moira Quirk

    ‘Do not fear the forces of darkness, for God, who promised us this land, is with us – and his will is light.’

    Religion is truly the opiate of the masses in this standalone dark academia fantasy from M.L. Wang – the first work of hers and possibly the first (originally) self-published novel that I’ve read. In fact, although Wang seems to have achieved widespread fame and success, Blood Over Bright Haven is the first of her novels to be picked up by a traditional publisher.

    Sciona is a dedicated graduate student who seeks to become the first ever female High Mage to be admitted to the Academy. You might call her obsessive, but of course that is what drives her to go where no woman has gone before.

    This is a world of distinct haves and have-nots: the colonists and the displaced. Sciona, a mage of unusual talent who has lived all her life in the city of Tiran, is firmly seated among the ‘haves’. Thomil, a refugee from a nomadic tribe beyond the magical barrier of the city, exists on the other side of the coin, having fled from the terrible Blight that ravages his homeland. Thomil’s people, The Kwen, are second-class citizens in Tiran — objects of self-congratulatory charity at best, and walking cockroaches at worst. The book alternates between the two viewpoints, although Thomil never quite feels as much a protagonist as Sciona.

    The combination of magic, academia and fervent religiosity in this story is an unusual one, especially as the magic here is more akin to a science than to traditional magic of the witches-on-broomsticks kind.

    Even within the Academy, the bounds of knowledge are set by religious doctrine based on the teachings of Tiran’s founders. The idea of the academic study of magic (which might as well be science as it runs the trains, turns on the lights and boils the kettle) being underpinned by hardline religious belief is initially jarring. But throughout history scientific understanding has often been constrained, either by religious dogma or by the prevailing theories, politics and groupthink of the day.

    As her studies take her in an unexpected direction, Sciona is forced to confront the unquestionable tenets of faith on which her beloved magic system is based. The sexism and discrimination Sciona faces, the way truth brushes up against convenience and doctrine, the comfortable city life enabled by a servant underclass, and worst of all, the truth she uncovers, all contain clear parallels with our own world — which is the book’s strength and also its weakness.

    When Sciona tries to raise the alarm, she finds that her fellow mages and citizens of Tiran have a strong incentive to keep their blinkers firmly on. If they can choose comfort here at the expense of destruction elsewhere, or destruction here to buy comfort elsewhere, the choice is tragically simple.

    The greatest success of Blood Over Bright Haven, the way it got under my skin, was the way in which the story reveals us to ourselves. Reading it, I had the same queasy feeling I had reading The Hunger Games, when the tributes from District 12 attend a fancy dinner party in the Capital at which vials of potion are provided to induce vomiting so the partygoers can fill themselves with food, then empty their stomachs and keep on eating. In this scene we feel the horror and disgust of the tributes, who have grown up one step from starvation, while the Capital takes their produce and taxes them to oblivion. And we also feel the disquiet of thinking that the potion sounds pretty good and recalling Christmas dinners where we’ve had to lie down clutching our overfull stomachs, while political and economic forces not unlike those in The Hunger Games ensure that others in faraway countries are experiencing hunger, malnutrition and preventable disease.

    In both books, the brilliance is in the just-subtle-enough: making us hate the oppressors for their cruelty and indulgence and selfishness, before the light shifts and the mirror is angled slightly to reflect the image back on ourselves.

    In other areas, though, Blood Over Bright Haven falls a bit flat. While we can in part forgive the heavy-handedness of the feminist messaging because Sciona is living in a world significantly less progressed than ours on gender equality, it does sometimes feel like the hammer is striking this gong a little too loudly.

    Similarly, there is lacking subtlety in some of the character portraits, interactions and dialogue – particularly the largely interchangeable ‘arrogant male scholars’ of the Academy. The conflict between 27-year-old Sciona and her colleagues feels more like schoolyard rivalry and bullying than the passive-aggressive subtle undermining and power games that haunt professional workplaces. And while I’m labouring on the complaints, I felt that the world, while compelling, was underdeveloped so that I never quite got a strong picture of it in my mind.

    So are there weaknesses? Yes, absolutely. Were they enough to slow my compulsive consumption of this book? They were not.

    My only major complaint (and it is quite major) with Blood Over Bright Haven was the ending. Endings are hard. So are beginnings and middles, of course, but so many excellent stories have been ruined by bad endings, there is clearly something singularly difficult about tying all the pieces together in a way that feels satisfying but not trite. This conclusion felt like a rushed attempt to write a certain kind of ending regardless of how it fit with the plot or the internal logic of the story. One comment I read online suggested that the ending didn’t work because the real-world problems highlighted in the book have no clear solutions.

    I think this view is valid, and may have been an area where the parallels with reality let the book down. Perhaps we seek refuge in stories because they simplify the bewildering complexity of life; they make the impossible achievable, let the underdogs win with statistical improbability, and persuade us that evil can be overcome – and indeed, easily identified.

    Disappointment aside, I binged this book, listening over consecutive days as I gardened, cleaned, walked and hung out washing. The narration by Moira Quirk is solid but a tad drone-y, with a tendency to overdo character voices which I think may have exacerbated some of the weaker dialogue. I did feel, as I often do, that it was a shame this book didn’t get one more draft to polish it into the gem it should have been. Nevertheless, it seeped into my bones and stayed with me after I finished (which didn’t take long).

    After a string of disappointments, I was thrilled to finally find a fantasy book I could sink my teeth into. Blood Over Bright Haven is not by any means perfect, but it’s (mostly) very good. I finished hungry for more: Wang’s previous book, Sword of Kaigen, is next up on my list.

  • Katabasis – R.F. Kuang

    Katabasis – R.F. Kuang

    ‘I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious… and I think that anything would be easier. Anything at all.’

    ‘There’s time for that.’ Peter grasped her by the elbow; firm, but gentle. His voice was soft. ‘It’ll always be waiting, Law. But we’ve got things to do.’

    I knew the name R.F. Kuang from her 2023 novel Yellowface, which caused a big stir but felt too tapped into the political zeitgeist to pique my readerly interest. It was only recently that I learned her primary genre is actually fantasy. Having heard positive reviews about her novel Babel, I picked up Katabasis with interest when it ended up in my luggage as the result of a buy-one-get-one-half-price deal at the airport.

    It should also be said that Kuang is a ridiculously successful writer and person, who published her first novel at 22 and has now, at the ripe old age of 29, published six novels, with more in the pipeline, and earned herself a Nebula and a #1 spot on the bestseller list of the New York Times. Somehow, while becoming a prolific bestselling novelist, she has earned two Masters degrees and is on her way to a PhD at Yale. These facts alone might be enough to compel you to pick up one of her books, and from the beginning of Katabasis there can be no doubt that it’s written by a very clever author.

    Some combination of fate and algorithms led me into the dark academia genre, as it often has of late, with this tale of two graduate students on a jaunt through Hell to retrieve their recently deceased thesis advisor. Alice and Peter are fellow students in the Academy of Analytic Magick, specialising in linguistics and logic respectively, and it’s clear they have a history to be teased out.

    A journey through the underworld for the sake of a PhD sounds like a fun premise, and in fact journeying through Hell and back and sacrificing half a natural lifespan seems to function as a fitting metaphor for the process of obtaining this notoriously gruelling credential.

    Katabasis has a lot to say on the state of academia, the tendency of advisors to steal their students’ work, and the role of women within this system that infamously lags behind modern expectations of gender equality. Kuang’s biting, satirical commentary on the quirks of academia and elite universities is fun to read. There is some excellent and nuanced exploration of femininity, sexuality, sexualisation and what liberation means. Desiring to be desired, without desiring back, for instance, or desiring the freedom to flirt with one’s professor, free of the obligation to sleep with him. But the backstory about campus life (which accounts for about half the book) is told as highly narrated flashbacks, which gives it all an unfortunate sense of emotional remove.

    Even so, the university is where most of the interest lies, whereas the Underworld is, ironically, a bit of a drag. Kuang’s vision of Hell seems more closely modelled on the endless trek to Mordor than on the fiery pits of Mount Doom. Alice and Peter wander through the eight courts encountering a big wall, some violent bone-piles and mostly vague and uninteresting dead ‘Shades’, but nothing for the most part to cause much concern. In fact, there was so much of nothing in Hell that when real peril did come knocking, I was too surprised to process what was happening.

    There’s a lot of wit here: Hell in fact takes the form of a university campus, where Shades spend centuries in a purgatorial state, writing essays examining their sins in the vain hope of being granted reincarnation by unknown and unseen deities, putting off a permanent ending to existence. They fuss over minute details of philosophical argument, spending decades trying to get the wording just right, only to acknowledge that they have never seen anyone actually pass this test or receive any feedback on their attempt.

    Peppered throughout are constant references to philosophy thought experiments, paradoxes and logic puzzles, which play an important role in magick – which seems to mostly consist of drawing chalk circles and imbuing them with some combination of equations and language tricks to make unlikely things occur.

    While interesting on their own, these constant references to philosophy probably end up distracting from the story more than driving it. Yes, an obscure thought experiment combined with some magic chalk might be enough to get our heroes out of a sticky situation or two, but ultimately it feels more like hearing an annoying kid in class constantly bringing up Plato and Kant and Heidegger more to show off how much he knows than to add any value to the conversation.

    Because most of these concepts cannot be explained in a few sentences, you really have to be already familiar with them in order for the references to mean anything or their relevance to the story to make any sense – which rather narrows the pool of potential readers suited to this novel. And then, if you are familiar with the concepts, they’re not explored in enough detail or with any real novelty that would make them particularly interesting to read about other than nodding and going, ‘Ah, yes, Monty Hall – ah, yes, Pascal’s Wager. Mmm. Indeed.’

    Once, in school, I took part in a kind of ‘puzzle-a-thon’ where we had to solve maths and logic puzzles as a team against the clock. Reading Katabasis often felt not like participating in one of these, but like standing watching it through a window and having the puzzle-solving activity described to you.

    The story almost suffers more because of all the clever ideas contained within it than in spite of them. The characters never fully came to life for me; the stakes never seemed high enough; the whole concept of magick felt sort of irrelevant. Hell was a bit too sandy and monotonous and the whole thing had some of the feeling of all the late night pub conversations you had with your friends at uni, pulled and pummeled into the format of a novel. It was a much longer book than its contents justified and, while always an enjoyable reading session, ended up being a bit of a grind to get through.

    I guess not all magick has that magical feeling, and Hell might just be a place where nothing ever happens. (But yes, I will still be putting Babel on my reading list. And maybe The Poppy War Trilogy, too…)