The House of Shattered Wings

[sawyl]

Having enjoyed Aliette de Bodard's previous novels and dazzling shorter fictions, I've been eagerly anticipating The House of Shattered Wings, a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel combining angels with Daoist mythologies. And I haven't been disappointed: the book is an exciting, pacy read, with a well-realised cast of characters, a beautifully desolate setting, and some seriously nasty goings on courtesy of some seriously Fallen seraphim.

Grubbing an existence in the ruins of Paris, trading on the remains of his magical abilities, Philippe happens to be searching the ruins of the Grands Magasins when an angel falls to Earth. Philippe's fellow gang-member Ninon is determined to harvest as much power as possible from the fallen creature and sets about removing a couple of her fingers. The gruesome task is interrupted by the arrival of Selene, the head of Silver spires — the oldest Fallen House in the city — who places the injured angel under her protection and, intrigued and baffled by Philippe's ability to resist her magic, drags the young man along with her and uses her magic to bind him to the House.

Greatly reduced in status since the days when it was headed by Morningstar himself, Silver spires seems to be floundering under the leadership of the vanished angel's final pupil. From without the House is beset by rivals who, smelling blood, are determined to cast it down, with Asmodeus of House Hawthorn and Claire of House Lazarus, the only human to head up one of the Parisian Houses, joint first in the queue. Silver spires is also beset from within. The House alchemist Madeleine d'Aubin is nursing a chronic addiction to highly toxic angel essence, the only thing that helps her keep down the nightmares from her early days as a lowly member of Hawthorn, which promises to get her dismissed should anyone find out.

Silver spires is also the victim of a curse, enacted many years before by a vengeful former pupil of Morningstar's, which takes on a new lease of life when Philippe discovers a lost mirror in the ruins of Notre Dame which binds him to a dark magic. Rapidly Paris finds itself stalked by a new doom which starts with the deaths of minor human acolytes of the Houses before escalating with the death of one of the Fallen. Using the deaths as a pretext, Asmodeus calls the other Houses together and insists on an investigation into the affairs of Silver spires. There are further deaths the inquiry progresses and Philippe, despite having visions of the person who originally created the curse, struggles to resolve the central mystery.

The setting is beautifully done with Paris never more wonderful than in its ruined state, with its formerly great buildings co-opted by the Houses to keep the outside world at bay. Although the cause is never entirely explicit, it's clear that the cataclysm that ended the old world happened suddenly, abruptly cutting the transport links that allowed people to effortlessly span the globe: Selene makes mention of a member of Silver spires who was stuck in London and only extracted with something like a military expedition; whereas Philippe, originally from Indochina and in Paris on a mission, seems to have lost his homeland forever.

The cast of characters are beautifully drawn and delightfully detailed. Selene, cold and determined to those who only see her exterior, is beset by doubts, endlessly concerned that she isn't ruthless enough to preserve her House, and that owes her position to her teacher's abrupt disappearance — a disappearance which prevented him from setting her aside in disappointment as happened to all his previous pupils, human and Fallen alike. Madeleine, too, is a study in contradictions. Her greatest fear is that she will fall back under the sway of House Hawthorn — she left the night Asmodeus staged his coup against Uphir — but her coping mechanism, angel essence, is the one thing guaranteed to get her summarily ejected from Silver spires, should it be discovered by her head of House.

Philippe is a cypher to the Fallen and those who surround them. Obviously more than merely human, he originates in an ontology so different that of the Judaeo-Christian fallen that they struggle to categorise him. His magic sits outside the experience, granting him the ability to resist Selene's initial assault in the Grands Magasins and allowing him to carry out feats that the Fallen can't comprehend whilst at the same time being unable to break their enchantments which chain him to Silver spires. Isabelle, forever linked to Philippe following the loss of her fingers immediately after her Fall, starts as a blank ingenue, gradually becoming increasingly self-assured as her personality matures through contact with the more powerful members of the Fallen — and clearly lining her up to become a major power among the Houses.

The villains of the piece, principally Claire and Asmodeus although they're more opportunists and manipulators than ultimate forces of evil, add a great deal to proceedings principally because their ultimate motives remain unclear.

Claire, as the only human head of a House, has more to prove than the others but she expresses her power through a ruthless compassion: House Lazarus runs a hospital and a refuge for the city's underclass where any misbehaviour results in summary execution; while the House's apparent charity gives them access to a vast mass of unaffiliated humanity, providing them with a uniquely detailed source of intelligence on Paris and its inhabitants. Claire is clever and keenly insightful, easily outwitting the members of Silver spires she encounters, while her constant habit of surrounding herself with a group of children is an unexplained and unsettling little detail that seems to say a lot about her.

Asmodeus seems simple in comparison: ambitious and driven, he clearly intends to be Paris' preeminent Fallen and, with Morningstar vanished, he will do whatever it takes to remove Selene from his path. But for all his apparent outward coldness, Asmodeus is very clearly a master sadist who takes great pleasure in playing with and torturing those who dare oppose him; hence Madeleine's absolute and almost overwhelming terror of her abuser, her desire to avoid his eye if at all possible. But it is clear from the reappearance of Madeleine's former lover Elphon that Asmodeus hasn't forgotten and, having discovered a powerful piece of magic, has decided to test it in a way that also allows him to inflict yet more pain on House Hawthorn's long-ago-fled daughter.

Although the novel stands alone with the core plot resolved in an entirely satisfactory fashion, enough is left open to hint at the exciting possibilities of sequels. There are so many things that caught my attention, not least the mystery of the link between the Morningstar and Isabelle, Hawthorn's plans for Madeleine d'Aubin, and the precise nature of Asmodeus' long game and his intentions towards the other Parisian Houses. I can't wait to see what Aliette de Bodard does next, whether in the same world as The House of Shattered Wings or in some other; because whatever she decides, the results are guaranteed to be worth reading...