Nevernight

[sawyl]

In a few spare moments of late, I've been making my way through Jay Kristoff's Nevernight. Set in a world with three suns, where darkness only ever falls for a short time every few years, it follows a Mia, a would-be assassin, as she tries to find a way to avenge her father's execution at the hands of the Itreyan Republic. With more than a few nods to China Mieville and Scott Lynch and JK Rowling, I enjoyed it enormously.

The book establishes itself with a slippery prologue which frames the narrative, promising us nothing but the unvarnished truth about a now-dead assassin. Obviously, gentlefriends, such promises are never, ever to be trusted, making me doubtful of every word our overhelp chronicler says. So, with our feet on the path and our frame placed just so, we now get an opening that intercuts the scene of a girl ridding herself of her virginity with that of an execution; the words and actions mirror each other but with precisely opposite meanings. It soon becomes clear that the protagonist in both is the same: Mia Corvere, once the daughter of an ranking soldier now reborn as an instrument of vengeance.

And just like that, with a couple of chapters and a fistful of footnotes, the scene is established. The city of Godsgrave, so called because it is built form the skeleton of a fallen titan, is positively Venetian with its canals and its gossip and intrigue and betrayals. But its state, the Republic of Itreya, and its officials are pure Roman: the ambitious consol who uses Mia's father's rebellion to move ever closer to declaring himself imperator; the venal priest who wishes to become a cardinal; and the soldier who takes Mia's father's place as justicus, the head of the elite Luminatii.

Just as a traitor deserves no mercy, so too should his family share his fate. Thus Mia's mother and baby brother are sent to the Philosopher's Stone, a notorious fortress of a prison island, while the youngest daughter is to be drowned one of Godsgrave's canals. But, with the help of a shadow spirit, the girl saves herself and takes her first steps towards becoming an assassin. Now, aged sixteen and with the murder of her father's executioner behind her, Mia Corvere's master dispatches her to a rough town on the edge of a fallen continent, there to offer up the teeth of her first victim to Maw, the Goddess of Night.

After a series of difficult and, it must be said, amusing trials, Mia hooks up with a boy called Tric, another would-be acolyte, and the pair head out in search of the Red Church and its training academy for elite assassins. The school, when they eventually find it, is something of a Hogwarts of murder: the teachers think nothing of dismembering or poisoning their students; the penalties for breaking curfew involve being tortured to the point of death by a sadistic magician; and even though a killer is stalking the temple, the staff don't seem all that concerned that a murderer is thinning out their cohort.

Although Kristoff wears his influences proudly on his sleeve, he frequently uses these to confound the reader's expectations. Thus, he'll set up what looks like a book-defining feud between a pair of classmates, only to have one of them turn up dead in the next scene. He sets up what seems like a great mentor for Mia — the leader of the Church's assassins also has the ability to command the shadows — only to keep the character offstage for much of the book.

The characters are a finely drawn bunch, with Mia the snarky, troubled heart of the book. Determined to do well, both to please her surrogate father and to improve her chances of revenge, she's occasionally too soft-hearted with her fellows to be as ruthless as she needs to be to survive — although, as with much of the rest of the book, there are a couple of fine moments where she defies expectations and instead does something extremely ruthless.

Tric is clearly in love with Mia from early on, but he's more clearsighted about the fact that their teachers expect them to compete against one another for a handful of top places come graduation. Ashlinn, cocky and funny and light-fingered, is good balance to the more sober Tric and, as becomes clear as the story unfolds, is also in love with Mia; she obviously means a lot of more of her flirty, comic banter than Mia chooses to realise. Carlotta, a former slave, is the closest to Mia's rival in the school's poisons class, and the two bond over their shared dislike of Jessamine — Mia's great rival who, having also lost her father in the same purge that occurred after Mia's father's rebelion, blames the Corvere family for her own situation.

Nevernight is extremely accomplished and far more than the sum of its influences. It's a fun, frequently funny read, that doesn't pull its punches — despite being YA the characters drink and smoke and have sex and murder people (and each other) as the plot demands it — and the action builds to a really rattling finale that is all the more satisfying for arriving in a slightly unexpected way.