Bitter Seeds

[sawyl]

About six months ago I read Bitter Seeds, the first of Ian Tregillis' excellent Milkweed Triptych. It'd been on my radar since the US edition first came out a couple of years ago and sounded like it might tick a lot of my boxes: alt-history WWII, battery-powered Nazi Übermenschen, British warlocks, and a prescient protagonist. But, thanks to the author's terrible problems with his publisher, it took another two years for the UK edition to appear. Having now read the second book, I've realised that I've failed to blog the first book. So here, months late and based on my notes from the time, are a few thoughts with a view to putting the second book into some sort of context.

The book opens with three prologues, set on the same day in October 1920, which establish the identities of the protagonists. In Germany, siblings Klaus and Gretel are bought by Doctor von Westarp, owner of a sinister children's' home. In London, youthful tearaway Raybould Marsh is caught raiding a garden for food and finds himself unexpected taken under the wing of the garden's owner. In the Midlands, the crazed Duke of Aelred drags his grandson William Beauclerk off to a haunted spring on the estate to indulge in a ceremony of bloodletting and speaking in tongues.

The plot proper picks up in 1939, with Marsh on a mission to a smuggle a Nazi defector out of Spain. When his target spontaneously combusts in a hotel lobby, Marsh is left to return to England with a case of burnt documents and a handful of frames of film that appear to show a group of German supermen on loan to Franco. Convinced that they need something to counter the Nazis' new super-weapons, the British turn to Will Beauclerk and through him, to a network of reclusive warlocks who able to call on the near-omnipotent powers of the supernatural eidolons.

Even the powers of the eidolons aren't enough to offset the advantages conferred by Gretel, whose ability to foresee the future allows her to manipulate events in a way that make her untouchable. But unlike the rest of the characters, Gretel's motives are obscure. Why does she fail to warn the German High Command about certain disasters that have the power to change the direction of the war? And why does she deliberately allow herself to fall into Marsh's hands? Is she insane and merely determined to cause as much chaos as possible as Marsh and later Klaus come to believe. Or is there some deeper agenda behind everything she does?

Happily, Bitter Seeds more than lived up to my expectations, with strong world-building and intriguing if not entirely likeable protagonists. I though the gloom of war-time London felt authentic and I liked the way the book didn't shy away from the costs of the British and German super-weapons: the acute psychological damage imposed by von Westarp's procedures to bring out his protégés powers; the high cost in blood and innocent lives demanded by the eidolons in exchange for their defence of Britain.

Interestingly, of the characters, Klaus is by far the most sympathetic despite his Nazi affiliations, while Marsh and Stephenson, his mentor and boss, come across as the worst kind of ruthless utilitarians. I also appreciate the conscious decision to underplay Gretel's role, keeping her off-stage for much of the action and showing the consequences of her actions from Klaus' and Marsh's viewpoints rather than making her a viewpoint character in herself. Will's characterisation is slightly problematic — his decent into alcoholism and drug addiction is signposted from the first, as dictated by the convention that no teetotal character should appear unless it is to implode into booze-fueled misery later on — but ultimately, I think that he works.

My only real problem with the British characters is their almost total lack of feel for class. Will occasionally feels embarrassed by his expensive clothes, but this doesn't stop him blending in with the crowd of a working class pub — cf. the ease with which Miss Meteyard penetrates Peter Wimsey's disguise in Murder Must Advertise — whereas, in reality, it seems likely that anyone as Eton & Oxford as Lord William would stand out acutely however much he might try to ameliorate his accent. I also have problems with Marsh, who doesn't exactly feel like a working class boy made good, and with Stephenson's reactions to Marsh's choice of wife — I can imagine either a condescending acceptance or a irritation at Marsh's hypogamy, but not the sort of easy acceptance that he displays in the book. Still these are minor quibbles and they don't detract in any significant way from the core of the book.

Finally, something must be said about the skill with which Tregillis pulls of the trick of plotting out a novel where one of the major characters has the gift of prescience. From very early on, the narrative makes it clear that Gretel possesses an almost perfect knowledge of the future and is able to use her understanding to shape the course of events. This means that although some of her actions seem random or insane in the context of Bitter Seeds — Klaus is convinced that many of sister's actions are motivated more by malice and madness than a grand, overarching plan — it is safe to assume that they're actually carefully judged and have consequences that pay off much later on in the triptych. All of which requires considerable care on the part of the author, both in scoping out the plot well in advance and paying attention to the details to make sure that nothing is neglected along the way.

(Gretel's abilities also raise interesting metaphysical questions about the Milkweed universe. If she is able to see the future perfectly, this suggests that the universe is deterministic. But if this is the case, how is she able to choose to behave in ways that force history to unfold according to her design? Does this mean that she is the only character in the novel with free will and unconstrained by determinism? I'm not so sure.

Rather, I suspect that Gretel's ability is intended to be read in Frankfurtian terms: that she is able to precisely gauge the consequences of her actions in a way that allows her to ensure that people, of their own volition, select a course of action that meets her requirements even though she has gamed the scenario to prevent them from acting in any other way. That is, if an infinite number of possible futures exist and at least one future contains a series of decisions where each of the characters freely chooses courses of action that match Gretel's requirements, her ability allows her to winnow out this possible future from all the others available and to ensure it comes to pass)

So, to wrap up: an excellent novel that mix alternate history, blood magic and Nazi super-science in a way that bodes extremely well for the rest of the trilogy.