Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Catching up on my book backlog, a few thoughts on Fran Wilde's debut novel Updraft. Set in a cloud city of bone spires jutting high above the clouds, it follows Kirit as tries to come of age despite an unusual ability which marks her out for attention from the Singers, the city's de facto rulers.

We begin with Kirit at home on Densira tower, watching her mother depart on a trade mission. Lingering too long on their balcony, Kirit is attacked by a skymouth — a giant invisible predator — only to escape when something in her scream drives it off. When a Singer, a man called Wik, arrives to investigate he is disturbed by Kirit's talent and promptly tries to blackmail her into joining his order, threatening to have everyone she cares about convicted of a crime if she refuses. Needless to say Kirit turns Wik down flat, only for her and her best friend Nat to be assigned a punishment detail cleaning out the lower reaches of the tower.

With their wingtest coming up — a vital rite of passage that grants the right to fly alone and to take apprenticeship — both Nat and Kirit are concerned that the cleaning duty will scupper their chances at freedom: clearly what the Singers have in mind. But after meeting a strange old hermit called Tobiat, who not only helps them tidy but also gives them a set of bone chips etched with something that looks like Nat's vanished father's handwriting thereby opening a whole new set of mysteries. With their work unexpected complete on schedule, the pair go on to complete in their wingtest, despite the Singers' best attempts to prejudice the test against them.

Following the test, the pair's destinies diverge. Kirit, who has long hoped to become her mother's apprentice, feels slighted when she is instead passed off to a distant trading clan and agrees to accompany Nat on a rebellious flight. As a result, Kirit finds herself reluctantly agreeing to a very different sort of apprenticeship. With the help of Selis, a girl of around the same age with whom she has a competitive, difficult relationship that never quite seems to blossom into full friendship, she learns new songs about the city's history and the role played in it by the Singers.

Updraft is a positive delight of a novel. The city is brilliantly evocative and Wilde doesn't go out of her way to explain its origins, although it's pretty clear from the presence of very rare metal items that its inhabitants must have had access to the ground at some point but they seem to have lost all knowledge of their distant past.

What past the city does remember seems to be troubled. The towers' gradual growth through the clouds was obviously a period of war and anarchy; a time so hard that the Singers have come to the Hobbesian conclusion that just about any form of rule is better than none at all, and have imposed a ruthless set of laws and punishments ever since in an attempt to maintain order. They even go so far as to manipulate the towers' oral history — tales and laws are passed on the form of songs — while keeping their own songs separate and pure.

The characters are well drawn and grow naturally as the plot progresses. Kirit starts out with an idealistic and childish view of the world, sure that her mother can do no wrong and that they are destined to form a brilliant trading partnership. When her hopes are dashed, she is initially deeply resentful, but as she learns more about the city's history and her own family's past she comes to realise why her mother has behaved as she has and what it has cost her to do so.

Kirit's friends are all very different and her relationships with them follow the arc of her character. Nat is, and remains, her best friend despite some bumps on the road. Wilde eschews the temptation to make it a romantic friendship, giving them a sibling closeness that really convinces. Her relationship with Wik starts on a bad note — it initially looks like he is inimical to her — but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Wik has his own agenda and that on any number of occasions he has been obliged to go along with things he doesn't really believe in because he is completely committed to the idea of democratic rule, albeit for strange values of democratic, and he grows into the most solid of Kirit's friends.

Updraft is an extremely accomplished debut and a I can't wait to see what Fran Wilde does next. Whether it's another novel set in the same world or something completely different, I'm sure it'll be good.