Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

I've mentioned this a couple of times already, but over the little while I've been reading my way through Emma Newman's Split World novels, starting with Between Two Thorns. The central conceit is that reality is split into three: Mundanus, our everyday world; Nether, a timeless space in between where people don't age and whose buildings mirror those in Mundanus; and Exilium, a hyper-real prison containing the Fae Court. The separation is maintained by seven sorcerers, each with their own chapter of incorruptible Arbiters policing both the Fae and their client families in the Nether.

The story itself opens with a chance event. Staggering home from the pub Sam Westonville slips into the Holburne Museum for a crafty piss, only to have his memory wiped by a couple of weirdos carrying a body. Meanwhile in London, Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver, student, runaway from the Nether, and part-time accountant at the Emporium of Things in Between and Beside, steps into the stockroom only to find herself confronted with her family's patron: the Fae Lord Poppy. To complete the set-up, a Wessex Arbiter by the name of Max is investigating the impossible — the subversion of London's Arbiters — when a spell goes wrong, leaving his soul trapped in a gargoyle.

So much, then, for the exposition that weighs heavily on the opening couple of chapters. But once Cathy has been forced to accede to Poppy's demands — that she return to Aquae Sulis, the Nether version of Bath, and that she make three wishes before the start of the first ball of the season in such a way that impresses him — things rapidly switch from tell to show and the whole enterprise settles nicely into its stride.

Back in Aquae Sulis for the first time in three years, Cathy learns that her parents have arranged for her to marry William Reticulata-Iris. When she tries to object, her father beats her and her mother drugs her to prevent her from escaping. William, just returned from a Grand Tour of Mundanus, isn't a bad guy — by his own Regency era standards, at least — but he's chauvinistic, distinctly unimpressed with Cathy's lack of social polish, unable to see beyond his family's expectations, and rather too keen on the beautiful and possibly dangerous Amelia Alba-Rosa. Although he always tries to do the right thing — such as moving up the date of their wedding when he realises Cathy's father has attacked her — he almost always comes across as chronically sexist, completely failing to imagine that Cathy might have her own ideas and goals that might not match his own, leaving him constantly annoyed at what he perceives as her lack of gratitude.

Max, meanwhile, has returned to Wessex and to the house of its sorcerer, the eccentric Ekstrand. Under Ekstrand's dubious guidance, Max starts looking into the disappearance of Aquae Sulis' Master of Ceremonies; a task that leads him first to Sam, then to Cathy who, as Lord Poppy's favourite, can persuade the Fae to remove the block on Sam's memories. With Poppy's help, Max realises that the obnoxious Horatio Gallica-Rosa, a resident of Londinium and cousin to the Alba-Rosas, is making a push for entry into Aquae Sulis society and seems to be willing to do anything to achieve his ends.

I loved Between Two Thorns — just as LibraryThing predicted — both for its fantasy world-building and for its feminist agenda. At it's heart the book is essentially an exploration of what happens when Cathy, a third-wave feminist brought up on SF novels by her radical governess and further educated by her time at university, is forced back into a reactionary version of Georgian society that believes that women's only goals in life should be marriage, children, and embroidery.

Cathy's innate contradictions make her a particularly successful character. On the one hand, she knows how she is being treated and positively bristles when Will patronises her — which he does all the time because he can't conceive of her having her own interests — but on the other her non-confrontational nature, engendered largely by her horrifying parents and their oppressive expectations, makes it very difficult for her to take the necessary ruthless steps required to safe-guard her own interests and to make a clean break from her past.

Will is also very well drawn and contradictory, able to see problems elsewhere whilst unable to see what is happening directly in front of him. Thus he is suitably appalled by the former society women he saw working in a brothel on his grand tour and spends considerable time polishing the nostalgic memories of a holiday romance in Sicily into his own escapist fantasy. But at the same time he can't see that his forced marriage to Cathy shares something with the woman he saw forced into prostitution, nor can he see that he is just as constrained by the absurd patriarchal society of Nether as the women are. (And it really is patriarchal: at the top are the Fae Lords, below them are the family's Patroons, and then the fathers of the various branches. That one of the Fae, Lady Rosa, is family seems to be neither here nor there)

Of the other characters, poor old Sam is a little underwhelming — he spends most of his time thinking about getting drunk and lamenting his disintegrating marriage to Leanne — but Ekstrand, whose mental abilities wax and wane with the day of the week, and Max and the Gargoyle, representing different aspects of the same person, are rather better served. The sense of place is well done — it's nice to read an urban fantasy not set in London! — and the fantastic elements feel coherent, with a nice sense of powerful blocs moving behind the scenes to maximise their advantages. (I assume, although it's never explicitly stated, that for all their apparent differences, the Fae are actually manoeuvring in concert to come up with a way to escape Exilium).

Onward to the sequels!