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A Cathedral of Myth and Bone by Kat Howard
In these sixteen exquisite stories Kat Howard deftly weaves in and out of the countries of myth and hagiography to write the lives of women untold and unexplored.
A woman being written into her boyfriend’s fiction is at first flattered to be his muse, but then finds her real life literally consumed and overtaken by his. A desperate young woman makes a prayer to the Saint of Sidewalks, but the miracle she receives isn’t what she expected. A painter spies a naked man, crouched by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, transform into a beautiful white bird and decides to paint him, and becomes involved in his curse. Jeanne, a duelist and a sacred blade for God and Her holy saints, finds that the price of truth is always blood. And in the novella “Once, Future” Howard reimagines the Arthurian romance on a modern college campus as a story that is told, and told again, until the ending is right.
Mundane and magical, profane and reverent, romantic and uncompromising, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone journeys into the liminal spaces of contemporary fiction and unfurls them.
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I first encountered Kat Howard’s fiction in her novella length collaboration with Maria Dahvana Headley, The End of the Sentence, and then again in her debut novel, Roses and Rot, a brilliant dark fairytale retelling. A Cathedral of Myth and Bone is the first time I’ve really engaged with her short fiction, with its arresting title, especially for an architecture and myth geek like myself.
A Cathedral of Myth and Bone takes sixteen of Howard’s stories from the last decade (the oldest, and the first in the collection, is from 2010; the most recent is original to the 2019 collection), and allows the reader to luxuriate in her thematic and aesthetic approach. That approach comes wearing purple crushed velvet and listening to The Sisters of Mercy, Paradise Lost, and at its lighter moments, perhaps Evanescence; this is one of the most beautifully goth collections of stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.
The stories are melancholic, and even formally tragic, without ever defaulting into cliches of how that should look; nothing in A Cathedral of Myth and Bone comes without cost, without payment, and nothing comes easy, but equally, nor is anything worthless, or without consequentiality. These stories reframe their narratives, often repeatedly; ‘Once, Future’, the original novella-length piece in the collection, most obviously engages with the idea of retellings and myth-patterns in its engagement with Arthuriana, but there is a theme of creating one’s own story and seizing control of the narrative running through the entire collection.
One stand out piece in this regard is the one that closes the book, ‘Breaking the Frame’; in it, Howard tells the story of how a woman goes from passive muse to active changer of the art to creator herself. In so doing, she changes the narratives the art also depicts. The layering of the story is typical of Howard’s work; the surface, simple read is true, but misleadingly simple, as depths reveal themselves with more consideration. Technically, the story also shows off Howard’s skill at creating verbal portraits; ‘Breaking the Frame’ rests on a series of photographs, and Howard’s brief descriptions of each are precise and powerful vignettes that really convey the imagery.
A very different story using a similar technique of narrative interspersed by something else is ‘The Calendar of Saints’, Howard’s homage to Ellen Kushner’s Riverside. It is simultaneously very familiar, in that regard – the sense of faded grandeur, the honour at the point of the blade, the ritual – and very different; a much more religious world, and the whole story centres on faith in an alternate Catholic Church whose nature and differences are slowly revealed as the story moves. The ending is tragic, unexpected, and beautiful, a signature Kat Howard ending judging by this collection.
It is hard not to talk about every story in the collection, but I would be remiss if I did not return to ‘Once, Future’, since it (length-wise, at least) dominates the volume. In it, a modern class on Arthuriana decide to test the narrative inevitability of the story, and it turns out to be a lot stronger than anyone (or almost anyone…) had anticipated; Howard’s take on the Arthurian myth, and modern engagements with it, is brilliant, and her characters’ approaches to the events of the various parts of the corpus (such as the Green Knight) are well thought out and intelligent, while still letting the essential course of the story shine through, and the tragedy of Arthur slowly unfold while also fighting against it.
What may not have become obvious so far is the centrality of women to A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. In all the stories, women are central; every story is about a woman, with the exception of ‘The Speaking Bone’, which is about a place, and even still the only solid characters are women, and ‘Painted Birds and Shivered Bones’, about a man and a woman. Howard’s women are not the simple maidens of much genre fiction; they are abused women, they are angry women, they are women with agendas and minds of their own, and in every case, they want control of their own stories, whatever that takes. The opening story, ‘A Life in Fictions’, is the weakest in this regard – the ending feels a little like a failure to really take agency back, especially in light of later approaches to similar dilemmas – but the women of the collection are universally intelligent and dedicated, in their different ways, and very different to each other.
If a collection can be said to reveal the author, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone reveals Kat Howard as a mythographer, as a woman demanding the right to her own agency and to control her own fate, as a goth… and above all, as a bloody brilliant writer.
Cottingley by Alison Littlewood
In 1917 the world was rocked by claims that two young girls – Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths – had photographed fairies in the sleepy village of Cottingley. In 2017, a century later, we finally discover the true nature of these fey creatures. Correspondence has come to light that contains a harrowing account, written by village resident Lawrence Fairclough, laying bare the fairies’ sinister malevolence and spiteful intent.
~~~~~
Cottingley is a historical engagement with Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous folly, The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922; whereas Doyle’s work was supposedly nonfictional, and about the glory of the fairies, based on the since-admitted fakes of Wright and Griffiths, Littlewood’s takes a somewhat different tack…
This is a horror novel, pure and simple, and takes part in many of the standard conventions of such. Cottingley is one of those books that very directly aims to chill the heart with rendering the familiar and cosy, strange and dark; in this case, Littlewood takes on the comfort of the woods, the idea of the fairy at the bottom of the garden, and makes it increasingly sinister and destructive as the novel goes on. The creeping horror is mountingly effective as the narrator is willing to believe in the fairies from the beginning, but becomes increasingly disconcerted by their natures; these are not the gentle fairies of Conan Doyle but a rather more sinister, bloody group of beings, more linked to earlier folklore. Littlewood builds up the atmosphere in stages, with minor malice and fascination growing by degrees across the course of the novella, with the hints of the evil right in the very first encounter but unwilling to be believed, before Cottingley changes entirely.
The entire novella is epistolary, correspondence from Lawrence Fairclough to Edward Gardner, who helped Conan Doyle investigate the real Cottingley Fairy photographs. Cottingley suggests Lawrence is an ardent admirer of Conan Doyle’s fiction, and drawn into the great writer’s obsession with fairies, seeks to investigate himself; the relationship between Edward and Lawrence changes and alters over the course of the book, although Littlewood only gives us Lawrence’s side of the correspondence, leaving the reader to try to fill in the gaps oneself, and attempting to work out what the other side has said to prompt certain parts of the letters.
The solipsistic nature of this approach has its drawbacks. While Lawrence’s daughter in law, Charlotte, and granddaughter, Harriet, are fleshed out somewhat, they remain relatively elusive and idealised in the letters themselves; Cottingley really only has one complete character, and even he is very limited as we only see him in retrospect of times of crisis. Littlewood distills the plot down to its utmost drama, but at the sacrifice of individuality; Harriet is a good, dutiful, bookish girl, while Charlotte is the model of a good wife grieving a husband lost in the First World War now looking after her father in law. Even Lawrence is little more than a caricature, a man looking for something to cling to after losing his son, and finding the fairies; Littlewood makes him somewhat sympathetic but largely this is by the forces raised against him, not on his own account.
In the end, Cottingley is a good piece of literary horror, and an excellent engagement with one of Conan Doyle’s weirder obsessions, but as fiction goes, Littlewood has sadly forgotten the importance of character.
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Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng
Catherine Helstone’s brother, Laon, has disappeared while bringing the Gospels to the Dark Continent – not Africa, but Arcadia, legendary land of the magical fae.
Desperate for news of him, she makes the perilous journey to that extraordinary land, but once there, she finds herself alone and isolated in the sinister house of Gethsemane. At last there comes news: her beloved brother is riding to be reunited with her – but the Queen of the Fae and her insane court are hard on his heels.
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Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun marries two powerful streams in British fiction; the gothic, a trend that goes back to the 18th century, with fairy tales, a genre that goes back much further. At first glance these two might sit uneasily together; does Ng make them fit?
Gothic is, in no small part, a matter of atmosphere; whether the Northern faded grandeur and isolation of Crimson Peak or the baroque claustrophobia of Mervyn Peake’s magnificent Gormenghast, that is the foremost marker of the gothic. It is one Ng embraces wholeheartedly from the very opening of the novel; we are introduced to Catherine, Under the Pendulum Sun‘s protagonist, as she reaches the strangeness and abstraction of the Faelands. The opening of the novel is then concerned with her journey to the preacher’s manse of Gethsemane; a pile of stone that simultaneously seems to have been altered over the years, and to have been built in one go with the appearance of great age. Empty, slightly decaying, and understaffed, Ng’s chosen setting partakes of a number of gothic tropes, reworking them through excellent language and a powerful, although not light, touch that really does create the horror innate to the genre; this continues in those few sections that take place outside the castle, where the moors or forests are twisted versions of ones familiar to us, and that twist is simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish.
The plot is also suitably baroque; Under the Pendulum Sun concerns Catherine’s attempts to first find her brother, and then to discover what happened to the previous missionary to the fairies. Ng, loathe to leave no gothic tropes unused, also threads a forbidden romance into the mix, which burns slowly and alters the tenor of every character interaction between the only two humans in the novel, Catherine and her brother. The different plot elements are incredibly smartly done, and Ng wears her education lightly but effectively: events hinge in no small part on a matter of longstanding theological debate, and the degree to which theology is threaded through the novel as a lived concern cannot be overstated. The gothic cliches in the conclusion come thick and fast, but are well written, and Under the Pendulum Sun always makes sure the groundwork is laid for them.
Ng is less strong in her character work. Catherine is brilliant, and her emotional state decaying and fraying across the course of the novel is captured brilliantly, as are her varied desires in conflict with each other; Under the Pendulum Sun has a protagonist whose voice is never lost. Laon, however, seems a shallow character; he is a cipher for the plot, in no small respect, and without a strong sense of who he is throughout the book. The smaller parts are equally mixed fare; Mr Benjamin, the gnome gardener convert (whose mine was closed by the Lady of Iron), is a brilliantly curious little character, whose constraints and theological probing are at times hilarious and at times deeply moving. Ariel Davenport, on the other hand, is a rather thin character; Ng relies on Catherine’s attachment to Ariel to stand in as a proxy for reader attachment, and Under the Pendulum Sun suffers a bit for it.
The other place Under the Pendulum Sun suffers is stylistically. Ng has a beautiful, slightly baroque style, and a wide and fascinating imagination, encompassing sea whales and semiotic moths. At times, however, her style could have done with a tighter edit; there are points at which the text becomes repetitious or unclear, and occasional moments where the fantastic claustrophobia of the text becomes less an intentional trap of the gothic and more a frustration to the reader.
In the end, while Under the Pendulum Sun does have some shortcomings, Jeannette Ng has written an utterly brilliant gothic novel, using all the tropes and cliches of the genre and rising above them in magnificent style. I highly recommend it.
Disclaimer: Jeannette Ng is a friend.
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A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne M. Harris
I am as brown as brown can be,
And my eyes as black as sloe;
I am as brisk as brisk can be,
And wild as forest doe.
(The Child Ballads, 295)
So begins a beautiful tale of love, loss and revenge. Following the seasons, A Pocketful of Crows balances youth and age, wisdom and passion and draws on nature and folklore to weave a stunning modern mythology around a nameless wild girl.
Only love could draw her into the world of named, tamed things. And it seems only revenge will be powerful enough to let her escape.
~~~~~
Folklore and mythology have always been fertile ground for genre fiction; Joanne Harris herself, with an added Iain Banks-style M., has previously touched on the Norse sagas in novels like Runelight and The Gospel of Loki. Now, though, she’s turned her sights to a mythology far more rarely treated in fiction: that of the Child Ballads, in this case, specifically Child Ballad 295…
Harris’ novella retelling the story of that Ballad is focused, as is the ballad itself, on the wronged woman at its heart; the “brown girl” of the title. In A Pocketful of Crows, Harris makes this titular woman a witch, a member of the “travelling folk” who can take on the form of animals and do certain magic. She falls in love with a local lord’s son, William McCormac. This fall is precipitous and extreme; Harris writes sympathetically and with a lot of heart about the way our protagonist slowly realises how deep her attachment to William is, and the way her denial of it slowly falls away, over the course of a series of months; and the way he slowly accepts her and draws her in, tempting her into the human society he is a part of and naming her Malmuira. As a result of this, she loses her powers, and Harris writes about the trade off of magic for love with a real beauty; it’s heart-wrenching but worthwhile for the protagonist, even as she regrets the loss.
Of course, this can’t continue; A Pocketful of Crows isn’t a romance, after all. Instead, William casts aside Malmuira on the orders of his father, as an unsuitable partner; at which point Harris’ narrative takes on a colder, crueler turn, as she seeks to regain her old powers and freedoms. This takes up the latter two thirds of the book, as the woman who was nameless then named Malmuira frees herself from the tangle of human concerns involved in loving William; it’s a dark series of events, and Harris revels in that darkness, really giving it weight and heft. However, A Pocketful of Crows doesn’t just delve into the darkness; it contrasts that with the way its protagonist finds her freedom through this darkness, and how she returns to herself rather than the person tangled up with William. The way Harris ties these two narratives strands together, and then slips a third brilliant twist in right at the close of the novella, is absolutely brilliantly crafted.
This section, the latter two thirds of the novella, contains both the most beautiful writing in A Pocketful of Crows, and also some of the least effective. The darkness and frustration of the protagonist is powerfully evocative, and the way Harris calls the passing seasons and changing world to mind brilliantly and with a real sensorium. However, it can also drags a little; scenes feel repetitive as nothing happens or changes, and as we experience slight variations on the same events time and again, losing some of the edge of the book.
Throughout the story is a theme of identity as mediated not by the individual, but by the way the individual is perceived; as Malmuira’s identity in the public perception shifts and warps from William’s bit on the side to an evil witch, the character herself finds herself freer of human society and the constraints it imposed on her powers. A Pocketful of Crows is deeply concerned with the idea of the mutability of stories; the way Christianity is overlaid on old folk beliefs, the way fear of witches can develop and be fostered, and the way stories change are all things that Harris doesn’t foreground so much as allow the reader to glimpse the importance of as she tells this dark tale.
The big flaw in the novella is the way it carries certain racist tropes from its inspiration. A Pocketful of Crows is based on a Child Ballad, which carried tropes about mystical Travellers and magical dark skinned people. While Harris makes her brown girl into a non-human being, solitary and isolated, a truly magical witch rather than a Romani person, there is still a hint of the way much Western literature caricatures the Romani people in there, perhaps inescapably.
In the end, though, A Pocketful of Crows is a dark tale, and a savage one, and a beautiful one; Harris really shows what she can do with the short form in this little novella.
Disclaimer: Joanne Harris is a friend. This review was based an ARC, without illustrations, provided by the publisher, Gollancz. An event to launch the novella will be held at Waterstones Argyle Street, my place of work, on October 18th.
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Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones
All her life, Liesl has heard tales of the beautiful, dangerous Goblin King. They’ve enraptured her mind, her spirit, and inspired her musical compositions. Now eighteen and helping to run her family’s inn, Liesl can’t help but feel that her musical dreams and childhood fantasies are slipping away.
But when her own sister is taken by the Goblin King, Liesl has no choice but to journey to the Underground to save her. Drawn to the strange, captivating world she finds―and the mysterious man who rules it―she soon faces an impossible decision. And with time and the old laws working against her, Liesl must discover who she truly is before her fate is sealed.
Dark, romantic, and powerful, S. Jae-Jones’s Wintersong will sweep you away into a world you won’t soon forget.
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Wintersong is one of those books that is getting hype all over the place, in part I suspect because of the way its plot (and indeed aesthetic) recalls the cult classic film Labyrinth, starring David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King. So, does it stand up to the comparison…?
In some ways, Wintersong is very much in the shadow of its inspirational predecessor. S. Jae-Jones has drawn strongly on the aesthetics of Jim Henson’s puppets and Ellis Flyte and Brian Froud’s costuming of both Jareth and Sarah, such that the Goblin King of the novel very strongly resembles the striking portrayal by David Bowie, including hair and slight androgyny. Similarly, the goblins strike the reader as rather Hensonesque, with the way they are described not recalling specific puppets from the film, but the whole aesthetic of the film. The big difference is in the setting; the late 18th century Bavarian setting of the real world and the very much more subterranean, earthy and claustrophobic setting of the Underground world are new to Wintersong, and Jae-Jones recalls them very clearly to the reader’s eye, not necessarily with precise strokes but with broad, evocative ones.
The other key aesthetic difference is the way Jae-Jones uses music in Wintersong. Music is the driving force of the novel, from Liesl’s music with her brother to the strange interest in her music of the Goblin King; music, its playing, its composition, its style and its quality run as themes throughout the novel, in a very explicit way. The problem here is that evoking something so auditory as music on the page is virtually impossible; different media manage different approaches, from only showing its effects, to putting in the notation in a comic, but describing it with a mix of specific (such as key and tempo) and general really doesn’t work. Instead, what the reader is left with is the sense of missing out on something, instead of Jae-Jones having achieved something.
The plot is a neat little thing of twists and turns, in five sections, each with its own way of turning what came before on its head; Wintersong diverges increasingly far from the Labyrinth template as you get deeper into the book, with an interesting approach to developing romance and love, and what those things can mean, explored by Jae-Jones. The different permutations of relationships in each movement are really well explored, and the relationship between Liesl and the Goblin King isn’t a simple, one-dimensional one, it’s a complex, changing thing, that develops alongside their characters across the course of the novel.
That character development is the core of Wintersong; it’s Liesl’s bildungsroman, and also to some extent Josef’s (happily queer!) bildungsroman in the background and enabled by Liesl. The way Jae-Jones handles that character development is subtle and never made explicit, very carefully; the whole book, being told in third person from Liesl’s point of view, shows the development in everything from the narrative voice to what it focuses on, but no one ever talks about growing up. We also see different ways of growing up and accepting oneself, dealt with very neatly.
In the end, Wintersong is let down by itself; if S. Jae-Jones had stuck to the emotional and visual-aesthetic story, this would be a brilliant fairy tale. As it is, she tried to deal with turning the purely auditory into text, and there, she failed, and in doing so, let the whole book down.
DISCLOSURE: This review is based on a copy of the final novel provided by the publisher, Titan Books.
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The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church.
But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods…
~~~~~
As you’ll likely have gathered, I’m a sucker for fairytales, for non-Anglosphere stories, and for hype, and The Bear and the Nightingale is a much-hyped retelling of a Russian folk tale, grabbing my attention thricefold. Beautifully packaged and widely anticipated, when I saw it on the shelves at work I didn’t really bother trying to resist.
The writing is undeniably beautiful; Arden is fantastic at calling up the windswept snow, the chilly winter, the expectation of frostbite, the fear of famine, the darkness of a long night, the beauty of an icon, the crowded musk of a family packed together in the long months. The Bear and the Nightingale is a visually stunning book in that sense, with evocative writing that makes the best use of the landscapes and settings of the tale; there really are shadows in the woods, and those aren’t just your mind creating faces where none really are… It’s got a kind of creepiness to it, at times, that matches Algernon Blackwood at his creepy animistic best.
Sadly, the beauty of the writing isn’t really matched by the rest of the book. The Bear and the Nightingale falls into a number of tropes typical of fairytales, including passive women (it almost avoids this and then, at the crucial moment… men to the rescue), the wicked and hateful stepmother who sees her new stepdaughter as a rival, and a seriously weird objectification of women (from everyone; so many of the male characters’ motivations are based around the sexuality of the women, without concern for the thought of the women). Arden is uncritically retelling, rather than reworking, rewriting, or otherwise playing with, a folk story, and a rather misogynistic form of that folk story. This is no subversion, unlike the work of Kirsty Logan, or critical retelling, like Angela Carter, or complete rebuilding, a la T. Kingfisher; Arden has left all the elements of such stories that cry out to be rewritten for a modern age wholly intact.
The plot is also just messy. Plot lines are picked up (a son goes to a monastery; a daughter marries upwards; the father marries upwards) but then fundamentally abandoned – there appears to be no change in the family or in social stature from any of the events of the book except in the immediate village. Hooks are dangled throughout that are seized upon for a moment but then passed over as if the reader out to expect no further consequences from events, actions, or feelings; every character, one feels, is left totally unfulfilled because the thing that would fulfill them vanished from the book.
The other major problem is a thematic one. Arden takes as a key theme the conflict between traditional beliefs and Christianity, and ends up in something of an incoherent muddle; The Bear and the Nightingale casts as evil those who fanatically take religion as the only truth, in opposition to superstition, and makes those superstitions true without the slightest hint Christianity is… but also attempts to have Christianity correct, not just a positive force but a true one as well, a needle it never really threads well. It’s a poorly thought through argument that is just left to lie, like so many of the plotlines in the novel.
That is all compounded by an unnecessary afterword that her editors should have told her to leave on the cutting room floor. Arden, in The Bear and the Nightingale, uses inconsistent transliterations – which no reader would know unless they knew the Russian; the problem is her reasoning for why, namely “to retain a bit of their [the Russian words] exotic flavour”, and to make them “aesthetically pleasing” to Anglophone readers. Both lines of reasoning recast the whole book in an unpleasantly Othering light, right down to the approach to the setting; everything must be looked at with more critical eyes, and as a result some less pleasant and happy conclusions reached.
In the end, I came out of The Bear and the Nightingale disappointed. I was hoping for something more like Catherynne Valente’s Deathless, a reworking of a myth, but instead came out of a book with the prose of a Valente but no real craft to back it up.
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The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
The Hamilton sisters weren’t supposed to exist. Joseph Hamilton wanted a male heir, and his wife did her best. But in the end, he was disappointed, left with no son, no wife, and twelve girls, whom he kept secluded in the upper rooms of his Fifth Avenue town house and raised with only the scantiest knowledge of the outside world.
Jo, the firstborn, “The General” to her eleven sisters, is the nearest thing they have to a mother. She is the one who taught them how to dance, the one who gives the signal each night, as they slip out of the confines of their home and escape to Manhattan’s underground speakeasies. Together they elude their distant and controlling father, until he announces his plans to marry them off.
As their father handpicks the suitors he deems eligible, the girls continue to do what they have always done: dance. From the Salon Renaud to the Swan and, finally, the Kingfisher, the club they would call home. They dance until the night it is raided, and Jo finds herself confronted by a bootlegger from her past. As old mistakes and the demands of her father and eleven sisters bear down on her, Jo must determine who she can trust, and how much she is willing to risk on her own.
~~~~~
After the weird, postapocalyptic, dark world that Genevieve Valentine gave us in Mechanique, it is perhaps fitting that she has turned her gave to the altogether different world of Prohibition-era New York; to both she has brought a sense of magic, a fairytale quality, especially appropriate in this retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princess .
That is not, of course, to say that her worldbuilding is bad; no, quite the opposite. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is a beautiful recreation of late-1920s New York; the underground libertinism (one particularly underground club has mixed-race and homosexual couples!), the casual corruption, the sense of freedom and escape, the repression of women and their rebellion against it, and the seamy underbelly. Valentine’s New York lives and breathes, just as its inhabitants do; this isn’t gleaming skyscrapers, it’s the speakeasies, the clubs, dodging cops and catching cabs.
The characters are equally vivid. With a novel featuring at a minimum thirteen major characters, and in reality probably closer to the region of twenty, all of whom have to be believable if not sympathetic, Valentine has taken the decision to largely focus on Jo; it is through the General’s eyes that The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is mostly scene, although key moments jump to show us the actions of all twelve in a brilliant piece of writing. Every single character, likable or otherwise, clearly has an interior life, has motivations, is in fact human; even Jo’s detested father is humanised by the end of the novel. Switching perspectives also has the advantage of showing us Jo from other perspectives; in her own mind, she’s apart from the other girls but helping them, keeping them safe, while they see things rather differently. Valentine manages to balance these competing realities throughout the book, never tipping one way or the other; Jo isn’t a flawless hero, she’s just another person doing the best she can.
That “best” is what The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is all about. The first half sets the scene for the second, achronologically introducing us to the girls, showing how the sisters’ rebellion grew while also showing us the effect of the twelve as a unit; both domestically and in the clubs, the interactions between the girls and their audiences set the stage for later events beautifully. Indeed, Valentine’s narrative control is on full display here; despite multiple characters, multiple timelines and the need to set all her cards up, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club feels smooth throughout, the pacing and style always appropriate to the moment and blending seamlessly with what preceded and what follows it. That’s one of its great strengths; Valentine has a beautiful, gentle style that really pulls the reader in and hypnotises one, so that one can spend a whole day reading the book and not even realise it until the last page is turned.
Oh, and as intimated above, it’s a queer book; this is made beautifully little of, as Valentine drops in the homosexual couples dancing as just a fact of an underground club, and Rose’s lesbianism as no different to any of the preferences in men of the other characters; The Girls at the Kingfisher Club shows so little interest in treating queerness differently that is just blends into the background of the novel in a truly beautiful way.
If Mechanique was an amazing debut novel for Valentine to burst onto the scene with, then Girls at the Kingfisher Club shows that it was no fresher fluke; this sophomore novel gets right everything Mechanique did, and then does it better. Read it. Read it now.
Intellectus Speculativus 