By Simon McNeil
I must admit that what first drew my attention to the Cities of the Weft trilogy by Alex Pheby was when a friend described the first book in the series, Mordew, as being “like Gormenghast”. I’d learned of Mervy Peake’s Gormenghast books when the BBC 2 mini-series first came out in June 2000. I was in university at the time and immediately read the first three books in that fantasy series. Gormenghast’s remarkable deployment of gothic tropes, class consciousness and surrealist styling made the novels favorites of mine ever since.
If, in Peake, I saw the possibility of a fundamentally different sort of fantasy story from those of Tolkien and his many imitators then in Pheby we can see the perfection of that method. Because there is some truth to the suggestion that the Cities of the Weft trilogy is like Gormenghast.
Like Gormenghast, Cities of the Weft applies a gothic sensibility to its fantastical cities, like Gormenghast the Cities of the Weft employs a kind of psychogeography wherein the built environment becomes as much a character as part of the setting. This tie between Peake’s work and Pheby’s is intensified in their respective third volumes with clear structural and thematic parallels between Sharli and Nathan’s stories in Waterblack and the text of Titus Alone, the third Gormenghast book.
But it’s grossly insufficient to describe Cities of the Weft as being just “like Gormenghast”. Instead what we find is an odd fusion of Ulysses, Titus Alone, The Jungle, The Prestige and several treatises of post-Kantian metaphysics. It can be hard to talk about what these books are actually about, because they’re about rather a lot of things, but the central thread that runs through them is a deep interrogation of the nature of power and of authority. This is approached at multiple valences and, particularly in the concluding volume, the authority of an author and of a text is repeatedly examined, often in the same breath as interrogations of economic power and the self-propagation of exploitation.
On a plot level Cities of the Weft describes a war between wizards in the post-nuclear future of Earth. One of the wizards killed God and, ever since, the cabal has been in heated competition to secure the power of God. In order to facilitate their plans, Nathaniel and Cassandra Treeves create a son who they imbue with the will of God. This boy, Nathan, becomes entangled in the plots of his parents, the Master of Mordew and other members of the tontine. Meanwhile a faction of science-minded people called the Assembly have formed an “Atheistic Crusade” and have plans to purge the world of these wizards and their schemes. However I hesitate to talk too much about the plot of Cities of the Weft as if that was the point of the trilogy. There is a plot. It’s actually quite thrilling. But, much like the Modernist novelists to whom Pheby is obviously indebted, the plot isn’t the main attraction. You don’t read Ulysses for the thrill of finding out what happens next.
There are occasions, especially in Mordew and in Waterblack where an audience might be permitted to nod sagely and say back to the text, “yes we’re all good Marxists here, so must we belabor the material interrogation of power relations?” but this is destabilized by the book’s vehement idealist metaphysical commitments, commitments that are not fully problematized until the climax of the trilogy.
Ultimately, with the Cities of the Weft trilogy we get a story that looks at the chosen one trope of fantasy fiction and turns it on its head, that then interrogates what it means to be a protagonist and invert that arrangement before finally beginning to question even the authority provided by the formalities of the novel structure. It isn’t so much that the trilogy is unreliably narrated as that the trilogy invites the audience to question what we might mean by reliability in the first place.
In Letter to a Harsh Critic, Gilles Deleuze says, “I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.” In a way this is precisely what Pheby accomplishes with this trilogy – taking the fantasy genre from behind and giving it a monstrous child of its own. The challenges the text makes to received tropes, to the structure of the novel, to the questions of power and authority engage deeply with fantasy and science fiction but do so in a way that reveals much of the dark heart of the genre. The narrator asks the reader quite straightforwardly, “A boy like him only wishes to be loved, and no amount of death can achieve that.
“Once in the slums of Mordew, when he was too young to know better, his father made a boat for him from paper and cat bones. Together, hand in hand, they sailed down a river of ordure and rainwater. Who would Nathan have to kill to make this happen again?” in the full knowledge of how many books before it would have gladly let the young protagonist, come into his power and inheritance, kill and kill to set the world right.
Metaphysical Commitments
The world of Mordew has a very specific metaphysical arrangement. There is a realm of material and a realm of concept. These both exist within the weft but are effectively opposite poles of the weft. The material is, simply put, what both is possible and that is. The realm of concept is, in its absolute form, that which is impossible and that which is not. The weft gives rise to the Weftling (which is also known as God) and this entity is said, by in-universe documents found throughout the appendices of the books, to be the sum totality of all that is impossible. The weftling regulates the material through the presence of its body as that sum of all that is impossible. Considering the association of the impossible with the conceptual we can suggest that we can extrapolate that the weftling, and the realm of concept which is functionally coterminous with it, represents the sum of all those things that can be imagined but that do not exist in the world.
The Weftling is also dead, killed by Nathaniel Treeves as part of his activity within the Weftling tontine – the formal name for the wizard war that occupies the principal action of the story. Through the murder of God, the occultists of the Tontine were able to access godlike powers which each uses in a different way.
But, to talk about wizards bringing about miracles via the murder of God, we must necessarily get at the question of will. And here, I think, the book begins to show its hand somewhat with how it describes will as an itch. When the sensation of the itch becomes too much to bear then a magic user might scratch it. This metaphysical scratching causes a change in the world. A half-living fluke might become a rat. A boy might become a book, or a Bellows.
This aligns with a Deleuzean read of the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power: “for Nietzsche, the capacity for being affected is not necessarily a passivity but an affectivity, a sensibility, a sensation. It is in this sense that Nietzsche, even before elaborating the concept of the will to power and giving it its full significance, was already speaking of a feeling of power,” Deleuze says in Nietzsche and Philosophy and I think that this affective read of the will to power, the idea of will as being a pathos plays out at multiple valences in the story – starting with Nathan’s primitive itch and scratch experimentations but going all the way to the Master’s complex ritual to create a Bellows being guided almost entirely by his own loneliness and alienation or the way in which the Mistress of Malarkoi constructs perfect heavens for each of her sacrifices in order to right the balance with them.
Now this opens up two additional avenues for exploring the metaphysics of the Cities of the Weft books. The first is to begin looking at what exists between the pure material and the purely conceptual. In the Cities of the Weft trilogy magic users frequently create “intermediate realms.” These realms are spaces that operate on different balances of material and conceptual. Within them the wizard who created them has great leeway to design the rules – in intermediate realms impossible things become possible. In an intermediate realm time might move differently. It might be an eternal reward for a sacrifice. It might be a home for creatures that do not exist – people with the heads of cattle, snakes with the heads of people, dragons or the like. An intermediate realm is not fully material; elements of it are impossible and insufficient power has been expended by the wizard to bring these impossible elements fully into the world. But they’re more material than the zone of pure concept that represents a return to the weft.
The other avenue is to explore how the metaphysics of the world treats power as transactional. At a metaphysical level this is described as “spark”. Any living being has a spark. This spark is representative of a being’s potential, so the most potent sparks exist in the youngest beings – infants or even embryos – with their whole lives ahead of them everything they might be remains potential, it remains possible but not manifest in the world, conceptual in character. A magic user can use their own spark to fuel their magic but this is destructive to them. Drawing too heavily on one’s spark drains the magic user of materiality – as they return their spark to the Weft to fuel drawing the impossible down into the world they become more concept-like and less material themselves. The other option is to sacrifice other beings and to harvest their spark. But this act creates an obligation on the part of the magic user. And this brings us to another key discourse that the Cities of the Weft trilogy explores regarding power: the obligation of the powerful to their victims.
Power and Obligation
In Waterblack Nathan Treeves, the failed chosen-one of Mordew finally comes into his inheritance as the Master of Waterblack, city of the dead. Waterblack is Dublin now sunk by catastrophe to the bottom of the ocean but, more than that, it is the place where the spirits of the dead congregate to seek recompense or revenge. He travels the city, guided by dead cats called the Sparkline Actuaries – beings who exist to tally that which is owed to the dead and how it is repaid. Each of the dead plays out the tableau of their death at a window of a building within the city until the Master of the city chooses to make right their death. Nathan discovers his father, the one who actually killed God, accomplished this supernal feat of magic by sacrificing an army of men: “there were too many of these soldiers to count- like the facets, they were so similar that it was hard to separate them as individuals – but there must have been tens of thousands of soldiers, all in the same uniform, all adopting the same posture… they had all died at once, in the same place, of the same action, and that action was caused by his father.”
Nathaniel Treeves rejected his duty to the souls of the dead and went to live in the slums of Mordew with his wife where the Lungworm created by his own guilt at his refusal of his moral obligation of his victims and the presence of Nathan, crafted by his parents as a vessel for God’s will, slowly consumed him.
Nathan is then led to his own quarter of the city, in which his victims are housed. Having learned from the failure of his father Nathan understands his obligation to his victims. The first of these he encounters are the “Alifongers” (elephants) who he killed in Mordew in wrath after being deceived by the Master of Mordew that his friends had betrayed him. The girl Prissy had loved the Alifongers and so, unwilling to exact his revenge directly, Nathan scourged the last three of these creatures out of the world with heavenly fire. He must craft of them angels in order to right his debt. However even this is insufficient, the actuaries add a tally for cruelty owing to the manner in which Nathan destroyed the creatures and the terror he caused the infant Alifonger. To fully make right the debt, Nathan must grant that the Alifongers will be allowed to exact their revenge when the time comes. And so he fully realizes the obligation of power in the most full manner by allowing his victims to trample him to death. This act of self-sacrifice rights the scales.
But this obligation does not just follow the Treeves family. Clarissa, Nathan’s mother, tries to dodge this obligation by using her own fertilized embryos, frozen at the moment of fertilization in a form of magical stasis, to fuel her workings. With this power she nearly supplants God before being destroyed by the Master of Mordew. However the Mistress of Malarkoi also understands clearly that she has an obligation to her dead. Rather than resurrection and the creation of angels which Nathan undertakes, the Mistress constructs intermediate realm “heavens” to house each soul that is sacrificed to her. And she demands many sacrifices of her followers – she claims that she requires only the second-born of each family but she is distant from the material realm, residing in a deep intermediate realm, and Sharli’s story suggests that many more than just the second-born children are sacrificed by her priests.
The Master of Mordew attempts to avoid his obligations through the use of much more material exploitation. Mordew, the remains of Paris, is a city of industry and capital. The Master lives in a mansion at the top of a magical glass road enchanted to keep out the hoi polloi and he tries to fulfill his obligations with coin – paying for the boys that fuel his magics. Furthermore he rarely sacrifices these boys straight-out, instead preferring to transform and transmute them to serve his needs. A boy becomes a book. A boy becomes a Bellows. A boy becomes a tinderbox. The Master also supplements his power with proximity to the corpse of God, housed in a chamber beneath the city. However for all his cunning the Master is, perhaps, ultimately, the weakest member of the Tontine as he seems most afraid to have to make good on his debts. He’s ripped to pieces by Nathan’s dog, resurrected by Nathan after having been killed by the Master once before and elevated to deific status as Goddog, and has no power to prevent this retribution.
This idea that the exercise of power creates a life-debt carries out through most levels of the book. Sharli’s progress as an assassin shows how the exercise of power upon her necessarily creates an obligation toward her in those who wield power in purely material concepts. Through the taking of slaves and the rape off slave girls the nail factory overseer comes to owe his life to Sharli, who happily takes it. Her path to becoming an assassin becomes a dark reflection of Nathan’s journey through the sunken city of Waterblack. She learns the methods of taking and wielding of power just as he learns the methods of reconciling and repaying the victims of power. She is at once a wielder of power and a victim of the same.
Throughout all this, there is a sense of the occult around these obligations to the exploited. The closest we see to an agency here is the sparkline actuaries but it’s entirely unclear where they came from or who created them. Nathaniel abandons mastery of Waterblack because he refuses to make good the obligation he holds to his dead – an obligation the sparkline actuaries are all too willing to make Nathan aware of. The book describes the sparkline actuaries as being like factotums for Nathan. So long as he is operating within the bounds of granting the dead recompence or revenge – as is his duty – he simply has to will something and the Actuaries make it so.
Nathan’s resurrection and restoration into his city is accomplished via a massive sacrifice from the Mistress of Waterblack, who uses the accumulated spark of a billion infants to return Nathan to the world. When he makes good on that obligation by resurrecting the infants into a massive army of angelic cherubs all he needs to do is signal to the sparkline actuaries that it is to be done and it is done. But why Waterblack holds dead cats of remarkable occult power, why these creatures are tasked with counting the debt of the living to the dead, who created them and to what end, all these questions remain unanswered.
This occultism is also reflected in the deeds of the Mistress of Waterblack, who seeks to escape the bounds of physical and conceptual alike by summoning the mysterious counterpart to the Weftling, called the Warpling. Her methods of sacrificial magic and her methods of reconciling her debt to her sacrifices becomes one of occult sympathy. We are able to see only a small number of heavens – the intermediate realms of the cow-headed people, the person-headed snakes, the immortal wolves and deer of the druids, the shadowy realm of the ominous Roi de l’Ombre, the personal intermediate realm of the Mistress and the heaven of Joes are all shown to us. But there are an infinitude more such heavens and each of those seems to share structural similarities to the Golden Pyramid of the Mistress that anchors the path through these intermediate realms back to the material. These books always withhold just enough from us to prevent the audience from having any sort of systematic understanding of magic. As magic is the drawing down of the conceivable impossible into the material it has rules but those rules are necessarily partially withheld from the readers.
But these wizards and their occult practices are not the only force in the world. There is also the Assembly.
Bringing science to the god war
One thing I found fascinating about the Assembly parts of this series – both the extended sequence in Waterblack during which Sharli lives in New Juda and the various Assembly documents that populate the appendices across all three volumes – is the way in which the tone of the book shifts when it follows the Assembly. The fantasy elements of chosen ones, gods, wizards and their occult bargains slip away and we get a very science-fictional setting populated by materialist characters who all talk like PhDs. Some Assembly documents become so technical that they’re almost as opaque as the vagaries of magical obligation but not because of any occult element so much as the rigor and structural complexity on display.
The first glance inside the Assembly looks quite utopian. We see a rational world guided by the most educated. Having looked at the outcome of nuclear war that the trilogy intimates was set off by Nathaniel Treeves in his effort to kill god, the Assembly has revised even warfare into a series of numbered “atheistic crusades” led by scholars and operating within the oversight of an ethics committee like you would expect to find at a university.
The people of the Assembly live lives of ease. They have whole streets traversed by dancing and those people who aren’t engaged either in the academy or its crusades against false gods live lives of leisure and artistic exploration. If you are a citizen of the Assembly you need not fear the capitalist exploitation of Mordew nor the ritual sacrifice of Malarkoi.
But then you find out what keeps the Assembly going.
The Assembly is powered by power plants that depend on the differential between what the material realm should be and what it is as a result of the death of God and the weakening of the bounds between the material and conceptual this brings about. The reason that the Atheistic Crusades always end in a stalemate where the Tontine is not destroyed and where the Assembly withdraws to within its prior borders is because the Assembly needs the exploitation of Mordew and Malarkoi in order for its culture of scholasticism and artistic expression to continue.
Furthermore the ethicists of the Assembly have carefully built an epistemology that justifies the horrible thing the Assembly does on crusade. Their method of dealing with gods and wizards is to create a baited trap. Once the target enters the trap they are crucified and then their nervous system is cut out of them while they still live with a knife that is basically the Subtle Knife from Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. We are told on multiple occasions that this method of execution is particularly excruciating.
The ethical justification given is that the Assembly doesn’t really believe any members of the Tontine are still alive.
This is justified via a series of brief materialist tracts regarding the nature of the soul. Across these “soul propagandas” the idea is put forth that the translation of a body into a new realm is necessarily destructive. The being who is created when one transitions from the material realm to the intermediate realm may contain all the memories of the prior person but there is no continuity of body. And without a continuity of body there is no continuity of being. Likewise anyone resurrected from death or restored as an angel cannot be seen as the same person according to Assembly propaganda. Weft-manipulators (wizards and gods) are parasites who pervert the natural order. They might hold memories of long-dead occultists but, to the Assembly, they are not those people. They’re not really people at all. They’re concepts that have a bit too much solidity. On this basis their military leadership sees no ethical issues with slowly torturing them to death. Even if the “parasite” in question is a young boy who only ever wanted to be loved.
The Assembly have constructed a new super-weapon – a “weft bomb” – that collapses intermediate realms down into the material realm. The detonation of such a weapon and the massive chaos it causes represents the climax of the trilogy but this act also puts lie to the idea that the Atheistic Crusades have truly learned from the dangers of nuclear holocaust. Their weft bomb creates a level of chaotic destruction easily equivalent to a nuclear detonation.
It seems like the lesson the Assembly teaches us is that a utopia built upon the necessary exploitation of those outside the utopia remains false. It is simply a re-articulation of the logic of empire, which maintains luxury at the core through the oppression of the periphery. The luxury in which the Assembly lives depends on the sacrificial altars of Malarkoi and the slave-factories of Mordew even as the artists and academics who populate it construct logical arguments for why they’re so superior to the priests and the slave takers of the wizard-cities.
The powers of the false
Another Deleuzean concept that seems built into the theoretical backbone of the trilogy is the idea of the powers of the false. This is a concept that argues that difference arises from repetition – that, contrary to Socratic and even contemporary Baudrillardian conceptions of the order of simulacra, there is a productive potential in the simulacrum. While Baudrillard looks for truth in the simulacrum the Deleuzean reading argues that it is in falsity that the simulacrum has power.
Nathan appears to be a simulacrum on his surface – a boy gestated by two wizards and aged rapidly to fit the timeline of their plans – he holds part but not all of his father’s name. He is, in many ways, his father come again. He ascends to mastery over Waterblack on the shoulders of a mass sacrifice much as his father did. But where his father was incapable of looking at the moral weight of his own actions and where he thus left his dead to languish in the sunken city, Nathan, who only ever wanted to be loved, is able to break the cycle and redeem the dead as they should have been. What power Nathan holds is in the imperfection of how he copies Nathaniel. In Cinema 2 Deleuze says, “the imaginary will appear in the form of caprice and discontinuity, each image being in a state of disconnection with another into which it is transformed.”
And for Deleuze the linkage between these imaginary linkages and the “real” linkages which follow logically one image to the next leads to the construction of a concept that problematizes the idea of truth., “Leibniz says that the naval battle may or may not take place, but that this is not in the same world: it takes place in one world and does not take place in a different world and these two worlds are possible but not compossible with each other.”
Deleuze cites Borges as pointing out that this incompossibility does not fully solve the problem of truth as it leads to an infinite forking of incompossible possibilities – what Pratchett might call the Trousers of Time. He says in such cases that “narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying. For Deleuze this falsifying narrative “poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts.”
Considering how this trilogy handles time I suspect that this is something that is being deliberately foregrounded. Time is messy in Cities of the Weft. The narrative jumps around between past and present for one. Half the events of Waterblack happen significantly before the events of Mordew from a straightforward chronological perspective but that’s the least of it. As well as an out-of-order narrative we have time-traveling ghost dogs who are rewriting history as the story progresses; they kill a cruel dog breeder and replace him with his own ghost made just material enough to supplant the original. In this way we have a situation where two incompossible presents (one in which Heartless Harold Smyke lives and one in which he is killed by ghost dogs) are made fundamentally simultaneous. And from this act of suspended incompossibility we get Anaxemenes – the World Saviour – a talking dog who might also be the messiah. He is, after all, a child of Sirius the Goddog.
Likewise the Master’s intermediate realms all operate on different time scales. As he goes about recreating Bellows he manipulates time in ways that are quite harmful to his own body.
But, at a fundamental level, time is quite vague in the book. We know that the Tontine were in each other’s orbit in 2024 – the only named year in the trilogy – and that subsequent to their encounter in 2024 Nathaniel Treeves started a nuclear war and then an indeterminate period of time followed. Geography is reshaped. Dublin, now Waterblack, sinks beneath the ocean. Paris, now Mordew, rests at the coast of a grand ocean. How long any of this took is really anyone’s guess. There were seven Atheistic Crusades launched by the Assembly before the trilogy but we don’t know how long any of them took. In fact very little accounting is made for the time of travel across the series. Nathan goes from Mordew to Malarkoi in a page. It takes chapters for Prissy, Gam and Dashini to reach the Mistress in her pyramid and along the way they encounter a deer who can reset time. How long any of these various transversals took is unclear.
In the case of Sharli she is frequently knocked unconscious then carried to a new place. This disorients us as to how long it took for her to travel from Malarkoi to Mordew or from Mordew to New Judah. This book rarely tells us what is simultaneous because we rarely know precisely when any given deed occurs. The fact that any given character might be operating on an entirely different time scale from the others means that we are left adrift, without an anchor in time to keep the sequence of events truthful. By mystifying time the incompossible presents are more comfortably able to occupy the page together.
It doesn’t help that the wizards of the Tontine are functionally immortal. In fact we see the Master, during one sequence in Malarkoi, copy himself. The copy subsequently murders the “original” with a shotgun. But, of course, the Assembly would contend that the original, by translating himself to an intermediate realm, was also a copy. In fact we don’t know how many copies of copies of copies exist of each member of the tontine. There are at least two Masters, there are at least two Clarissas. The Mistress is able to grant her essence to other people, such as Prissy and Dashini, making them her heirs but also, in an ineffable way, her, again. Sharli, too, is duplicated. In a straightforward way one of the Haley Beths of the Assembly takes on her appearance and replaces her. Again we find power in the false. “This was not the replacement of Sharli, that he loved, this was the original Sharli, for whom he had no feeling.” We read in the appendices to Malarkoi, describing the reaction of Deaf Sam the assassin and Sharli’s lover to her changing personality. It’s in her falsity that she had the power to cause him to love her. Sharli, the original Sharli, goes through so many transformations in essence. She is a substandard child in Malarkoi, safe in her neglect, ill-suited for anything. The Assembly transforms her and she becomes a bright and perfect child, a perfect ritual sacrifice. She flees and becomes a slave who can only see herself as a nail. She escapes to a brothel and becomes an assassin. She reunites with the assembly and becomes a god-killer. The book invites us to see Sharli the insufficient child and Sharli the god-killer and to question how much of the original Sharli, the essential Sharli is present in the revised one.
The Assembly adheres to a strict and rigid set of dogmas that insist each of these identical doubles are unique entities with no continuity but that the transformed Sharli, who is so different from where she began, is the same person she ever was. Their “soul propagandas” are presented like straightforward fact, without art or adornment. They have the air of an informational pamphlet. And then the book invites the readers to doubt that the Assembly really knows what the hell they’re talking about.
Power as violence
This trilogy pulls no punches when it comes to the question of the moral dimension of violence. The clearest articulation of this comes in the simple realization Nathan has at the end of it all, “better to die, he understood now, than to be a devil.”
Power is omnipresent in the Cities of the Weft trilogy. We encounter it first in Mordew in two intertwining forms: the power of magic and the power of capital. The class dynamics of Mordew, the city, are realized across the trilogy in scintillating and wholly disdainful clarity. Aristocrats are first encountered as, “fragile, ornate delicacies of people, ornate and rare,” but the second they speak they show their ugliness, “He must know that it is a crime for a slum child to come so high into the city. And to invade here, our place of beauty and spoil it, is a greater crime still,” says the man with the faun coloured birthmark – a rich man all too willing to go slumming for his own amusement, effectively calling being poor a crime in and of itself.
This is just one of a thousand vignettes across the trilogy that reveal a pervasive moral vacuum among the aristocrats and merchants of this story. If being poor is a crime then being rich is a moral failing. This is reflected in Waterblack with Sharli’s early experiences as an assassin. She follows Anatole, her first mentor in assassination into a restaurant where he goes to sing. She is seated near a table occupied by the mercantile riche who are arguing loudly about bourgeois politics: “Because the sound of his voice filled the restaurant, the four at the table seemed to find this appropriate cover for the resumption of their argument. It began again with some half-hearted apologies for having overspoken, but almost immediately devolved back into insults, albeit delivered with slightly less volume.
“In any case, Sharli’s experience of the song was ruined.”
When Sharli murders one of the four along with nearly her whole family they are compared to pigs to the slaughter.
Sharli’s perspective is also used to demonstrate the moral emptiness of the priests of Mordew who sacrifice the best children to fuel the mystical rites of their Mistress. But, even if she is molded by the cruelty and violence of the world around her, Sharli is not absolved of the moral weight of her murders and tortures. The trilogy proper, notwithstanding the essential appendices, ends with Sharli reunited with the other assassins. “The sun sank, reddening the sky, the braziers seemed to brighten, and Sharli knew Mr Padge would emerge, sooner rather than later, with a job.
“This, though she had agreed to forget it, was heaven for her.” If there is redemption to be found it is in the self-sacrificial act of Nathan, who allows himself to be trampled to death by alifonjers. As he lies, dead, a firebird descends and shelters him beneath its fiery wings. While the book never tells us if he is restored by his friends we must remember that the phoenix is ultimately one of the key symbols of resurrection.
But the trilogy takes a broad view of power and its violence. Within the books power is the imposition of will from one party upon another. This central violence is ascribed even to the power of a book to order narrative. Waterblack begins by admonishing readers not to be preoccupied with plot and then jams the resolution to the stories of many of the characters into appendices, segregated by category from the story-proper. There is a magic book in the trilogy – it was made out of a boy, transformed by the magic of the Master and the Mistress. It can reveal anything on its pages. It is Bellows’ brother and its name is Adam Birch. Near the end of the appendices we learn that this is, in fact, the book we have been reading all along. “Read me from start to finish, if you wish. Or skip through me. Or flick here and there. Dog-ear my pages, if you must: the choice is yours. Only, do not tell me what I must be: we are all different, I as much as you, and so may it remain forever.”
The trilogy attempts to divest itself of the power to order its own narrative. It deliberately eschews the agency of the protagonist, ends on a cliffhanger with nearly no connection to the rest of the story, it regularly implores the audience to remember that narrative attention is a form of power that imposes the will of the Author on the audience. This book says it wants to be a form of difference in itself.
But then the review is also a form of power. The studious and well-read critic sits down to tell an audience what the book is Really All About. If I read these volumes and I see a vast construct of Deleuzean theory fiction, if I give preference to the powers of the false, or the will to power as an affective phenomenon, if I highlight the uneasy balancing of materialist commitments and socialist politics with a post-Kantian focus on the idea of the transcendental concept, if I try to tell you, the audience reading that review that these are the machinery underpinning this strange work of art, this is, in a way a violence I am doing to you. I barely mentioned that the three talking dogs, Anaximander, Thales and Anaximenes are named for the three most famous pre-Socratic Hellenic philosophers. I drew parallels between Sharli and Nathan but failed to mention that Sharli was apprenticed in the same brothel as Prissy’s sister. I feel like I must, if I am to give a true account of these books, surrender my own authority as a critic. And yet I read what I read and saw what I saw.
Books, as a whole, are marvelous things – they fully suspend time. As a critic I rifle the pages of three volumes, pulling this or that quote to support my statements. Adam Birch is right – the choice of how one reads a book depends entirely upon the reader. Read it in order or out. Read it closely or read it shallowly. A book is full of contradiction and this book, and you will note I have pivoted from calling it a trilogy to calling it a book now, is no exception. It’s hard to square the command to read as you will with the statement from the dramatis personae of Waterblack: “Providing you are not one of those inadequate readers whose eyes skip across the page in search of ‘what happens next’ you will learn the meanings of the phrases above and how they are used in context. If you are one of those skipping inadequates, there is little chance you are reading these words in any case, since they do not relate directly to the ‘plot’.” Each image is in a state of disconnection with another into which it is transformed. An admonishment to read closely and not to fix upon plot becomes an encouragement to read as you will.
And so read.
