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[tealin]

I have the good fortune to share a house with someone who works for a book distributor. She gets all sorts of advance readers' copies (ARCs) of the books that she's distributing, usually long before they appear in the store. Unfortunately, she doesn't distribute HarperCollins, which publishes most of my favourite books, but I do get to read the Artemis Fowl and Bartimaeus books in advance. Every so often there'll be a brand new one that catches my attention, and the most recent of these was Fly By Night, by Frances Hardinge.
    It's certainly something. The world it creates is intricately detailed and well-organized, and once you learn how things work (it doesn't take very long) it feels like it could be completely real. It's been described as a 'fictionalized 18th-century England' but the only things that tie it to that reality are the costumes, the idea of coffee houses, and the authorities' fondness for capital punishment. If you take 18th-century England, make it polytheistic, add a long-running multi-candidate debate on royal succession, and throw in some very powerful guilds, then you might get close to the world in this book.
    The star is Mosca Mye, a 12-year-old orphan who, thanks to her late father's tutelage, loves to collect words. Aside from this idiosyncracy, she's pretty much like every plucky and resourceful orphan in literature, except that the story she's a part of does not follow the same narrative rules as Plucky Orphan stories usually do. The central character may be 12 but she lives in a very adult world equipped with more than its fair share of politics, and she gets inextricably entwined in them. There's all sorts of action and suspense and humour and all that, but the most riveting thing about the book is that you never know who the 'bad guy' is. As soon as you think you've got it figured out, the tables turn – sometimes 90°, sometimes 180°, sometimes upside down – and you have to approach the story from a whole different perspective.
    It's mostly about the power of words. You can tell it's a book written by someone who loves language, and I can see it being greedily devoured by aspiring young writers for the imaginative and illustrative way in which it is written, something you don't find much in modern straightforward, cut-and-dry fiction. Beyond the power the words have in telling the story, however, there is the power of propaganda, the power a few carefully-chosen words have to influence popular opinion, the power that comes from control of the press, the power of words that sneak out from under this control – and the powerful effect of flowery words on a compulsive collector thereof, which starts the whole thing rolling in the first place. It's also got a bit of a theological (or, hm, anti-theological) bent to it, though it stops short of being a sermon on secular humanism the way Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is, and instead promotes independent investigation into what is true ... so I suppose it's more agnostic than atheist.
    Anyway, it's about time I explain the drawings. The strikingly white lady is Lady Tamarind, sister to the duke of the principal location of the book, a city-state called Mandelion.* Being spotlessly, impeccably white is her trademark. Below are Hopewood Pertellis and Mosca Mye. Mosca, as I have mentioned, is the main character, and is often described as 'the ferrety-looking girl with unconvincing eyebrows' – the place where she grew up has some sort of calcareous rain that bleaches uncovered hair and gradually turns things to stone, so she draws on eyebrows with charcoal. Mr Pertellis is (without giving too much away) a teacher, and by far my favourite character, as you may be able to tell. Hopelessly idealistic and naive, he's also the sort of character that female writers seem to be very good at creating... I fear he may have a limited life expectancy.

Colouring things is addictive.
For those who are curious, Fly By Night is being published by Macmillan UK in Great Britain and Canada in October, and by HarperCollins (of course) in the States ... I don't know when they plan to release it, though.

*A sign that I have been reading Too Much Discworld: Mandelion has a river running through it. At one point, something drops in it (I believe it may be a shoe, but that's unimportant). In my mind, I did not picture it sinking right away. Help.

Comments

second part of second reply

[(Anonymous)]

The path was a troublesome, fretful thing. It worried that it was missing a view of the opposite hills and insisted on climbing for a better look. Then it found the breeze uncommonly chill and ducked back among the trees. It suddenly thought it had forgotten something and doubled back, then realized that it hadn't and turned about again. At last it struggled free of the pines, plumped itself down by the riverside, complained of its aching stones and refused to go any further. A sensible, well-trodden track took over ...


Living in England and being English the self-same thing as your aged experience and your intelligence and wisdom. My mind whispered vengence, for the insult this passage of clumsy expressions has done my mother tongue.
Read this confounded book, from which you have taken this passage, compare with other recognized classics and note the difference. No, my dear, it is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of common sense and fortune. I trust you have plenty of both.

Re: second part of second reply

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I never said this book was a classic, or destined to be one. In many ways it is obvious that it's a debut novel, and there are times that Ms Hardinge takes a little too much pleasure in her very decorative language. It doesn't stand up to many of the Greats in literature, but – and this is the basis for my mentioning it at all – it is a fair sight better than most of the swill cluttering up the YA bookshelves at the library. I know there are a number of aspiring writers who visit my webpage – and, by inference, my journal – and I thought they might appreciate a heads-up in regards to an upcoming book that actually uses some imaginative writing. I enjoyed it, whatever its literary merit, and I thought others would too. If you don't like Ms Hardinge's use of the language, you are perfectly welcome to avoid reading the book. I avoid Hemingway for the same reason, and he definitely has more 'literary merit' than some first-time novelist writing for 9- to 14-year-olds ... at least, according to people with degrees on the subject.