Kam
GOSH but I really enjoyed this book! It’s been a while since I read a book with prose like this, and not gonna lie, I thought it was great. It’s very lush and rich, heavy on the descriptions and artistic flourishes, in a way that reminds me of art nouveau, almost. Not everyone’s going to like it, but readers who enjoy that sort of thing will DEFINITELY love the writing style here.
I also really enjoyed the way the author twined the two different narratives together, in such a way that the timeline wasn’t entirely clear. In other novels this would be a failing, but in this novel it’s one of the highlights: the reader’s never really sure what events take place when, unless they’re able to pick up on the clues that are scattered throughout the text to indicate which events take place when. I thought it played a big role in slowly revealing to the reader who certain characters would turn out to be, which helped in understanding the history not just of the characters and their connections to each other, but of the city of Tiliard as a whole.
Speaking of Tiliard, I really liked how the city was a character in its own right, in a way that reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen. It was fascinating reading how the city was more than just a backdrop against which the rest of the story happened; instead, it was both a focal point for the plot, and a powerful force in shaping the characters. It has its own identity, a sense of itself, and seems to actively accept or resist the ways in which the characters try to shape it.
While there are plenty of themes that one can draw from this novel - the relationship between class, power, and art; the nature of monstrosity; and the concept of revolution as disease, among many others - but the one that still sticks with me now and which I don’t think is mentioned in other reviews is the cyclical nature of history, and how easy it is to manipulate the historical narrative. Throughout the story the powerful attempt to control the historical narrative for their own ends, often doing so to ensure that they remain in power. This is best reflected in the way they use the arts like painting and theatre: there is a line in the novel, about how nothing is worth remembering unless it is sung about, and throughout the book it is shown how the powerful attempt to control that history by controlling artists through a patronage system, as well as through state censorship. If the reader sees any parallels to real world attempts to control the arts and what the arts express, well… There is a good reason for that.
As for the cyclical nature of history, this is portrayed most clearly by the city itself, as well as the motifs around growth, rot, and regrowth that dominate the worldbuilding, and in the offhand remarks characters make about previous events. This also ties into the theatre motif: the actors might change, but the scripts and roles remain more or less the same. Any true break from the cycle requires extremely radical change, but even then, it doesn’t guarantee that the change will really stick. Like the stump on which Tiliard stands, and the river that flows beneath it, some forces are just too powerful to change in a single moment, and believing so is a futile hope.
If this book might be said to have a weakness, I personally think it’s the characters. Some are standouts, but there are moments when they fall a bit flat. Fortunately, those moments are fairly infrequent, or fairly easy to ignore in favor of the other elements of the story.
Overall, this was an excellent read. The prose is luscious, the worldbuilding is fantastic, and while the characters come across a bit flat at times, the rest of the novel does enough heavy lifting that some lapses in characterization are forgivable - especially when the city of Tiliard itself looms large as a character in its own right. That being said, the writing style might not sit well with some readers, so if one prefers a more spare, less ornate type of prose, then this is not a book one will enjoy.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.
GOSH but I really enjoyed this book! It’s been a while since I read a book with prose like this, and not gonna lie, I thought it was great. It’s very lush and rich, heavy on the descriptions and artistic flourishes, in a way that reminds me of art nouveau, almost. Not everyone’s going to like it, but readers who enjoy that sort of thing will DEFINITELY love the writing style here.
I also really enjoyed the way the author twined the two different narratives together, in such a way that the timeline wasn’t entirely clear. In other novels this would be a failing, but in this novel it’s one of the highlights: the reader’s never really sure what events take place when, unless they’re able to pick up on the clues that are scattered throughout the text to indicate which events take place when. I thought it played a big role in slowly revealing to the reader who certain characters would turn out to be, which helped in understanding the history not just of the characters and their connections to each other, but of the city of Tiliard as a whole.
Speaking of Tiliard, I really liked how the city was a character in its own right, in a way that reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen. It was fascinating reading how the city was more than just a backdrop against which the rest of the story happened; instead, it was both a focal point for the plot, and a powerful force in shaping the characters. It has its own identity, a sense of itself, and seems to actively accept or resist the ways in which the characters try to shape it.
While there are plenty of themes that one can draw from this novel - the relationship between class, power, and art; the nature of monstrosity; and the concept of revolution as disease, among many others - but the one that still sticks with me now and which I don’t think is mentioned in other reviews is the cyclical nature of history, and how easy it is to manipulate the historical narrative. Throughout the story the powerful attempt to control the historical narrative for their own ends, often doing so to ensure that they remain in power. This is best reflected in the way they use the arts like painting and theatre: there is a line in the novel, about how nothing is worth remembering unless it is sung about, and throughout the book it is shown how the powerful attempt to control that history by controlling artists through a patronage system, as well as through state censorship. If the reader sees any parallels to real world attempts to control the arts and what the arts express, well… There is a good reason for that.
As for the cyclical nature of history, this is portrayed most clearly by the city itself, as well as the motifs around growth, rot, and regrowth that dominate the worldbuilding, and in the offhand remarks characters make about previous events. This also ties into the theatre motif: the actors might change, but the scripts and roles remain more or less the same. Any true break from the cycle requires extremely radical change, but even then, it doesn’t guarantee that the change will really stick. Like the stump on which Tiliard stands, and the river that flows beneath it, some forces are just too powerful to change in a single moment, and believing so is a futile hope.
If this book might be said to have a weakness, I personally think it’s the characters. Some are standouts, but there are moments when they fall a bit flat. Fortunately, those moments are fairly infrequent, or fairly easy to ignore in favor of the other elements of the story.
Overall, this was an excellent read. The prose is luscious, the worldbuilding is fantastic, and while the characters come across a bit flat at times, the rest of the novel does enough heavy lifting that some lapses in characterization are forgivable - especially when the city of Tiliard itself looms large as a character in its own right. That being said, the writing style might not sit well with some readers, so if one prefers a more spare, less ornate type of prose, then this is not a book one will enjoy.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.