Book Notes - Notorious Sorcerer, by Davinia Evans

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RichardAbbottRichardAbbott
in Book Reviews

This is the first book in The Burnished City series, of which the second (Shadow Baron) has just been published. @Apocryphal flagged it up to me a while back, and at the time, my local bookseller hadn't come across comment positive or negative. It seems intended to be a duology and both books are longish - around 450 print pages - and although on occasion I wondered if some of the length could have been trimmed, by and large Notorious Sorcerer keeps you going at a reasonable pace.

It's a fantasy setting in the city Bezim which Davinia Evans likens to Byzantium, but which to me felt like Renaissance Italy or possibly parts of the Far East - lots of different factions, including Montague / Capulet style feuding gangs, a posh aristocracy with refined and exotic tastes, a city district known for high-class gambling and prostitution, a grindingly poor working class mainly involved with fishing... and a whole gaggle of alchemists working at different levels of sophistication and mastery. Alchemy is tolerated by the governing body, so long as it is used only for minor tricks, and "proper" magic is illegal and punished by exile (for the wealthy and powerful) or poisoning (for the rest). The dividing line between the two levels of alchemy/sorcery is unclear, and the theory of magic proposed in the book strongly suggests there's no real difference. 

Our hero, Siyon Velo, is originally a member of a poor fishing family, then a member of one of the gangs (Little Bracken), and currently a procurer of exotic ingredients for the alchemists. He has considerable native talent, but the main advantage he has at the start of the book is a huge array of contacts with people at all levels of society. To some extent he can be seen as the Hero Whose Coming is Prophesied... except that there are no prophecies! There is, however, a general realisation amongst practitioners at all levels that there's something profoundly out of balance in the world, conceived as four interlocking planes loosely related to the four elements earth, water, air and fire. And as the plot develops, apparently only Siyon can fix things, with a little help from his friends.

Davinia isn't a Tolkien as regards the language underpinning her world, and every now and again her choice of words kind of threw me out of the book - for example one of the gangs is called Haruspex, but they have nothing to do with the ancient world, nor augury, nor divination - so far as I can tell it's just a cool-sounding name. The main characters are all quite young - she describes in a postscript how she'd changed her mind a couple of times as to Siyon's age and background, and for my taste I'd have liked a few more mature individuals in key narrative roles. But I guess she chose in the end (or was advised) to pitch at a younger readership. As it stands, even the married couples come across as only barely familiar with one other (and usually finding excuses to spend time with other pursuits than each other) so again come over as basically quite immature.

Her social structure is very interesting, especially when the characters start to find unexpected relationships between card games or opera plots and alchemical practice. A major theme of the book is that of uncovering alternate paradigms for looking at the same phenomena, and that any one approach in isolation will not get very far. That was a fascinating aspect of the book. But on the social front, I never got a clear sense of how big the city was or how many people lived in it - it seemed just to expand every now and again with new groups of people when needed for the plot. For example, all of a sudden the city is swarming with hundreds of "inquisitors" - a word with religious overtones, but they have nothing to do with religion and are in fact a kind of alchemical police force. Where were all these people before, who controls them, and what do they do when not combing the streets for our hero and his friends? So the description of the city left me with more questions than answers. I'm assuming (from occasional hints in this book) that the second will focus more on the gambling district.

But where Davinia Evans really shines, I think, is in the cosmology of her world. The four planes aren't just a rehash of our four elements, but have been thought through creatively in terms of appearance, occupants, emotional weight and affinity in this plane (the Mundane), trappings that you'd use to access them, and so forth. This attention to cosmology really carries the book through the other difficulties mentioned, and came over to me as very convincing. I imagine that the second in the series will delve more into that, as each of the planes is intriguing in its own right and worth exploring some more.

So all in all a very good but not (I think) a great book. I'll happily tackle the second in the series at some point but will let the first one settle a bit before doing so. It'll also be interesting to see if she gets caught up in the world and just keeps writing books set in it, or if she'll stop after #2 and move to something else.

Who would like it? I think it is a younger person's book more than older, especially considering the characters and their (lack of) real emotional depth. It doesn't rely heavily on standard fantasy tropes so might well be accessible to folk who haven't read much fantasy before. But for someone like me who has read a lot of fantasy it still worked as a concept - I don't think it's quite so original as maybe the blurb about it suggests, but aspects of how the ideas were developed were certainly new, and it's definitely not just a rehash of older sword-and-sorcery plots. In short, I'd be happy to recommend to a range of readers of different experience and taste, who want some fantasy writing that's set in a slightly unusual context.

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