Book review: Navola

By Paolo "Windup Girl" Bacigalupi. Sadly, not up to that. It is long and, as I suppose I should have guessed in this debased age, is but the first volume of some trilogy if I suppose it sells well. Despite all my whinges below I enjoyed perhaps the first third, and did after all finish the thing.

The setting is yer familiar Italian city-states era kind of place and time; think Children of Earth and Sky; at least, I think Italian, because there are lots of invented words that end in "i". And the loving depictions of the banking system fit what I picked up from Wolf Hall; and the interspersed "legends" of the gods seem very romanesque. Sufficiently so that perhaps it should have been set in a rather more real Italy; that might have offered enough constraint to provide some backbone to the tale; authors with complete freedom are apt, as here, to find their story flopping around the edges and in need of propping up.

I am also disappointed in the dragon's eye. The dragon could have been the best part of this; in many ways, despite its rather brief appearance, it still is. But that leaves the tale unbalanced: there is precisely one magical artifact in this world, and no hint of magic elsewhere, and yet no-one displays any interest in it as such; and it does so little in the book besides providing a convenient escape route for Our Hero at the end.

This Goodreads review tells me that it is a "masterpiece of storytelling worthy of comparison with many of the finest works of fantasy, stretching as far back as [redacted] finest. It is a historical fantastical epic replete with elegant world-building... that will introduce readers to an intoxicating blend of intrigue and horror". That is all drivel. It is instead rather formulatic; we have the cunning banker who outwits everyone and so on; we have an instantly recognisable cast of characters; the intrigue is kinda Dune-like, and I don't mean that as a compliment. As to the world-building; it is a long book without really anything to say, and so inevitably ends up full of world-building; it isn't as bad as Eye of the World though.

This one says it is "very gory and excessively sexually explicit". I don't think that is right either. There is one sex scene - somewhat jarring, and badly written - because it is necessary that OH gets off with Our Heroine before they are parted, but I think we could have been spared the details; and there is a little gore towards the end; but just like with the dragon, the book is so unbalanced in these respects. The sex scene is also deeply weird, because it occurs on OHi's nominal wedding night, and starts with OHi draped only in the flimsiest of bedwear, through which her alluring body can be glimpsed, and then she gets up, OH shuts his eyes for a moment, and suddenly she is dressed in her wedding outfit. Which he then rips off, obvs. But FFS, a wedding gown of that period is not a thing you get into or out of quickly, or indeed without a maid or seamstress to help you. I'm also doubtful about the absence of serving maids; but this is all of a piece: while nominally set way-back-when, all the attitudes are modern.

OH does seem desperately wet; and his loving father does seem blind to how useless he would be. Towards the end, one of his trusted-retainers-who-yet-betrayed-him patiently explains to him, and to us, that this is why he betrayed him. This explanation is necessary, because it isn't natural. The plot requires the betrayal and downfall of the house of whatever-they-are-called, because Our Author has run out of interesting things to say about banking houses, but the total failure of his father to anticipate any of it is quite inexplicable in view of his previous omniscience; I feel that better "intrigue" was required here.