I listened to a podcast recently in which the interviewee reflected on the brutality of his years at an English boarding school. It was clear to me that the experience was utterly emotionally devastating at the time; even decades later he was still in pain from it. He did very well to talk coherently nonetheless, and I recall that he mentioned the effectiveness of these boarding schools at generating colonial officers capable of perpetrating cruelties across the globe in the name of empire.
This resonated with a few things I’d been thinking about, one being the enduring success of the genre of magical academia. I think I enjoyed Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education because it’s one of the few books I’ve encountered in the genre that doesn’t covertly (or otherwise) celebrate the existence of elite academic instutitions. The Scholomance, Novik’s magical boarding school, is a sort of Howl’s moving castle in the void, filled with unsupervised wizard children and a menagerie of vicious and hungry monsters. It’s a horrifying place, and there’s no reprieve of holidays at home – once in, the only way out is to make a run for the gates at the end of senior year, hoping you’ve learned enough to survive the monsters.
The Scholomance, then, is a grim inevitability for a child with magical powers, not a thrilling validation of inherent specialness. In this way it put me in mind of Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch books, which I adored as a child even though part of their delight was in how bleak the school seemed, how stern the mistresses, how miserable the cells into which the girls were locked each night like little anchoresses. I dreamed of being similarly locked away, with my regulation black cat purring on my pillow and a residue of pondweed-gathered-at-midnight on my fingers and the sound of the bats in my window awakening in the moonlight. The Scholomance resists such fantasising, as the idea of being trapped in the bowels of a semi-sentient monster-infested architectural absurdity lumbering through the void is decidedly less appealing.
A Deadly Education takes place entirely within the Scholomance, and from this resolutely non-aspirational environment Novik takes aim at elitist institutions which share power and privilege amongst a lucky few. In her magical universe those institutions are enclaves, and they’re a beautifully-imagined creation – I especially loved the explanation of how the London enclave survived the Blitz without being cast off entirely into the void. But where another writer might have romanticised these, Novik makes it clear that they are utterly unfair, creating advantages for their members that dramatically increase their chances of survival at the expense of those from the outside.
El, Novik’s protagonist, is one of these outsiders, and her life is made more difficult still because she’s ‘strict mana’. This means she generates and stores all her own magical power, rather than drawing it from the world around her. It’s a kind of do-no-harm approach encouraged in El’s childhood by her mother Gwen and rewarded with ice cream. This gave me a little bit of whiplash as I think veganism would have been more in line with Gwen’s spiritual ideals, but perhaps it was non-dairy? Anyway, El sticks to the approach because it turns out she has an affinity for dark magic and if she so much as sacrificed an ant to turn a piece of bread into a slice of cake she’d probably raise a demon army by mistake.
I always thoroughly enjoy a magical system that can be used as a way of understanding a real-world challenge. While reading about the ways in which Novik’s wizards power their incantations I thought of the emotional mechanisms that power human action, and the ways in which strength and social prestige can be generated through cruelty, either to other people or to parts of ourselves. I was also struck by El’s first experience of power-sharing from an enclave after spending her whole life generating her own mana. I think it’s clearly a metaphor for money and influence, and for how much easier life is when you are surrounded by money from birth, but I also felt a sense in which it stands in for love, and for the enormous privilege of being surrounded by love in childhood and therefore learning how to receive it, give it, and trust it. El has love in abundance from Gwen but she’s suffered total ostracisation from all communities she’s hoped to be a part of; watching her tentatively build alliances and even friendships gives a really lovely emotional arc to the story.
A Deadly Education is the first in a trilogy, and I haven’t read the other installments yet. My hope is that El will use her beautiful book flung out of the void from Baghdad a few centuries ago to build some kind of anti-enclave and take down the whole system in a way that feels convincing and inspiring. I’d also love to see a resolution of her personal story that perhaps offers some hope for anyone who struggles with powerful but destructive emotional drives, as we’ve seen the beginnings of that very successfully negotiated in this book.