Farewell, void

I finished reading Novik’s Scholomance Trilogy with mixed feelings, and I’m inclined to be a little cautious expressing the more negative of these. While I felt like I was definitely the target audience for the other books I’ve been reading lately, I don’t think that was the case for this trilogy. I couldn’t quite tell whether it’s supposed to be YA, because the exposition is far too dense at times and more in line with the expectations I’d have of adult fantasy literature. But with the teenagers-saving-the-world plot, and the enemies-to-lovers tragic-ish heterosexual romance, and the school setting, not to mention a didactic authorial voice lurking beneath the exhausting snark of the protagonist, it seems that these books are not aimed at a reader of my advanced age. As such, I’ll see if I can keep my own exhausting snark to a minimum, out of respect for the author and her significant achievement with this series.

I enjoyed so many things in these books, and the quality of ideas is consistently high. I was impressed by this in the first book, A Deadly Education, and continued to appreciate Novik’s efforts to build on what she established early in the series. We learn in The Golden Enclaves that every enclave is created with malia - in Novik’s universe, this is the term for magical energy that is stolen, rather than gifted or earned. Using it always hurts others. The beautiful gardens in London’s enclave invite a comparison with the real-world splendours of this country that are built on stolen wealth, and its many institutions that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Now that I reread some of the passages I marked, I consider their invitations to political critique a little heavy-handed, but it didn’t bother me on a first reading, perhaps because I was wholeheartedly in agreement with El’s cause and excited to learn how she might build an alternative world.

The question of worldmaking is reminiscent of the final installment in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, another magical academia series published about a decade earlier than Novik’s. Like El, Quentin finds a spell that enables him to create an alternative world, a new magical realm. It’s a beautiful idea, because so much of Grossman’s trilogy is specifically about being an adult who never stopped seeking refuge in fantasy books. Seeing the protagonist create his own magical refuge was a moving way to conclude his story. El’s dream is less intellectual and more practical - the “magical doorway to a place of shelter”¹ she wants to build is an alternative to the existing enclave system, which is rooted in the most horrifying malia. The truth of this is revealed later in a shocking moment which skilfully draws together a few different story threads and drives the plot towards a satisfying conclusion, in which - as with any proper YA fantasy - we see the fragility of the post-dystopian world order, and resolve to apply our newfound revolutionary fervour to the real world.

(I said I’d keep my snark to a minimum, not eliminate it altogether, remember?)

Something I really enjoyed in A Deadly Education was El’s inner life, her volatile combination of talent and anger, and the ways in which Novik’s magical system works as an allegory for this experience, not just as a vehicle for political commentary. Throughout the second and third books, we see an interesting development of El’s abilities and her character. She becomes more like her mother, the spiritual healer Gwen, who doesn’t cast spells so much as just ask the universe for what she needs, when she needs it. And here’s the interesting thing - I think at one point in the series it’s pointed out that the ability to do magic is essentially the ability to store mana. Gwen can do this, but it seems that she doesn’t - she’s like the ideal countryside forager, only ever taking what she will use, always trusting nature to provide when she runs out.

And El develops her own magical ability profoundly influenced by this. Her killing spell, the one she invents herself, doesn’t actually draw on a huge amount of mana. It relies on simply saying “you’re already dead” - simply convincing the object of the casting that they cannot be alive, they cannot exist, it is an impossibility. The truth, as spoken by the sorceress, does nothing inherently destructive or murderous beyond resolving this impossibility. And that gets to the heart of an amazing and possibly underexplored facet of Novik’s system - magic depends on belief, not just the ability to store and draw on power. I was partly expecting the grand conclusion to the series to be a collective agreement among wizards to stop believing in monsters, as it’s explicitly stated that ‘mundanes’ are unthreatened because they can’t fully believe in them. That’s not quite what happens, although it does turn out that a collective, compelled ignoring of evil is at the heart of the creation of enclaves. That’s what El seeks to eradicate.

Glancing through some reviews of the trilogy, I’m not surprised to note that many critics point out Novik’s missteps in her worthy attempt to create a genuinely international and diverse world of magic. It turns out that the most egregious of these was cut from later editions of A Deadly Education, and Novik made a sincere apology for it after the issue was pointed out. But there were other missteps that, while not offensive, were interesting to me. I was especially attuned to Novik’s overcooked attempt to create an authentically ‘British’ voice in her protagonist, complete with copious and often misjudged slang. It reminded me of the challenge of writing from the perspective of a more dominant culture - in this case, I’m talking about the dominance of American idioms over British ones in popular culture, and the slight irritation of being native in the latter and seeing it inexpertly emulated by the former. This is nitpicky, but it’s not snark for snark’s sake - it’s an important lesson that I’d like to consider at a later date, for when I’m writing from within a culturally dominant perspective and susceptible to similar blunders.

I began this post with a statement of reluctance to be over-critical of the Scholomance Trilogy. In part this is out of respect for the monumental effort of generating a substantial and intricately-imagined body of work. I also said I wasn’t the target audience for this trilogy. But I think it’s a little more complex than that. When I first posted about A Deadly Education I noted my fascination with the magical academia genre, and I think a big part of that is that I retreated into these kinds of books as a child. They were a refuge; their authors created worlds that felt comforting and safe even when they were dangerous. And yet, as I’ve got older, I’ve been increasingly troubled by the conservative ideologies that underpin so many of these worlds. I’ve tried to interrogate the legacy of these within my own approach to writing, and more broadly within the organisation of my own life. The beauty of The Golden Enclaves is that we see a powerful protagonist rejecting those ideologies and creating a magical world herself, in accordance with her hard-won principles. Novik, like Grossman, concludes her trilogy with a call to create, to continue playing with and renewing this endlessly appealing genre. I look forward to seeing who takes up the challenge - and how - in the years to come.