Book Review | A Shadow in Summer (Daniel Abraham)
I've been re-reading the first book of The Long Price Quartet, one of my favorite fantasy series' of all time by one of my favorite authors. I present my review of the first book, A Shadow in Summer.
Daniel Abraham is a fantasy and science-fiction writer first published in the late nineties, after attending a Clarion West Workshop, and selling a couple short stories to anthologies. He continued to write short stories and get published in anthologies and magazines and eventually he wrote the short story "The Lesson Half-Learned," which became the prologue of A Shadow in Summer, his first novel and the first book of his first series, The Long Price Quartet.
The others are A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring.
Some of his other work includes:
- the novel Hunter's Run, written with George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
- the five-book epic fantasy series The Dagger and the Coin
- under the pseudonym M.L.N. Hanover, the urban fantasy series The Black Sun's Daughter
- collaborating with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey, the space opera series The Expanse
- and more short stories under all three names (those under the Corey name being collaborations with Franck)
This is, in my opinion, surely one of the most original fantasies ever written, and the entire Quartet is absolutely fantastic.
The characters here are all well-developed and interesting people, rather it's Otah, the man who wouldn't become a poet, or Maati, the poet-in-training, or Amat Kyaan, the fifty-year-old lady with a strong sense of justice, or Liat, who in some way is connected to all of them.
Daniel Abraham does a lot to set himself apart from other fantasy writers.
The first, I think, though certainly not the most important, is his system of magic, flawlessly integrated into the world and integral to the storyline and the way the world works.
As Walter Jon Williams put it, the andat are "the Word given Flesh." It's a little more complex. Poets use the grammar and language of the old Empire to construct a binding with which they are able to bind and hold an idea. The idea itself becomes the andat - able to walk and talk, though it does not need to breathe. An andat is originally a formless thing that can not thing. Bound, it takes on a human form. The andat hates its binding and wants only to escape.
The andat central to A Shadow in Summer is Removing-the-Part-that-Continues, a.k.a. Seedless. It is used by the city of Saraykeht to maintain dominance in trade by removing seeds from cotton. But there's a dark underside: Seedless is also used in what is called "the sad trade." Abortion.
If an andat escapes from its binding, a new way must be found to describe it and hold it. If a binding fails, than the andat extracts a gruesome price from the failed poet, almost always fatal. One andat mentioned is Rain, which escaped and was later re-captured with a new binding, under the name Seaward. By the time of A Shadow in Summer, this andat is long gone, bound and lost too many times. There's no possible way of coming up with a new and unique description of it.
Second is the world.
The world itself - though there are a couple other countries which end up basically irrelevant - is divided between two great powers: the Galts and the Khaiem. The Khaiem is where A Shadow in Summer takes place, in one of the summer cities, Saraykeht. Each of the major cities of the Khaiem have a poet, and each of the poets has an andat.
This prevents the Galts from running their armies through and conquering and pillaging the Khaiem's rich and prosperous cities. What can you do against an enemy that can cause the abortions of every pregnant woman you have, effectively killing a whole generation? The Galts have great armies.
The andat, though, do restrain the Khaiem to an extent. In the first quarter of the book, a Galt brings a steam-powered toy to the court of the Khai Saraykeht (who rules the city). The Khai is told that the Galts are working on military applications of the technology. It's laughed off: an army of teapots.
The Khaiem, fascinatingly and unique among most fantasy, is not the vaguely-European world we are accustomed to but instead vaguely-Asian. They have a physical language of poses which can express ever more subtle nuances of emotion and even indicate social status and education - a pose of farewell with an edge of permanence, a pose of dismissal appropriate for a master to an apprentice. Your mileage will vary. I found it fantastic.
They have a unique tradition: when the Khai dies, his first three sons all compete to see who'll become the next Khai. Did I say compete? I mean kill, and the survivor emerges as the new Khai, abandoning his name for that of their city. Thus the Khais do not have a name: they are the Khai Saraykeht, the Khai Udun. The remaining children are generally sent to the poet's school.
(I have elected, for the purposes of this review, to avoid talking about details of the world that only emerge in later books. I will also endeavour to avoid spoiling the story.)
So that covers two of the unique aspects of the novel - its world and its system of magic. Now, on to the content of the novel!
You'll be pleased to know that this isn't a doorstopper: it goes by in 330-ish pages. Don't take that to mean it's overly-fast or rushed: Abraham's pacing is very deliberate. There's little action. The motion of the story comes from its characters and their decisions. The story's biggest moments are also those of smallest scale, and this lends them a power and weight that you might not expect.
Its characters are perhaps its greatest strength: each feels well-rounded and complex. Each character's decisions make sense, even if we disagree with them. Be it Maati or Otah or Amat or Liat or Marchat Wilsin, each of whom has their point of view appear, or be it the characters we see from their perspective: Heshai, the poet, or Seedless, the andat, or Maj, the poor islander girl brought in by Wilsin as part of the Galt's plot.
I'll not say what that plot is. I'll leave you with the book's in-flap blurb, though:
The city-state of Saraykeht dominates the Summer Cities. Its wealth is beyond measure; its port is open to all the merchants of the world, and its ruler, the Khai Saraykeht, commands forces to rival the Gods. Commerce and trade fill the streets with a hundred languages, and the coffers of the wealthy with jewels and gold. Any desire, however exotic or base, can be satisfied in its soft quarter. Blissfully ignorant of the forces that fuel their prosperity, the people live and work secure in the knowledge that their city is a bastion of progress in a harsh world. It would be a tragedy if it fell.
Saraykeht is poised on the knife-edge of disaster.
At the heart of the city's influence are the poet-sorcerer Heshai and the captive spirit, Seedless, whom he controls. For all his power, Heshai is weak, haunted by memories of shame and humiliation. A man faced with constant reminders of his responsibilities and his failures, he is the linchpin and the most vulnerable point in Saraykeht's greatness.
Far to the west, the armies of Galt have conquered many lands. To take Saraykeht, they must first destroy the trade upon which its prosperity is based. Marchat Wilsin, head of Galt's trading house in the city, is planning a terrible crime against Heshai and Seedless. If he succeeds, Saraykeht will fall.
Amat, House Wilsin's business manager, is a woman who rose from the slums to wield the power that Marchat Wilsin would use to destroy her city. Through accidents of fate and circumstance Amat, her apprentice Liat, and two young men from the farthest reaches of their society stand alone against the dangers that threaten the city.
Finally, setting Abraham apart also is that his work is more feminist than is typical for fantasy.
One of the central characters is Amat Kyaan - a fifty-year-old woman, an accountant. Of all the book's characters, perhaps she is the closest to truly being the hero of the story. She pursues justice and what is right, no matter the cost to her own life. Even as she has attained more power than a typical woman of the Khaiem, she remains an underling until the very end, met with disbelief as she makes a move to take over a business.
The other is Liat, who, though undoubtedly promising, has little opportunity to spread her wings.
A big theme, then, is the choices women have and what they can do when their choices are constrained by their society.
A Shadow in Summer is a novel tinged with inevitability and melancholy. Its characters are true to themselves, even as they question it, even through all the pain it brings. It's atypical fantasy: there are no grand battles to save the world, there's not even so much as a swordfight. For all that the book is ostensibly about Otah and Maati (and really Otah is clearly intended as the central protagonist), it's Amat, the fifty-year-old woman with a bad leg, the accountant, who is the hero. The greatest and largest moments are the smallest-scale in nature, and for my money they are far more powerful for it.
Unique too is that this novel is self-contained. The Long Price Quartet's books are each self-contained because they happen roughly fifteen years apart from one another. They do not have to be read sequentially. But I recommend it. It's a beautiful and sad thing to see the same couple of characters grow and evolve from teenagers, to adults, to middle-aged men, to old men.
After reading it sequentially, and then re-reading it, knowing how it ends, you'll have a new appreciation for it. One of Abraham's ideas, he said in an interview, was this idea of how epic a normal life was. Even though Otah and Maati hardly live normal lives, they live long ones. And so from four books emerges a greater whole. From thirty, sixty years individually emerges a whole lifetime.
Jo Walton, over at Tor, called these books "post 9/11 fantasy." She said further that they were the first books to feel that way. I'll present this without comment - not because I agree or disagree, but simply because I lack the knowledge to comment with any level of intelligence.
I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys fantasy and wants something new, original, and atypical for the genre.
Next, naturally, will be a review of A Betrayal in Winter. Before it arrives, though, you may catch eye of a magazine review. While at Barnes & Noble on Monday I also picked up an issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. So keep an eye out!
Have you read Daniel Abraham, either his fantasy - be it The Long Price Quartet or The Dagger and the Coin, his urban fantasy as M.L.N. Hanover, or his sci-fi with Ty Franck as James S.A. Corey? Have you read his short stories before? What did you think? The comments section is always open and I make a point of responding.