Illustrations: Aitch
‘Stories were ruthless creatures, and sometimes fattened themselves on bloody happenings.’ (p 8)
From fantasy to history (of sorts) . . .
Frances Hardinge describes her own books as ‘odd’, and it is hard to disagree with this. However they are odd in a good way, a very special way. Her oddness is that of a striking fecundity of imagination, often devastatingly original. Her early books were an absolute joy of fantasy invention, and her first, Fly by Night, remains one of the true treasures of speculative fiction for young readers. She followed this with several other fantasy gems, but more lately her novels have left the realms of ‘high’ fantasy, and delved more into history, although with significant elements of what could be supernatural thrown in. Her stories have also grow darker with time, and their orientation towards, perhaps, slightly older readers. They have culminated in what I consider two masterpieces of contemporary literature, The Lie Tree (the recent hardback re-issue, wonderfully illustrated by Chris Riddell, is well worth looking out for), and A Skinful of Shadows (see my review, posted Oct. ‘17), which was one of my Books of the Year in 2017.
. . . and back to fantasy
Now her most recent novel, Deeplight, returns to a context of pure fantasy, and does so with all the panache, all the wild, idiosyncratic imagination of her early forays into this genre. The naming of things, characters, places, and perhaps, especially, gods, has always been one of her many delights; no less so here, where the defunct sea-monster gods that inhabited a stratum of breathable water below (!) the bottom of the conventional ocean, are a triumph of both evocative nomenclature and highlights of highly original world/myth building. Diving and scavenging for ‘godware’, remnants of these defunct deities, has become a major activity for the entrepreneurs of Myriad, the multi-island geography she conjures, be they the impoverished child equivalents of Thames mudlarks, or the viciously completing gangs of submarine pirates.
Deeps with depth
As might be expected from Frances Hardinge, she conjures yet another new world of fascinating and highly entertaining, not to say astonishing, oddness. And yet this latest novel of hers is not altogether a return to the style or feel of her earliest book. Rather it retains a great deal of the darkness, complexity and thought-provoking disruption of ‘normality’ that were dominant characteristics of her more recent literary triumphs. This story is deep and disturbing in more than its oceanography. It has more layers than its physics-defying waters. It is a book with many themes, and plumbs ideas associated with our creation of and need for ‘superstitious’ religion, with priesthoods, with cults and with science. It equally treats of phobias; of true and false friendship and how they arise, and are destroyed; of belonging and dislocation; of roots and nationalism; of the ties of family, actual and developed. It is as rich in though-provoking themes as it is in vivid, quirky imagination. Although not as rib-tickling as, say, Fly By Night, it is not without touches of wry sharpness either. For example it is drily said of the former sea-creature gods: ‘What’s the point of a god you can pickle?’ (p 243)
Signs of empathy
There is something further, too, that makes this book particularly special. Its fictional surmise is that the amount of extremely deep diving that many inhabitants undertake causes profound hearing loss. This means that a number of its characters are deaf, including a young girl protagonist. The book therefore explores communication through both sign language and lip-reading, together with some of their inherent difficulties, not as an ‘issue’, rather as a given and ‘normal’ aspect of life. That deaf characters are included and accepted in this way will both provide a rare point of identification for children with similar characteristics and allow hearing children valuable insights. It is a story that carries important messages about empathy, diversity and inclusion.
Story story
And one of the most remarkable things of all about Deeplight is that, at the same time as being a profound novel of ideas, it also succeeds in being a totally engrossing and exciting story, a thrilling rollercoaster of a read. Don’t miss it. This one too is headed straight for inclusion in my Books of the Year.
‘Stories, stories. He had always been a storyteller of sorts . . . Now other people’s stories were the treasures he prized. He was a storykeeper for gods and heroes. . . You could keep people alive forever through stories.’ (p 434)