I read Natasha Pulley’s first novel back in 2015 during a big family vacation, so I thought it would be appropriate to catch up on her second novel while on this year’s family vacation. (I had a nice surprise when I went to buy the book and found out that I’d already bought a copy a couple of years ago, and then promptly forgot about it. Thanks, Past Me!)
It’s 1859, and the remnants of the East India Company are looking to break the Peruvian monopoly on cinchona trees, the source of quinine that at this point is the only known treatment for malaria. The company desperately needs someone to sneak cuttings of the high-yield plants out of Peru, and for some reason the best person for the job is Merrick Tremayne, a skilled botanist and former smuggler who’s facing the fact that he’s never going to fully recover from a shrapnel blast that almost took his leg three years ago.
You’d think that a story based on the international trade in quinine would be a little dry. Fortunately Natasha Pulley not only spins an excellent historical novel, she has her characters walk from the 19-century British Empire into an imaginary Peru, one that’s filled with glowing ivy and cleverly-made moving statues, Incan religion and clockwork-lamps, lighter-than-air wood and exploding ducks (you heard me) and a fantastical village set hundreds of feet high on the top of naturally-formed towers of glass and stone: the Bedlam Stacks.
“We are…being sent to steal a plant who’s exact location nobody knows, in territory now defended by quinine barons under the protection of the government, and inhabited by tribal Indians who also hate foreigners and have killed everyone who’s got close in the last ten years.”
I probably should know a lot more about the British Empire in the 1800’s than I do, and there’s quite a bit of going on in this book that was a little over my head. But even though I didn’t always understand the fine details, it helped that the author obviously does; she’s very clearly done her research on this. Just in case you get lost, the bare minimum of what you need to know is that while the British government thinks it’s in charge, the shots are really being called by the East India Company. And what the East India Company wants, it eventually gets, even if that means a disastrous Dutch mission where half a regiment was lost is followed by another mission consisting of Sir Clements Markham – a ridiculously over-enthusiastic geographer – and Merrick, who can climb down three stairs before having to stop for a break. Maybe four on a good day.
The whole expedition sounds like a crazy suicide mission at first. And it is, but it actually makes an odd kind of sense. Merrick’s career as he knew it is done. He’s stuck in a falling-down mansion belonging to a brother who’s too proud to admit that the family fortune is gone, and who’s trying to get Merrick sent to a parsonage in the middle of nowhere, or to an asylum, since Merrick insists that the statue over their father’s grave has been moved. Or is moving.
Dying on another continent couldn’t be worse than that, and the East India Company will either get the cinchona cuttings, or the death of his wealthy friend Clem will give Great Britain the excuse to send in the army, burn some villages to the ground, and take what they wanted anyway.
It was better to get shot in the Andes than live for another forty years while they both looked at me that way.
So it’s all fairly straightforward: bring back the cuttings or die trying. It’s only when they reach the edge of the Andes that things get complicated. A friendly and terrifying Spanish trader named Martel discovers their Absolutely Not A Mission To Smuggle Cinchona No Sir We’re After Coffee, and “persuades” them to bring along Raphael, a local guide who may be willing to betray Martel in order to be free of him. Or he may be planning to kill them like he possibly killed the Dutch regiment. It’s hard to say.
The first quarter of the book drags a bit with all the necessary exposition, but it starts rocketing forward once the explorers reach Raphael’s home in the hospital colony on top of the volcanic-glass Bedlam Stacks.
All of the lovely weirdness from Pulley’s first book is magnified here into something very like a malarial fever dream.The volcanic glass runs through the stone towers, the riverbed, everywhere, and it has a tendency to refract light into something that will boil the river and set boats on fire. Even the seashells on the river bottom are glass, and there are sometimes ruins and even fish suspended deep inside the Stacks themselves. Giant stone statues known as markayuq appear in random places around the town, and the townspeople seem to worship them with offerings of knotted string and salt in tiny glass vials. Raphael asks for part of his payment in broken clocks, which he uses to make clockwork lamps out of old glass fishing floats and a local glowing flora that just gets more and more beautiful the more you learn about it. Every single chapter there’s a new wonder, and the author keeps dropping in fascinating details about life in a town six hundred feet about the river, in a place where for some reason the bricks of the houses are painstakingly shaped to go around the bedrock.
The characters themselves aren’t any less fascinating. Merrick’s family has been somehow connected with the little district of Peru for two generations, and he’s only now realizing how much he’s forgotten of what his father and grandfather told him. Meanwhile Clem pushes his way through different cultures and languages like a bull pushing its way through grass. He seems determined to see everything through the lens of “natives with their crazy beliefs, am right?” and there’s an almost constant back-and-forth snarking between British anthropologist and put-upon guide. This is a lot of fun, and also a little stressful, since you don’t know exactly how far he can push Raphael before something snaps.
And then there’s Raphael, the “priest” of Bedlam Stacks and caretaker of the markayuq. The story very gradually reveals what Merrick learns about his own family, and also what it is about Raphael that’s both unique, and uniquely broken. I can’t even go into too much detail since I don’t want to take away from those sections where you learn just enough information to get that moment of “Oh. Ohhh. That’s…that’s kind of horrible.” It’s beautifully done, that sense you get of heartbreak tangled with fear, something which gets both better and worse as Merrick forms a bond with their soft-spoken guide (and possible assassin).
The book has very improbable friendships, shocking moments of sudden violence, and that special kind of betrayal that comes when someone finally tells you what they really think of you. The author created too many vivid images and cinematic moments to share in one review (I do so wish I could see this as a movie). And there’s even a small but important link to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. It doesn’t quite make this book a prequel, but it does set it in the same world, and promises for some interesting developments when Pulley’s next book – The Lost Future of Pepperharrow – comes out next year.