TIMELINE: FIVE MINUTES TOO LATE, THIRTY SECONDS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD.
Next up for the Hugo-nominations is Seanan McGuire’s novel Middlegame, something which I really should have read during last October’s Scary Books month, because oh boy does this ever qualify.
The plan begins in 1886, with the brilliant alchemist Asphodel who’s going to remake the world, starting with publishing a series of best-selling children’s books and also using corpses and alchemy to create a flawless man who bring about her vision sometime after he murders her.
But things don’t really get underway until more than a century later, when a seven-year-old literature prodigy gets help with his math homework from a voice inside his head.
The Impossible City. It wasn’t always called that. It was Olympus once, Avalon, the Isles of the Dead, the alchemical apex which waited at the peak of all human knowledge and potential. The city that is dreamed of but never claimed or controlled.
The twins shouldn’t have known each other existed, not until the time was right. Carefully engineered and born in a lab (or extracted; it was tidier to make sure the host mother didn’t survive), each carries one half of the fabled Doctrine of Ethos: Math and Language. Roger and his sister Dodger were sent to adoptive families on opposite sides of the country. They were never supposed to meet.
And yet somehow they did meet. One moment it was just a lonely seven-year-old girl with a frightening talent for math and few social skills, and a moderately lonely but still charming seven-year-old boy who reads all the time and learns languages for fun. And then the next moment the two of them can talk to each other in their minds, can see through each others eyes. And both of them are exactly what they’ve needed their entire lives.
Every now and then you could almost think this was a young adult book. There are magicians trying to find a fabled lost reality, many of the chapters start with an excerpt from a children’s book, and two plucky children find out that they’re somehow magically connected and become each other’s best friend.
But then you have the darker elements. I mean really dark. Dark like sneaking into a house with a candle made from the hand of a murder victim and slowly cutting pieces off someone who’s still alive while the bodies of their family members are cooling in the rooms down the hall. This book really pushes the concept of “alchemists” so much further than I’ve seen it done before, and the stakes are a lot higher for our child protagonists when the bad guys routinely dissolve their enemies and chop up their failed experiments (ie: other children) into spare parts for the next round of experiments.
The man pulling all the strings in this story is James Reed – Asphodel’s creation and murderer – and his overeager henchwoman is Leigh, a woman with scrimshaw bones, and crows’ wings for a heart. That’s not a euphemism, by the way; people can be put together out of all sorts of things in this world. Both Reed and Leigh are horrifying in their own way, but Leigh’s chapters have a particularly high body count. Not nearly high enough for her though;she’s a woman who loves her work, and Reed has no problem with pointing her in the direction of someone who’s gotten in the way of his grand plan.
And Reed’s plan is…well it’s a little hard to understand at first, and I don’t want to say too much because McGuire drops in the details so gradually that by the time someone actually comes out and says what’s going on, the reader will have been completely immersed in the entire surreal setup.
Reed and Leigh will leave a trail of bodies in their wake just to make sure no one even hears something they shouldn’t, so of course they don’t have any problem with destroying a relationship, destroying a child, to make sure the two halves of the Doctrine don’t connect before they’re supposed to.
The book is a roller coaster of perfect happiness crashing down into misery. Multiple times. Roger and Dodger together make for some wonderfully entertaining reading, whether as children exploring their neighborhood or young adults in grad school eating pizza and relaxing in Dodger’s apartment (the walls of which she’s turned into a giant dry-erase board for her endless equations.) The way they both love what they’re drawn to – language or math – is just entrancing. Their abilities play off each other and the dialog that McGuire creates for them just pops and smiles. The back-and-forth brother/sister conversations that are just so fun.
“Heaven forbid you do anything cliche, Mr. English-Professor-in Training,” says Dodger. “You might find a single cliche is a gateway drug to tweed jackets and khaki slacks, and the next thing you know, you’re teaching Kerouac and making eyes at that cute undergrad in the front row who makes you think about fucking all of Middle America in one triumphant go.”
Roger blinks.
“How long have you been saving that one up?” he asks.
“About a week.” Dodger admits.
“Feel better?”
“Little bit.”
It’s the kind of closeness that’s more than friendship or even siblings. And they spend a huge part of their lives apart because their first instinct when something goes wrong is to run, tearing huge chunks out of each other when they do. The people closest to us are the ones who can do the most damage, and since Roger and Dodger are literally inside each other’s head, the damage is pretty extensive.
“You had friends, you had a girlfriend, and I had this big notebook filled with apologies that might be good enough to make you love me again.”
Poor Dodger seems to suffer the worst of it. Roger has his charm and his good nature, but Dodger has math and she has Roger. And when she’s on her own, well, she can fit in by analyzing human interaction and finding all the pressure points that will let other people see her as human. But that only works for so long. And just like everyone else, she can be furious at someone for doing something unforgivable and be equally as convinced that she did something to deserve it.
What’s one more lie in the fact of all the lies she’s already told, the ones she’s telling every time she smiles like she means it, or doesn’t open her mouth and scream?
I should probably drop in a trigger warning for a suicide attempt here. Not so much for the act itself, which happens mercifully off camera, but the planning for it. The rationalizations that Dodger make to convince herself that she’s better off without the world, and the world is better off without her, are just so heartrending. What’s almost worse is the fallout afterwards, the guilt that comes when realizing that the people she was trying to “protect” from having to be around her anymore are also the ones who are the most hurt by what she tried to do.
Threaded through this hugely believable character study as we follow Roger and Dodger from childhood onward is horror; the monsters chasing them (with plenty of omigoditisn’tdeadyetRUN) and the way McGuire can make you feel the characters’ terror, in all it’s flavors. Terror mixed with resignation. Terror that surprises you with how quietly it settles into and lets you know you’re about to die. A constant stream of betrayals, and the paranoia that comes from never knowing which person you know is really just another mask.
…the calm fear that swept through her like ink through cotton, coloring her from end to end with dread.
And then at the midpoint of the book something happens and everything becomes so much larger than I thought it was, and then things get really interesting.
How many times?
How many times?
How many times
McGuire creates something epic here, the plot interweaving with other stories, some of them created by the McGuire and some of them tying in to other stories from the larger world, or into the place behind all the stories. The quotes starting the main sections bounce back and forth from scientific to emotional, from math to language, from the fear that comes from a lot of knowledge to the fear that comes from realizing just how much we don’t know. There’s a growing panic in the chapter titles, the time stamps just get more and more confusing, and even when you understand what’s happening the explanations feel like a game of Cards Against Humanity.
”We need to let my terrifying ex-girlfriend tell us how we’re supposed to manifest a primal force of reality before asshole alchemists set us the fuck on fire.”
And the entire time the two halves of the Doctrine are getting stronger, with their natural abilities playing off each other. There are cinematic moments, earthquakes, images of math and languages creating something out of nothing in a burst of fractals, and Dodger being an utter bad ass. What Roger can do with language is usually subtle, occasionally shocking, and in at least one situation incredibly satisfying, but Dodger is perfectly capable of killing someone with math.
“Architecture is chaos theory in sheet-rock and two-by-fours. I can figure out where the weak spots are.”
“Math isn’t a superpower.”
“Says YOU.”
The twins have to make the decision over and over to let something horrible, unforgivable happen because trying to stop it will mean something even worse will happen. 
The book actually begins with the ending and takes a lot of glorious twists to get all the way back around to it again.