I’d really enjoyed Camille Griep’s 2015 novel Letters to Zell, so when I was looking for something to distract myself from, well, everything, I decided to try her 2016 novel New Charity Blues. This book is a dystopian fantasy in a United States that’s been devastated by a pandemic and NO WAIT HANG ON IT’S NOT LIKE THAT…
For anyone looking for escapism, the story takes place after the plague has already run its course. We see the world through the eyes of Cas – a citizen of the idyllic New Charity – and Cressyda (Syd to her friends) a voluntary exile from New Charity and now a resident of the dying metropolis known as the City. New Charity has sealed all the area’s water inside their reservoir for their own hydroelectric dam, leaving the City to crumble in darkness.
When Syd learns that her wealthy absent father has died, she’s given a one-time pass to enter New Charity and claim her inheritance. She’s planning on making it a quick trip, just a few days to wrap up her father’s affairs, grab some antibiotics for the City clinic, and if at all possible tear down the reservoir and throw New Charity and everyone inside back into the Dark Ages, all while finding out that her father hadn’t just died, he’d been murdered.
Welcome home, Cressyda. Watch your back.
What could go wrong? Remember me, New Charity? Pardon me while I rob your pharmacy and destroy your reservoir.
Compared to the beauty and cleanliness of New Charity with all its modern conveniences, the City is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. So it’s appropriate that we spend the first few chapters there with Syd so we can understand why she’s so eager to get back there, even before she steps back inside New Charity.
Not that she’s necessarily happy in the City. Her dream of being a professional ballerina – the reason she and her mother left New Charity in the first place – died with the rest of the plague victims. She’s still in mourning for her mother and her best friend Danny, both killed by or because of the plague. She and the rest of the Survivors are living off of canned tuna and rainwater, no lights, no infrastructure, and very little hope that things can ever get better. But Syd has clawed a life for herself in this place, working at a free clinic, helping her elderly friend Agnes with her project to create a library of salvaged books on the second floor of their apartment building, rescuing an adorable moppet of a little girl and her loyal dog. Syd has more than just a community, she has a family, which makes it infuriating when her old friends and neighbors in New Charity wonder why she would “betray” her old home by being loyal to “those animals” in the City.
The township of New Charity is a magical place, literally. I thought at first that the references to the Spirit protecting them from the plague and blessing them with a beautiful land and clean water was a way of convincing themselves it was okay to seal off the town and leave the Survivors outside to die. Nope, the people of New Charity have always had magic, and the town leader known as the Bishop convinced them to give up their individual powers to make a magical Ward over the town’s water supply. About the only people who can still use magic are Cas and Len, twin sister and brother who can see the future and who the Bishop has set up as Acolytes to serve the town (basically lead religious services and tell everyone what they need to hear).
Not that I figured out any of that right away. The author really respects the reader’s ability to pick up things with very little information, so much so that I sometimes wondered if there was an earlier book that explained all of this beforehand. The real situation is even more muddled by how Syd doesn’t seem to entirely believe that Cas and Len’s magic powers exist (even though the three of them were best friends when she was growing up in New Charity). Plus, Cas has been seeing visions of something horrible in the future, but Len has been drowning out his nightmares with booze so he hasn’t seen the same thing, and their father refuses to believe anything that isn’t convenient, or that goes against anything the Bishop is telling him to believe, which sort of makes me wonder why you would have a real fortune-teller in a position of authority rather than someone who will just read from a script.
There’s a lot going on here. Syd thinks the Bishop has been telling tales of magic and the Spirit to keep the townspeople docile (which he kind of is), Len and Cas’s older brother Perry thinks Syd only came back to town to betray them (which she kind of has), the Survivor camp thinks Syd doesn’t fully belong to either group anymore (and Syd would reluctantly agree), Syd’s former lover doesn’t understand why they can’t pick up where they left off, and anyone who used to be close to Syd is somehow still reeling from her decision to leave New Charity seven years ago.
And everyone, absolutely everyone, takes all of this very, very personally.
People get angry fast in this book. It’s usually startling, and sometimes irritating, how a character will go from “just asking a question” to a blank-brained rage, like clicking on a light switch. One minute it’s a somewhat tense discussion and then all of a sudden words like “traitor whore” will get thrown around out of nowhere. Realistically by three quarters of the way through the story both Cas and Syd shouldn’t have been able to speak or see past split lips, bloody noses, and black eyes. The author threw in enough humor to keep me from cringing my way right out of the book, which is good because lord above there are so many people who see the two main characters as nothing more than the-person-who-could-make-me-happy-if-she’d-stop-being-a-little-bitch-about-it.
“He’s a nice guy, Syd, You could do worse, you know.” “I don’t have to do at all,” I say. “Post-pandemic doesn’t mean prefeminism. I’m not chattel.” “Might be easier if you were.” “Moo.”
The plot is partly murder mystery, and part fantasy/intrigue as Cas and Syd try to figure out why Syd’s father was murdered and what that means both for New Charity and the growing number of Survivors camped outside the town gates. It starts as a fairly complex character study of people trying to get each other to actually see who they are and what they need rather than the picture of them they’ve painted in their own head. Eventually though the pace becomes so relentless as the body count goes up that it sours any good feeling you could get from even the most uplifting ending.
The blurbs for this book describe it as a “post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Trojan War”, but honestly it really isn’t. It pulls in some of the names and a couple of the plot elements, but that’s about it. Probably the biggest similarity between this and the Battle for Troy is all the devastation and tragedy caused by two groups of people who are bent on each other’s destruction long after they’ve stopped caring about the reason the battle started in the first place.