Author: Lilith Saintcrow
Publisher: Crown
Rating: WARTY
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
This novel was really hard to follow. I'm coming into this series at volume 3, and such an approach evidently doesn’t work well with these novels: it seems that you have to be there from the beginning to 'get' everything that's going on, which is a nuisance when it comes to reviewing adequately, so please keep that in mind. Having said that, the only thing I got out of the first chapter is that Saintcrow doesn't appear to have a very good handle on the difference between sewage and sewerage!
On the positive side, the reading is easy in the sense that the novel is very short and the chapters also short, but the writing style and language use is far too affected and dense, especially for an opening page. After a while it was easier to stay with it, but there wasn’t really very much happening, and I never felt drawn into the story or engaged with the main characters. They offered nothing to love or admire, nothing with which to empathize, and nothing to stir my interest or to attract me to them. There was no chemistry between the female protagonist and the male. The story is very dry and the conversation uncomfortably stilted. The intentional misspellings of certain nouns is pretentious and annoying: Yton in place of Eton, Houricane in place of hurricane, Englene for England for example. I saw no point to that at all, and found it to be irksome at best, although I have to admit that one of them: 'mentath' (evidently intended to describe someone who excels at some mental skill) isn’t too bad, if slightly awkward.
The novel is evidently intended to be an attempt at steampunk, but it never gave me that feeling. Actually, even using that term is problematic, although this has nothing to do with Saintcrow. What is it, exactly, with the appendage of 'punk' to a word in the fatuous pretense that it actually represents a genre?! We have 'steampunk', 'cyberpunk', 'splatterpunk' and others, in the same way we have terms derived from Watergate, such as 'oilgate' for example, but whereas appending 'gate' to another word does convey a certain level of scandal (to do with oil, say) what does the addition of 'punk' lend to the term? I contend that it offers nothing! It’s just as useless as a false hand; you can give a fake hand fingers, and tart it up to make it look like it's flesh, but it has no real value unless it’s a hook or a pincer, or these days, a robotic hand. So yes, we know what 'steam', 'cyber', and 'splatter' contribute, but what does punk offer in rounding-out the term? I suggest it lends nothing but an extra syllable and that's its only utility.
Anyway, pet peeve off, moving along! The characters in The Red Plague Affair get around on what are apparently clockwork horses, and they take the royal gryphons if they need to fly. The main characters are Emma Bannon, a 'prime sorceress', and Archibald Clare, a mentath. I had expected them to be working closely together as some sort of variation on Holmes and Watson, but this wasn't the case. They rarely interact, and the interactions between them are mundane and boring. Emma is some sort of James Bond character in service of the monarch, Queen "Victrix". I have no idea what Clare was supposed to be in this team. he really did very little. Not that Bannon did much more. Why a female name for a male character? Yes, it was his last name, but it just struck me as weird. Clare apparently was the (or a) subject of Bannon's investigation in the first novel in the series so that's how they hooked up.
I never was quite sure what, exactly, 'prime sorceress' meant. Perhaps if I'd read the entire series this far it would be a lot more clear, but even without that, it became quickly apparent that her sorcery is nothing more than the same ineffectual clichéd MacGuffin with which we routinely find magical people endowed in these stories. I failed to grasp what the benefit of equipping Bannon with sorcery actually was. She rarely uses it and it seems to be of very little utility when it comes to making any real headway in her assignments, yet each day she has to 'renew' her magical energy from 'Tideturn'. I have no idea how that's supposed to work. She evidently has to do this whether she's expended any magical energy or not. It's just weird. And if she is so powerful a black wizard, then why does she need a bodyguard? That makes no sense either.
There was a hard-to-follow flurry of nondescript characters, none of whom made any sort of impression on me as either interesting or dangerous, and they were popping up one after another like targets in a first-person shooter video game. The basis of the story is that someone has evidently invented some sort of poison and is using it to poison church-goers and others! I'm not sure how this constitutes a threat to the nation, although it seems to be tied int to the appalling London fogs of that era, which were actually more dangerous than the Red Plague ever threatened to be!! Indeed, given that in New Testament fiction, Jesus tells people that they should pray in secret, maybe this is the second coming and Yeshua himself is punishing those who pray in public?! Who knows?
I love that Saintcrow shamelessly invents the verb "to gentle"! Ian Fleming would approve, but not Noel Coward! As I read more and more of this, I found that I was skimming over paragraphs here and there because they offered nothing to engage me, which doubtlessly contributed to my not getting some parts of the story, but I honestly considered that I'd had so little out of it at that point that it wouldn't make a material difference anyway.
In conclusion I cannot recommend this novel. I was hoping for, and indeed expecting, a novel which offered mystery and engaging repartee, but I was denied those pleasures. It occurs to me that a good question to ask about this novel is: if this were a first novel submitted by an unknown author, would this publisher have accepted it as it stands, and I think the answer to that is a rather obvious 'no', which begs the question, "why then should I accept it?"
