Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Short and sweet(ish) July 14, 2020

I am very happy with this new trend of authors publishing novellas set in the same universe as their series of novels. It seems to lead to works which explore relationships, characters, or corners of their imagined worlds that there just wasn’t space for in the novels — and therefore gives their fictional worlds and characters more space and three dimensionality. This kind of novella can be used to make space for missing moments in the preceding narrative, or — my very favourite kind of story — show what happens after the final page is closed. I’m a nosy reader: I want to know what happens after the story ends, and what the characters do in their downtime, in moments of cosy domesticity.

The answer to that in Aliette de Bodard’s novella Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders is ‘solve a murder mystery.’ Her characters certainly don’t get much in the way of downtime! The book sees Thuan and Asmodeus — dragon prince and fallen angel respectively, joint heads of the fallen House Hawthorn — return to the kingdom under the Seine to celebrate Tết with Thuan’s family. But any hope of a peaceful, pleasant holiday is shattered almost immediately, when the pair uncover a murder, a potential coup, and a court rife with tension, plotting, and corruption. One of the things I loved most about this couple in the preceding novels in de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series was their contrasting — and conflicting — ways of dealing with problems: Thuan preferring to work within existing systems and come up with a diplomatic solution, his husband Asmodeus preferring to blast his way through any impediment with threats and violence. These contrasts are on full display in Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, to excellent effect — but what the novella also shows is how those contrasts are complementary, and when these two formidable supernatural husbands work together, things have a way of working themselves out. I really appreciated this element of the story: for all that it is a fast-paced whodunnit (as well as an exploration of the poisoning effects of institutional corruption), it’s a relationship study as much as it is a murder mystery, written with exquisite subtlety.

Samantha Shannon’s The Dawn Chorus also brings its central relationship to the fore. This novella has two interwoven strands: flashbacks to missing moments in the earliest book in Shannon’s Bone Season dystopian series, and scenes which take place in the immediate aftermath of the third novel. The series really doesn’t give its characters much time to breathe, and in some ways The Dawn Chorus represents just that kind of pause — it gives the narrator, revolutionary Paige Mahoney, and her friend, former captor, and sometime lover, the Rephaite Warden — the space to work through the various tensions, traumas, and sheer overwhelming emotions generated by their terrifying existence and complicated relationship. It’s a story about recovering from trauma (and fiercely independent, untrusting Paige letting Warden help her recover) — its action picks up just after Paige has been rescued from weeks of torture and her impending execution — but in spite of this heavy subject matter it’s also a rare chance for the two characters to be alone for almost the first time since they met. Theirs is a relationship that carries a lot of baggage — they met in seriously unequal circumstances, and the novella is in part a way for them to finally address that openly — and matters aren’t helped by the fact that Paige’s torturer constantly brought up this relationship as yet another weapon to wound her. But here, for once, in their safe house in Paris, Warden and Paige’s relationship doesn’t have to be a performance for either their enemies or their allies. Now they simply need to work out what that relationship does look like, away from the eyes of others.

I really hope to see a lot more such novellas from both authors, set in their two respective dystopian universes. I particularly appreciate that in these kinds of books, both de Bodard and Shannon can give a lot more prominence to emotions, romantic relationships, and self-reflection than is possible to give the characters in either main series of novels. The novellas both flesh out, and give further emotional context to, characters’ actions in the wider series. I’d been stuck in a bit of a reading slump, but reading these two novellas in quick succession has made my next choice of books clear: a reread of both The Bone Season and the Dominion of the Fallen series!