Be The Rain: C.L. Clark’s ‘The Unbroken’
“Sky above, Luca wanted to do right by that laugh.”
I read most of this book on sun-drenched beaches and benches in and around Venice, crowded on all sides by jaw-dropping Gothic architecture pushing ten centuries in age largely built with Croatian limestone and suffused with Byzantine and Islamic influences on account of the vast and storied trading network and extensive mainland and maritime territories of the thalassocratic republic that endured for 1100 years through the Pax Mongolica and long beyond.
It was a fitting backdrop for a secondary world serving as a seething anatomisation of France’s colonisation of North Africa rendered through the symphonic lens of epic fantasy (with one of the very best SFF covers ever crafted, complete with that utterly evergreen and galvanising shoutline).
“We’ll get her ready, but I don’t want you to fall into her pretty words. People like you and me have to remind people like her the difference between what’s important and what’s possible.”
The story follows conscript soldier Touraine, who was abducted from her homeland by the Balladairan empire when she was a child and raised to fight in their brutal wars against her own people. Everything changes when she’s assigned to quell the stirrings of rebellion in the home city now so foreign to her and finds herself both saving the life of the imperial princess she’ll soon fall for and uncovering life-shattering secrets about her own stolen history…
“The princess stepped in again. Her voice was like a dip into a cold river on an already frigid day.”
The magic system is a particularly compelling one, our window onto it revolving around the princess obsessed with forcibly acquiring the ancient healing powers of the people her father colonised who she now oppresses, a shamanistic sorcery further complicated by the entry of the mysterious non-binary desert priest and their companion lioness and vulture, vessels of a warging animal magic the desert tribes share with their pale northern cousins who can shapeshift into bears as they worship the same god. The implications of the series name, Magic of the Lost, loom large in the outro.
“They brought clay jars of goat’s and sheep’s blood in on silent rickshaws and one by one covered the Balladairan districts, daubing blood on doors, pooling it through the thoroughfares, until it would be impossible for the Balladairans to move without bloodying their feet. A suitable symbol, Djasha agreed.”
Though it was frustrating at times in the meticulous build-up to the rebellion to helplessly bear witness to Touraine making terrible decision after terrible decision, with such a changeable and conflicting sense of what she wants and who she wants, that rampant inconsistency is what makes her so human. Her burgeoning relationship with Luca was difficult to root for (even in this delightfully queernorm world) right up until the latter’s blood-drenched and long overdue epiphany, and her similarly embattled and embittered dealings with Pruett reached a crescendo made even more poignant because of it.
The political machinations were just as intricately drawn, with loyalties and allegiances and motives shifting like the desert sands on the whims of the summer winds. This also felt profoundly human, and again a testament to the real-world history stitched into the bedrock of the book.
“It would be impossible to fix every betrayal on her shoulders. Too many of them were contradictory. She wished she could fix them all at once, tie them together like the laces of a boot.”
Indeed what lingers most after turning the final pages is a sentiment expressed by the author in their March 2021 interview with Color the Shelves in response to the question of what they hope readers take away from The Unbroken:
“Fantasy got me obsessed with England and France and Italy—so many of my favorite worlds inspired by their empires, their kings. Their accents in my favorite movies! They were Right and Good and Cool. It did that to all of the fantasy nerds I know, and I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of in that. It’s how the system is designed. It’s why they wrote the fantasies. But that obsession also led me to studying French—to studying it enough to learn beyond France’s borders and into its impact. That led to me studying Arabic and learning from my Amazigh friends and teachers. To learning about Palestinian occupation. To the person that I am now and the person I’d like to become. Fantasy broadened my world and my perspective in ways I don’t think those writers ever intended. And so, I would like readers to come away with more curiosity—curiosity about the places that inspired The Unbroken, about how these power fantasies are acted out in the real world. And then, whether they’re a Touraine or a Luca, to think about that and start…unlearning. And then, properly learning. And then, to start helping.”
Be the rain.
