“Well, the world is full of surprises. And shadow kings. And curses. Coffee?”: VE Schwab’s ‘Conjuring of Light’
‘Stas reskon’ means ‘chasing danger’ in Arnesian, the language of Red London. It occurs in Book 2 of VE Schwab’s incandescent Shades of Magic series, A Gathering of Shadows, when the badass seamster and quirkily maternal Calla applies it to our relentlessly independent protagonist Lila Bard. It’s my favourite Arnesian phrase and captures in totality Lila’s penchant for piracy, be it on land or water.
At Waterstones Crouch End’s dystopian fantasy panel on Monday 19th March 2018, V explained why Lila Bard would be the first of her characters to survive an apocalypse by describing her as an “existential cockroach”. Nothing could characterise Delilah Bard better, an existential cockroach if ever there was one.
I finished this extraordinary series last week, and have spent the time since trying to come to terms with the fact that it is over. Unlike those who read it when it first came out, I do have the incredible fortune of knowing that there is a sequel trilogy in the works, entitled ‘Threads of Power’, as well as a prequel comic book series beginning with the story of Red London’s monarch Maxim Maresh, or ‘The Steel Prince’. But it doesn’t make the withdrawal symptoms any less acute.
‘Vitari’ means ‘magic’ in the ancient language of the Antari, a word that “belongs to every world and none”, a word that refers to both the existence and the creation of magic, “if Magic had a name, it would be this”. That’s what this series is. Vitari all over.
Shades of Magic is the kind of sweeping, emotionally intense fantasy I was desperately looking for when I first started exploring outside kidslit and YA. My favourite childhood novels were all SFF: The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones, The Cry of the Icemark by Stuart Hill, Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques, Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies, Sabriel by Garth Nix, Exodus by Julie Bertagna, Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve… and the list goes on. But as soon as I started browsing the adult shelves, the most prevalent and prominent fantasies were always predictably Western European-style medieval worlds that turned out to be pasty white hetero-normative patriarchy after pasty white hetero-normative patriarchy with painfully binary systems of objective morality and absolutely no socio-political context for why their ideological histories mirrored our own when they were literally different universes.
Enter Schwab *she says in parentheses*. V has literally kept my sanity intact over this last year as I’ve worked my way through all her books while ploughing through the final chapter of my first degree.
Shades of Magic is quite simply the soul-soothing literary star-stuff I wish I’d always had. Her name had been floating in my peripheral for some time while I worked as a bookseller at Waterstones Piccadilly, but I had yet to get around to her because I had, shamefully and erroneously, assumed she was male – talk about social conditioning. However, epiphany was impending.
My obsession began when this ‘VE Schwab’ I’d been hearing about suddenly popped up on my YouTube feed under a thumbnail of a fiery redhead in a Hamilton t-shirt. Reader, I YELLED. I have now met her twice, read all of Monsters of Verity (Kate Harker, you’re engraved on my heart) and Shades of Magic, my sister has become her biggest fan on the planet, and my best friend and I indicate the need to dive into deep-level plotting by deploying the phrase “let’s V it out”. If you’ve been following her on Twitter you’ll know she just rewrote the entirety of Vengeful, a feat which involved spreading a gazillion scene cards across the floor and rebuilding it from the ground-up like a massive paper courtyard.
For those unfortunate souls who have yet to discover the cross-dressing sass pirate that is Delilah Bard, our royal Red brothers Kell and Rhy Maresh, and the idiosyncrasies of Antari magic, let me enlighten you.
V said on Monday that the genesis of the story began with “a young man in a fabulous coat walking through a wall and colliding with a girl dressed as a boy”. She then started crafting the alternate worlds, whittling them down from a variety of colour-coded cities, including blue and green ones, to just four. And so, Shades of Magic is set in four parallel Victorian-style Londons in a world of tangible magic. Humans can control the elements by plucking on the threads of power that run through everything like the strings of an instrument, the greatest collation of which is in the river that courses through Red London, the most magic-rich incarnation of the city. A special race of humans called Antari have an affinity with this magic, marked by their one pure-black eye, that enables them to tap directly into its threads through their blood and so control all the elements. The story revolves around the balance of power between the threads, the key antagonist of which is power itself when it reaches the extremes of excess, personified as conscious magic. Its corrupting force already destroyed one London and now it threatens the borders of the other three.
A Darker Shade of Magic begins with the discovery of this dark magic and the quest to control it by the power-hungry and malevolent, while Kell, the Antari of Red London, and the muggle-filled Grey London’s Lila Bard struggle to return it to the destroyed city of Black London. The series sews together an intricate tapestry capturing the mercurial nature of power and how it grows and spreads and destroys when those who covet it allow themselves to be blinded and corrupted by greed.
There is an exquisitely drawn queer relationship between a prince and a pirate. There is an intensely powerful bond between two brothers that is neither competitive nor corrosive but deeply loving and expressive. There are Legend of Korra-style elemental games, knives that ignite when poetry is recited, and female captains, pirates, generals, and champion magicians at every turn. It is as bloody brilliant as it sounds.
I don’t think I’ve ever read tighter writing. There is literally no excess, no insulation. I feel this is a combination of V’s extraordinary gift for storytelling and the eagle-eyed editing of Miriam Weinberg (@MiriamAnneW). It’s basically the polar opposite point on the spectrum to what Henry James once described as the “large, loose, baggy monsters” of 19th century fiction. Every single word in Shades of Magic feels plotted, placed, and pondered. The world-building is seamless, and I’m the biggest stickler for this kind of detail that I’ve ever come across. You can’t have printed books without printing press technology. You can’t have codices without bookbinding and ink production. You can’t have paper without paper mills grinding pulp or flax. You can’t have silk without a climate suitable for silkworms or silk moths and a means to produce it. You can’t have kerosene lamps if you’ve not even invented the pendulum clock yet. You can to an extent make shit up, create a plant that produces xyz for this or that purpose, but this shortcut should not be used as a constant crutch. There is a special alchemical reaction that occurs when you read a really well-crafted world. Your brain needs to expend no effort in keeping track because the suspension of disbelief is not too great, the information creeps in via osmosis rather than flash flood, and everything obeys the laws of the world.
V nails it like no one I’ve read before. She said she wanted to “play with expectations and departures” when first creating the parallel Londons, stripping away the layers of the city like a body reduced to its bones, before building it back up again. It’s irresistible craftsmanship, harking back to the scops of Old English poetry who, like the Greeks, spoke their stories before they had the means to write them down. ‘Scieppan’ means to ‘build’ or ‘create’ in Old English, and so these ancient bards were literally building words and stories. V evokes this oldest of literary forms like she’s hooked herself right into the mainframe, crackling with the cumulative electricity that has charged down the centuries.
I could quite literally write an essay on all my favourite bits across the three books, all the quotes I would choose for tattoos, all the scenes I have fully cast and directed in my head, but possibly my most favourite element of the lot is the refrain of “stay with me”. It is not only woven throughout all three Shades of Magic books but through the Monsters of Verity duology as well – Kate says it to August as she drags him burning, sobbing through the trees, and August says it to Kate as she lies dying in his arms.
Listening to the Vitamin String Quartet’s gorgeous arrangement of the eponymous Sam Smith song while you close your eyes and think about the various relationships in these books is a peerless reading soundtrack (I almost fell off my chair with glee when V said at Monday’s event that she also creates playlists for each of her books and that her favourite material for the eclectic matter of scene-stuff always comes from film scores – she said that’s how she sees her scenes, playing the relevant tracks on repeat until they become the white noise behind them).
Lila says it to Kell, and Kell to Lila over and over again when she lies bleeding out in the street. Alucard says it to Anisa as he carries her from the rubble of the Emery estate, the shadow king clawing at her mind. Even Holland says it, before his poor skin was covered in a web of methodical scars and he became too well acquainted with the shape and scale of pain. It occurs with just enough frequency in the most specific of moments that it can’t be anything but intentional. This is a pretty powerful phrase, especially in the context of a world pitched into an apocalyptic war, and for a character like Lila, who loses everyone, or Kell, who has everything to lose, it becomes a desperate prayer in the face of futile darkness.
It is not in Lila’s nature to be open with anyone. Her instinct is to run when bonds are forged because she knows she’ll get hurt one way or another.
“This is why I run.
Because caring was a thing with claws. It sank them in, and didn’t let go. Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again. Caring didn’t break you clean. It was a bone that didn’t set, a cut that wouldn’t close.
It was better not to care – Lila tried not to care – but sometimes, people got in. Like a knife against armour, they found the cracks, slid past the guard, and you didn’t know how deep they were buried until they were gone and you were bleeding on the floor.”
But Delilah Bard is human, so prepare to have the structural integrity of your heart sorely tested.
V also said she always knows the final page of her stories before she begins writing the first because she needs to know who her characters are at the end to know who they are at the beginning, needs to know their “endgame”. Justin Cronin said a similar thing during the London leg of his book tour for The Passage trilogy, which is also a sweeping symphonic fantasy suffused with humanity and the monstrosity that can corrupt it. He said his last line was in his first. This is the level of connectivity I aspire to. The entirety of Shades of Magic glows like the bioluminescent roots of Eywa in Avatar and the reader gets to forge a direct neural link with its whispering network.
There is a moment in Book 1 when Calla decks Lila out in a whole new look, an armour of sorts, echoing one of the oldest and most male-dominated type scenes in heroic literature. Paris, Agamemnon, Patroclus, Achilles, Athena, Odysseus, Beowulf, Gawain… name the hero, they’ve had their arming scene. For Lila Bard, after an entire existence of operating in the shadows on nothing for anything, this is the moment she finds herself in the utterly alien situation of choice and indulgence and unencumbered agency. For the first time she is able to embrace her most bone-deep identity and truest aesthetic, and it is glorious.
Thus, I leave you with her thoughts as she sees her reflection for the first time, my favourite quote in what has secured itself as one of my favourite series of all time.
“Her polished boots glistened from knee to toe, lengthening her legs. Her coat broadened her shoulders and hugged her waist. And her mask tapered down her cheeks, the black horns curling up over her head in a way that was at once elegant and monstrous. She gave herself a long, appraising look, the way the girl had in the street, but there was nothing to scoff at now.
Delilah Bard looked like a king.
No, she thought, straightening. She looked like a conqueror.”
