Foz Meadows's Reviews > Cold Magic

This is going to be a longish review and also a rambling one, so I’ll ask you to bear with me.

Despite having purchased the third volume in Kate Elliott’s amazing Crossroads trilogy close on three months ago, I’ve not yet started reading it. This is due, in large part, to the originality of her worldbuilding; and I mean that as a compliment. Being as I am a devout mythology and history geek and also a lifelong fantasist, there are certain narrative cues to which my interests make me sensitive. When a fantasy author borrows from particular human cultures, like ancient Egypt, or from known myth-forms, like the Norse tradition – and more, if they do so with the intention that a similarly well-versed audience will be able to note the relationship, and appreciate it – the way I read their stories changes. Automatically, I infer background details about the world, the society, the religion, which is less presumptuous than it is natural, because to a certain extent, that’s what I should be doing. Rather than explaining every little thing, the author is allowing me to fill in the gaps with my own knowledge, which in turn allows them to get on with the business of telling a good story. The first Kate Elliott series I encountered was Crown of Stars, which, while featuring several original societies, took place primarily in a more familiar medieval setting, albeit one shaped with certain fascinating and significant alterations. The point of mentioning this is that, when the first Crossroads book came out, I more or less assumed that its worldbuilding, too, would contain comparable levels of familiarity to Crown of Stars, and that I would therefore be able to navigate the narrative in my usual fashion, strengthening my grasp on what the characters were doing and where they were headed by comparing the rules of their world to what I know of ours.

What actually happened was that I found myself in a setting completely outside my experience, blind to the sorts of cues which, had they been anchored in a mythos comparable (say) to that of ancient Rome, I would have pounced on in a heartbeat. Not only was I unable to predict the actions of the characters or the twists of the plot, but I couldn’t piece together the shape of the higher magical story. A sidenote at this point, by way of demonstration: consider the average vampire novel. In this day and age, an author can reasonably assume that, if they drop hints about a character who is pale, unfond of direct sunlight and possessed of a tendency to stare at necks, their audience will think, vampire. There is no tension on our behalf as to this fact, even if the characters are, of necessity, slower to catch on. But imagine you, the reader, had never heard of a vampire. The hints would still be there, but harder to spot; without having a creature in mind possessed of all three traits to signal that this was a cluster of important facts, you could easily be forgiven for dismissing certain pertinent information – such as the paleness – as mere background detail, there to flesh things out, but not, of itself, significant. Given the current popularity of fantasy stories, particularly urban fantasy, even non-mythologists use their knowledge of certain monster-and-magic types to guide them through each successive story.

Kate Elliott’s writing is unique to my experience, in that she can borrow from known cultures, mythologies and settings and yet reinvent them so completely that the reader is, utterly and truly, transported to a new world. From the smallest social details to the higher magical, social and political destinies of her characters, Elliott challenges her readers to work without the usual safety nets. Which is why, midway through the second Crossroads book, I suddenly realised that everything I’d been assuming about the world was wrong, because – shamefully – I had been dismissing relevant information out of a self-inflicted inability to recognise it as such. The Crossroads mythology was so different to anything I’d read before that even when presented, time and again, with the key stories about the gods and their behaviours, I failed to make the connection between those invented myths and the hints as to their significance strewn throughout the plot and actions of the characters. I was being a lazy reader; I was not paying attention. By the end of the second book, I’d made up my mind: before embarking on the third, I’d have to read the first two again – only this time, I’d keep my eyes open and refrain from making assumptions.

Which brings me to Cold Magic, the first volume in the new Spiritwalker trilogy. The setting is an alternate past-history Earth, but with so many inventive differences that any attempt at trying to intuit the shape of the narrative on that basis simply won’t work. There is something utterly fascinating about being dropped into a world to which one feels an automatic sense of ownership – it is still Earth, no matter how altered, therefore I should still comprehend how it works – and realising that, actually, no. Elliott has a gift for detail: instead of leaning on turns of phrase appropriate to our own reality, her narrator is provided with ample world-appropriate alternatives, so that, even where we might deem one new saying to be the equivalent of a particular old one, we are still forced to consider its meaning anew. Small social niceties and behaviours are observed by the characters, but we must learn these, too, such as the fact that shaking hands is considered a politically radical way of greeting someone else, because of the equality such a tactile gesture implies. There are flashes of known mythological concepts, particularly as relates to Celtic traditions, but renamed and altered so skilfully that even trying to compare them to the Earth originals doesn’t quite work, because the new names have properly come to mean something quite different. Elliott has described the work as a mash-up, which it technically is, but also, in a more literal sense, isn’t. Despite the disparate elements drawn together to build the world, the story, the society, its peoples and their magics, there are no stitches in evidence at the juncture of this and that. The skin of the whole is smooth and unblemished, the gait fluid, the eyes sharp, and what the tongue seeks to describe, it does not miss.

Narrated by Catherine Hassi Barahal, known as Cat, the eldest daughter of a Kena’ani family, who are also called Phoenecians, the story follows her travails after the aunt and uncle by whom she has been raised are forced to hand her over in marriage to a haughty cold mage. Cat’s world is shaped by the struggles of an industrial civilisation: common folk are rebelling against their masters, both magical and political, desiring to change society through new technologies such as rifles and airships, which the cold mages despise. The political landscape is fraught with ancient tensions, too: old Roman lies about the nature of Phoenecians, the history of the mage Houses, and the comparatively recent uprising of Camjiata, a would-be emperor whose defeat and subsequent island imprisonment are reminiscent of Napoleon’s captivity on Elba. Separated from her beloved cousin, Bee, Cat is forced not only to consider her own place in this world, but her options in navigating its dangers, whether through her cold mage husband, the laws of the Europan principalities, the writings of her father’s diaries, or the revolutionary words of radicals. Cold Magic is an incredible novel that blends questions of culture, society and humanity with enthralling mythologies, heated politics and strong, compelling characters: in other words, it was written by Kate Elliott, and you should go read it. Now.