Elemental (Arcane History 2) by Scott Thrower

[Ulysses]

Elemental (Arcane History 2)
By Scott Thrower
Published by the author, 2019
Five stars

Question: What’s the difference between a grave-robber and an archaeologist?
Answer: Time.
“Just because a white man digs something up, it doesn’t mean it’s his.”

I kept this book hoarded on my Kindle backlog for too long, and now there are two more books in the series—both of which I’ve bought after finishing this. The first book in this series was so very satisfying, I’d sort of lost track of the ongoing volumes. How much fun to rediscover them! This is a distinctive and creative story arc, sophisticated in its plotting, its period setting, and in the moral questions it poses (but doesn’t fully answer, appropriately enough).

In his Arcane History series, Scott Thrower creates a unique spin on magic, its nature and its sources. Magic is sort of like nuclear power—its potential both catastrophic for and beneficial to the human race. The similarity doesn’t stop there: the wrong kind of people are drawn to magic and for the wrong reason. Power. Magic could save the earth, or destroy it, depending on who gets their hands on it.

Charles Graham, a graduate student in Toronto in 1916, is sidelined by the diabetes that is slowly killing him. That disease also keeps him out of the increasingly appalling war raging in Europe, a war into which Canada and its troops have recently been drawn (the U.S. won’t enter the war for another year). Charlie’s interest in arcane history leads him to inadvertently release magic back into the world, along with a god who is its source, sealed away for all of recorded human history.

Oops.

The second book explores further the physical and moral puzzle of magic. Charlie is cured of his diabetes, but only as long as he stays with reasonable distance of the source of magic in Toronto. Awkwardly, Charlie is also immortal. As he notes several times, he can’t die, but he can be damaged. He can suffer—eternally, if things go wrong. The problem with Charlie’s magic—he is a wizard, one of t hose humans who can use magic—is that he can’t control it very well; and it’s also selfish, meaning that its prime directive is to protect Charlie from harm. Charlie wants to help others with his power, but his power doesn’t care.

When a mysterious ancient carved stone disk begins to arrive in pieces by mail at the Royal Ontario Museum, Charlie and his friends are caught up in the meaning of this new magical mystery. Even as he and his beloved Henry, a medical student, try to calculate building a life together in the hostile world of 1916 (hostile for all gay men, that is), the mysterious disk and its purpose becomes increasingly fraught. Even the god that Charlie released into the world—in the form of a willowy young blond man who calls himself Benedict—can’t answer the questions Charles poses to him.

The book is really an adventure-thriller, as Charles races against time to figure out his own magical capabilities, possibly at the cost of the various relationships important to him. The book is replete with that special kind of deceit that people seeking power fall back on, and spiced up with the kinds of plot twists that you might expect when you realize that you’re not the only immortal person in the game.

Charles and Henry’s relationship is the hub around which the plot turns. It provides the ironic counterpoint that the two men trying to save the world (again) are themselves marginalized by their very nature within the world they’re trying to save. Even at the climactic finale of the story, the core conundrums of the larger narrative are not resolved. That’s why I had to buy the next two books. I so admire when an author satisfies the reader but leaves them hungry for more.