A review by stromberg
Airy Nothing by Clarissa Pattern

adventurous emotional inspiring medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

We speak of “identifying with” a character in a story or drama, often merely to indicate we feel some affinity to them—but to “identify with”, in a more thorough sense, is to experience a blurring of the distinction between oneself and the character, much as an actor may “become” the role they play.

Notably, we also speak of “identifying as” a given sexuality or gender. The dual meaning inhering to “identify with/as” blends “being” and “becoming” in a manner very pertinent to how Clarissa Pattern’s Airy Nothing (2021, tRaum Books) dwells on and explores blurred boundaries—between female and male, between gay and hetero, between the mundane and the fae, and between theatre and real life. 

Those indistinct borderlands are the regions where John is best suited to live. A country naïf who has run off from his village to the London of Shakespeare’s day (accompanied by a friendly hobgoblin), John longs to prove himself a boy but prefers girls’ clothing and is taken (or mistaken) to be female at every turn. It is never clear whether John is a gay boy, or a trans girl, or a homoamorous but asexual androgyne—and this is eminently suitable in context, as our contemporary taxonomies of gender and sexuality would have been alien notions in the Tudor era. What is clear is that he is tormented by his mismatch with masculinity. He has also grown up faerie-blessed, guided by the fae in herblore and needlework, given to visions of other realities, and apt on occasion to metamorphose without warning.

All of which makes him surprisingly suited (in an era when women are barred from performing on stage) to the theatre.

Lost and bewildered in London, the newly arrived John encounters Black Jack, a jaunty cutpurse and mile-a-minute raconteur. But Jack’s street-toughened hustler’s exterior is a shell which, resist though he might, he finds gradually prised open by John’s vulnerability and open-heartedness (not to mention his otherworldliness). Inch by inch the two boys grow to each other;

indeed, from their meet-cute onwards, the ultimate trajectory of John and Jack’s relationship is never much in doubt;

we read on, not to learn whether they will or won’t, but to experience the development of their characters. This development is sensitively and thoughtfully handled. The novel is informed by questions of identity but is not a manifesto on identity; it is about two particular boys, who they are and who they become, and how each incorporates some essence of the other—again, a blurring of boundaries, this time between self and self.

Through it all, Shakespeare. This London is imaginary, with historical liberties taken for dramatic convenience, but walk its thronged and rumbustious streets long enough and you may cross paths with even the Bard himself. The magic of his lines and the magic of the faeries commingle, imbuing the tale with enchantment of two varieties.

My sole dissatisfaction with the novel is that I was not always convinced by the Elizabethan English usage which occasionally peppers the dialogue. Such thee/thou-ing rarely appears, though—for the most part, characters speak the English of our century—and anyway this is unlikely to bother anyone who is not a pedantic twit like me. This aside, the accessible prose of the narration and the sensitivity and earnestness of the protagonist’s and deuteragonist’s characterisations, not to mention the author’s evident warmth for Shakespeare, make for a charming reading experience—one which well earns the HFC Silver Medal for Best Historical Fantasy that Airy Nothing received in 2021.