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tourneuse 's review for:
The Kingdoms
by Natasha Pulley
This is the third book of Natasha Pulley's that I've read. The original idea, setting, plotting and writing style are all absolutely flawless so I am really loath to give it 3 stars only. But after 3 books it has become clear she can only write one character dynamic, and it's absolutely doing my head in.
Character 1: the sheltered, ordinary, inoffensive-to-everyone man who has never gone beyond his mental or physical horizons. Character 2: the exotic, enigmatic, charismatic man who, instead of communicating anything at all, pines away hoping the first man will shake off the cobwebs of heteronormativity and recognise their LoveTM. Meanwhile the female characters are always both awful and awfully written, and frequently fridged in support of the LoveTM. Despite the wonderful, inventive plots, most of the dramatic tension comes from whether Character 1 will realise his feelings before it's too late.
All this made me uncomfortable in the first two books of hers that I read ('The Watchmaker of Filigree Street' and 'The Bedlam Stacks') but in this one it is particularly in your face and reached the territory of distasteful.
The setting is an England where Napolean won the war and all the British are slaves to the French. Character 1, Joe Tournier, is a recently freed English slave who receives a postcard, in written English (not allowed) and dated a generation earlier, from the Eilean Mor lighthouse, which in his universe has only just been built. Haunted by this conundrum, he decides to become an engineer, and when word comes that the lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor have disappeared (inspired by the historical incident) he manages to get himself sent to investigate. The lighthouse is a portal between 2 times, Joe's and one a hundred years earlier, i.e. the historical timeline 'we' know, where the English have not yet been defeated. Joe is captured by a ship from 'our' England, and forced to divulge technological advances from his time to help the English avoid defeat.
So far, so amazing, right?! Absolutely ingenious premise, with a sympathetic, logical, and intriguing trajectory set up for the protagonist. I had such high hopes for this book.
Enter Character 2.
'Missouri Kite' (seriously), the ship's captain, is prodigiously young for the role, Byronic in build/garb/hairstyle, mistreated by his aristocratic family of birth for being illegitimate and mixed race and cast off to the 'found family' on his ship, and scarred down one side of his face. You can't get more clichéd, right? Wrong. Kite is bizarre, unpredictable, occasionally psychotic to the point of literal murder of a literal child. Much of the suspense of the book centres around the mystery of his behaviour. For reasons 'unknown to us', Kite is cross about having to capture Joe, but even so, he is written as an entirely different person from his initially promising opening appearance. Naturally (this is not a spoiler because it could only be one thing, given Pulley's previous two books) his motivation is not related to any of the tick-box trauma I've just described, but to do with something he knows about Joe personally and will do absolutely anything to stop Joe from finding out.
All this, I cannot stress enough, is entirely obvious from the second scene he is in; all that's left to find out is Kite's side of the story, and he seems to be on a mission to be so obnoxious as to stop you caring about it. The central dilemma (again, stated from the outset) is whether Joe, once he has provided information to help the English, will stay in the alternative timeline or return to his own time, where he has a wife and daughter, his love for whom is depicted quite tenderly at first. The question is naturally moot, because by providing the information in the first place he will have destroyed his own reality (an uncomfortable fact never really explored, as Pulley focuses instead on his increasing guilt when Kite sulks every time he reiterates his intention to go home TO HIS CHILD), and because this is a Natasha Pulley book, meaning that Joe obviously won't care about something as trivial as (checks notes) his daughter as soon as he finally learns about Kite what is painfully obvious to a reader with more than one brain cell. I don't really know why I bothered to read it. For all the inventiveness of the premise and the snappish wit of the prose, I knew exactly where it was going the whole time.
This is a real shame. There are so few authors writing in this really specific genre that is 'real world with some fantasy/supernatural elements', with grounded stakes that don't just feel like the characters are interchangeable and the author is trying to write an 'end of an era' allegory. Still fewer can write as well as Pulley can. To give credit where it is due, she particularly excels at action scenes that aren't in an action book: they aren't so detailed as to distract or bog down, but they're detailed enough that they feel well-researched, relevant for advancing the plot, and not an afterthought of the setting. But the relationships are dehumanising. Peppered throughout this book are casual slurs directed at Kite because of his mixed heritage; being mixed-race myself it was jarring and upsetting, as it's not actually necessary to the story. The abuse he suffered as a child just 'fuelled Kite's ambition', clearly the only pathway a white author could imagine. Nowadays Kite doesn't seem to care about a damn thing except Joe going back to his wife and child. So he didn't need to be mixed-race OR illegitimate to explain his ruthlessness: these are just offensive clichés.
This, in turn, really throws into relief the status of Joe as a 'slave' of the French. This theme of slavery is not addressed with anything like the level of gravity it deserves, with the French 'master' depicted as sympathetic and genuinely fond of Joe. Many, many black (which I am not) creatives have discussed how harmful this sort of depiction is. It is lamentable, but hardly unexpected, if the book had just stayed in its lane. Instead, by throwing in sprinkles of racism, 25% for grit/realism and 75% to further Joe's character development (as he begins to care about something not himself, yada yada yawn), Pulley highlights that the whole edifice is... kinda skeevy.
I should add here that Joe himself is not white either, he is of east Asian descent? But he has no concept of himself as such, and *he* is not subject to any racism - only Kite is. Why? It would have been better to just leave it out entirely. Nobody picks up this genre to get realistic depictions of bigotry; make it a feature of the storyline or leave it out. Joe's identity in Kite's England also makes no historical sense if he is east Asian, but that's glossed over, so why couldn't the racism towards Kite be? Oh, silly me: it's because we needed something to excite sympathy for Kite, since he has no positive character traits. We needed a 40-year-old man to feel bad for refusing to wipe his daughter out of his existence in favour of the enigmatic murderer 10 years his junior he just met (this itself a very harmful, sensationalist, homophobic cliché). Lest we forget, by the way, Kite is only an enigmatic murderer because he's so frustrated that Joe doesn't want to obliterate his daughter. It's all Joe's fault for being so oblivious. That's the takeaway from this book.
I haven't got into the subject of the depiction of disability, but it goes without saying that the scars down one side of Kite's body and face add absolutely nothing to the character except to further the 'looks like could kill you, and indeed has killed several people, but is actually a cinnamon roll because he's in (he thinks) unrequited gay love' vibe we're supposed to be buying into.
I get that Pulley wants to cover all bases with putting diverse characters in historical fantasy. But this ain't it - not when being a victim of racism since childhood comes second in a supposedly genius 30-year-old man's character development to his destructive love for a seemingly straight married man. Don't get me wrong, that would be a fascinating portrait... if Pulley didn't VALIDATE all of the terrible s**t that Kite does because of it. A world without major homophobia or agonising about sexuality per se? Great - but not when your female characters are fridged. How did we get to this from such an amazing premise?
This is LGBTQ+ for young, probably straight, white women. Good prose doesn't disguise it. I don't know whether I plan to give Pulley a fourth shot, but I really hope she does better, because there are so many amazing things about her books, and I wouldn't have even bothered to finish this if she weren't such a good writer otherwise.
Character 1: the sheltered, ordinary, inoffensive-to-everyone man who has never gone beyond his mental or physical horizons. Character 2: the exotic, enigmatic, charismatic man who, instead of communicating anything at all, pines away hoping the first man will shake off the cobwebs of heteronormativity and recognise their LoveTM. Meanwhile the female characters are always both awful and awfully written, and frequently fridged in support of the LoveTM. Despite the wonderful, inventive plots, most of the dramatic tension comes from whether Character 1 will realise his feelings before it's too late.
All this made me uncomfortable in the first two books of hers that I read ('The Watchmaker of Filigree Street' and 'The Bedlam Stacks') but in this one it is particularly in your face and reached the territory of distasteful.
The setting is an England where Napolean won the war and all the British are slaves to the French. Character 1, Joe Tournier, is a recently freed English slave who receives a postcard, in written English (not allowed) and dated a generation earlier, from the Eilean Mor lighthouse, which in his universe has only just been built. Haunted by this conundrum, he decides to become an engineer, and when word comes that the lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor have disappeared (inspired by the historical incident) he manages to get himself sent to investigate. The lighthouse is a portal between 2 times, Joe's and one a hundred years earlier, i.e. the historical timeline 'we' know, where the English have not yet been defeated. Joe is captured by a ship from 'our' England, and forced to divulge technological advances from his time to help the English avoid defeat.
So far, so amazing, right?! Absolutely ingenious premise, with a sympathetic, logical, and intriguing trajectory set up for the protagonist. I had such high hopes for this book.
Enter Character 2.
'Missouri Kite' (seriously), the ship's captain, is prodigiously young for the role, Byronic in build/garb/hairstyle, mistreated by his aristocratic family of birth for being illegitimate and mixed race and cast off to the 'found family' on his ship, and scarred down one side of his face. You can't get more clichéd, right? Wrong. Kite is bizarre, unpredictable, occasionally psychotic to the point of literal murder of a literal child. Much of the suspense of the book centres around the mystery of his behaviour. For reasons 'unknown to us', Kite is cross about having to capture Joe, but even so, he is written as an entirely different person from his initially promising opening appearance. Naturally (this is not a spoiler because it could only be one thing, given Pulley's previous two books) his motivation is not related to any of the tick-box trauma I've just described, but to do with something he knows about Joe personally and will do absolutely anything to stop Joe from finding out.
All this, I cannot stress enough, is entirely obvious from the second scene he is in; all that's left to find out is Kite's side of the story, and he seems to be on a mission to be so obnoxious as to stop you caring about it. The central dilemma (again, stated from the outset) is whether Joe, once he has provided information to help the English, will stay in the alternative timeline or return to his own time, where he has a wife and daughter, his love for whom is depicted quite tenderly at first. The question is naturally moot, because by providing the information in the first place he will have destroyed his own reality (an uncomfortable fact never really explored, as Pulley focuses instead on his increasing guilt when Kite sulks every time he reiterates his intention to go home TO HIS CHILD), and because this is a Natasha Pulley book, meaning that Joe obviously won't care about something as trivial as (checks notes) his daughter as soon as he finally learns about Kite what is painfully obvious to a reader with more than one brain cell. I don't really know why I bothered to read it. For all the inventiveness of the premise and the snappish wit of the prose, I knew exactly where it was going the whole time.
This is a real shame. There are so few authors writing in this really specific genre that is 'real world with some fantasy/supernatural elements', with grounded stakes that don't just feel like the characters are interchangeable and the author is trying to write an 'end of an era' allegory. Still fewer can write as well as Pulley can. To give credit where it is due, she particularly excels at action scenes that aren't in an action book: they aren't so detailed as to distract or bog down, but they're detailed enough that they feel well-researched, relevant for advancing the plot, and not an afterthought of the setting. But the relationships are dehumanising. Peppered throughout this book are casual slurs directed at Kite because of his mixed heritage; being mixed-race myself it was jarring and upsetting, as it's not actually necessary to the story. The abuse he suffered as a child just 'fuelled Kite's ambition', clearly the only pathway a white author could imagine. Nowadays Kite doesn't seem to care about a damn thing except Joe going back to his wife and child. So he didn't need to be mixed-race OR illegitimate to explain his ruthlessness: these are just offensive clichés.
This, in turn, really throws into relief the status of Joe as a 'slave' of the French. This theme of slavery is not addressed with anything like the level of gravity it deserves, with the French 'master' depicted as sympathetic and genuinely fond of Joe. Many, many black (which I am not) creatives have discussed how harmful this sort of depiction is. It is lamentable, but hardly unexpected, if the book had just stayed in its lane. Instead, by throwing in sprinkles of racism, 25% for grit/realism and 75% to further Joe's character development (as he begins to care about something not himself, yada yada yawn), Pulley highlights that the whole edifice is... kinda skeevy.
I should add here that Joe himself is not white either, he is of east Asian descent? But he has no concept of himself as such, and *he* is not subject to any racism - only Kite is. Why? It would have been better to just leave it out entirely. Nobody picks up this genre to get realistic depictions of bigotry; make it a feature of the storyline or leave it out. Joe's identity in Kite's England also makes no historical sense if he is east Asian, but that's glossed over, so why couldn't the racism towards Kite be? Oh, silly me: it's because we needed something to excite sympathy for Kite, since he has no positive character traits. We needed a 40-year-old man to feel bad for refusing to wipe his daughter out of his existence in favour of the enigmatic murderer 10 years his junior he just met (this itself a very harmful, sensationalist, homophobic cliché). Lest we forget, by the way, Kite is only an enigmatic murderer because he's so frustrated that Joe doesn't want to obliterate his daughter. It's all Joe's fault for being so oblivious. That's the takeaway from this book.
I haven't got into the subject of the depiction of disability, but it goes without saying that the scars down one side of Kite's body and face add absolutely nothing to the character except to further the 'looks like could kill you, and indeed has killed several people, but is actually a cinnamon roll because he's in (he thinks) unrequited gay love' vibe we're supposed to be buying into.
I get that Pulley wants to cover all bases with putting diverse characters in historical fantasy. But this ain't it - not when being a victim of racism since childhood comes second in a supposedly genius 30-year-old man's character development to his destructive love for a seemingly straight married man. Don't get me wrong, that would be a fascinating portrait... if Pulley didn't VALIDATE all of the terrible s**t that Kite does because of it. A world without major homophobia or agonising about sexuality per se? Great - but not when your female characters are fridged. How did we get to this from such an amazing premise?
This is LGBTQ+ for young, probably straight, white women. Good prose doesn't disguise it. I don't know whether I plan to give Pulley a fourth shot, but I really hope she does better, because there are so many amazing things about her books, and I wouldn't have even bothered to finish this if she weren't such a good writer otherwise.