A review by mafiabadgers
Fires' Astonishment by Geraldine McCaughrean

adventurous dark funny mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

First read 01/2025

The contours of the land channelled him down towards the sea, hanging in folds like a cloak from the collar of white chalk at Worm Head. At the Head the wind was so blustery that it stole all sound from the seagulls, from under the horse’s hoofs and out of the leather tack. It left only the sensation of his cloak cracking and his horse staggering a little as he hurried on down into the arms of Worm Bay. A spring tide was stuffing sea water enthusiastically but clumsily up the estuary, leaving patches of sand bare but swamping dry roots and bushes. A fluke of wind had flexed the sea round the promontory and swelled the basin where the fishing boats were moored. From up on the slopes they looked like dogs straining to get free.

Things I knew about Fires' Astonishment before reading:

• Philip Reeve called it "the spark that set me writing Mortal Engines" in the acknowledgements of Thunder City.
• Geraldine McCaughrean wrote Peter Pan in Scarlet, which I think I may have started but not finished when I was in secondary school.
• She also wrote A Pack of Lies, one of only five books to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
• Stands to reason she's a children's writer.
• That's it.

Things I know about Fires' Astonishment after reading:

• It's good. It's really, really good.
• Imagine someone wrote a mediaeval historical fiction novel about sex and sin and dying and then decided to chuck a dragon in there for good measure. That's Fires' Astonishment.
• It's not a children's book, but I feel like it could be, if children were cool.
• Despite not being set in any particular location, it feels very firmly situated. Do I detect a hint of Alan Garner?
• The characters are not heroes, but feel oh so very people-y. I think this is where the influence on Reeve comes through most strongly, in the humour and heartbreak, because it's a million miles away from madcap cities driving around eating each other. The first description we get of the female love interest emphasises eyelashes crusted with yellow by some slight infection, and psoriasis across the bottom half of her face; it's so refreshing to have non-Hollywood female characters. Reeve understands this also.
• It has that weirdness I associate with books that are more mediaeval than the Tolkien-y fantasy benchmark, though I freely concede that I don't really know enough about the Dark Ages to judge.
• It was published in 1990, the same year as Le Guin's Tehanu, the book that (to me) encapsulates the broader fantasy genre's feminist self-reckoning. Fires' Astonishment has not learned that lesson. The men do just about everything, and the one female character of note who tries to arrange her life the way she wants it, is the villain.
• The ending feels rather convenient.
• I don't care. It's still great.
• It's got probably the best sex scene/description I've ever come across. It's haunting. How the hell do you write a sex scene that's haunting? I'm looking at one and I still don't know.

He put both arms round her, body, breast and elbows all, and threw her, like a log on to the hearth, through the curtainless doorway and on to the big old bed. But her fists were knotted in the skirt of his jerkin and he was fetched off his feet on top of her, bruising his shins on the baseboard.
The weight of his body jerked the air out of her in a cry: he both heard and felt it against his cheek. He heard, too, the bell ringing way over at Saint Bede’s. He heard his servant climb half-way up the far-end steps and presumably reach his head above the landing. He heard the man’s foot miss a rung and slip down to the one below. He heard the withdrawal downstairs, an exchange with the other servant and a snort of dirty, good-natured laughter — laughter tinged with a cheer, such as you hear at a wedding.
Then all he could hear was his own breathing and the blood pushing its way through the flotsam of noise in his ears, like flood-water breaking a dam and cascading into the mainstream; and a drowning man’s cry in the flood that dilapidates the boundary fences of Eden.