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A review by annelyle
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard
4.0
One of my favourite genres outside fantasy is historical crime, so a series that combines both is an irresistible lure to me. I was very glad, therefore, to come across de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood series, set in the pre-Columbian Aztec Empire.
Disclaimer: Aliette and I share both a publisher and an agent. I take this, not so much as bias, as an indication that our tastes are similar and attract a similar audience. It should not surprise anyone, therefore, if I enjoyed this book!
Servant of the Underworld is de Bodard's debut novel and the first in her series about Acatl, High Priest of the Dead in the city of Tenochtitlan. In it, Acatl finds himself embroiled in the case of a missing priestess when his brother, a knight of the prestigious Order of the Jaguar, is found in her room covered in blood. Acatl has always been jealous of his more successful brother, but concern for his sister-in-law and her children, as well as a dogged sense of honour, drive him to pursue the case despite his misgivings.
By choosing to set a novel in the Mexica Empire, de Bodard has a tough task on her hands. Most readers will probably have some basic ideas about the Aztecs, thanks to Indiana Jones and similar sources--cue mental images of step pyramids, crystal skulls, and of course human sacrifice!--but the details of daily life are less familiar and, thanks to a fragmentary archaeological record, incomplete in any case. Writing fiction in such a setting therefore requires a mixture of historical research and fantasy-style world-building, not to mention the ability to present this world in an easy-to-absorb fashion.
Take the matter of names, for starters. The language of the Mexica Empire, Nahuatl, is agglutinative, meaning it produces long polysyllabic words. Add to that a Spanish-derived orthography and you end up with names that are difficult for any English-speaking reader to parse and remember: Ceyaxochitl, Neutemoc, Quiyahuayo. Thankfully de Bodard is careful not to introduce too many characters at once, and her protagonist at least has a short name, but added to the unfamiliar culture it makes this a hard book to get into at first. Unfortunately there's no real way around this unless one resorts to translations of names, and not all names translate into English in any case. I suspect this is one reason why non-Eurocentric real-world fantasy is relatively rare. An Anglophone writer creating a secondary world is free to invent names that are easily comprehensible to an English-speaking audience--Gandalf, Elric, Rincewind--whereas one writing about a real, historical culture has no such option.
The second difficulty de Bodard faces is the reality of the religion of this period, notorious for mass sacrifices (of humans as well as animals) which presents a real barrier to reader sympathy. Characters slit the throats of animals to power their spells, or speak casually of the deaths of men, women and children that are required to placate their gods. De Bodard softens this impact by never dwelling on the gory details--which is appropriate, since to her characters this is all very normal and unremarkable--but it is an ever-present shadow nonetheless.
What holds the story together and keeps the reader turning pages is the steady presence of the amateur detective, Acatl, who is himself a fish out of water: an unambitious parish priest promoted higher than he feels competent to deal with. Acatl's humility and caution also help to balance the fact that he wields powerful magics; powers that could all too easily overwhelm the plot in the hands of a more assertive character (or a less skillful author!). Occasionally I felt that Acatl went a little too far in the direction of humility, and his constant fretting about his relationship with his brother became a little repetitive, but this was a minor detraction from the pleasure of spending time with him.
One advantage of writing a crime story in an unfamiliar setting is that the reader knows too little to be able to guess the ending, and yet the challenge to the writer is that the identity of the killer still has to make sense. I felt this was handled pretty well in Servant of the Underworld, with the escalation from an apparently simple murder to a major conspiracy at the highest levels of the Mexica world presented in digestible chunks. I confess that I'm not a terribly analytical reader, however, so it's quite easy to slip clues past me under cover of an exciting storyline!
The book is not quite as long as its page count would lead one to believe. In true epic fantasy tradition there are several appendices, including a dramatis personae, an Aztec glossary, and an essay about the background to writing the book. This latter gives some interesting insights into de Bodard's writing process, as well as explaining how much fact vs fiction has gone into the novel. The one thing I felt was lacking was a pronunciation guide for the names; I was driven to search the web for guides to Nahuatl, but finding a reliable one that adequately covered the names used in the book proved a difficult task.
Overall I enjoyed this book a great deal, and will definitely be reading the second volume, which is already waiting on my iPad!
Disclaimer: Aliette and I share both a publisher and an agent. I take this, not so much as bias, as an indication that our tastes are similar and attract a similar audience. It should not surprise anyone, therefore, if I enjoyed this book!
Servant of the Underworld is de Bodard's debut novel and the first in her series about Acatl, High Priest of the Dead in the city of Tenochtitlan. In it, Acatl finds himself embroiled in the case of a missing priestess when his brother, a knight of the prestigious Order of the Jaguar, is found in her room covered in blood. Acatl has always been jealous of his more successful brother, but concern for his sister-in-law and her children, as well as a dogged sense of honour, drive him to pursue the case despite his misgivings.
By choosing to set a novel in the Mexica Empire, de Bodard has a tough task on her hands. Most readers will probably have some basic ideas about the Aztecs, thanks to Indiana Jones and similar sources--cue mental images of step pyramids, crystal skulls, and of course human sacrifice!--but the details of daily life are less familiar and, thanks to a fragmentary archaeological record, incomplete in any case. Writing fiction in such a setting therefore requires a mixture of historical research and fantasy-style world-building, not to mention the ability to present this world in an easy-to-absorb fashion.
Take the matter of names, for starters. The language of the Mexica Empire, Nahuatl, is agglutinative, meaning it produces long polysyllabic words. Add to that a Spanish-derived orthography and you end up with names that are difficult for any English-speaking reader to parse and remember: Ceyaxochitl, Neutemoc, Quiyahuayo. Thankfully de Bodard is careful not to introduce too many characters at once, and her protagonist at least has a short name, but added to the unfamiliar culture it makes this a hard book to get into at first. Unfortunately there's no real way around this unless one resorts to translations of names, and not all names translate into English in any case. I suspect this is one reason why non-Eurocentric real-world fantasy is relatively rare. An Anglophone writer creating a secondary world is free to invent names that are easily comprehensible to an English-speaking audience--Gandalf, Elric, Rincewind--whereas one writing about a real, historical culture has no such option.
The second difficulty de Bodard faces is the reality of the religion of this period, notorious for mass sacrifices (of humans as well as animals) which presents a real barrier to reader sympathy. Characters slit the throats of animals to power their spells, or speak casually of the deaths of men, women and children that are required to placate their gods. De Bodard softens this impact by never dwelling on the gory details--which is appropriate, since to her characters this is all very normal and unremarkable--but it is an ever-present shadow nonetheless.
What holds the story together and keeps the reader turning pages is the steady presence of the amateur detective, Acatl, who is himself a fish out of water: an unambitious parish priest promoted higher than he feels competent to deal with. Acatl's humility and caution also help to balance the fact that he wields powerful magics; powers that could all too easily overwhelm the plot in the hands of a more assertive character (or a less skillful author!). Occasionally I felt that Acatl went a little too far in the direction of humility, and his constant fretting about his relationship with his brother became a little repetitive, but this was a minor detraction from the pleasure of spending time with him.
One advantage of writing a crime story in an unfamiliar setting is that the reader knows too little to be able to guess the ending, and yet the challenge to the writer is that the identity of the killer still has to make sense. I felt this was handled pretty well in Servant of the Underworld, with the escalation from an apparently simple murder to a major conspiracy at the highest levels of the Mexica world presented in digestible chunks. I confess that I'm not a terribly analytical reader, however, so it's quite easy to slip clues past me under cover of an exciting storyline!
The book is not quite as long as its page count would lead one to believe. In true epic fantasy tradition there are several appendices, including a dramatis personae, an Aztec glossary, and an essay about the background to writing the book. This latter gives some interesting insights into de Bodard's writing process, as well as explaining how much fact vs fiction has gone into the novel. The one thing I felt was lacking was a pronunciation guide for the names; I was driven to search the web for guides to Nahuatl, but finding a reliable one that adequately covered the names used in the book proved a difficult task.
Overall I enjoyed this book a great deal, and will definitely be reading the second volume, which is already waiting on my iPad!