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A review by ergative
The Curator by Owen King
5.0
This was a slow burn that ended up being utterly enthralling. On its surface it feels like a literary exploration of the dangers and follies of an unripe proletariat revolution, with the cruelties and brutalities that such actions let loose without proper leadership. It is not quite secondary world fantasy--there are references to Rome and Russian and Paris and London and so on--but the city it's set in is clearly invented, as has the country that the city is a capital of. Cultural details--the worship of cats among the working classes, the myths about the origins of cats as the escaped wisdom of the devil---are clearly not part of any location we're intended to recognize. Or perhaps there is an alternate history going on. The technology level is maybe 1920 or so (I suspect that era is not an accident), but there are references to current events like 'The Frankish Campaign' that certainly never happened in our timeline in 1920. It lends the entire setting a rather dreamlike quality.
The revolution is doomed from the beginning. It succeeds even at the startbecause the army is out of the country at the time, and although the revolutionaries can command the city, they have no hope of controlling the whole country. Indeed they're going to be doomed when the army turns around and comes back. The people are cautiously accepting of the new regime at first: The working classes certainly witnessed the appalling injustice--a cold-blooded murder of a potter by a government official that went unprosecuted--that sparked the entire process. But it doesn't take long at all for them to realize that the Provisional Government is entirely out of its depth. Its trio of leaders--- a naive university student, a gruff dockhand, a doddering old playwright who wrote rather disagreeable plays---are simply not able to bring order to the city, and atrocities are carried out without their knowledge.
Against this backdrop, we have Dora, whose actions are mysterious at the start. She was a maid before the revolution, and through the influence of her boyfriend, a lieutenant in the new army, she lands herself the curatorship of the Museum of the Worker. It's an odd job, since no one really cares about museums in the midst of a revolution, and Dora herself had actually wanted control over the INstitute of Psykical research next door, until it turned out to have burned down in the upheval. (Indeed, one of the most striking bits of this narrative is the way it describes both the upheval of the new order, and also the attempts to preserve the infrastructure of the city: driving the trams, selling beer, running the hotels.) Dora herself is a cipher; she's quite hard to understand, and I suspect that this property is behind a lot of the negative reviews on goodreads. You have to watch her actions, be attentive to her decisions, the way she is quietly watchful and attentive to everyone around her, to understand what she's after.
If you do it right, if you are patient and watchful and attentive, you'll come to the second part of this story, the bit that moves it from literary fiction into fantasy. A ghostly ship starts being seen flying around the city, captained by the murdered potter, and crewed by other people whose lives have been cut short or wasted. (There are a lot of these; Dora's neighbour who's taken up shop at an abandoned embassy runs the office where people go to disappear---one fo those atrocities that the Provisional Government is unaware of, indirectly responsible for, and incapable of stopping.) Triangle symbols are dotted around the museum, and on the wreckage of a burned Institute next door, where Dora's brother used to study before he died of cholera. Mysterious artifacts appear in the museum of the worker, exhibits thaat weren't there when Dora first took over, or that don't always work in the same way to everyone who examines them.
The way all these plot threads---Dora's quest, the revolution, the Institute, the triangles, the magic cats, the doddering old playwright.--- intertwine in the last portion of the book is really masterful. This is a book that knows how to do multiple things at once: to build a world, to build a plot, to build a revolution and a personal quest. And the cats are impeccable.
The revolution is doomed from the beginning. It succeeds even at the startbecause the army is out of the country at the time, and although the revolutionaries can command the city, they have no hope of controlling the whole country. Indeed they're going to be doomed when the army turns around and comes back. The people are cautiously accepting of the new regime at first: The working classes certainly witnessed the appalling injustice--a cold-blooded murder of a potter by a government official that went unprosecuted--that sparked the entire process. But it doesn't take long at all for them to realize that the Provisional Government is entirely out of its depth. Its trio of leaders--- a naive university student, a gruff dockhand, a doddering old playwright who wrote rather disagreeable plays---are simply not able to bring order to the city, and atrocities are carried out without their knowledge.
Against this backdrop, we have Dora, whose actions are mysterious at the start. She was a maid before the revolution, and through the influence of her boyfriend, a lieutenant in the new army, she lands herself the curatorship of the Museum of the Worker. It's an odd job, since no one really cares about museums in the midst of a revolution, and Dora herself had actually wanted control over the INstitute of Psykical research next door, until it turned out to have burned down in the upheval. (Indeed, one of the most striking bits of this narrative is the way it describes both the upheval of the new order, and also the attempts to preserve the infrastructure of the city: driving the trams, selling beer, running the hotels.) Dora herself is a cipher; she's quite hard to understand, and I suspect that this property is behind a lot of the negative reviews on goodreads. You have to watch her actions, be attentive to her decisions, the way she is quietly watchful and attentive to everyone around her, to understand what she's after.
If you do it right, if you are patient and watchful and attentive, you'll come to the second part of this story, the bit that moves it from literary fiction into fantasy. A ghostly ship starts being seen flying around the city, captained by the murdered potter, and crewed by other people whose lives have been cut short or wasted. (There are a lot of these; Dora's neighbour who's taken up shop at an abandoned embassy runs the office where people go to disappear---one fo those atrocities that the Provisional Government is unaware of, indirectly responsible for, and incapable of stopping.) Triangle symbols are dotted around the museum, and on the wreckage of a burned Institute next door, where Dora's brother used to study before he died of cholera. Mysterious artifacts appear in the museum of the worker, exhibits thaat weren't there when Dora first took over, or that don't always work in the same way to everyone who examines them.
The way all these plot threads---Dora's quest, the revolution, the Institute, the triangles, the magic cats, the doddering old playwright.--- intertwine in the last portion of the book is really masterful. This is a book that knows how to do multiple things at once: to build a world, to build a plot, to build a revolution and a personal quest. And the cats are impeccable.