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Zen Cho
Macmillan, 21 March 2019
HB, 367pp
I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley. I have also bought a copy - the beautiful signed and numbered limited edition from Goldsboro Books, (which should be a destination for you if you're ever bookshopping in London (it's close to Trafalgar Square)).
The True Queen is the sequel to Sorcerer to the Crown, in which heroine Prunella, a humble young woman who is mixed race, overcomes many obstacles to become the first ever Sorceress Royal, official magician to the Crown of the United Kingdom and head of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers. That a woman, and a woman of native ancestry (as the book has it) should rise to such a position in Regency London is a great scandal, and the opposition has not died down when this book opens, with intermittent attacks, insults and barbs aimed at Prunella and her supporters. That book was great fun, in a kind of Becky Sharp-with-magic kind of way and I was really pleased to see Cho return to this world again.
Unlike Sorcerer to the Crown this is not Prunella's story and understandably, with the duties of the Sorceress Royal to manage, she stays rather in the background - neatly avoiding the risk of such a powerful magicienne sorting everything with one brandish of her staff. The focus instead is on two sisters, Sakti and Muna, who have arrived from the island of Janda Baik in the Malacca Strait to seek help in having a curse lifted.
The viewpoint is thus definitely not that of white Englishpeople and indeed there is a certain inherent distrust of the English, who are felt to have their greedy eyes on Janda Baik. It has been politic for Sakti and Muna to come to London for help with the curse, but there is actually a great deal more going on than they or anyone else realise (though by the end, I suspected that the famous witch Mak Genggang, the sisters' guardian, and ruler and protectress of Janda Baik who was also in Sorcerer to the Crown, might know a bit more than she lets on).
The book soon spirals, then, into a complex imbroglio involving fairies, a stolen amulet (the 'Virtu'), a dragon aunt, a family with mountains of debt who wish to marry a daughter off to bring in some money, and much more. I thought I detected traces of Wodehouse, but as I said, I can also see Thackary as well as Austen and the whole genre of Regency romances. It's a wonderful mixture, great fun and often very funny - that lost 'Virtu' giving scope for a great deal of mild innuendo sparking off 18th century novels such as Pamela. ("Do you mean to tell me that the Duke gambled away the Queen's Virtu?") There's even a character here called Clarissa...
The seemingly light tone does though accompany important themes. Muna, the more sensible of the sisters, is trying to solve a very serious puzzle: the mystery of who she is and where she belongs, and also to find Sakti, who has gone missing. As if that wasn't enough, there are other issues addressed here: the place of young women in society, colonialism ('"another favour!" said the polong. "You are like the Dutch asking for land"'), mysogyny (to get away from her family and practice magic, one character deploys a simulacrum, an enchanted thing made from cloth and stuffing, to take her place - her suitor does not actually realise it's not her), diverse sexuality (if that term isn't anachronistic - consider: young man and a male dragon in a relationship that also permits marriage to a woman who may be in a relationship with another woman), religious differences and the duties of rulers to those they govern. And that's really only the start.
Muna herself is a redoubtable heroine, suffering from fear and uncertainty, lacking a memory of who she is but still unfazed by a foreign and hostile society (at best she's treated as an exotic accessory to be shown off at parties) but still formidable whether dealing with patronising Englishpeople, sly spirits or indeed, dragons. She may be in turmoil, but she knows what she wants to achieve and is determined to get on with it. And if that gets her in some awful scrapes - as happens a few times here - she doesn't waste time in self recrimination but pushes on and finds a way out, generally turning things to her own advantage. Even though she herself has no magic, she finds ways to command it (including ingenious use of a pantun, a form of poetry used in Janda Baik, to shape a spell) and she takes no nonsense from anyone. As I said, shades of Becky Sharp here.
It was good to see a fantasy novel in which all the main characters are women: the two sisters, Prunella herself, her best friend Henrietta, the Fairy Queen, Aunt Georgiana, Mak Genggang and several more. The males are by and large secondary in this story, if still able to meddle and cause trouble ("Relations are a terrible burden to a girl with magical ability").
It's an artfully told story, with lots of zest and a fast moving plot. If I had one small criticism it would be that in places things move a little too fast - fairly hefty bits of plot (long journeys, the retrieval of a key object) happen off stage, as it were, courtesy of a helpful bit of magic or a useful support character. But that's hardly unique to this book, and doesn't really diminish the action we do see (of which there'e plenty) or what the characters, Muna especially, achieve through their determination, guile and courage.
I'm now looking forward to a further instalment, confident that Cho will shake things up again in a third book!
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