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Robert Jackson Bennett
Jo Fletcher Books, 23 August 2018
Trade PB, 503pp
I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for a copy of Foundryside to read and review and an opportunity to tale part in the Blog Blast. Since reading Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy I'd been waiting eagerly to see what he would write next - and Foundryside didn't disappoint. It is a chewy, absorbing story of rebellion and identity set in a grim manufacturing city where a form of "magic" has been industrialised.
It's clearly an otherworld fantasy, but I wouldn't try to pigeonhole it further than that. Especially, don't let anyone try and tell you that just because the book focusses on industry and the commercialisation of this world's form of "magic" it must be "steampunk". There is very little steam here, and indeed referring to scriving as "magic" isn't quite right, although it definitely isn't science either.
Imagine, rather, you could somehow hack into the code that runs the world, and alter the nature of things - or what they believe about their nature - with strings of written commands. That's the basis for the economy of Tevanne, where powerful merchant houses employ legions of scrivers to design the products which they then stamp out and sell. These may be carriage wheels which are tricked into thinking themselves running downhill so they turn endlessly, structures which are commanded to act as if they are ten or a hundred times stronger than they "really" are or weapons of incredible, unnatural power. There are limits to scriving, based on how far or for how long you can push reality, and on how those commands ("sigils") can be combined and modified to express more complicated ideas.
The culture behind all this is a bit tech (with an emphasis on coding), a bit esoteric (much of the language of the sigils is lost so there's a kind of Indiana Jones element to seeking out and reconstructing it) and a lot capitalist, with huge profits to be made (and even a reference to the "move fast and break things" arrogance of the tech business). For all that, life in the enclaves of the four Houses is good for the best workers with plenty of food, clean water and low crime.
Outside - in Foundryside and the other districts of Taverre - it's almost a hell on earth. There is no government, no law, and precious little to live off. People do the best they can amongst filth and squalor, living in in overcrowded, decaying slums. This is where we meet Sancia Grado, escaped slave and possessor of strange talents, who's surviving as a thief. She's engaged on a job, and the description of this sets the tone for much of the book which from one perspective is a series of audacious heists.
Grado is the central character of this book and indeed carries almost all the narrative, with others - such as irritable scriver genius Orso or law and order crusader Captain Gregor Dandolo of the Waterwatch - very much acting as foils to her, at least until late in the book when Bennett gives them more depth. Sancia is though a magnificent creation, well able to bear that focus: maimed by her history, in many ways afflicted by a "talent" that she is, nonetheless, able to turn to some advantage, and fiercely, fiercely devoted to survival.
When she is drawn into the wider plot, concerning existential threats to the city and indeed the world itself, Sancia very sensibly asks why she should risk everything when she's been dealt such a shitty hand in life. Hasn't she suffered enough? Isn't she actually owed? The cruel surgery that gave her her talent - and which is related to that threat - pales, she argues, beside the evil of slavery which is something that was and is accepted by all its beneficiaries, including Dandle who present as being od so moral.
That question is at the heart of the book, also arising in connection with Clef, another character I loved and who Sancia comes to know well. The revelation of his true nature came as a real shock, but did explain the bond that formed between the two. (The scenes between Sancia and Clef are one of the best things in the book - both funny and increasingly sad, the relationship between the two depicted sensitively and with a lot of emotional truth).
Foundryside has deep resonances with our world, from colonialism and the exploitation of slaves to the impact on workers of unrestricted capitalism and the treatment of women (women scrivers are being eased out of the profession; other women are treated as counters in the dynastic games of Taverre). Bennett integrates these well with the fantasy plot, maintaining a real sense of mystery as to what is really going - at certain points it seems straightforward but then he turns things on a sixpence and all seems up in the air again.
I think there is a bit of homage to Sir Terry Pratchett: most obviously, the industrialising society somewhat resembles Pratchett's "technology" novels, and Gregor has a bit of Carrot, a bit of Vimes about him (he's trying to introduce the rule of law in a chaotic city-state). More subtly, there is that moral heart I mentioned above, which in various different ways (negative as well as positive, the pursuit of power as well as the desire for freedom and survival) motivates nearly everyone in this book.
It's a riveting book, an example of what fantasy can be, and like the best fantasy, poses hard questions about us and our own society.
(Content warning: Foundryside contains a couple of scenes with brief implied references to/ threats of rape).
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