#Review - The Broken God by Gareth Hanrahan

Cover by Thea Dumitriu

The Broken God (Black Iron Legacy, Book Three)
Gareth Hanrahan
Orbit, 20 May 2021
Available as: PB, 578pp, e
Read as: Advance PB copy supplied by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9780356514369

I'm SO grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of one of my most anticipated books of 2021.

The Broken God follows from The Gutter Prayer and The Shadow Saint, chronicling the prosperous manufacturing and trading city of Guerdon - a place where commerce, magic and industry mingle easily. The Godswar has finally come to Guerdon, but in contrast to the apocalyptic impact visited on other battlefields, an uneasy truce has been brokered with different areas of the city occupied by forces from Haith (a Northen power based on necromancy), Ishmere (home to mad gods) and Lyrix (a nation of pirates and dragons).

Action in The Broken God is chiefly focussed on Cari (Carillon Thay, who featured in Book 1, with less of a part in Book 2) and on Rasce, the human amanuensis of one of those dragons, who has been planted in Guerdon to reap the profits of the occupation ('The dragon takes what he wants'). Cari has left Guerdon carrying an ancient tome of magic (AKA 'the f****ng book') to trade her way into the wizard city of Khebesh where she hopes to find a cure for her friend Spar, who was turned into a new part of the city at the end of Book 1 (keep up!) 

Cari's journey spirals into disaster, with an ally of the dragons chasing her for vengeance, power-hungry alchemists chasing her to find out what she's made of (literally) and exploit her connection to Spar, and... well, another old enemy also chasing her for vengeance (she killed a goddess). Rasce's story is like a supernatural twist on The Godfather - the dragons very much run their own organisation within the Lyrixian forces. It's all very family, with Rasce serving the dragon called Great-Uncle, who sets clear expectations of profit (the dragon takes what he wants). Soon, Rasce is allying with elements in Guerdon's restless underclasses of thieves and ghouls to seek power and wealth. 

Hanrahan uses these two very different strands adroitly to keep the reader guessing, and the story flowing, both echoing and undercutting the style and themes of the first two books. The goings-on in Guerdon, featuring Rasce but also an espionage sub-plot as the authorities of the city try to tame him, reminded me more of the first book (which introduced Cari, Spar and their ghoul friend, Rat, in a doomed heist attempt) than the second (which largely followed the Haithi in their power plays). Again, there's more behind what happens than is apparent at first. Cari's adventures are rather different again - away from Guerdon and facing new threats from ragged gods, there is a real sense of her diminishment. Cari's lost the power that her bond with Spar gave her, and she's vulnerable again. In that vulnerability we discover a lot about Cari's history, her time as a sailor and why she fled Guerdon that first time. The world has changed since then, and a lot of what she remembers is now lost - when she discovers fragments of that early life, will they help her, or lead her into sentimentality and danger?

It's hard to convey the sense in this book of hard, or no, choices, of taint, a kind of moral culpability which infects everyone, Cari included, to some degree. There are really no heroes, only opponents. And there are no villains (one or two fairly minor characters excepted, perhaps) - only more opponents. Artolo, for example, wants revenge on Cari. He behaves in a pretty unpleasant way, but then Cari did cut off his fingers. Cari, equally, is ready to bargain with unspeakable horrors and to aid them, if it will get her into Khebesh. Rasce isn't all bad: the Guerdon thief Baston, who allies with him, tells himself that Rasce might be persuaded to serve a noble purpose - and justifies compromise in pursuit of that. The book conveys a unique atmosphere of shiftiness, compromise, failure, and decay. 

Behind all this - somewhere - are the dreadful Black Iron Gods, and the tyrannical gods of Ishmere, but this is a world where people think they know how to deal with gods. Gods, here, are a kind of technology and none are so wild or so dangerous that somebody won't try to make use of them. The profusion of divinity emphasises, rather than overshadowing, human motivations, plots and struggles - while raising the stakes, the consequences of success or failure. If the gods are a technology, it's a deadly technology, a sort of nuclear-level dangerous technology which can leave whole lands haunted by monstrosities and fragments of jostling realities, a landscape worse than if it were simply made sterile. That's the world that Cari's struggling to travel through, subject to one horror after another, and it is a bad place to be, but the really scary truth she has to face is the ruin she seems to bring and the guilt that comes from that when the consequences come home to those she thinks of as friends.

The law of the Black Iron Gods seems to be the law of unintended consequences, of good intentions gone sour, of enmeshed and conflicting interests, of chains of events that nobody can foresee or control. It makes reading The Broken God into a fascinating, addictive and haunting experience where a distaste for what almost everyone is doing is finely balanced with a sneaking desire for them to push on further. To betray. To devastate. 

The reader becomes complicit with what's happening, awful though it is.

It's the sort of book which, after you've finished it, doesn't so much make you feel unclean, as in need of an exorcism. In short, then, wonderful stuff, and a series that shows so signs of flagging, rather of really getting going. I can't recommend it too strongly.

For more information about The Broken God, see the publisher's website here. 

Review - The Shadow Saint by Gareth Hanrahan

Illustration by Richard Anderson,
design by Steve Panton LBBG

The Shadow Saint (Black Iron Legacy, 2)
Gareth Hanrahan
Orbit, 9 January 2020
PB, 562pp

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for an advance copy of The Shadow Saint.

"The spy climbs a stair of fire to get to Heaven..."

This is the sequel to Hanrahan's first novel, The Gutter Prayer, which introduced us to the city of Guerdon, its Machiavellian leader, Kelkin, the Godswar which rages abroad (but it's getting closer!) and most particularly to Carillon (Cari) Thay and Eladora Duttin, cousins whose fates are bound up with the city, the imprisoned Black Iron Gods and with the Godswar.

The focus of that book was very much on Cari, a young woman who had run away to sea but was now returned and first seen leading a gang to carry out a daring robbery. Cari, Rat and Spar (who was suffering from a disease that gradually turned him to stone) were caught between political and religious factions, as well as family politics and history, in events that eventually led to a crisis in the affairs of Guerdon and to Rat (having become king of the city's ghouls) trying to kill Cari. Hanrahan has given a detailed recap here - I wish more authors would do that! - which is worth reading before turning to The Shadow Saint.

The Shadow Saint picks up the story shortly after, with more focus on the Godswar. We see the city of Severast, recently fallen to the conquering forces of the Mad Gods (the fires of sacrifice still smoulder) We see the grim, necromantic kingdom of Haith, which is fighting a rearguard action against the conquerors. Haith's politics will play a central role in this story, which focusses on Eladora, rather than Cari: sensible, dutiful Eladora, who has gone from her studies at the University to working for Effro Kelkin, leader of the Industrial Liberal party and the wily fox at the centre of Guerdon's government. (She's also learning magic, under the tutelage of the formidable Dr Ramegos).

While the forces of the deranged gods advance, Guerdon is bickering over politics and religion, leading to an election, and schemes are afoot in the Haithi embassy, focussing on that nation's crown and on family succession. Oh and there is, as the quote above implies, a spy in Guerdon (actually, there are many, but this one is particularly crucial).

It all makes for a complex, atmospheric (you can almost taste the alchemical pollution that drifts on Guerdon's air...) and tactile book, the reader occupying something of a privileged position in being privy to most - but not all - of the writhing plots, which enfold and stymie one another continually (sometimes to darkly humorous effect - Guerdon's gods are widely regarded as stupid, and at one moment they carry out an act that is so misconceived and self defeating as to be near impossible to convey: fortunately I don't have to try as it would also be a huge spoiler). It's a bit Smiley meets HP Lovecraft  meets Pratchett, the latter especially in the way that stupidity, bad luck and sheer obduracy ensure those best-laid plans - whether Kelkin's, devised at his back table in the coffee house, or Lys's, intelligence chief of Haith - really do gang aft agley.

Guerdon and its world are, as ever, brilliantly realised - this is a fantasy city with a Metro system, representative democracy (oiled by generous campaign contributions) and a manufacturing sector (Guerdon thrives on its arms trade, supply both sides in the war). A city where the Gods are kept weak, lest they join the war. A world of modern naval fleets with unspeakable, alchemical weapons and undead warriors wielding ancestral, soul-hungry swords. It's hard, as I said above, to convey just how right it all seems, how natural. The characters are also excellent - Cari, who has become something like a saint (though her god is the New City, not a divine being) has taken up the foul-mouthed mantle of Saint Aleena, my favourite character from The Gutter Prayer: 'The fucking fuckers are trying to fuck with us' as she sagely observes more than once. (Note to self: redact that before submitting review to Amazon...)

In all, it's joyous mayhem with a coherent, metaphysically literate, idea of godhood and the supernatural at its centre, characters who are, even if monstrous and constrained by unspeakable fates, sympathetic - and throughout, a sense of unease, a sense that dreadful things can happen at any moment...

For more about the book, see the publisher's webpage here.

Review - The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

Illustration by Richard Anderson
Design by Steve Panton

The Gutter Prayer
Gareth Hanrahan
Orbit, 17 January 2019
PB, 512pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

I'm writing this review in a slight haze, after being up past midnight finishing this superb book ("The city hasn't slept. It staggers, drunktired, into the new day...") so please forgive me if I drift off into incoherent praise... gripping, imaginative, real... My message for you is simple - just BUY THIS BOOK.

If you're fantasy inclined, you NEED IT, you really do.

If you're equivocal about fantasy - as I am - then, you STILL need it.

Indeed I would say that coming from a position myself of slight fantasy scepticism, it did all the right things for me - a recognisably alt-modern setting (no furs, snowstorms,  dragons or timbered halls) that is all the more weird for liking like our reality, only distorted*. That's not to say this book, and its world, are unaware of fantasy conventions, indeed Hanrahan has some fun with them - for example when a character dimly remembers fusty old tales the language switches to parody fantasy just as we see faux King James Bible or Shakespeare used as shortcut i the present day: "The bane sword... he tries to recall - the bane swords were forged in lo the year something because verily a dread thing arose. Demons. Something something."**

The city presented here is dealing with refugees from a distant war. Its alchemical industries are gross polluters, causing illness and poverty. Many of the products of those industries are weapons, sold to all sides in the war (a moral question that hangs over the book: "She's seen the weapons of war the alchemists can make... - fires that never stop burning, animals warped into huge monsters, knife-smoke, ice contagions.") There are political tensions between the Church, modernisers in Parliament and the industrial lobby.

This is the city of Guerdon, ancient, destroyed and rebuilt countless times, home to many races, religions and peoples, from the ghouls who live in deep tunnels and caverns, to Crawling Ones - collectives of worms in human form, to various gods including some who embody themselves in human saints. (I loved sweary Aleena ('Are you the fuckwit that scared of all the bloody ghouls?" she asks') saint of the kept Gods, who's 50% cynicism and 50% sheer, naked violence).

It's here that three low-level thieves stage a daring heist, and come to grief. There's Rat, a young ghoul who's trying to stay on the surface and avoid the stage of ferality that plagues kind. Spar, a young man who is infected with a  deadly disease, slowly turning him to stone. And Cari (Carillon) Thay, temple dancer, adventuress, rogue and wanderer whose family were murdered and who has recently returned to Guerdon. Together, they set out to burgle (appropriately) the House of Law.

Rat, Cari and Spar soon come up against thief-taker and steam-punky Sherlock-Holmes alike investigator Jere who's been tasked by a political boss to take down the Thieves' Guild. Much of the first part of the book is taken up with the question of how things went wrong in the House of Law and who might seize some advantage from it - Spar has ambitions for leadership of the Guild, in the footsteps of his father - while at the same time, various nasties begin to emerge (check out the Raveller...)

Between worries about the possibility of the city being drawn into the apocalyptic Godswar, the machinations of the Kept Gods' priests and Jere's attempts to bring Heinreil, head of the Guild, there is a lot going on but Hanrahan deftly keeps it all moving - this is a book that seldom lags - and has a real ability to make the weird seem everyday; one accepts his explanations for the co-exitensce of a kind of alchemical science, of sorcery, of real gods which are a kind of emergent phenomenon because they're grounded in the goings on of ordinary seeming people in believable institutions (University, Parliament, industry). Granted alchemical technology, there would obviously be a shadow market in stolen and illicit traded products. Granted active gods, issues of religious tolerance become very real and urgent. Granted a plague that can turn people to stone, there would be issues of disease control, prejudice and access to medication. Hanrahan borrows just enough from our world and experience to make his background plausible, while retaining a cheeky sense of the fantastic at the same time.

The characters here are also terrific. I've already mentioned Aleela, who may be a reluctant saint but is never short of a quip, but Cari is pretty awesome too, both making her way in a pitiless world and remaining loyal to her friends. And I should also mention Cari's cousin Eladora who starts out as a mousy scholar, loses everything - home, mentor, money - and changes, developing a swagger and a menace and managing to uncover the key information that shows what's really going on while struggling several times with Nameless Horrors and Ancient Evils.

(A warning, though: don't become too attached to anyone, Hanrahan is brutal with his characters.)

Those horrors and evils signpost the story, I think, as having a bit of a Lovecraftian vibe, indeed if you wanted a label for it you might call it "steampunk Lovecraft" although that doesn't really do the book credit. Yes, Hanrahan weaves what is in many respects a superficially modern world menaced by horrors from the past, but actually Guerdon is of a part with that past, which isn't really the past at all, just the way the world is. We have ex-mercenaries here reliving the horrors of bombardment in the Godswar, still raging overseas and displacing refugees. We have food shortages causes by the war.  So it's not that a "civilised", "modern" world is imperilled by atavistic, "dark" "savage" forces (we all know what HPL was getting at there, don't we) it's that terrible extremes coexist in one world, in one city, in the same people (sassy Aleela's a case in point: she's committed slaughter for her gods - the civilised, "decent" gods that supposedly protect Guerdon) and somehow those extremes will have to resolve themselves.

There is simply so much in this book too think about, it's such a bewildering, exhilarating, head-hammering banger of a book, that if you have any interest in or curiosity  about the best recent fantasy, YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK.

For more information about the book, see the Orbit website here.

*Reading this book made a point clear to me that I hadn't spotted before: the fantasy I have most enjoyed recently has all been of that recognisably modern-but-but-weird type - for example, Fonda Lee's Jade City and Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy have something of the same balance to them.

**Not the only way in which Hanrahan has fun with broad modern source material - I spotted references to Stranger Things, to The Italian Job, and many more besides (and I'm sure I missed a lot too).