Friday, November 27, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine



Ink and Bone is the first book in Rachel Caine's "Great Library" series of alternate history SF/ novels, the fifth and final book of which came out in 2019.  Caine was* an author I've seen fairly respected on twitter and I've always wanted at some point to try her out, but well she has a substantial back catalog so it was hard to figure out where to begin.  But when Kate Elliott and Zoraida Córdova began a bimonthly reread of this series on the Tor.com blog, well that made my choice of starting point fairly obvious, and I wanted to catch up to them if I could.  Fortunately, the Hoopla eLibrary has the whole thing in audiobook, so it was easy to pick up.

*Caine, real name Roxanne Conrad, passed away from cancer between the time I finished the last audiobook in this series and this one.  I only wish I'd gotten to her work before this.  

And well, Ink and Bone is a very interesting start to a series, one in which I'm not sure is for me.  Like many SF/F series, it's a book centered in large part around a powerful Library - in this case an alternate Library of Alexandria that survived and expanded throughout the world, using magic to control the flow of books.  But unlike most of those series I've read, the Library is not a force for good - it's essentially a Fascist international power that uses its absolute control of the flow of information for its own ends, and the world that this takes place in is a dark dark place as a result.  Into this world comes our 16/17 year old protagonist and a group of friends who are supposedly training to become part of the Library...only to run into the realities of this world.  It's well done mostly, but the darkness and where Caine takes it goes in certain directions I don't particularly love...but that may be more of a matter of personal taste.

Note:  The Book Summary on Amazon/Other-Booksellers, which I presume is also on the book's back cover, is awful and spoils an even that occurs in the last two 10% of the book.  It's not really a surprise when it happens, but you're still better off avoiding that book summary if you can.  

Note2:  I read this as an audiobook, and I would recommend it in that format: the reader is very good, with solid different voices for basically every character, and really adds to the experience.  

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
The Great Library - the Library of Alexandria - is the most powerful force in the world, through its main location and its Serapeums spread around the world.  All original books are held in its clutches, and people around the world can use its magic art of mirroring to read those works on "Blanks"....with the Library's permission of course.   

Jess Brightwell grew up an enemy of the Library: as the son of one of England's - if not the world's - most successful book smugglers, Jess ran and smuggled original books from a young age in London to the rich people who could pay for them.  But Jess never took to the smuggling trade, and so his father hatches a plan: he will have Jess take the test to become one of the Library's own agents, a scholar hopefully, where he can work inside the institution to help the smuggling business.  Jess, doesn't care too much for the spy business, but the idea of being legally inside the Library, with access to all those books, is salivating for him.  

But the Library is not the force for good that most believe it to be, with a dark history that has crushed dissent throughout history.  And as Jess and his fellow postulants - a group of teenagers from all over the world - learn more about the Library business, they find themselves thrust into terrible danger, facing not just the Library's enemies, but the horrors of the Library itself...
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Ink and Bone is another take on a literary/genre favorite - the story featuring an incredibly powerful Library at its heart and characters who love books (gee I wonder why that's a favorite).  But in a change from series like Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library for example, the Great Library here is not a force for good, using its control of information to essentially become a Fascist Empire that rules behind the scenes in a world that otherwise still has similar cultures to our own.  And cleverly the book doesn't hide this - or really hide much of anything, with each chapter preceded by an excerpt from letters/documents from the Library's present or past, revealing what the Library truly is to the reader right from the start, as well as other truths about this world.  The characters may need to find this out on their own, but Caine reveals it from the beginning.  And this works incredibly well to ground this setting in a dark tone.  

That said, while Caine is hardly hiding the tone of this series from the reader, it does get darker and more brutal than even I expected, especially in the book's ending.  In another departure from the norm in this type of story, our lead character is not utterly naive to the reality of the library and this world: Jess comes from a family of smugglers, and the prologue shows him on a smuggling run going horribly wrong - innocents killed by library security measures and the rich bastard buying the book being a true bastard towards the thing that cost all those lives.  Jess still has ideals about the library and the good it might do, but his own ties to its enemies keeps him from being totally blinded by its own myth.  And yet, Jess till cannot quite comprehend until he's forced to how evil the fascist grip of the library truly is, and the book endeavors to break him of even that level of complacency.  It gets to the point where in the final chapters, he is no longer under any illusions, and has the correct reaction when he realizes someone more naive than him has innocently taken an action that is a threat to the library.  

And how the book gets there is honestly my biggest issue with it, with it trafficking in what borders on being a really bad trope (Spoilers Below) to get there.  This isn't the only such instance of that - for example, another annoying issue is that Jess' roommate at the library, Dario is an utter privileged ass (its his defining character trait) who basically sexually harasses one of two major female characters among Jess' class (a third is a minor character) until the two actually become close and in a relationship by the end.  The book also has a clear six major characters among the postulants from the start, making it quite clear when they go into danger that other such characters might as well be wearing red shirts.  And again, the ending is just very dark, ending at a moment of tremendous despair.  

Spoilers in ROT13: Zbetna, gur tvey jub rffragvnyyl Wrff snyyf sbe (naq gur srryvat vf zhghny), vf dhvgr dhvpxyl erirnyrq nf na Bofphevfg, gur glcr bs crefba gur yvoenel onfrf vgf zntvp bss bs naq ybpxf njnl.  Zhpu bs gur cybg srngherf ure gelvat gb nibvq qvfpbirel, ohg vgf varivgnoyr, naq Wrff jvaqf hc nppvqragnyyl orgenlvat ure ol zvfgnxrayl jevgvat bhg ure cyna va uvf wbheany - juvpu vf zntvpnyyl gnccrq ol gur Yvoenel.  Wrff gura pna'g nqzvg gb ure jung unccrarq sbe onfvpnyyl ab ernfba, juvpu vf whfg vafnaryl naablvat, naq gura Zbetna VF ybpxrq hc ol gur raq bs gur abiry, nf vs fur'f onfvpnyyl SEVQTRQ sbe Wrff' zbgvingvba.  Zbetna frrzvat gb unir sbhaq n jnl gb pbzzhavpngr jvgu Wrff guebhtu Pbqrk ng gur raq ubcrshyyl cbvagf ng ure univat zber bs n ebyr va gur shgher guna whfg orvat zbgvingvba ohg vg'f fgvyy oyrpu.  

I don't mean to just complain about this book mind you.  Jess is a fantastic lead character, and the five other major students are mostly great as well (Dario excepted) from Jess' best friend and master artificer Thomas, to the brilliant prodigy Khalila, to the mysterious Morgan, and the Welsh soldier girl Glain...they're all really built well even when they're still mysterious and full of secrets.  Even more impressive are Jess' teacher Scholar Wolfe and the soldier Captain Santi, whose relationship will be obvious quick to the reader if not Jess, and who really work in this setting. 

It's these characters that have me wanting to come back and see where this is going.  If the second book can give me a story with more hope, and not just more despair (not guaranteed in a 5 book series) then this could really be the start of something great.*  Otherwise, it might just be another series with strong writing that just isn't for me, due to being too dark and featuring some tropes I just can't get over.  We'll see.  

*Spoiler:  I've now read the entire series before publishing this review, and yes the book resolves all my fears.  So yeah, much more comfortable recommending this now.
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