Tuesday, January 11, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

 
Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on February 1, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.    

In the Serpent's Wake is the long awaited sequel to 2018's Tess of the Road (My review here) by Rachel Hartman, one of my favorite books of the last 5 years.  The story, a spin-off from Hartman's Seraphina duology (which I didn't read before reading Tess) featured its protagonist, 17-year old Tess, escaping a family who treated her as a shame due to a childhood pregnancy (caused by rape), and going on an adventure on the Road alongside a childhood friend to find a mythological creature, encountering others suffering and thriving alongside the road, and both finding and not finding a way to overcome her own trauma, as well as a purpose for her in life.  The story doesn't provide easy answers, and makes it clear that one can heal and not heal at the same time, and worked perfectly as a stand-alone, even as it promised a further adventure.  

But In the Serpent's Wake is a VERY different book from its predecessor, not just in expanding its viewpoint to other characters, but in moving the plot beyond Tess dealing with her own trauma into Tess trying to discover the traumas and pains of others in the world - especially those suffering from the evils of colonization in a fantasy archipelago.  Pairing Tess with a Countess who at her heart knows what her people are doing is wrong but insists upon staying neutral and not doing anything because of her own perilous standing as a woman, the story takes on not just the evils of colonization, and all of its horrors, but both the white liberal and the white savior tropes/phenomena.  Like its predecessor, In the Serpent's Wake offers no easy answers, and the answers it offers are often contradictory, but it works, even if not quite as well put together as Tess of the Road.   

TRIGGER WARNING:  As you should expect from the first story, Rape is part of Tess's backstory, and that plays a role here as well.  Meanwhile this story deals heavily with the evils of colonization, particularly of Island peoples (by essentially a European stand-in), complete with torture, brutality, religious and cultural oppression, racism - both explicit and implicit.  This is all handled well, but it may not be for all readers.  

Note:  I do not think you can read this book without reading Tess of the Road first, but the book includes a recap of that book (amazingly, in verse), so if you've read the first book, you will not need to reread it to jump right into this book.  


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
Tess healed on the road, and has resolved to do better for others, and to try and make restitution for her mistakes - most notably her revealing of the World Serpent to scholars who immediately went and killed it, harming her quigutl friend Pathka who had connected with the Serpent.  And so, Tess accepted a quest from her sister Seraphina and Seraphina's lover, the Queen Glisselda - to join an expedition by a Ninysh explorer - the famed Countess Margarethe, ostensibly to search out the second World Serpent in the Antarctic, to make it up for and to heal Pathka, and to prevent anyone else - human or dragon - from killing it.  But the Queen also asked Tess to keep her eyes open for what the country of Ninys is doing in this area of the world, the southern archipelago, where it is suspected that the Ninysh are making war on and slaughtering the native peoples.  

But what Tess finds is far worse than she could have imagined - for the Ninysh are indeed colonizing and oppressing the island peoples, and doing so without even a thought that doing so could be wrong.  And while some of Countess Marga's crew understands this to be wrong, and is actively repulsed, the Countess insists on an approach of utter neutrality, and not making any waves or speaking up as to how things are wrong, no matter how outrageous or cruel the behavior she observes is.  And to make it worse, the Countess has a connection to the worst part of Tess' past, resulting in the reappearance of her rapist, her ex-boyfriend Will.  

And so Tess finds herself not just desperate to get Pathka - whose condition is deteriorating - to the World Serpent, but also to do something - anything - to help these peoples.  But what can she do as one person to help these others....especially when the alternative of calling in her people's own navy just results in trading one invading army for another, and would make them the monsters instead of the Ninysh?  
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Tess of the Road was largely Tess' story, and was told entirely from her own perspective.  By contrast, while Tess it the guiding character in this book, this story is not really centered around her, and the book expands to reflect that: roughly every other chapter is told from a different other character's point of view (some characters get featured more than others), with these chapters generally featuring an unknown narrator (which gradually comes to be explained) dictating events to the "Mind of the World".  These chapters often give us glimpses of other stories, some of which work really well, such as that of the disabled scholar dragon Spira, who struggles with others expectations of their own gender, and the love they begin to feel for the mysterious Lord Hami - who also struggles because Hami's own quest requires him to destroy Spira's own quest for the good of his people.  

But these side aspects are really the side to the main dish of this story, which is the impact of colonialism on the people of the Southern Archipelagos.  It should be noted that this theme could be done poorly as this is written by a white author, but it very much avoids the dangerous tropes to tell a powerful story.  The Nynish behave very much the way Europeans did in our world - treating the indigenous people there as if they were all one people, acting like they were stupider or less valuable, like their own brilliant contributions couldn't possibly have been deliberately created by them, etc.  And they enslave and oppress them all, slaughter them when a few begin to act out, and refuse to accept their guidance as anything worth listening to - brutally punishing them to warp their culture to what they think it should be.   

Tess is wise enough to see immediately what is happening when she encounters it, and to be horrified, but she is even more horrified by the actions of the Nynish around her.  Oh some are okay, like the Countess' uncle who tries his best within the system to fight for the oppressed...and yet even he refuses to see that very system will only bend so far and not nearly enough to actually reverse or provide restitution for its oppression.  But then there are the obnoxious secret police or nobles who deliberately refuse to stop performing horrors, or who invent sciences to justify such horrors.  

And even worse there are people like Marga, who admit to themselves that these things are wrong, but refuse to actually hear people when they tell her to do something about it and that "neutrality" is merely taking the side of the oppressor.  Marga is absolutely the worst for much of the book - refusing to see what is in front of her, and refusing to listen to those who tell her things that she does not want to hear, demanding impossible amounts of proof to change her mind.  She's essentially the characterization of the White Liberal Lady who strove for herself and for other white women, but refuses to acknowledge those who didn't even have the possibility of making such strives because they are not White.  It takes a long time of being hit around the head, and lots of horrifying ignorance for her to realize that she needs to actually do something.

And then she, as well as Father Jacomo and Tess herself to a lesser extent - need to realize that what they need to do is to support the oppressed people and to provide what they need, and to ASK what those people need, rather than to try to play the role of the hero or protagonist.  Tess is better about this, and realizes quite simply the idea of simply calling in the Goreddi navy will only be replacing one group of invaders for another, but at the same time she stumbles with what she can do, especially once her rapist returns as part of the oppressors (for a thankfully short part of the book, but his impact is still felt thereafter in her psyche).  And Tess also has that same temptation as Marga - the quest to save Pathka by getting to the world serpent - which constantly tempts her to try to do anything to move forward even if it means turning a blind eye.  Unlike Marga, Tess isn't able to do that, but the competing ambitions make it hard for Tess to do the right thing, or even to figure out what the right thing is, and as a magical creature tells her - it becomes all too easy for her to take the easy path out, even if that path doesn't look easy on the surface.  It's an emotional journey for Tess, as the oppressed people come together to fight back in the end for a better future around her - without her direct help, that should be clear inspiration for many of us today who are more well off than those who have suffered for generations due to colonization.  

Not all of this works super well.  The power of the horrifying focus on colonization is really well done, although the ending of the conflict at the end of this book seems a bit optimistic, perhaps wrapping things up in a way that didn't quite sell me on things not immediately getting worse from re-invasion.  And Tess' own emotional and character journey sometimes gets lost in the greater story - so for example occasional parts of it and the final part of it turn on Tess avoiding going back to her pregnant sister who definitely needs her, but the book seems to forget about this for large segments at a time.  Similarly, the book seems to tease potential romantic or just platonic character relations with Tess and two other characters, but they're not really developed and so when they're mentioned again and Tess gets jealous at one point, it's hard to feel anything for them.  

Still, In the Serpent's Wake is a very good tale of the impact of colonization and the limits of what one person or even a nation can do to try and make things better, as well as the importance of centering the oppressed and their needs and wants in any efforts to try to help.  It's a problem in our world too that can only be handled by teaching the future generations about it and helping them ensure it isn't repeated again, and that restitution is necessary, and this book illustrates that incredibly well, through characters and prose and verse very very well done. 

Oh and I should point out that this book deals with a lot of other themes too, besides the aforementioned ones, such as the difficulties of language and how any translation puts in something of the translator, the various ways stories can be interpreted and how those change based upon the listener - and what duty the storyteller has when telling stories, etc.  There's a lot here, and it's mostly done very very well.

So yeah, recommended.  

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