Wednesday, January 19, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Mage of Fools by Eugen Bacon

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 15, 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.     

Mage of Fools is the latest novel by African-Australian author Eugen Bacon, and the third experience I've had with her work.  The first was in her novelette/short story "A Maji Maji Chronicle", which was published as part of the Dominion anthology (Reviewed Here), and which I really enjoyed.  The second was as part of an anthology of her work that was, well, different, hitting a number of interesting ideas while also being so weird that sometimes I honestly had little idea what to think.  Mage of Fools is the first novel-length story of Bacon's I've had the opportunity to try, and so I was really curious what I'd be getting here.  

What I got is a novel that might not make full sense if you think about it in pragmatic terms, but is rich in themes and ideas.  The novel features a young mother in an African country Mafinga, turned into a dystopian socialist state where all the men have been killed by an alien sorcerer and follows that young mother Jasmin as she struggles to remember the better times and fights for a return to such times despite her lack of power.  It's a story of love - both romantic and communal, of ties together and of losses, and of how that can get lost when loses the individual as well.  There's also a part where the story gets incredibly weird scifi-y all of a sudden, in a way that feels very differen tfrom everything else.  I'm honestly not sure I've gotten all of what Bacon is going for here, but well, I'll try to explain the best I can.  


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Jasmin can just barely remember Mafinga before it changed, before the sorcerer Atari came to save the life of the Prince, and the two of them took over the country and reshaped its society; before the men of the country all died from a poisonous sun, leaving Jasmin alone with her two children from her beloved husband Godi, before the adults of the country were all forced into communal work places with little luxuries, at punishment of death for disobeying.  For a little while Jasmin bore it all with her lover Solo, until the day Solo was transferred to the mines and away from her.  Now the only thing that keeps her sane is the story machine she keeps hidden, filled with forbidden stories and philosophies, some small bits of which she tries to impart to her two children.  

But when Jasmin is taken for execution to the Queen's palace along with her children for her disobedience, she finds that this new world isn't quite what she expected - from the barren Queen desperate to steal her children, to the teens seeming to run the country's propaganda, to the mysterious man skulking in the shadows.....and to the strange vats of the mining efforts of the country hoarded by Atari. 

And as Jasmin learns more, she becomes determined to do something to fight back....and begins to think that such a fight might not be hopeless after all.......
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Mage of Fools is certainly a story that can be taken a number of ways, and is almost certainly at points referencing real world situations or other literature.  The story takes place in a dystopian socialist society, where a ruler demolishes his country's entire infrastructure and instead forces everyone who isn't him and his family to live in identically miserable shacks and to work in miserable meaningless jobs for the supposed sake of the community, with propaganda being constantly pumped out and drugs issued to try and make people compliant...with cruel guards enforcing it all, and traitors ratting others out.  This could easily be seen as a right wing capitalist-esque text in that lens, although given how the book goes after the first act, I don't really think it's meaning to do so.  

Each act, except one (more on that in a bit) follows Jasmin through a new part of the country of Mafinga - first the country itself as she's one of the laborers, hoping just to keep surviving with her children, pining for her dead husband and her lost lover - then into the palace, where she discovers the Queen was broken-hearted due to her barrenness, that the propaganda is literally pumped out by teens, and that the claims about why things went wrong were all as bunk as she imagined, even if in different ways.  In each place, Jasmin tells stories to her children of a trickster character tricking his way against stronger animals, and remembers stories and philosophical treatises* from her story machine as she tries to understand and make sense of what she finds.  And through it all, Jasmin maintains a sense of her own individual purpose and strength, while also gaining understandings and appreciation for, if not love, for the others she meets who all fight for themselves in different ways - even if those ways do hurt Jasmin individually (like the Queen and the Queen's secret lover).  Jasmin has immense empathy, and it is that empathy that drives her and makes her into a leader for the eventual resistance.  

*I suspect that these excerpts are inspired by various real world authors and their philosophies, with their names at least slightly altered, but I can't match any of them to real things myself.*

That resistance is contrasted by the one part of this novel which diverges, a part dedicated to the sorcerer Atari, who is literally an alien who was tortured and disregarded by his parents who wanted someone else, and winds up losing all empathy in the process.  This whole segment is INCREDIBLY weird, with Atari growing new siblings by losing body parts, there being a mad scientist doctor, several other experimented on individuals, etc.  Through it all Atari, unlike Jasmin, never finds a group he can connect to and always finds himself on his own, left with nothing but a high he can get from a drug - and so he's defeated when Jasmin and others form that connection to defeat him, to his utter surprise.  

These connections are fascinating, because well they involve characters who definitely don't like each other at times, and whose love may have fallen apart for other loves, but they still allow Jasmin and the others to triumph over this non-empathetic selfish regime (socialist-styled or no, which is why I'm suspecting this isn't Bacon trying to make a capitalist argument in any for).  And they make this story work, even if the practicalities of how Jasmin and those others can seemingly super easily overthrow the system in the end despite it looking impossible before kind of unlikely - those practicalities just aren't important.  


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