Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke
| Publisher: |
Erewhon |
| Copyright: |
November 2024 |
| ISBN: |
1-64566-099-0 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
443 |
Metal from Heaven is industrial-era secondary-world fantasy with a
literary bent. It is a complete story in one book, and I would be very
surprised by a sequel. Clarke previously wrote the Scapegracers
young-adult trilogy, which got excellent reviews and a few award
nominations, as H.A. Clarke. This is his first adult novel.
Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their
machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long
foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to
you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second
self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing
outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason
for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun
comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink.
When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.
Marney Honeycutt is twelve years old, a factory worker, and lustertouched.
She works in the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in Ignavia City,
alongside her family and her best friend, shaping the magical metal
ichorite into the valuable industrial products of a new age of commerce
and industry. She is the oldest of the lustertouched, the children born to
factory workers and poisoned by the metal. It has made her allergic, prone
to fits at any contact with ichorite, but also able to exert a strange
control over the metal if she's willing to pay the price of spasms and
hallucinations for hours afterwards.
As Metal from Heaven opens, the workers have declared a strike. Her
older sister is the spokesperson, demanding shorter hours, safer working
conditions, and an investigation into the health of the lustertouched
children. Chauncey's response is to send enforcer snipers to kill the
workers, including the entirety of her family.
The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new
morning."
An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her
head.
Marney survives, fleeing into the city, swearing an impossible personal
revenge against Yann Chauncey. An act of charity gets her a ticket on a
train into the countryside. The woman who bought her ticket is a bandit
who is on the train to rob it. Marney's ability to control ichorite allows
her to help the bandits in return, winning her a place with the
Highwayman's Choir who have been preying on the shipments of the rich and
powerful and then disappearing into the hills.
The Choir's secret is that the agoraphobic and paranoid Baron of the
Fingerbluffs is dead and has been for years. He was killed by his staff,
Hereafterist idealists, who have turned his remote territory into an
anarchist commune and haven for pirates and bandits. This becomes Marney's
home and the Choir becomes her family, but she never forgets her oath of
revenge or the childhood friend she left behind in the piles of bodies and
to whom this story is narrated.
First, Clarke's writing is absolutely gorgeous.
We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the
place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike.
There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so
than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that
squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in
planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather,
the ground was lineless.
The rhythm of it, the grasp of contrast and metaphor, the word choice!
That climactic word "lineless," with its echo of limitless. So good.
Second, this is the rarest of books: a political fantasy that takes class
and religion seriously and uses them for more than plot drivers. This is
not at all our world, and the technology level is somewhat ambiguous, but
the parallels to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are unmistakable. The Hereafterists that Marney joins
are political anarchists, not in the sense of alternative governance
structures and political theory sanitized for middle-class liberals, but
in the sense of Emma
Goldman and Peter
Kropotkin. The society they have built in the Fingerbluffs is temporary,
threatened, and contingent, but it is sincere and wildly popular among the
people who already lived there.
Even beyond politics, class is a tangible force in this book. Marney is a
factory worker and the child of factory workers. She barely knows how to
read and doesn't magically learn over the course of the book. She has
friends who are clever in the sense rewarded by politics and nobility, who
navigate bureaucracies and political nuance, but that is not Marney's
world. When, towards the end of the book, she has to deal with a gathering
of high-class women, the contrast is stark, and she navigates that
gathering only by being entirely unexpected.
Perhaps the best illustration of the subtlety of this is the terminology
in the book for lesbian. Marney is a crawly, which is a slur thrown at
people like her (and one of the rare fictional slurs that work exactly as
the author intended) but is also simply what she calls herself. Whether or
not it functions as a slur depends on context, and the context is never
hard to understand. The high-class lesbians she meets later are Lunarists,
and react to crawly as a vile and insulting word. They use language to
separate themselves from both the insult and from the social class that
uses it. Language is an indication of culture and manners and therefore of
morality, unlike deeds, which admit endless justifications.
Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near
her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies,
the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance
of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her
delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to
slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.
The handling of religion is perhaps even better. Marney was raised a
Tullian, which sits alongside two other fleshed-out fictional religions
and sketches of several more. Tullians tend to be conservative and
patriarchal, and Marney has a realistically complicated relationship with
faith: sticking with some Tullian worship practices and gestures because
they're part of who she is, feeling a kinship to other Tullians,
discarding beliefs that don't fit her, and revising others.
Every major religion has a Hereafterist spin or reinterpretation that
upends or reverses the parts of the religion that were used to prop up the
existing social order and brings it more in line with Hereafterist ideals.
We see the Tullian Hereafterist variation in detail, and as someone who
has studied a lot of methods of reinterpreting Christianity, I was
impressed by how well Clarke invents both a belief system and its
revisionist rewrite. This is exactly how religions work in human history,
but one almost never sees this subtlety in fantasy novels.
Marney's allergy to ichorite causes her internal dialogue to dissolve into
hallucinatory synesthesia when she's manipulating or exposed to it. Since
that's most of the book, substantial portions read like drug trips with
growing body horror. I normally hate this type of narration, so it's a
sign of just how good Clarke's writing is that I tolerated it and even
enjoyed parts. It helps that the descriptions are irreverent and often
surprising, full of unexpected metaphors and sudden turns. It's very hard
not to quote paragraph after paragraph of this book.
Clarke is also doing a lot with gender that I don't feel qualified to
comment in detail on, but it would not surprise me to see this book in the
Otherwise Award recommendation list. I
can think of three significant male characters, all of whom are well-done,
but every other major character is female by at least some gender
definition. Within that group, though, is huge gender diversity of the
complicated and personal type that doesn't force people into defined
boxes. Marney's sexuality is similarly unclassified and sometimes
surprising. My one complaint is that I thought the sex scenes (which, to
warn, are often graphic) fell into the literary fiction trap of being
described so closely and physically that it didn't feel like anyone
involved was actually enjoying themselves. (This is almost certainly a
matter of personal taste.)
I had absolutely no idea how Clarke was going to end this book, and the
last couple of chapters caught me by surprise. I'm still not sure what I
think about the climax. It's not the ending that I wanted, but one of the
merits of this book is that it never did what I thought I wanted and yet
made me enjoy the journey anyway. It is, at least, a genre ending, not a
literary ending: The reader gets a full explanation of what is going on,
and the setting is not static the way that it so often is in literary
fiction. The characters can change the world, for good or for ill. The
story felt frustrating and incomplete when I first finished it, but I
haven't stopped thinking about this book and I think I like the shape of
it a bit more now. It was certainly unexpected, at least by me.
Clarke names Dhalgren as one of their influences in the
acknowledgments, and yes, Metal from Heaven is that kind of book.
This is the first 2024 novel I've read that felt like the kind of book
that should be on award shortlists. I'm not sure it was entirely
successful, and there are parts of it that I didn't like or that weren't
for me, but it's trying to do something different and challenging and
uncomfortable, and I think it mostly worked. And the writing is so good.
She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled
nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.
Metal from Heaven is not going to be everyone's taste. If you do
not like literary fantasy, there is a real chance that you will hate this.
I am very glad that I read it, and also am going to take a significant
break from difficult books before I tackle another one. But then I'm
probably going to try the Scapegracers series, because Clarke is an author
I want to follow.
Content notes: Explicit sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Political
violence, mostly by authorities. Murdered children, some body horror, and
a lot of serious injuries and death.
Rating: 8 out of 10
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