Book Reviews: Of Alchemy, and Ethos, and Siblings

Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor)

I’ve enjoyed Seanan McGuire’s books since I discovered Rosemary and Rue and the “Incryptid” series. Her sense of dramatic flow, finely-handled narrative pacing, and just plain nifty stuff made each successive adventure more enjoyable. I quickly learned that when I picked up one of her books, I was in for a good time. Sometimes I wondered how she was able to maintain the quality of her work, given how productive she was. Not only did she consistently deliver one good story after another, but her recent releases have leapt from “good” to memorable. Her novella, Every Heart a Doorway, was stunning, a journey of the heart as well as a series of dramatic events, richly deserving both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. I loved her “Sparrow Road” ghost stories, too. Now I can add Middlegame, an alchemy/Frankenstein/time-traveling/sibling-story to that list.

The outer frame of the story involves a precocious and wildly talented alchemist who devises a way to remake the world through the human incarnations of the Doctrine of Ethos.

“In the ancient world the Greeks believed music had a magical power to speak directly to human emotion. In what has come to be known as the doctrine of ethos, the Greeks believed that the right kind of music had the power to heal the sick and shape personal character in a positive way. The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that when music was designed to imitate a certain emotion, a person listening to the music would have that emotion.” – From Music and the Doctrine of Ethos, classicaltyro.com.

McGuire uses a somewhat different sense of this doctrine, albeit still in the sense of possessing transformative powers. The alchemist, Asphodel Baker, and her disciples set about creating pairs of twins whose natural talents (language and mathematics, for example, or order and chaos) complement and complete one another. Adopted out and separated as infants, when mature they will be drawn together to fully manifest the Doctrine and grant the one who controls them power over the universe. Or so goes the plan.

The inner story involves one pair of twins, Roger and Dodger, and their early ability to communicate telepathically and experience the world through one another’s talents and senses. Dodger helps Roger with his math homework, and he guides her through learning to talk to people and develop relationships. But they have made contact too soon for Asphodel’s heir (and Frankenstein creation), the sinister autocrat James Reed, who then takes measures to divide them until he determines the time is right.

All of this is done up in prose that ranges from really good to luscious:

“For your safety,” says Dr. Barrow, in a voice like butter and cyanide.….Roger knows the words – shock, surprise, epiphany – but he doesn’t know how to put them in an order his sister (his sister, he has a sister, not just a weird quantum entanglement with a girl on the other side of the country, but a sister, someone whose blood knows his almost as well as his heart does) will be able to hear and understand. He supposes he’s stunned. The impulse to close his eyes and retreat into the space that exists between them is strong. He forces it aside. This is a real thing; this needs to be a real thing. He didn’t realize until this moment how badly he needs it to be a real thing, something spoken in the open air, something honest and concrete that he can put down between them, look at from all the angles, and know for the truth. Real things are too important to entrust to quantum entanglements.

I stayed up way too late on a number of nights, following Roger and Dodger on their quest for one another and for a life truly, humanly lived. I heartily recommend this book and expect it to be a contender for major awards in speculative fiction.