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language: English
country: Zimbabwe
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Edinburgh Nights, #2
dates read: 15.7.22-18.7.22
at long last the audiobook of T.L. Huchu’s Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments arrived, and I’ve just finished it. it was fun! I don’t know if it was quite as much fun as the first book, but Ropa’s voice is still very engaging, and we got to know Priya and Jomo better. Ropa’s relationship with her family was much less in the foreground, which was a bit unfortunate. I’m still sufficiently engaged to want to read the next book, whenever it comes out.
my hesitations about the way it’s balancing magic and alternate history are still there, but my main concern in this one had more to do with the way it handles the both historical and contemporary relationship between the Society (Scotland’s somewhat shadowy main regulatory body for magic) and the Royal Bank of Scotland. on the one hand, I think this has some good stuff to it — in the spirit of Jameson’s “Radical Fantasy”, part of what’s going on here is that magic itself becomes part of the terrain of anticapitalist struggle through its institutional association with the financial structure of empire. on the other hand, part of the effect of this is to suggest that there is or was a shadowy cabal of (magical) bankers manipulating and profiting from world events and imperialism, which is. hm. we’ll see how later books continue to handle this. the treatment of the Darien scheme felt a little flippant, too, in its treatment of the violence of colonialism.
I’m still waiting for more to come from the chivanhu/“scientific magic” dichotomy; some of the reveals in this book suggest that we may get there eventually (I just still think it should be happening already). it also seems like we’re going to be getting some interesting negotiation between Scottish nationalism and the British state in the rest of the series, and I’m looking forward to see where that goes.
I’ve given this the same set of moods that I gave The Library of the Dead. in some ways it’s not as dark but it’s also significantly more gruesome, so it evens out, and Ropa’s sarcasm and pragmatism still keep the darkness from becoming overwhelming.
the audiobook I listened to was a bit mixed, although it was good overall. on the one hand, the reader (Kimberley Mandindo) did a great job handling the varied linguistic texture of the novel; on the other hand, as I noted before, she never quite seemed to figure out how to mark the boundaries between Ropa’s speech and Ropa’s internal monologue, which made it sometimes difficult to follow. she did, however, hit more of a rhythm with Ropa’s voice.
moods: adventurous, dark, lighthearted, mysterious