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language: English
country: Zimbabwe
year: 2025
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Edinburgh Nights, #5
dates read: 13.1.26-20.1.26
T.L. Huchu’s Secrets of the First School — the fifth and final book in his Edinburgh Nights series — is unequivocal: not only is Scotland as a national(ist) project dead, but even were it to be resuscitated its rotting, undead husk would be indefensible. the project of Scotland is inextricable from the project of Empire (a project that looms — unresolved — over the novel).
politically, this is probably the strongest of the series, and certainly the most polemic. where the previous book, The Legacy of Arniston House, seemed to be trying to find a way to get past Scotland’s bourgeois nationalism to something that might be better, Secrets of the First School says: no. burn it all down. topple the idols of Scottish nationalism and leave their shattered remains unburied. it also changes course on some of the things that have bothered me earlier: it is, for example, only the Highland magicians who are willing to aid Ropa in her efforts to defeat the undead literal-ghoul of Henry Dundas, returned from the dead to declare himself a god, and it is the “witches” of many of Scotland’s marginalized communities — most prominently Travellers and immigrants, but lesbians are also there, and with a few notable exceptions the witches are markedly proletarian — who form the bulk of the army Ropa is attempting to gather.
this is a novel of revelations: truths about Ropa’s past and her family, the moral bankruptcy of both Scottish and English institutional life, and, perhaps most importantly, the nature of magic.
I am of two minds about the handling of witchcraft here. on the one hand, many aspects of the novel are closely aligned with neopagan ideas about witch-cults and “pagan” survivals in folk practice (the witches are, of course, the titular “first school”). I do think it stands out somewhat, though, by virtue of its framing: at long last we have returned to the tension that was introduced in the first book and then basically abandoned, between the “scientific” magic that Ropa has been studying and the “folk” magic that her grandmother wanted to teach her. the novel avoids some of the excesses of witch-cult narratives first by refusing to frame this conflict as one between evil Christianity and good paganism — two of the witches are Catholic nuns, among other things. rather, the conflict here is between the crude scientism and institutionalization of “scientific magic” and the myriad practices it denigrates as (mere) “witchcraft” or simply as superstition and probably dangerous. crucially, while Ropa draws heavily on (literally) the magic of her ancestors, through her gift for necromancy, she nonetheless affirms that she finds aspects of scientific magic useful for understanding what she’s doing and how she’s doing it — just not its reliance on the “imitation” of ancient Greek tradition. here, at least, there is some possibility of reconciliation.
this partial reconciliation is one of method only, however: the institutions of scientific magic are as indefensible as the rest of Scottish nationalism.
so much for the novel’s politics. unfortunately, I think this is probably the second-weakest aesthetically, for a few main reasons. one is that the foreshadowing is simply too heavy-handed: at one point within about one sentence of the beginning of a particular interaction it was clear where it was going, but Ropa belabors the point for several paragraphs before it finally dawns on her what’s going on. there are a few unexpected twists, but not as many as it seemed like the novel felt it was providing, and one of them (contradicting what I thought was being foreshadowed) was a bit of a disappointment, though I’ll grand that that one might just have been me.
more generally, the pacing was a bit off, I think. part of this is a reflection on the series as a whole: having introduced the scientific magic / folk magic (and more specifically Shona chivanhu, though I note the term isn’t used in this book) distinction all the way back in The Library of the Dead, Huchu kind of abandoned it for the intervening three books, so he has to rush it a bit here. meanwhile, the Gathering Allies sequences ended up feeling repetitive to me — I think if there had been perhaps one fewer Big Disappointment it they would have individually landed better, but as it was, by the time Ropa was visiting the Sorcerer Royal I was a bit like, “okay, yeah, I get it, can we move on?”
nonetheless, I have really enjoyed this series — it’s not perfect, by any means, but there’s a lot to like, and Ropa’s both engaging and down-to-earth voice both sustains and grounds it. she spends a lot of this one quoting and paraphrasing Clausewitz and I love that for her. I also want to give a huge shoutout to Kimberly Mandindo, the audiobook reader. her prosody is a bit clunky, but she does a really impressive job with the range of voices, accents, and — here — languages, with both Shona- and Scots-speaking characters. the one thing I think was Gaelic left something to be desired, but I’m willing to let it slide insofar as the story is being told from Ropa’s perspective.
and, aesthetics aside, I think Huchu’s read of Scotland is worth sitting with, iterating on. what would it mean to abandon “Scotland” as a project? what else could we make instead?
moods: dark, polemic, reflective, tense