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language: English
country: Zimbabwe
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Edinburgh Nights, #4
dates read: 21.11.24-25.11.24
T.L. Huchu’s The Legacy of Arniston House is the fourth book in his Edinburgh Nights series, following Ropa Moyo, a Zimbabwean-British teenager navigating a dystopian future Scotland where magic is afoot. the book begins not long after the end of the previous book, where Ropa turned her back on the Scottish magical community which abandoned her and took a position working for the English Sorcerer Royal.
it’s difficult to describe the plot of this book without giving major spoilers. fortunately, one of these is provided by the blurb: about halfway through the book, Ropa discovers that her grandmother, who raised her and her younger sister after her parents’ deaths and taught her about magic, has been murdered, and her murderers have framed Ropa. as a result, she spends the second half of the book very much on the back foot — both grieving and running — on her way to a bunch of revelations about her past and the interconnections between past mysteries (all the way back to The Library of the Dead), leading to a dramatic climax that, while I had begun to suspect part of it, nonetheless caught me off-guard. the book ends on a cliffhanger both literally and figuratively, and I will be impatiently waiting for the next one.
The Legacy of Arniston House is, if anything, even more cynical than The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle was. this book is a scathing critique of Scotland’s social and political institutions and especially of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism that coopts the oppression of the Scottish working class for its own benefit. it crystallizes my sense of the series as a response first to the crushing disappointment of the 2014 referendum and then to the failure of Scottish civil society and political institutions to take meaningful or substantive action after the BrExit referendum. if the novel’s characters are dubious of the viability of executing the king and queen in the streets as a solution to the economic crises facing Scotland, it does nonetheless seem to say: at least the separatists tried something. Huchu is grasping for a way beyond the fatal flaws in Scotland’s bourgeois social and political institutions.
this isn’t to say that it’s entirely successful on this front. the focus remains narrowly on the Central Belt, and while Gaels are less prominent here their portrayal remains steeped in 18th- and 19th-century stereotypes. “travelling folk” are, if not villains themselves, then apparent accomplices to the villains. perhaps most egregiously, the bourgeoisie are represented here as an evil cult. nonetheless, the previously intensely mercenary Ropa is coming, slowly and with some trepidation, into the beginnings of class consciousness, in a way that leaves me optimistic.
there is still a strange and striking tension between the series’s insistence that this dystopian Britain is one of conservative and elite retrenchment and the fact that racism and homophobia appear to be non-factors (save that one of the Gaels present at the climax refers to his enemies as “cocksuckers”). on the other hand, Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Tories now, so who knows what contradictions will be carried into the future.
politics aside, I also must admit that the novel’s portrayal of Ropa’s grief and her grandmother’s funeral really got me. the dramatic irony (me having read the blurb vs. the fact that the murder only happens halfway through the book) was a bit much sometimes, but oof, the handling of the aftermath really landed.
I am also becoming cautiously optimistic that the hints of Something between Ropa and her best friend Priya are going somewhere, albeit in an excruciatingly slow burn. we shall see.
moods: dark, grimy, reflective, tense