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language: English
country: USA
year: 2025
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Shadow of the Leviathan, #2
dates read: 26.1.26-30.1.26
Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption is…oof. where do I start. let’s begin with the cover: the series has apparently been rebranded, no longer Shadow of the Leviathan but instead An Ana and Din Mystery. this strongly suggests that Bennett is no longer conceptualizing the series as a cohesive narrative but rather as an indefinite series of fantasy mysteries, and I hate that, because it seems likely to severely limit the series’s ability to deal with historical change. no longer are we facing the looming shadow of the leviathan; instead we are following our plucky cops on their quest for Justice, to — verbatim quote! — “keep an Empire worth defending”. hello? is anyone else seeing this?
the book follows Din and Ana to the northern concession of Yarrowdale, a kind of off-brand Hong Kong (literally on a hundred-year lease that’s about to expire), an outpost of the Empire that’s about to either revert back to the Kingdom of Yarrow or be annexed fully along with Yarrow as a whole (depending how negotiations go). here they find themselves facing up against a criminal super-genius who seems to be attempting to severely incapacitate the Empire, though to what specific end they don’t immediately know.
okay.
the good: Bennett has made two (mostly) very compelling main characters! if I read the third book it will be almost entirely on the strength of the characterization.
the bad: well. let’s start with the aesthetics. narratively this book is simply not well-constructed. it is, notionally, a mystery, but in contrast to The Tainted Cup — which gives readers enough information to keep them guessing but not enough to resolve the mystery without Din and Ana’s intervention — A Drop of Corruption practically beats the reader over the head with all of its foreshadowing. I had figured out every single major plot point 100-200 pages before they were Dramatically Revealed (when I posted “the foreshadowing is…heavy-handed lol” I was like…20 pages into the book and it took a solid 150 more pages for Bennett to be like, “surprise! we’re doing [thing that was obvious from page 20]”). the result is that despite its fast pacing I constantly found myself rolling my eyes and saying, “yes, we get it. can we just get to the point, please?”
so much for the mystery. the world-building is…fine. as I observed while I was reading, the treatment of Yarrow society vs. Imperial society has some very silly implications about Imperial society. when Din enters the seat of the Yarrow kings and sees all of the carved figures of their ancestors he is awed not just by the art but by the sense of genealogy/lineage at all:
“What are those?” I asked.
“The faces of the many kings of Yarrow, long dead,” muttered Malo. “They watch all who enter here.”
Having never known a line of such antiquity—ancestors meant little to common Tala folk such as I—I found the idea awe-inspiring.
this is, I think, both a fundamental misapprehension of the way kinship has worked in much of the world until very recently (especially for a character who has an apparently non-occupational surname!!) and, perhaps more importantly, simply boring. it places Din — and by extension Imperial society writ large — squarely within the norms of contemporary bourgeois sociality (immediate nuclear family only) but without any serious interrogation of that; it simply takes it for granted that Din’s (= basically 21st-century USAmerican) perspective is Normal so that the reader can be suitably impressed by the depth of Yarrow genealogy.
the most important world-building problem here is also a political problem: this book is trying to be A Book About Autocracy. all of the Imperial citizens are offended-disgusted by Yarrow being an absolute monarchy and having institutionalized, hereditary serfdom. the Emperor, in contrast, is cloistered and either four hundred years old or possibly just dead; there’s a Roman-style Senate that deals with day-to-day governance, and it does seem to be basically an aristocratic institution. the only person who comments on this is the villain. but at least Imperial citizens get to do wage labor instead of having corvée obligations, I guess!
anyway. centering this critique of Autocracy in pseudo-Hong Kong has obvious anticommunist implications (particularly with Din getting distressed at the idea of the Empire “abandoning” “its” people in Yarrowdale if it were to revert back to Yarrow), but more importantly the book kind of just ends up retreading the same ground as The Tainted Cup? one subplot here is Din trying to decide whether to pursue a transfer from the Iudex (= Justice) civil service division to the Legion, defending the Empire’s walls from the monstrous leviathans. in the context of the novel’s painfully obvious political allegory, essentially Din is trying to decide whether he should stay in the FBI or go be something between a marine and a CBP officer (again, the premise of the Legion is: the Empire is under constant threat from an inhuman outside force that wants to wreak havoc on it unless our Brave Soldiers-cum-Border Guards are able to fight it off).
if The Tainted Cup felt, first and foremost, safe, A Drop of Corruption feels simply kind of boring. Bennett is good at maintaining narrative tension, even when the actual plot is predictable, but in a sequel I usually want to see at least some pushing of at least the world’s internal boundaries, even if there’s nothing groundbreaking in terms of the book’s genre writ large. here there is neither, just more of the same.
and the characters are fun, and I was engaged throughout the book (though annoyed by some of its pacing), but…I need more than this. please.
moods: dark, grimy, reflective, tense