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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Shadow of the Leviathan, #1
dates read: 15.12.25-22.12.25
The Empire is strong because it recognizes the value in all our people. Including you, Dinios Kol. And when the Empire is weak, it is often because a powerful few have denied us the abundance of our people.
as this passage suggests, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup is very much — painfully, actually — A Book About The United States. the problem here is that its analogue for the US is a self-identified Empire, which means that whenever it expounds on the liberal view of the United States as a fundamentally Good political project that has been Corrupted but can still be Saved (if we simply Believe In It/Ourselves — “the more its citizens feel it is broken, the more broken it actually becomes”) what it is actually saying is: the only problem with Empire is all the exploitation —
— with, apparently, no recognition that without the exploitation there is no Empire. there are hints that it may develop a more nuanced perspective as the series progresses, in particular as we come to a more fulsome understanding of its speculative ecology; we shall see. in the meantime, this is one of the most politically facile books I’ve read in quite a while. it is a book that could only have come from the imperial core.
that being said, I also do think it’s a very good fantasy detective story, with a few caveats, and I will likely read the next book.
the novel follows a young man, Dinios “Din” Kol, an apprentice investigator assigned to assist the decidedly eccentric imperial detective Ana Dolabra. Din and Ana work for the government of the Empire of Khanum, protected by layers of enormous walls from the roving leviathans (or sometimes “titans”) who emerge from the sea every wet season, threatening to destroy everything in their path. the Empire makes use of biotechnological alterations called “suffusions” to augment its servants: Din, for example, is an “engraver”, enhanced with a perfect memory; he is also severely dyslexic, a fact he has carefully and desperately concealed.
Din and Ana find themselves on the trail of a series of murders that have undermined the integrity of the coastal wall and in which one of the most powerful families in the Empire is implicated. the investigation proceeds in a fairly conventional — but well-executed — set of steps, unraveling piece by piece until the big reveal, which of course is followed, after the climactic appearance of a leviathan, by a quieter, secondary revelation.
there’s a lot to like here. while Bennett’s commitment to Din as unworldly and naïve got a bit tedious as time went on, both Din and Ana are nonetheless compelling characters. Ana’s eccentricities could easily have become comical, but Bennett does a good job of taking her seriously and getting me to take her seriously as a result. (I admit I found some of her dialogue a little too pat — the frequent profanity felt a little forced, for example — but it worked well enough overall.) I also really liked Din, naïveté notwithstanding; it did help that he kisses a man.
the actual mystery is, I thought, well-executed. it’s definitely the kind of mystery narrative where the reader is not provided with enough information to solve the mystery themselves, but it parcels out enough information to keep me engaged, and Din gets to piece some things together on his own before Ana comes in with a flood of conclusions. part of this, too, is the handling of world-building information: as befits a mystery novel, the book does spend a reasonable amount of time explaining aspects of its setting, but the explanations are, for the most part, well-integrated into the narration of the mystery. that Din is a working-class civil servant from a rural area helps explain why he’s unfamiliar with some seemingly important aspects of his world. I will say, though, that it wasn’t always smoothly done — the explanation of patronage was particularly clunky:
Ana laughed gaily. “Oh, that’s simple. The answer is patronage.”
“Patronage?’ I said. “As in—giving gifts?”
“Right,” grunted Miljin. “Though it sounds like Kaygi Haza was giving them a hell of a lot more than gifts, though…”
the double “though” is obviously particularly clunky, but this kind of feels as if Bennett expected his readers not to understand what patronage would mean in this context and felt he had to gloss it as “giving gifts”.
I note also that the leviathans — the series is, after all, called Shadow of the Leviathan — raise another ideological problem. the Empire that Bennett posits and quite obviously positions as an analogy for the United States is one that is under constant, existential threat from inhuman forces outside its borders that would destroy it utterly if the Brave Defenders stationed at the border were not there to protect it. you all of course know that I love Pacific Rim, so I’m not, you know, entirely opposed to kaiju narratives. but this one has yet to convince me that it’s not buying into the sanctity of borders — though there are, again, hints that the situation may be more complicated vis-à-vis the ecology of the leviathans. much remains to be seen.
did this book deserve the Hugo Award? I don’t know. I liked it, enough that I will probably read at least the second book. but Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time simply consumed me when I was reading it, and I think it did a better/more sophisticated job considering the problem of Empire despite spending a lot less time Ruminating On The Nature Of The Empire. for all its apparent strangeness, The Tainted Cup feels, to me, safe. fun and well-executed, but not, in the end, pushing any boundaries.
moods: dark, grimy, mysterious, reflective, tense