Fires of the Faithful
Turning the Storm
Naomi Kritzer
Bantam Spectra, 373 pages and 369 pages, respectively
Order this book This
duology by new author Naomi Kritzer began life as a single book, and was
split in two and expanded at the behest of the publisher. It seems appropriate,
therefore, to review it as a single work.
Sixteen-year-old Eliana is a violin student at an isolated rural conservatory.
Times are hard--a recent war has laid waste to large parts of the Mestierese
Empire, and there’s famine in the south. But life at the conservatory is
reasonably secure, and Eliana has hope, once her training is complete, that
she’ll land a prestigious appointment to one of the ensembles at the Imperial
Court.
Then a new roommate, Mira, arrives, and Eliana’s life is changed forever.
Mira is strangely secretive about her background; even stranger, she can’t
make the witchlight that nearly everyone can summon, even if they’re not
trained mages of the Circle. Mira also has unusual knowledge. Every musician
knows a few of the Old Way songs--survivals of the heretical monotheistic
Redentore religion, which has been supplanted by the Lady-centered Fedele
faith--but Mira knows a lot of them, and she offers to teach Eliana and Eliana’s
friends how to play them. There’s a power to the forbidden Old Way music,
and the more Eliana and her friends learn the more they’re drawn to it, gathering
and practicing in secret. But their experimentation goes too far. One of
Eliana’s friends becomes a Redentore apostate, and is discovered and punished. Soon after, Mira’s
secret past catches up to her, and she’s forcibly removed from the conservatory.
Before she goes, she reveals to Eliana the terrible secret the Circle has
been hiding since the war’s end: it wasn’t the retreating army of the Vesuviano
Empire, sowing the fields with salt, that caused the withering of the land--it
was the magefires the Circle summoned to defeat them.
Shattered by this discovery and by the loss of Mira, confused as to her allegiances
(Eliana has never been a particularly devout Lady-worshipper, and while the
Redentore faith--or more precisely, the ancient power of its music--appeals
to her, she’s not yet ready to convert), Eliana decides to return home. But
further horrors await her there, and she winds up eventually at one of the
huge refugee camps the Mestierese Empire has established in the wastelands
that lie along the Vesuviano border. Here, amid the seething discontent of
people forced from their land by famine--some of whom are members of a reform
movement that already knows the truth about magefire, and many of whom are
secret Redentori--Eliana finds herself thrust unexpectedly into a leadership
role. From this beginning springs a campaign to spread the truth about magefire,
to overthrow the Circle, and to break the grip of the repressive Fedeli on
the faith of the people.
The above is certainly the stuff of epic fantasy. But Kritzer dispenses with
the heroic trappings in favor of a more realistic approach. Eliana isn’t
your typical epic protagonist, swept headlong toward a glorious destiny by
forces beyond her control, but a practical girl with a wry sense of humor
who stumbles and makes mistakes and frequently wonders what on earth she’s
doing (and sometimes, stubbornly, chooses not to go along). The peasant army
she assembles isn’t ultimately transformed by the nobility of its purpose
into a legendary fighting force; it remains a ragtag bunch that, while reasonably
inspired by the cause it follows, is just as concerned with petty personal
squabbles and pointless rivalry between its various units. The reform movement,
run by students and scholars, is self-absorbed and inefficient in a way that
anyone who has ever joined a leftist student organization will immediately recognize.
This is fantasy with the warts left on--a refreshing change from more usual
fare.
Unusual also is Kritzer’s portrayal of the rival religions. Standing new
age dualities on their heads, she posits a Goddess-centered religion as the
repressor, and an analogue of Christianity as the repressed (though she dodges
the patriarchy issue by making the Redentore God female). The Fedeli are
as obsessed with orthodoxy as any group of medieval inquisitors, and as brutal
in their enforcement of it. Goddess-centered religions are usually associated
with fertility and the renewal of the earth, but the magefire that was the
Lady’s gift actually damages the earth, drawing out its life-force. By contrast,
the Redentori are intimately connected to the earth through their rituals
and their music, and ultimately discover that in the practice of faith they
too can summon up a kind of magic, one that gives life back rather than draining
it. This is no mere good religion/bad religion dichotomy, however; Kritzer
takes pains to show that her Fedeli aren’t hypocrites but true believers,
and to portray the problems that arise when charismatic faith begins to transform itself
into institutionalized religion. The new Redentore church clearly has the
potential to become as intolerant as the Fedeli.
Kritzer’s engaging tale, with its down-to-earth approach and interesting
themes, is somewhat hampered by flaws in execution. Her choice of an Italianate
Renaissance setting makes for a pleasing alternative to the more standard
medievalism, but while some locations (the conservatory and the first refugee
camp) are well-drawn, others (Cuore, the Imperial Court) have a generic feel,
and the broader cultural background and history are barely sketched in. The
religions too are explicated less fully than one might wish, especially the
process by which the Fedeli supplanted the Redentori. Character motivation
isn’t always as well-grounded as it might be--Eliana’s transition from schoolgirl
to general, for instance, strains credibility both in its swiftness and in
her lack of reflection on the change. And the latter half of the second book,
in which momentous events pile up in overly quick succession, would have
profited from being expanded by an additional 50 or 60 pages.
I suspect these problems may reflect the artificial process of taking a single
book and breaking it in two, as much they do a new novelist still finding
her feet. Overall, it’s a promising debut from a fresh new voice in fantasy,
and I look forward to Kritzer’s future work.
Copyright © 2003 Victoria Strauss
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