ackward runs The War of Our Year till reels the mind. Steph Swainston's first novel, which at first sight gushes like a stew of orts and militaria out of every good or goodish fighting fantasy novel ever written, and which at final sight rings like a bell unbroken, does everything (it might seem) the wrong way round. It begins in a jumble of consequence, and ends in a state of what might be called Heroic Clarity. It is a fantasy novel about war and valor and treachery and worlds clashing, but it is only as the novel closes that we begin to gain some sense of the scope of the war, some inkling as to how Swainston distinguishes between heroes and villains, some real grasp of the interrelations among the worlds at stake. The Year of Our War is a novel to wait for until you've read it.
So any outline of what seems to be happening will necessarily fail to convey the bristly in-your-face contusions of mess crosshatching to a fare-thee-well the first couple hundred pages of Swainston's conspicuously complicated narrative. Gusts of contrariwise story—some elements of which pay tough-love homage to a dozen earlier writers—beset us from the first. These assaults of bits of story are conveyed to us through the only voice whose viewpoint we will be able to share at any point in the book, the only consciousness we are going to have any access to: the nagging unreliable voice of Jant Shira, who is also known as Comet, a kind of title that designates his Hermes-like role in the Circle of mortals who have been raised to immortality by the emperor of a world called Fourlands, which has been under attack from Somewhere Else by Insects from Time Immemorial, or at least from when God (whom Swainston addresses as an it) died.
Jant is a half-breed, part Rhydanne (a gaunt highland tribe of hard-drinking loners who look like Keith Richards if Keith Richards had spent his life herding sheep on top of a mountain in M. John Harrison's Viriconium, which is also a world invaded by Insects) and part Awian (a winged but flightless folk, and an egregious play of words on avian). Jant, uniquely, can use his wings to actually fly. He is also a drug addict (but uses his addiction to save the world in the end); he is extremely beautiful (a bit like the perilously photogenic Viriconium author, or like Keith Richards); he is a coward (but brave), a rapist (but that's how Rhydanne have sex with each other), a selfish shifty git (but profoundly loyal to Fourlands). He is, in other words, a walking chaos of echoes, talismanic utterances, vatic lurches, drug-tinged bullshit. He is our hypnopomp.
We are in the middle of the war, without a map (the absence of any maps, in a fantasy novel with lots of names and campaigns and dynastic shifts from one armed house to another across the Land, seems to be another deliberate dislocation move). The Insects—giant mindless ravenous insatiable flesh eaters—are swarming. King Dunlin Rachiswater, who is enfeoffed to the emperor, is mortally wounded in a crazy assault through the wall that divides Insects from Fourlanders. He is in terrible agony. Jant kills him with an overdose of the drug to which he is addicted, and which (we now learn) translates one's consciousness into a different body in a kind of parallel world run on Wonderland principles, with puns determining the nature of reality: whorses being prostitute horses, etc, etc. The dead king, now a live king in the Wonderland world, takes control and defeats the Insects there, who build a transdimensional bridge back to Fourlands. So innumerable Insects now invest Jant's native land.
Meanwhile, Jant recounts his obsession with a Rhydanne woman he had raped, like what they do up there. This part of the novel, like other parts, proceeds backward, from the present to the past, from jumbles of consequence to thrillingly depicted cause; see page 253/260 for some
extremely well-done sex. The political and military consequences of a love triangle with child among other imamortals is also examined, in a likewise fashion.
A cacophony of speculative voices
Halfway through the novel, we swim in clues, noise, overdose. We have been exposed to an adroit cacophony of echoes of a dozen writers. M. John Harrison, throughout; China Miéville, for the winged semi-crippled protagonist (though The Year of Our War is devoid of a feature of Miéville's Perdido Street Station that significantly distinguishes it from most of its brethren: a protagonist who thinks hard about the nature of things); Mary Gentle, for the spunky swordswomen who lead affrays rather often; Angela Carter, for ironized intimations that the whole tale is a patent artifact that, nevertheless, means lots; Michael Moorcock, for a few quick countervailing immersions in Weltschmerz; Roger Zelazny, for lots: for the Lord of Light/Amber pantheon of mortals acting like a quarrelsome extended family of Greekish gods, and walking among us, and taking liberties with us; and for the Donnerjack pattern of seemingly created worlds, which may ultimately be inexplicable, but which (as in Donnerjack) may eventually, if there is a sequel or two, be explained as a series of pocket universes in a cyberspace universe, which may have gone out of control: as one of the few mortals Swainston pays attention to in the novel says, near the end of things, "When god reappears from its break it's going to have a shock."
And, finally, E.R. Eddison may be a conscious influence, as it is his great first novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), that made the arena of Amber possible, that made it possible for adult writers to think of heroes and heroics doing great stuff in such an arena, without sliding either into adulation or sarcasm. Eddison got the romance of great deeds committed by loudmouths exactly right, and The Year of Our War achieves something of the same balance, especially in its latter pages, where she molts free of most of her contemporary influences, grows through pastiche into a crafted story that comes to a fine climax.
This freeing of story from the feverish cross-referentiality of 21st-century genre writing may well be (I think it almost certainly is) entirely deliberate. The confusions of the first half of the book are a coughing of the throat of a storyteller being born in difficult but enthralling times. Steph Swainston's knowingness is a necessary condition, in this era of high infection, for the attainment of wisdom. Here, with her first cough-ridden but triumphant novel, I think we may be in at the borning of a Teller.
