Stories set in magic school have become commonplace to the point of cliché; unless the author is willing to take the story in a new direction, like weaving parody into a genuine story (Lev Grossman’s The Magicians), the work is going to suffer from comparisons to the very popular books in the space, including those by she-who-must-not-be named. In The Incandescent, Emily Tesh takes a different tack by setting her novel at a magic school, in an alternate-world England where magic is just part of normal life, while making her protagonist one of the teachers, as well as making at least two more significant plot decisions that set this delightful book apart from its peers.
In The Incandescent, Saffy Walden is a senior teacher who works primarily with some of the oldest and most advanced students at Chetwood School, a day and boarding school outside of London where Walden herself was a student twenty years previously. One of her academic and practical specialties is dealing with higher-order demons – most magicians can handle the lower-order imps who love to occupy electronic devices like photocopiers or even wall clocks, but Walden is one of the few magicians in the world who can handle the most difficult, higher-order demons, which may turn out to be significant. And since Chetwood is full of young magicians learning to harness their powers, it attracts many demons trying to break through from their plane into ours, including a very powerful one nicknamed Old Faithful who has killed some students in the past. The threat of Old Faithful leads the school to bring in a Marshal, a sort of magical security agent, named Laura Kenning, who immediately rubs Walden the wrong way, so you can probably see where that’s going.
The story of The Incandescent has multiple peaks, so if you were wondering, say, if the whole novel was heading towards a denouement where Walden fights Old Faithful, you may be surprised when the demon shows up before the book’s midpoint. It’s misdirection by adventure, as every subplot is interesting and intense, but Tesh’s ultimate goal won’t be apparent until quite close to the novel’s end, when she finally reveals where all of this has been going.
Walden is a wonderful main character, and by the time the novel is through, Tesh has given us a huge amount of her life story as well as insight into many aspects of her character, particularly her somewhat low interest in romantic relationships. She’s not aro, but she’s indifferent enough that romance ends up a tangential part of the story rather than the core plot point. Her flaws are realistic and fit within her character while eventually playing a significant part in the development of the plot. The Marshal, Laura Kenning, and at least two of the four students who comprise Walden’s main class are also well-developed and have some sort of arc within the novel’s various subplots, while several side characters show up and get enough screen time to feel more than two-dimensional. (I was particularly fond of Todd, the groundskeeper/maintenance guy who has some untapped magical potential of his own; he needs his own story at some point.)
When the actual climax comes, the whole ground beneath the book shifts, and the final fifty-odd pages are a full-on sprint, thanks to two twists, one I saw coming and one I didn’t. It all makes sense in hindsight, and Tesh set it up perfectly. An author has to earn this kind of massive plot shift, and Tesh did so, while staying completely true to her characters.
The Incandescent was nominated for this year’s Hugp Award for Best Novel, which Alix Harrow won for The Everlasting, as well as this year’s Nebula Award for the same. This is the first of the six Hugo nominees I’ve read, and I’m currently in the middle of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author. Tesh won previously for Some Desperate Glory, a sci-fi novel that was good but flawed, and this is a better work in almost every way, from plot to character development to playing with popular tropes. It’s also a more memorable novel. These characters and this wonderful setting will stay with me for some time, and while I don’t think it needs a sequel, I hope Tesh revisits this universe in some fashion.
Next up: I’m about a quarter of the way through Death of the Author, which feels like a very ambitious novel so far.
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