Frances Hardinge Fest 3/3

To celebrate the release of Frances Hardinge's latest novel, Deeplight, here is a bit of a Frances-fest!

Let us skip Frances' next offering, A Skinful of Shadows, which I place quietly beside Cuckoo Song in my mental Hardinge library, and move on directly to her latest, Deeplight, just out this week. 

30 years after the dramatic disappearance of the gods in what has become known to the natives of the Myriad as the Cataclysm, teens Hark and Jelt scrape a living thanks to the very valuable pieces of 'godware' that can still be found under the waves. Life is hard enough, but then something wants to be found and it becomes… complicated. 

Dead gods, smugglers, mad scientists, winged submarines, sea-kissed people, insular slang and sign language, priests, militiaemen…  Deeplight suffers a little from 'too much imagination'. But can you really hold it against this vast, well-developped world? Right from the killer two-page prologue, you want to know what the story is with those gods, who the sea-kissed are, what caused the Cataclysm, how come you can breathe in the mysterious Undersea, how a submarine with wings can possibly work and more… 

The reader's enthusiasm is fuelled by this thirst for knowledge (take me there, tell me more), perhaps even more so than by their attachment to the various characters. Fractured, rough around the edges, they can be hard to like or to understand, and it's mostly with time and continued acquaintance that Hark and Selphin and the others earn their place in the reader's heart. The depiction of the friendship between Hark and Jelt could have done with more showing of the good times rather than telling, and that would have probably placed me more quickly on Hark's side. 

But back to this thirst for knowledge, this desire to know. As you read on, some questions are answered, some not, new ones arise, in a constant flow, as new characters add new stories, new perspectives to an already-known (or seemingly known) state of affairs. The remaining questions (around the gods, around Jelt and Hark's story) become like an itch in the back of the reader's mind, like sand grains between your toes after a trip to the beach.

But by the time you reach the ending, everything you thought you knew has been revisited and uncovered anew by the tide of the narrative, an outgoing tide, ready to carry the characters (and the reader) towards new shores. This overarching ebbing movement of rediscovery is pretty masterful and will probably stay with you for a fairly long time.