Review:
Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
May 2019 |
| ISBN: |
1-250-19551-9 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
528 |
Roger and Dodger are cuckoo children, alchemical constructs created by
other alchemical constructs masquerading as humans. They are halves of
the primal force of the universe, the Doctrine of Ethos (which is not what
the
Doctrine of Ethos is, but that is one of my lesser problems with this
book), divided into language and math and kept separate to properly
mature. In this case, separate means being adopted by families on
opposite coasts of the United States, ignorant of each other's existence
and closely monitored by agents Reed controls. None of that prevents
Roger and Dodger from becoming each other's invisible friends at the age
of seven, effortlessly communicating psychically even though they've never
met.
That could have been the start of an enjoyable story that hearkened back to
an earlier age of science fiction: the secret science experiments discover
that they have more power than their creators expected, form a clandestine
alliance, and fight back against the people who are trying to control
them. I have fond memories of
Escape to Witch Mountain and would
have happily read that book.
Unfortunately, that isn't the story McGuire wanted to tell. The story she
told involves ripping Roger and Dodger apart, breaking Dodger, and turning
Roger into an abusive asshole.
Whooboy, where to start. This book made me very angry, in a way that I
would not have been if it didn't contain the bones of a much better novel.
Four of them, to be precise: four other books that would have felt less
gratuitously cruel and less apparently oblivious to just how bad Roger's
behavior is.
There are some things to like. One of them is that the structure of this
book is clever. I can't tell you how it's clever because the structure
doesn't become clear until more than halfway through and it completely
changes the story in a way that would be a massive spoiler. But it's an
interesting spin on an old idea, one that gave Roger and Dodger a type of
agency in the story that has far-ranging implications. I enjoyed thinking
about it.
That leads me to another element I liked: Erin. She makes only fleeting
appearances until well into the story, but I thought she competed with
Dodger for being the best character of the book. The second of the better
novels I saw in the bones of
Middlegame was the same story told
from Erin's perspective. I found myself guessing at her motives and
paying close attention to hints that led to a story with a much different
emotional tone. Viewing the ending of the book through her eyes instead
of Roger and Dodger's puts it in a different, more complicated, and more
thought-provoking light.
Unfortunately, she's not McGuire's protagonist. She instead is one of the
monsters of this book, which leads to my first, although not my strongest,
complaint. It felt like McGuire was trying too hard to write horror,
packing
Middlegame with the visuals of horror movies without the
underlying structure required to make them effective. I'm not a fan of
horror personally, so to some extent I'm grateful that the horrific
elements were ineffective, but it makes for some frustratingly bad
writing.
For example, one of the longest horror scenes in the book features Erin,
and should be a defining moment for the character. Unfortunately, it's so
heavy on visuals and so focused on what McGuire wants the reader to be
thinking that it doesn't show any of the psychology underlying Erin's
decisions. The camera is pointed the wrong way; all the interesting
storytelling work, moral complexity, and world-building darkness is
happening in the character we don't get to see. And, on top of that,
McGuire overuses foreshadowing so much that it robs the scene of suspense
and terror. Again, I'm partly grateful, since I don't read books for
suspense and terror, but it means the scene does only a fraction of the
work it could.
This problem of trying too hard extends to the writing. McGuire has a bit
of a tendency in all of her books to overdo the descriptions, but is
usually saved by narrative momentum. Unfortunately, that's not true here,
and her prose often seems overwrought. She also resorts to this style of
description, which never fails to irritate me:
The thought has barely formed when a different shape looms over him,
grinning widely enough to show every tooth in its head. They are
even, white, and perfect, and yet he somehow can't stop himself from
thinking there's something wrong with them, that they're
mismatched, that this assortment of teeth was never meant to share a
single jaw, a single terrible smile.
This isn't effective. This is telling the reader how they're supposed to
feel about the thing you're describing, without doing the work of writing
a description that makes them feel that way. (Also, you may see what I
mean by overwrought.)
That leads me to my next complaint: the villains.
My problem is not so much with Leigh, who I thought was an adequate
monster, if a bit single-note. There's some thought and depth behind her
arguments with Reed, a few hints of her own motives that were more
convincing for not being fully shown. The descriptions of how dangerous
she is were reasonably effective. She's a good villain for this type of
dark fantasy story where the world is dangerous and full of terrors (and
reminded me of some of the villains from McGuire's October Daye series).
Reed, though, is a storytelling train wreck. The Big Bad of the novel is
the least interesting character in it. He is a stuffed tailcoat full of
malicious incompetence who is only dangerous because the author proclaims
him to be. It only adds insult to injury that he kills off a far more
nuanced and creative villain before the novel starts, replacing her
ambiguous goals with Snidely Whiplash mustache-twirling. The reader has
to suffer through extended scenes focused on him as he brags, monologues,
and obsesses over his eventual victory without an ounce of nuance or
subtlety.
Worse is the dynamic between him and Leigh, which is only one symptom of
the problem with
Middlegame that made me the most angry: the degree
to this book oozes patriarchy. Every man in this book, including the
supposed hero, orders around the women, who are forced in various ways to
obey. This is the most obvious between Leigh and Reed, but it's the most
toxic, if generally more subtle, between Roger and Dodger.
Dodger is great. I had absolutely no trouble identifying with and rooting
for her as a character. The nasty things that McGuire does to her over
the course of the book (and wow does that never let up) made me like her
more when she tenaciously refuses to give up. Dodger is the math
component of the Doctrine of Ethos, and early in the book I thought
McGuire handled that well, particularly given how difficult it is to write
a preternatural genius. Towards the end of this book, her math sadly
turns into a very non-mathematical magic (more on this in a moment), but
her character holds all the way through. It felt like she carved her
personality out of this story through sheer force of will and clung to it
despite the plot. I wanted to rescue her from this novel and put her into
a better book, such as the one in which her college friends (who are
great; McGuire is very good at female friendships when she writes them)
stage an intervention, kick a few people out of her life, and convince her
to trust them.
Unfortunately, Dodger is, by authorial fiat, half of a bound pair, and the
other half of that pair is Roger, who is the sort of nice guy everyone
likes and thinks is sweet and charming until he turns into an emotional
trap door right when you need him the most and dumps you into the ocean to
drown. And then somehow makes you do all the work of helping him feel
better about his betrayal.
The most egregious (and most patriarchal) thing Roger does in this book is
late in the book and a fairly substantial spoiler, so I can't rant about
that properly. But even before that, Roger keeps doing the the same damn
emotional abandonment trick, and the book is heavily invested into
justifying it and making excuses for him. Excuses that, I should note,
are not made for Dodger; her failings are due to her mistakes and
weaknesses, whereas Roger's are natural reactions to outside forces. I
got very, very tired of this, and I'm upset by how little awareness the
narrative voice showed for how dysfunctional and abusive this relationship
is. The solution is
always for Dodger to reunite with Roger; it's
built into the structure of the story.
I have a weakness for the soul-bound pair, in part from reading a lot of
Mercedes Lackey at an impressionable age, but one of the dangerous
pitfalls of the concept is that the characters then have to have an almost
flawless relationship. If not, it can turn abusive very quickly, since
the characters by definition cannot leave each other. It's essentially
coercive, so as soon as the relationship shows a dark side, the author
needs to be extremely careful. McGuire was not.
There is an attempted partial patch, late in the book, for the patriarchal
structure. One of the characters complains about it, and another says
that the gender of the language and math pairs is random and went either
way in other pairs. Given that both of the pairs that we meet in this
story have the same male-dominant gender dynamic, what I took from this is
that McGuire realized there was a problem but wasn't able to fix it. (I'm
also reminded of David R. Henry's old line that it's never a good sign
when the characters start complaining about the plot.)
The structural problems are all the more frustrating because I think there
were ways out of them. Roger is supposedly the embodiment of language,
not that you'd be able to tell from most scenes in this novel. For
reasons that I do not understand, McGuire expressed that as a love of
words: lexicography, translation, and synonyms. This makes no sense to
me. Those are some of the more structured and rules-based (and hence
mathematical) parts of language. If Roger had instead been focused on
stories collecting them, telling them, and understanding why and how
they're told he would have had a clearer contrast with Dodger. More
importantly, it would have solved the plot problem that McGuire solved
with a nasty bit of patriarchy. So much could have been done with Dodger
building a structure of math around Roger's story-based expansion of the
possible, and it would have grounded Dodger's mathematics in something
more interesting than symbolic magic. To me, it's such an obvious lost
opportunity.
I'm still upset about this book. McGuire does a lovely bit of
world-building with Asphodel Baker, what little we see of her. I found
the hidden alchemical war against her work by L. Frank Baum delightful,
and enjoyed every excerpt from the fictional
Over the Woodward Wall
scattered throughout
Middlegame. But a problem with inventing a
fictional book to excerpt in a real novel is that the reader may decide
that the fictional book sounds a lot better than the book they're reading,
and start wishing they could just read that book instead. That was
certainly the case for me. I'm sad that
Over the Woodward Wall
doesn't exist, and am mostly infuriated by
Middlegame.
Dodger and Erin deserved to live in a better book.
Should you want to read this anyway (and I do know people who liked it),
serious content warning for self-harm.
Rating: 4 out of 10
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