The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard
Publisher – Awful Agent
Published – Out Now
Price – Available via https://books2read.com/u/bMgJOB
Paris has survived the Great Houses War – just. Its streets are lined with haunted ruins, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine runs black with ashes and rubble. Yet life continues among the wreckage. The citizens continue to live, love, fight and survive in their war-torn city, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over the once grand capital.
House Silverspires, previously the leader of those power games, lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.
Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen, an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction, and a resentful young man wielding spells from the Far East. They may be Silverspires’ salvation. They may be the architects of its last, irreversible fall…
The concept of the urban fantasy was quite popular a few years ago with the idea of magic just being around the corner in town centres. There were indeed a great deal of detectives solving supernatural crimes, but we also had the elegant and epic Matthew Swift series from Kate Griffin showing us we could do a bit more creatively with myth. But then we start to reach some boundaries often it was a very white and western setting and of course cities are not new adventures. Ten years ago, Aliette de Bodard started to release their Dominion of the Fallen series with the first instalment The House of Shattered Wings. Now re-issued I’ve looked back at this book which I feel both holds up very well and highlights the direction fantasy was moving to over the next decade.
Paris at the turn of the 19th century has only just survived the Great Magicians War. Europe has long been dominated by the Houses mainly by the Fallen. Angels cast out of Heaven and while now mortal and wingless still are capable of great magic. But the Houses collided and war on an epic scale left Paris as a ruined city where several Houses still vie for power. The arrival of a new fallen Isabelle who along with the mysterious mortal Phillipe found trying to steal her fingers are soon in one of the most famous houses Silverspires created by Morningstar himself but now in his absence looking increasingly fragile. A series of deaths suggests someone is trying to destroy a great house but to what end?
Looking back at Shattered Wings now it’s a story doing very much its own thing. It was not unusual to see angels being used in modern fantasy but there was often a huge tonne of mythology, status levels and Latin thrown in. De Bodard however eschews that and actually gives us little background bar a few mentions of what they feel they have lost. There is no re-match with their Maker on the cards here but powerful but decidedly not quite human people taking power or themselves on Earth. The fallen come in all types from the initially innocent Isabelle, the haughty but distant Selen who now runs Silverspires, and most of all watch out for the deliciously menacing but elegant Asmodeus who always seems to have an angle from his own House Hawthorn. The feeling we have is of ancient immortals for who decades are just a brief interval and those who lead plan many years in advance of everyone else. Haughty immortals who do not like to show weakness but can eventually under pressure release a vast amount of power. Unusually for the period this was written they’re also quite clearly comfortable with same sex relationships and its never even seen as out of the ordinary. In 2016 that was quite unusual to have so many and fairly prominently in the main cast.
Another dimension is the mixing of mythologies. A key part of that is Phillipe who we find is an Ammanite (we know better as Vietnam) brought over to Europe I the last war and when we first meet him in a street gang to survive. But we soon realise that Phillipe is capable of magic too and this opens up a vein not yet fully explored of other Heavens, other powers and creatures that the Fallen seem not to be fully aware of. De Bodard captures well the sense of Phillipe being an outsider as an immigrant in a land that is unaware of their culture and Phillipe resists the need to ally himself with a House. This brings an intriguing dimension with his main relationship with the Fallen Isabelle who he feels responsible for and yet he sees her slowly gain the guile and cunning the Fallen are known for. That keeps pulling him into the events unfolding around Paris.
The storyline is unusual and very claustrophobic. There is a huge feeling of claustrophobia massive Houses living in the ruins of Paris which everyone lives in and these vast warrens have secrets, wonders and occasional terrors to find. As House Silverspires comes under attack, we sense a strange presence the fallen do not know causing havoc and there is a feeling of menace and doom gathering in the story’s gothic atmosphere. However rather than all leading to a traditional crescendo we have a early resolution that opens up the storyline for the series suggesting more schemes are underway. Brooding menace was the feeling I got from this story, and it very much feels like it will need the other instalments to come.
It is not a tale without violence, and it also tackles hard subjects. We soon learn the bodies of the fallen are filled with magic, so when one dies their bodies are effectively dismembered and used for various tools. But they are also highly addictive chemicals and a key character we meet is Madelaine the alchemist of Silverspires whose body is now starting to wither away due to the drug’s impact. As well as drug abuse this is a story that will feature violent death and torture, not too graphic, but you’ll certainly wince upon occasion. This is a Paris of supernatural (mainly) crime lords and when they feel threatened, they show no sense of mercy to others.
The House of Shattered Wings really holds up ten years later. It points to the modern fantasy where the UK and US readership (and to perhaps a lesser extent publishing) started to explore non-western fantasy and also a slightly different way of storytelling – no quests and also a different form of social structure than the ones we were reading a lot of in the decades prior (I do not miss all those status levels). It also holds up as an unusual story doing different things with history and myth than a lot of authors prior or since have tried. I love the sense of claustrophobic menace that comes from this story. I again felt there is a lot of this world still to discover and a lot more secrets and pain to come. Fans of de Bodard’s other work may recognise here that sense of interior characters we have to learn to get to know beyond what they show to the people around them. I highly recommend you give this a try!
