Grey Sister

Mark Lawrence is a very good writer. The Broken Empire, was a remarkable feat for a first novel, and this, his third outing, is a very promising successor. The Grey Sister is the second in the series. In the review that follows, there will be spoilers for both this volume and the first, The Red Sister.

Lawrence's first major character, Jorg, the central force in The Broken Empire, found his initial well-springs in Anthony Burgess's Little Alex, the hero of 'A Clockwork Orange.' In his opening pages, Lawrence adopted some of the tics of language that characterized the narration of Burgess's classic. However, those were quickly pushed to one side by Jorg himself, who took hold of the story and ran with it, perhaps astonishing his author as much as he does the reader.

The problem with stories that are reliant on the power of characterization is that if the central character never catches fire, the whole enterprise fails. This is what happens in the second trilogy, where although there are one or two actors who show promise, the narrator is pretty much a limp biscuit, sketched out through a few catch-phrases such as Dickens might use to summon one of his minor characters. Lawrence drags Jorg and one of main female characters from The Broken Kingdom into the action, but very little come of either of them.

In the present trilogy so far, however, Lawrence manages to juggle a larger number of actors (juggling is a theme that runs through the book) which takes much of the pressure off his leading lady, a ten-year old girl. Piqued, perhaps, by some of the criticism that had been levelled at his earlier works, in particular by the accusations of sexism articulated in one particularly negative review - he was miffed enough to respond to it directly - he has set this trilogy in the feminine world of a nunnery, and his heros are, for the most part, female - as are most of the villains.

The nunnery is imagined as dedicated to worship of a god who is referred to as The Ancestor. How this deity is conceived of is rather murky; the people who owe him their allegiance are something of an enigma. They are sometimes pictured as the descendants of four 'races', each of which is possessed of a characteristic inborn power. But at some moments in the book it seems that there were already people on the world before the 'races' arrived, and that there has been interbreeding such that most of the present population have no exceptional talents at all, while others have inherited them, and may even have several of the powers to varying degrees. It seems that genetics don't work the same way on this planet as they do on earth, as there are some specimens - the heroine herself is one of them - who may be 'full-blooded' exemplars of several of ancestral lines.

The world itself is dying. The ice caps at both poles have expanded, until only a thin strip at the equator is left to sustain human life. This kept open by a satellite moon, launched by an earlier civilization, and which is, in fact, a magnifying glass that concentrates light and heat on the central zone. (I don't find this particularly convincing, but I am not looking for realism in a fairy tale, which is what this is). Things are getting worse, and many people cling to the belief in a prophecy that has it that the world will be saved by a messianic bearer of the blood of all four of the 'races'. Nona, the heroine, is understood by some to be an important figure in the prophecy.

We follow Nona from her village, from which she is cast out after revealing her immense capacity for destruction and death-dealing, to the nunnery, to which she is brought by the Abbess, who saves her from the gallows after catching a glimpse of her true nature. The rest of the first volume is taken up by a variation on the boarding school novel - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_story - which Lawrence handles with aplomb. The teachers are the usual mixture of sadists and thoughtful guides - sometimes both at once, as with Sister Apple, who cheerfully poisons her pupils in a variation on the pedagogy of violence which tends to underlie the genre. There are whippings, deadly tests, school bullies, false friends and false enemies and even the occasional exclamation mark. Nona passes all the tests, and suffers bloody beatings to rival with a Mickey Spillane detective.

Nona is one of a cast of characters several of whom play important roles in the development of the plot. So although she is central, she is never the only focus of attention. In the second novel in the series, she shares her starring role with the Abbess, who is both a kindly mother and a Machiavellian schemer. In this book, after an opening section which continues within the school tradition - more bullying, more tests - both Nona and the Abbess take to the road, heading towards a grand finale in which Nona saves everyone's bacon (with a little help from her friends). The villains that Nona has had to deal with in earlier sections now become sub-villains to the more monstrous players who act upon the world stage, rather than in the confines of the nunnery.

I found this second volume rather less powerful than the first. Although Lawrence gives himself room to excel in any number of fight scenes - he is very good at those, and the reader will be swept up in the brutal action as powerfully as if in the front row of a professional wrestling combat. But few of the characters reveal any great depths. Arabella and Zole, the two who may or may not be the Chosen One of the prophecy, are both little more than ciphers, and Nona herself, although inhabited by a devil for much of the book, has nothing like Jorg's depth and inner conflict. The one character that does show some complexity, Nona's false friend and betrayer, Clera, is mainly a plot device.

Although the main characters are female, there is a handful of males. Nona has a feud with a family of nobles of whom we see only the men. They are satisfactorily villainous, and one may imagine them twirling their moustaches. A young fellow we met in the first volume shows up again, and we are lead to understand that he may be destined for emotional entanglement with Nona. He has the crooked smile of the romantic hero.

The fantastic genre lends itself to an obsession with bloodlines. Witchcraft is an inherited substance, talents are handed down, sometimes in mysterious ways. Kings and Queens are born from the loins of Kings and Queens. One may take this as it comes, as simply a trope that is embedded in the genre. One may struggle against it, as, in these democratic times, many authors do. Lawrence occasionally genuflects to the demos : the Abbess proclaiming that the exceptional individual, however spectacular or miraculous their works, does not make history, but that it is the people in their mass that forge political and social destinies. But his story is, once again, of high inheritance. Nona at one point seeks her mother. She doesn't find her, and assumes her dead. I would not be surprised if both Nona's parents make key appearances of some kind in the third volume.