Thief's Magic is the first volume in a new trilogy from the popular fantasy writer Trudy Canavan. Regular readers of Canavan's books will know what to expect with this book and they won't be disappointed. Her characteristic skilful storytelling is in evidence alongside careful plotting and believable, sympathetic main characters, in a well-imagined and consistent universe. As with her earlier novels, humans are the focus: there are no elves or orcs in these stories, nor is the line between good and evil always clearly drawn; characters and issues can be complex. And, despite occasional flaws, Canavan's novels are always a good read.
Canavan started publishing in 2001 with The Magician's Guild, the first of The Black Magician trilogy, and has produced ten further books since then. They mostly come in trilogies. The first was, according to the Nielsen ratings, the most successful debut fantasy series of the early twenty-first century. This was followed by the Age of the Five trilogy, set in a different universe, then a return to her original world with The Magician's Apprentice, a prequel to her first trilogy, and finally a further three books, the Traitor Spy trilogy, set a generation after the Black Magician stories.
Her latest venture is set in another new universe and inaugurates a new series, Millennium's Rule. Canavan stories are "safe," in that the main characters usually survive, and the violence is kept within careful limits. Magic and the use of magic, power and the misuse of power, the development of the main characters—and their friendships, relationships, and challenges—are the threads woven through her books. There is always enough happening to maintain the reader's attention, with occasional surprises, changes in direction, and tense moments. Her novels are good comfort reading on a rainy evening, and hard to put down. Thief's Magic is no exception. It was with great anticipation that I sunk into this story of over 550 pages.
The novel consists of two strands told in alternate sections, several chapters at a time (as the novel goes on, the number of chapters a section contains becomes smaller and smaller). In one strand, the tale focuses on a young man studying archaeology and sorcery, Tyen Ironsmelter, who lives in Belton, capital of the Empire of Leratia. The culture is in the process of industrialising and magic plays a central role in this. During an archaeological dig Tyen uncovers the artefact Vella, a sentient book created from a woman centuries earlier by a powerful sorcerer, Roporien. She was designed to hold knowledge, which she acquires from the mind of anyone who handles her. Addressing Tyen by writing on the blank pages of her own skin, Vella pleads: "Keep me. Make use of me [. . .] All I ask is that you hold me as often as possible so that I can spend my lifetime awake and aware" (p. 7), and Tyen's subsequent adventures, including running away with Vella from the Academy where he was studying (presumably he is the thief of the title), flow from his increasingly obsessive response to her plea. Vella is an interesting character, although even by the end of the novel we know tantalisingly little of her powers and of the knowledge she holds.
The second strand, first encountered over a hundred pages in, follows the coming-of-age story of Rielle Lazuli, daughter of a family made rich by dyeing cloth, but not well regarded because of their trade. They live in the city of Fyre, in a culture close to a high medieval society, with cities, merchants, a priesthood, and no hint of industrial development. Since Rielle was a young child, she has had to hide the fact that she can see the dark trail left by the use of magic, as only boys can be trained for the priesthood. The tale follows the consequences of this ability, along with her developing relationship with a young painter, Izare Saffre, and the complications he brings into her life, set against the background of the largely authoritarian priesthood and the search for "tainted" individuals practising magic illegally. Rielle's changing attitudes to family, friends, and priests—and the emergence of her own talents both in painting and magic, which put her in danger—are at the heart of developments in this strand.
As the novel progresses, various plot devices are employed to develop the two strands of the story, including a love affair, a dramatic chase involving a kind of airship, forbidden magic, and travel to other towns. In both strands the main characters are playing with fire and endangering themselves. Other figures are introduced, although the focus remains clearly with Tyen and Rielle. Strong plotting and moments of suspense keep the reader engaged with both the stories, and each time it shifts between them the separate strands shorten, giving forward momentum to the twin stories and encouraging the hope that they might soon become entangled. The length of time between the strands in the early stages, however, makes it easy to forget who some of the subsidiary characters are, including even those in positions of some authority.
This is problematic because Canavan's novels tend to place emphasis upon some kind of authority structure, either involving magicians (in The Black Magician series) or a priesthood (Age of the Five). In Tyen's strand of the novel, the authority is the Academy hierarchy, with its politics and power struggles, which if needed can call on the Empire, the nature of which is barely realised in the novel, and its police force. In contrast, within Rielle's culture, the priesthood determines much of the nature of society, as well as the progress of the plot. The reader first encounters Rielle as she leaves her regular class at the temple, and priests play a significant role in the story including Sa-Baro, a largely sympathetic father figure, and Sa-Gest, a rather creepy priest who subjects Rielle to unwelcome attentions. Behind the priests are the Angels, who feature in the paintings which play a part in her culture and in her own life.
Not everyone approves of priesthoods and religion in fantasy novels: David Mitchell, writing in the Guardian recently about Ursula Le Guin's classic, Earthsea, noted that one of the reasons he liked it was that, unlike most fantasy novels, it didn't have a priesthood. I take his point, being a fan of Le Guin, but I also enjoy Canavan's novels, and indeed other fantasy novels featuring priesthoods, if portrayed thoughtfully and imaginatively. As in Thief's Magic, a priesthood can be a useful means of exploring both issues of power and the use of magic.
The nature of magic, whilst understood differently in the two strands, essentially works in a similar way in the novel's two cultures. Practitioners draw it from the surrounding air, leaving behind a dark residue visible to those who are gifted in magic. Canavan has previously used the idea that magic can be pulled out of the air, leaving less behind, in Age of the Five, but the idea that it leaves a residue is specific to this series. In his home city of Belton, Tyen is aware of "magic moving, pulled here and there to feed the city's needs. There was something thrilling about the way it constantly flowed through the city, billowing down from above then swirling off in all directions" (p. 41). In Tyen's world the residue is known by the neutral name of "soot," whilst in Rielle's culture it is pejoratively called "stain," and the ability to see it, as she does, marks an individual as suspect. This cleverly indicates differences in attitude between the two cultures.
Indeed, the sleeve notes flag up the issue of where this magic comes from as a key plot element in both strands, and the differing perspectives of the novel's two cultures play a significant part in this mystery. In Tyen's culture the old belief that magic is created by creativity, such as painting or crafts of various kinds, has been discarded in favour of a new understanding that it is present in the atmosphere. Rielle, however, still cleaves to the older vision. The use of these different perspectives helps to give these two cultures their distinctiveness, but, although the significance of these ideas became more apparent as the novel continued, the issues surrounding the nature of magic appeared rather contrived.
It is interesting to see Canavan taking on the challenge of writing about an industrialising culture containing magic. As usual, she is thorough and consistent with the way magic works and in the details of these societies. To return to our comparator, Ursula Le Guin has written about such worldbuilding, arguing that "The more realistic, exact, 'factual' detail in a fantasy story, the more sensually things and acts are imagined and described, the more plausible the world will be." This is generally true in Canavan's writing, including in the details of this industrial world. For example, various machines powering industrial processes, including printing and modes of transport such as "railsleds" and "aircarts." The latter, a key aspect of the first strand plot, are driven by pulling magic in from the surrounding air to power their propellers and heat their interior. Their inevitable trail of "stain," however, means that aircarts can be tracked, with predictable results. The amount of magic needed for all this means that practitioners have to be very careful drawing magic in a city, even to protect themselves from rain, because with all this industrial use it has thinned out, and minor usage could be dangerous, causing an aircart to fall from the sky. There are hints in Thief's Magic that industrialisation may have been a mistake, as a process such as running a railsled or a printing machine needs a large amount of magic, depleting the air around to dangerous levels and potentially causing disasters when more moves in to take its place. The idea that "magic might be running out" recurs from time to time in this thread. All these details help to create a believable world.
There are reasons, however, why fantasy novels are usually set in pre-industrial societies, or on backward worlds if the universe has far-future technology: it is hard to combine magic and industry without the latter seeming an evil in itself, as in Tolkien, becoming steampunk, or finally without it all seeming somewhat contrived. For instance, the Safehold series by David Weber started with Off Armageddon Reef, a crossover sci-fi/fantasy, but after a promising first few volumes lost its way as industrialisation proceeded and increasingly focused on an apologia for the development of the military and an obsession with guns. The main exception to this Fantasy Industrialisation Problem is Terry Pratchett, who, with his trademark self-aware irony, created in novels such as Raising Steam an industrial society where magic is still an integrated part. But the usual rules about world building do not quite apply to Pratchett in the same way. Canavan, to her credit, has created a magical industrial world that is largely convincing without being ironic. It would be preferable, however, if in the later volumes of the trilogy, industrialisation does not turn out to be a total mistake and complexities are engaged with.
There is a further difficulty in Canavan's industrialising culture, in that the explanation of the shift in beliefs that accompanied industrial development could have been explained more fully: the process is rather sketchy, and thus unconvincing. The culture clearly had some kind of Enlightenment, at which point the understanding of the cause of magic also changed and the possibility that creativity produced magic was dismissed. As Tyen explains to Vella (who has been dormant throughout these changes), "Rejecting primitive beliefs and fears and embracing only what can be proven is what led us into a modern, enlightened time" (p. 24). Whilst a complete history would be unnecessary, given that this shift was vital to the characters' understanding of magic and hence to one of the main story arcs (that the leaders in Leratia are mistaken in their theories of magic), a little more time to fill this one out would have been useful. Although I should acknowledge here that I am a historian by trade!
More of a problem, however, and increasingly so as the novel progresses, is the separate nature of the two strands. The twin stories, individually gripping, read like two separate novels running in parallel, an imaginative idea, but one that I found increasingly frustrating. The reader wonders when, if ever, these two stories are going to converge, and this anticipation makes the novel feel a little long-winded. The lack of a map at the beginning combined with the distinctive environments raises suspicions that not only are the two protagonists in very different geographical areas but that they might actually be on different worlds. There is a hint early on that this might be the case, when Vella explains to Tyen that she was created on a world called "Ktayl" and that there are many other worlds. A quick look at the summary of the book on Canavan's own website confirms that this is indeed the case: apparently it was not meant to be a secret.
In other Canavan books—for instance, Priestess of the White, the first of the Age of the Five trilogy—several different viewpoints and situations are explored, but there are enough clear links and connections between them to keep the reader intrigued and interested, whether in seeing one place from different people's perspectives, or experiencing different groups which clearly will converge in due course. In contrast, as this story develops, it feels increasingly as if the whole novel is only a mechanism to position Tyen and Rielle for the start of the second book in the series. As such, all that happens to each of them along the way, although gripping enough to keep the reader turning the pages, may be of no ultimate significance in the continuing development of the trilogy.
One final, and similarly inconclusive, contrast between the two strands involves gender roles. Whilst she is not overtly a feminist writer, Canavan's stories often feature women who are magicians, or who hold positions of power, and women who are exploring the possibilities life might hold for them. Sometimes this is just part of the background (Age of the Five) and the prejudices explored are more likely to involved class than gender. In this novel, though, gender is a key issue in that Rielle lives in a culture which does not recognise or train female magicians, and where most women's lives revolve around marriage opportunities; in the Empire where Tyen lives, meanwhile, it seems that only men attend and staff the Academy. These gender roles do not become a major theme here, but it will be interesting to see if they, too, are developed in the two future volumes.
I confess, then, that despite enjoying the ride, and having many of my expectations of a Canavan novel fulfilled, I found myself disappointed with Thief's Magic compared to her earlier work—and this was mainly because of the separate treatment of the two strands. The second volume of the trilogy, Angel of Storms, was published in November 2015. It will be interesting to see how the strengths in the first volume are developed and built on and how far the weaknesses are resolved.
Linda Wilson has loved SF and fantasy since childhood and although she is now a professional historian, she still spends rather a lot of time immersed in alternate or future worlds. She lives in Bristol, UK, with her husband and cats.