In Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s The 23rd Hero, Vancouver used to be green and lush, but climate collapse has turned everything brown except the harbor’s polluted water. Sloane Burrows compares the past and present images of her city daily: Her memory is so strong that she has perfect recall of every moment of her life. Because of the jealousy her academic father feels towards this talent, she’s considered it a curse. But when The Program selects her to be the next in a line of time-traveling heroes fighting climate change, she begins to see her memory skills as a gift—especially since the man of her dreams is on the team training her for a mission in sixteenth-century France.
Climate dystopia meets time-traveling historical fiction meets a romance so soapy you could choke on the suds: Nguyen’s novel is an ambitious mix that approaches a lot of important subjects, from self-destructive behavior in talented people to emotionally abusive parents, ideals of love to cumulative effects of historical injustice, and on to Christian extremism, gender inequality, and, of course, the climate crisis. Does it do these themes justice? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The reactions to climate collapse of the novel’s ordinary people certainly seem believable. Sloane’s boss, Brody, belongs to “a group of (mostly) white (mostly) cisgender men who wanted to outlaw masks, eat ‘real’ meat again, and bring back ‘real’ cars, ‘because freedom’” (p. 40). This feels terrifyingly contemporary and prescient at the same time. On the street, Brody takes off his head protection to talk to Sloane, disregarding the warnings of ground-level ozone as fake news. Then “[i]t started to rain, the droplets bouncing off Brody’s head in little puffs of toxic smoke, making it look like his hair had caught fire” (p. 42). Disliking Brody makes this enjoyable reading. He’s macho, arrogant, and has a superiority complex nourished by conspiracy theories: The schadenfreude that comes with every noxious drop of rain burning his scalp is particularly satisfying. Sloane’s muted reaction, however, is that of someone surviving through a global crisis. In this world, doom is just weeks away. Everyone has seen worse than a few puffs of smoking scalp. People treat danger with banal fatalism.
One thing the characters in this book don’t treat with banality, though, is love. It’s the overarching motivator for Sloane, more so than saving the Earth. While her falling in love with a recurring dream is hard to swallow, her exchange about it with her twin brother Simon opens up an interesting avenue:
Simon thought the man in the dream was Sloane’s soul mate, or maybe her “spirit guide.” Sloane thought the man in the dream was a metaphor for the love she would never experience in real life. She was resigned to the obvious fact that her only chance of being loved, freak memory and all, was in her dreams. But she cherished the dreams just the same. (p. 38)
Simon’s positivity balances Sloane’s negativity. Sloane makes the dream a manifestation of her flaws and Simon, good brother that he is, interprets it as a catalyst for improvement in her life. Any close friend of Sloane’s with half a heart would want Simon to be right, especially about the soulmate part. But we aren’t Sloane’s friends. We’re readers. The real story is Sloane’s self-hatred and this is the first clue that her journey to self-acceptance will be overly dependent on her romantic life.
To be fair, Sloane’s sexy dreams would distract anyone. In her sleep she sees the man floating on his back, naked and unmoving. No honest reader would judge her badly when
she lets her gaze fall over his broad shoulders, down the flat planes of his chest, past the bumpy range of his abdomen to his groin. He is flaccid in a way that strikes her as sacred, innocent, and for a split second, she feels safe. And then the safe feeling unfurls into hot, urgent desire, and she wants his hair in her mouth, the scent of him. (p. 36)
That description certainly doesn’t inspire sacred and innocent thoughts in this reviewer’s mind. The portrayal of physical desire in this book is, well, kind of hot. That’s no small feat, as descriptions of our fleshy protrusions and crevasses smacking up against each other often sound ridiculous in writing. To avoid this, modern writers often divorce sex from its physicality. Such scenes can be beautiful, but rarely arousing. It’s difficult to know where this line between slapstick and sexy lies, but Nguyen seems to have found it.
So it makes sense that the novel’s comfort with physicality would also be reflected in its humor. Some scenes strive for a Chaplinesque choreography of confused flailing bodies. When Sloane meets her dream man in the flesh for the first time, she serves him a coffee at the café where she works and “a spark visibly crackled in the air” (p. 52). That sets off the dance of drink spillage, scrambling to clean, slips, dips, flips, and the never-gets-tired “butt in the air” (p. 52). Slapstick in prose can be hit and miss depending on the reader’s mood. If it works, it gets a belly laugh. But it’s a naturally more cinematic than novelistic technique.
There is also a camp humor to Sloane’s relationship with her dream man, Bastian. Once they meet, the novel reveals its true, soap-operatic heart. After Sloane is selected for that mission in sixteenth-century France, she’s whisked away to a training facility. While learning how to live in the France of Rabelais, she and Bastian pursue each other like teenagers at summer camp. One particular piece of Bastian’s expository dialogue could outline half a season of Dynasty.
“The year Ashleigh passed was the same year I lost my parents in a car crash. The accident was in February, and then when Ashleigh got sick that fall, we found out she was pregnant. But she was too sick, and they had to … and we lost the baby, too.”
“Oh, Bastian.” (p. 166)
Oh, Bastian indeed! There’s humor in this information dump of life’s miseries: Prose can sometimes find laughter in excess. But it’s another fine line to walk. If Bastian had lost his dog, he’d have the lyrics to a classic country song in that tragic year.
In other words, it’s a lot to believe. But, listen, Sloane is about to be whisked through time and space by a mystical sphere of “code.” Suspension of disbelief is required for any piece of literature and the recommended dose is often a bit higher for time-travel stories. Readers have looked past technical and temporal paradoxes since Mark Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). So it isn’t hard to accept that a magical code-ball can select a time-traveling hero, create their mission, and send them (and only them) to the correct moment in time to complete it. But suspension of disbelief is harder with human nature—and personality paradoxes are The 23rd Hero’s big weakness.
The relationships in this novel, romantic or otherwise, are mostly at the service of the plot—and this sometimes conflicts with character. For example, Sloane’s father is psychologically abusive, but she neither rebels nor confronts the emotional scars caused by that abuse, unless it’s necessary for an upcoming plot point. That’s a problem, but one scene really threw me out of the story: the party. The training facility throws a party weeks before Sloan’s scheduled to leave. The Program’s organizers break protocol and invite her twin brother Simon for the night. Her brother has always been her rock of support. He’s so close to her that he often replaces her name with the epithet my heart.
“My heart” was shorthand for “My heart is your heart,” a secret phrase the twins had made up as kids to comfort each other after Sloane had asked Harry [her father] if he loved them, and Harry’s answer, after several moments of silent contemplation had been, “Sure.” (p. 34)
She’s overjoyed to see her heart. But then at the party, Bastian takes her for a walk to his quarters. While they’re talking the night away, she mentions Simon in a throwaway comment.
Bastian’s face fell. Simon was there, just for tonight, and he’d taken her away from him.
Even after Sloane promised him it was fine, Bastian looked doubtful.
“We had time to catch up, and I know he’s going to be okay when I’m gone thanks to you. Trust me—he’d want me to be here.” (p. 175)
Would he really? Sloane is about to leave forever. Which relationship is more important? Her eternally supportive twin brother? Or this guy she saw in a bunch of sexy dreams? I’m not sure Nguyen should have addressed this issue in the text. Perhaps as my gaze fell “down the flat planes of [Bastian’s] chest, past the bumpy range of his abdomen to his groin,” I, too, would have been too mesmerized to think about Simon. But, as it is, I felt too bad for him to enjoy Bastian’s washboard stomach. Also, it got me moralizing about the characters’ actions.
Protagonists don’t have to be good people. People in real life aren’t consistent and characters shouldn’t be either. Hypocrisies and contradictions make people interesting, in fiction at least. But inconsistencies have to serve the characterization, not the plot. If they don’t, it’s glaringly obvious and the characters come across as plot puppets. Sloane’s self-centered act shows that she values her brother very little and that would have had consequences in their relationship. But it doesn’t. Accepting that requires too much suspension of disbelief, especially since Bastian, sexy as he is, comes across increasingly as an entitled Silicon Valley CEO. I therefore lost my faith in the characterization of the novel and found myself scrutinizing all the characters’ actions, often unnecessarily.
The section in sixteenth-century France mostly pulled me out of my judgmental funk. It’s relatively successful because the story seems to reboot, as if the previous section were just authorly throat-clearing. In France, Sloane has a mission which automatically clarifies her motivations and gives her actions meaning, revealing character in a more subtle way than in the previous section. Nguyen skillfully integrates sixteenth-century customs, language, and social structures into the storyline. And finally we have a clear villain: the Bishop of Toulon, who runs his diocese like a warlord and abuses power with impunity. Even when not present, he’s a menacing figure in the background. This part of the story unfolds so differently that it feels more like reading the second book in a series than one section in a single .
The 23rd Hero is a well-researched, genre-blending story with a fun premise. There’s a good deal to admire in Nguyen’s writing and time-traveling romance fans will really like this book. I just wish Nguyen had revised the characters a little more: The research integrated into the story is done well, but characterization was simply lacking in key places. Similarly, the representation of sexuality was unabashedly erotic and physical, a fine example of how to write about bodies and desire; yet the obsession with romance at the expense of all other loving relationships made these supposed adults come across as selfish, horny teenagers. This novel has messages worth reading, history that’s interesting, and prose that takes ambitious risks. But I wonder how much better it would be if it had gone through one more draft to better harmonize plot with the complexities of human emotion. Instead of being a fun vacation read, The 23rd Hero could have been a unique (and still fun) examination of love and destiny.