Maressa Voss’s first novel, When Shadows Grow Tall, charts the intellectual sea changes of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and the origins of the security state. It ties together the questions of what might be asked of knowledge and what people are willing to endure for the impression of safety. These questions also feel salient and valuable in the modern world, and the novel asks them with deftness and style—even if it does not manage to follow through to possible answers.
The novel is structured around two strands which take until almost two thirds of the way through the novel to meet, though they are not fully integrated until the very end. For the most part, it tracks two stories in parallel, moving between the point of view of Lovelace—a ranger of the dactyli, an order of elemental magicians devoted to the search for knowledge—and Kylene—a young woman with big intellectual (and as a result, societal) ambitions. As a ranger, Lovelace is responsible for the magical collection of memories that will be used to make up the dactyli archives, but also for finding nascent dactyli, young men who display the signs of the elemental connection that provides them with their power, and bringing them into the order. These young men have been falling victim to a chain of murders committed by Alev—an appropriately threatening “fire-coalesced” rogue dactyli—and the corps of fighters he has been assembling for reasons that are somewhat unclear to the order. Kylene, meanwhile, is secretly performing scientific experiments in the hopes of developing new medicine, but rapidly finds herself on the run when it is revealed that her father is a rebel against the authoritarian regional lord, Osbert. As the book tracks Lovelace’s mission to find a mysterious nascent dactyli of unclear elemental alignment, it also chronicles Kylene’s efforts first to find and then to learn from her father’s compatriots, in an effort to resist Osbert and his repressive “safety.”
Unsurprisingly, Lovelace and Kylene are both supremely sympathetic. The novel goes out of its way to point to the abuses perpetrated by Osbert’s “peacekeepers,” for example, beginning with their punitive and family-ruining forms of punishment for sedition and other offences. One of the first things we learn about the government of this land, the Grasp, is evidence of the sheer violence of Osbert’s enforcement:
No one missed Assembly. All of Mossbridge had seen with their own eyes what had happened to Fabrice, three years ago, when he had refused to attend. Actions have consequences, Kylene thought with a tremor. She had been thirteen, and the wail of grief from Beata, Fabrice’s wife, reverberated in Kylene’s ears afresh. […] It was her father who explained to her that the pillory may as well have been a death sentence, not just for Fabrice, but for Beata and their two small children as well. Beata spent the year feeding Fabrice with a spoon, all while straining to maintain the running of the family’s mill. […] By the time Fabrice was released, the family’s estate had been seized, the operations of their mill taken over by a new family, all of whom wore Osbert’s crest of balanced scales pinned to their lapels with an air of supreme smugness.
This is a ruler who will suffer no resistance, no matter how seemingly trifling. This is a system that has been carefully designed not only to punish violations but to ruin “violators” and everyone in their orbit. For a crime that only even qualifies as sedition by the broadest of definitions—missing the required Assembly, which is seemingly religious, although the doctrine espoused by Osbert’s party is left a bit unclear—Fabrice is swiftly punished, ruined, and replaced with loyalists who know on which side their bread is buttered—and are seemingly intent to get everything they can out of their affiliation to the ruling party.
With this oppressive and self-serving regime established, it is no surprise when Kylene’s father, a printer and intellectual in the grand seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition of printer-publishers, is revealed to have been secretly publishing and disseminating seditious materials. Soon after this is discovered and her father flees, Kylene herself ends up on the run from the peacekeepers, hoping to continue her father’s rebellion. Both she and her father see independent thinking as central to societal progress—and the wide dissemination of the written word, free from the influence of powerful sociopolitical forces, as a vital instrument in that development.
Lovelace, on the other hand, exhibits the other side of this Thomas Paine-like ethos, as he chafes under the dactyli order’s refusal to use their stores of information to influence the world. The dactyli have long strived for perfect objectivity, using their encapsulated object-memories to distill the past down to its exact reality. They have not shared this knowledge, however, nor will they act upon it, for fear of acting wrongly. Lovelace pushes on the order to act, seeing the danger Alev’s behavior poses to both the dactyli and the world, especially as Alev allies himself with the increasingly oppressive regime of Osbert.
Once Lovelace and Kylene’s stories connect, the novel begins to ask itself what the action for which Lovelace is calling, and the world Kylene and her father hope to bring about, might look like. It doesn’t really come to a conclusion, though. Although my copy of the novel makes no mention of a planned series, I have to imagine that is the intent. At least I hope so: so much is left unresolved at the close of the book. It finishes with a delightfully ominous epilogue in the chambers of the villainous ruler, providing hints at Osbert and Alev’s goals and motivations, and this excitingly ambiguous ending—asking, as it does, how Lovelace and Kylene will work to save the Grasp from the clutches of evil, what exactly the villains want and why, and what the true natures of magic and knowledge are—makes it easy to want to return to the Grasp and explore what comes next. As a standalone novel, though—and although the prose is rich and vibrant and the characters thoughtful, sympathetic, and dynamic—When Shadows Grow Tall doesn’t quite hang together.
This book asks questions, but it does not answer them. Yet it is not a particularly short novel (though it is fast-paced)—so, in order to answer the questions it asks without requiring a second book (or more), it would need to be a vastly different text. When taken as a beginning rather than as something entirely self-contained, it works—I enjoyed it. The novel is thought-provoking and pleasant all at once, exhilarating, even. The struggle for the Grasp, and for the truth, has just begun. We can only hope that Voss is provided the opportunity to finish it: the back-cover copy—which promises, “So begins the battle for the minds of the Graspish people, and a quest for the heart of magic itself”—is a fitting encapsulation of a novel that never quite reaches an end.