Alex Pheby's WATERBLACK (And the rest of CITIES OF THE WEFT)

Hey Kate, tell us about the weirdest trilogy you've found since Brian Catling's Vorrh series, why don't you. Pretty please? Is it Jeffrey Ford's Well Built City trilogy? What about Tade Thompson's Wormwood books? Or Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy (wrong, I haven't read that yet. But stay tuned!)? Well, close, but no: it's Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft, and yes, Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack (also the names of the cities in the series title) are weird as hell.

And yeah, just like happened with Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog/Ludluda diptych, I didn't post on here when I read the first two books last year, in glorious audio book form as narrated by the idiosyncratically excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith*, but again, not because I didn't love them. I just don't post about everything I read anymore because I don't have the stamina I used to and typing still really hurts. Anyway, once again, I saw the final book on Netgalley and didn't want to wait, so now I'm honor-bound once again to share my thoughts about it. Which I have to talk a little about the earlier books to do at all well. So.

A warning to start: Alex Pheby is not here to meet your expectations. He's not writing any kind of fantasy that your average Big Publishing House marketing team would have any idea what to do with (so let's hear it for the brave and tasteful souls at Galley Beggar Press!). He's not giving a master class on world building, not here to give fan service to people who have come to care a lot for the kid who seemed to be the series protagonist in the first book, Mordew, nor to lovers of his urchin pals who take over most of the action in the second, Malarkoi, nor even for the incredible magical dogs who steal the show in both of those books.

We start Waterblack full of questions about what's next for Nathan Treeves, Prissy, Gam, Anaximander and Sirius (well, we kind of feel like we know what happened to the Goddog but Pheby has taught us to maybe not take certain endings very seriously). Nathan's mother, Clarissa, seems to have achieved her ultimate end already and has nowhere to go but down; is that what we're going to watch here? Nathan's enemy, Sebastian, the Master of Mordew, is still kind of kicking around though he was pretty disappointed at the end of Malarkoi, what about him? What about Portia, the Mistress of Malarkoi, "goddess of gods," who gave little Prissy quite a gift last novel? 

Cue pitiless laughter from our author, who doesn't give a fig for our expectations, but who knows that he's got us hooked anyway because the kind of people who enjoyed the first two volumes of his Cities of the Weft trilogy want to know where the hell he's going with all of this weirdness way more than we're invested in any particular character. Although, them, too, somewhat. I mean, there's still an untold number of "Nathan flukes" loose and wreaking havoc in the topologically distorted ruins of Mordew, after all, and Clarissa, who's been powering all of her mighty spells in the single most ruthless manner I've ever seen a not-quite villain employ in a novel of any kind, ever, still has... something going on and hey, does she care about her son, like, at all? And speaking of offspring, there's still a puppy of the Goddog's running around somewhere.

There are some very weird and intriguing and mind-blowing plot threads that have yet to be properly woven into this here narrative textile, is what I'm saying.

However...

Waterblack starts off by posing an extended philosophical argument as to how a whole bunch of stuff we've just been taking for granted as "true" within the universe of the Cities of the Weft... is ontologically impossible. This undermines almost everything we've come to understand about the hundreds of pages and dozens of hours we've devoted to exploring his creation.

And then he launches into a deep exploration of the background of a minor antagonist who had maybe two scenes in Malarkoi and wasn't even mentioned in Mordew.

But, because Pheby is a hell of a gifted storyteller, we're immediately interested in this girl, Sharli and her defective firebird companion, Tinnimam, anyway. Even before it's hinted that her back story may allow us to learn, at long last, what the hell the Women's Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade is all about. I mean, this isn't Philip Pullman, here; as the jacket copy on Mordew discloses before we've even read a page of this series, God has already been dead a long time, here. But there are definite echoes of Pullman's work in the Cities of the Weft; there's even a Subtle Knife, though the person who gets it puts it to very different use than sweet young Will does in the book named for it 

But wait, Pheby isn't done trying to talk you out of loving his trilogy. He still has many logical arguments to make as to why everything he's shared with us through hours of narration/hundreds of pages is really kind of bullshit, and he makes these arguments in exhausting detail (there's more than one reason why people refer to these books as the most Platonist since Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). And, as he starts warning us about halfway through the book, a lot of our pressing narrative questions will not be answered in the text of Waterblack proper; we'll have to wait for the appendices, which, Lord of the Rings-like, take up a good chunk of this last novel.

 

But that's really the only thing these books have in common with Tolkien, I assure you. 

What this ultimately comes to is the most fascinating yet frustrating read I've encountered in a long, long time. Waterblack does my favorite thing a series' final volume can do, which is make me want to go back and re-read the whole trilogy because it has fundamentally changed what the earlier books even mean. This is a particular achievement in this case, since I just re-read Mordew and Malarkoi last month in preparation for this! 

But so, despite Pheby's best and most perverse efforts to the contrary, I still love this series. I still love its characters, especially the magical dogs (and especially especially the new magical puppy introduced in Waterblack. I absolutely want a sequel devoted to the further adventures of Anaximines. I am also absolutely sure I'm never going to get one. But that's ok, I have this.); I still love its strange cities and its stranger creatures (especially the very cerebral and civilized Person-Headed Snakes). And I love most of all how it made me question pretty much everything I'd read before, both in and out of the fantasy genre. You might, too. Give the first book a try!

*Who commits pretty much every sin I hate most in an audio book narrator but makes it all work. Even his artificially high and breathy female character voices somehow work. But that doesn't mean I'll accept this from anybody else, you hear?