The last book I read by Premee Mohamed was The Butcher of the Forest, a dark fantasy that read very much like a fairy tale, in an extremely good way. But Mohamed has a huge range, so it’s not surprising that the next work of hers that I’ve read (I’ve missed several in the meantime, but I’ve been very busy), is something completely different, a spy novel. Yes, Wickhills also uses a dark fantasy setting, which is very important to the plot, but most of the book is about trying to outmaneuver other factions within a city-state, and figuring out whom to trust, so the main flavor here is espionage. It’s a complicated novel with complicated characters that grabbed my attention from the start and held it all the way through.
From the publisher’s description on NetGalley:
Looking after a defecting scientist should have been Vycol Ferec’s easiest mission. But now he’s on the run from the intelligence agency he works for, dodging a handler who might have gone rogue and relying on a secret patchwork of illicit resources and dodgy contacts. Turns out his defector might be carrying an apocalypse-level magical weapon — and protecting it requires Ferec and his team to go underground, literally. Down here, the rules are very different… and the tense peace between every city in the world will shatter unless Ferec can drag their darkest secrets into the light.
In the city-state of Wickhills, most people don’t spend much time thinking about why things are how they are, why hardly anyone travels anymore, why some buildings/streets/neighborhoods suddenly become closed off and effectively disappear, etc. These things are treated as minor natural disasters, and life goes on for the survivors.
Ferec, a self-made man (even more so than most people who think of themselves that way), was recruited years ago into a secret government department that tidies up loose ends, and he bends the rules in various ways that make things go even more smoothly, mostly, and get results. But what seems like a simple retrieval mission goes disastrously wrong, and for much of the book, Ferec doesn’t even know what’s going on, or what’s at stake.
Ferec is the protagonist, but that doesn’t make him a hero; far from it. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity in this story; a team member criticizes Ferec for not questioning the directives from his handler, or the methods and objectives of his department. Ferec ignores these questions as he pursues his goals, but eventually responds indirectly by revealing his origin story, in the quiet dark, as they await events.
Eventually, following revelations that horrify Ferec but had less effect on me as a reader, he does take a stand, but after being forced to it, in the sense that not taking a stand would also have been making a decision. He doesn’t have much hope of affecting the greater paths of the world, but at least he can stop one person from getting away with something.
There’s an epilogue that describes some of the consequences, for Ferec and others, but some fates are left untold. Something that I’d thought was an underlying question that would be answered turned out to have its revelations averted by some other drastic plot points. So there were some satisfying conclusions here, but other questions were left unresolved. Maybe tying all these questions up with a bow would have felt artificial; after all, our own real world leaves most of us with a great many answered questions.
As I mentioned earlier, the fantastic elements are important to the plot, and yet in other ways, it’s not much more fantastical than, say, China Miéville’s The City and the City., where people are trained to resolutely avoid perceiving or thinking about certain things. There are ogre-like beings and magical streetlights, a sleeping dragon that people appease with charms, a manticore for a boss, and a literal underworld with alarming creatures, but most humans in this world just don’t think much about magic.
That turns out to have some disastrous consequences, when it turns out that some people have been thinking about magic, and doing secret research. However, when the dread consequences fall, and the recovery begins, political leaders talk about finding culprits, but it’s obvious that the goal is to get rid of troublemakers, not to reconsider everybody’s way of life.
There’s lots of action-adventure in this novel, but it’s not straightforward. But if you’re interested in a complex story with some very interesting ambiguities, you may well want to check out Wickhills.
Wickhills by Premee Mohamed will be released by Tor Publishing Group on Sept. 8.
Content warnings: Murder, violence, betrayal, politics, implied torture, discrimination and callousness by some against elderly and less-abled people.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this novel from the publisher for review via NetGalley.
