One of last year's most talked about fantasy authors (thanks to two nominations and a win in major genre awards) was Lena Mellony Tami, who latest novel--reputed to be darker and more unpleasant than most epic fantasy in the current crop--I was able to acquire in ARC.
The title, Revolting, is of course a play on words, since the plot pivots around a rebellion against society and its norms (and ultimately against the very empire and its gods) by a boy whose very existence disgusts and repels his countrymen, leaving him outcast, untouchable, intolerable. The crime against decency committed by this wretch? To have survived the death of his twin, an achievement normally supernaturally impossible due to spiritual bonds. The existence of our hero, then, is more distasteful to his fellows, we are told, than a man fucking his mother is in our world. The trouble is, aside from the credibility of this taboo, on which more later, the comparison by which Tami tells us this fact breaks the fourth wall (and not in a good way, Reader). The whole things feels anachronistic, or at least to spoil the author's otherwise game effort to create a world at once morally very different from our own, and more or less believable.
And here is my problem with this book, which is in large part with how the book was marketed. We are told that this is a book about taboo, disgust, about individuals too repugnant to accept in society, about discrimination of a degree unknown in our own world. PW called it “nauseating … unsettling”; SH said, “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable, almost unclean”; NYRB restrained themselves to “upsetting”, which is closest to the truth. This is an upsetting book; there is violence, abuse, bigotry, bloody and disproportionate revenge. But it is not a book that successfully conveys that sense of disgust, of taboo, of deep-seated, psychological, bowel-churning moral rejection and stigma. We constantly feel the injustice of the boy subject to societal ostracism, but we're never shown what it is to be a member of the cultural that rejects on the basis of (to us arbitrary) personal status. And if you lay claim to writing a book about disgust, revulsion and horror, you need to do better than that.
While we have a fairly solid addition to the epic fantasy genre, therefore, with lower-class (and arguably "untouchable" caste) protagonists, a deep and keenly felt sense of injustice, and a hand for physically and viscerally (sometimes sadistically) described horror that comes from intimate knowledge of human military and criminal history, Tami has failed at her ostensible goal. While we see quite plainly why the hero of this book revolts, at no point does the reader understand, truly feel, why he is revolting.
The title, Revolting, is of course a play on words, since the plot pivots around a rebellion against society and its norms (and ultimately against the very empire and its gods) by a boy whose very existence disgusts and repels his countrymen, leaving him outcast, untouchable, intolerable. The crime against decency committed by this wretch? To have survived the death of his twin, an achievement normally supernaturally impossible due to spiritual bonds. The existence of our hero, then, is more distasteful to his fellows, we are told, than a man fucking his mother is in our world. The trouble is, aside from the credibility of this taboo, on which more later, the comparison by which Tami tells us this fact breaks the fourth wall (and not in a good way, Reader). The whole things feels anachronistic, or at least to spoil the author's otherwise game effort to create a world at once morally very different from our own, and more or less believable.
And here is my problem with this book, which is in large part with how the book was marketed. We are told that this is a book about taboo, disgust, about individuals too repugnant to accept in society, about discrimination of a degree unknown in our own world. PW called it “nauseating … unsettling”; SH said, “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable, almost unclean”; NYRB restrained themselves to “upsetting”, which is closest to the truth. This is an upsetting book; there is violence, abuse, bigotry, bloody and disproportionate revenge. But it is not a book that successfully conveys that sense of disgust, of taboo, of deep-seated, psychological, bowel-churning moral rejection and stigma. We constantly feel the injustice of the boy subject to societal ostracism, but we're never shown what it is to be a member of the cultural that rejects on the basis of (to us arbitrary) personal status. And if you lay claim to writing a book about disgust, revulsion and horror, you need to do better than that.
While we have a fairly solid addition to the epic fantasy genre, therefore, with lower-class (and arguably "untouchable" caste) protagonists, a deep and keenly felt sense of injustice, and a hand for physically and viscerally (sometimes sadistically) described horror that comes from intimate knowledge of human military and criminal history, Tami has failed at her ostensible goal. While we see quite plainly why the hero of this book revolts, at no point does the reader understand, truly feel, why he is revolting.
