Hugo Award Nominees: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Spinning Silver is based on the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in precisely the way that a symphony might be based on a simple folk tune. The themes are transposed, inverted, reduplicated, harmonised with each other. Or, to use a metaphor that Novik works into the action, the rough wool of the old story is re-carded, spun out into a fine thread, and woven into a new and complex pattern. The Rule of Three is a central leitmotif.

The tale is set in a fantasy version of late medieval Lithuania. Miryem Mandelstram takes over from her father as village moneylender, but to prosper, she must harden her heart to ice. As profits mount, copper coins are exchanged for silver and silver for gold. She boasts to her parents that she can turn silver into gold, but they are travelling through the forest that borders on the realm of the frost-fairy Staryk, and she is overheard. The Staryk bring her fairy silver to transform, since they love gold above all things. Luckily, Miryem knows a jeweller who can turn fairy silver into items more valuable than gold: a ring, a necklace, a crown. Each is sold to the local lord. When he puts the necklace on his "not especially pretty" daughter, Irina, who has a trace of Staryk blood through her mother, it becomes 

hard even to glance away from her, with winter clasped around her throat and the silver gleam catching in her veil and in her dark eyes as she looked at herself in the mirror on the wall there.

In the mirror, Irina tells us, she sees:

I was not standing in my father’s study. I was in a grove of dark winter trees, under a pale grey sky, and I could almost feel the snow falling onto my skin.

And right there, the components of the plot click together into a finely-crafted mechanism. Swiftly and inevitably, both girls find themselves unwilling queens, each wed to a monster: Miryem to the Staryk king and Irina to the sorcerous and sadistic tsar. Each husband wishes nothing more than to do away with his wife, but the girls find they have magic of their own as well as wit and courage, and they plot to turn the tables. Much of the story turns on fairy-tale logic in which every bargain is scrupulously kept and precise wording is crucial. In a hat-tip to the original story, the ultimate antagonist speaks exclusively in verse, albeit written out as prose, so it took this reader a while to notice.

Novik's prose is evocative and measured. Unlike some fantasy novels up for awards this year, nobody speaks as if they were in Poughkeepsie. She deals beautifully with the liminal magic of the Staryk. The white road to their kingdom can be glimpsed in the forest and even found by the unwary, but never stays long in the same place. Memories of meetings with them melt away like frost in the morning, and when Miryem is carried off to the Staryk kingdom, her parents are only vaguely aware they have lost someone. Wanda, Miryem's servant, takes it for granted that her mother's soul is is somehow present in one of the Staryk white trees...to her, Miryem's writing and account-book make for a far more powerful magic. Themes of belonging and alienation run through the book: as a Jew, Miryem knows she will never be accepted by her neighbours; though they can't easily do without her, but most of the other characters find themselves exiles at some point or another. 

Not everything works so well. As Miryem finds herself increasingly responsible for defending and preserving the Staryk people, and as we see that they worry about their children and need to eat, Novik can't stop them from seeming increasingly ordinary, despite their alien customs and morals.   The true form of the the antagonist turns out to be a lava monster out of central casting, just like Todd from The Good Place. 

It's tempting to imagine that Novik is having a bit of a poke at George R. R. Martin with this book. Not only is the plot quite literally Ice vs. Fire, but Novik also tells it by swapping between a steadily-increasing number of viewpoint characters. Unlike Martin, she doesn't clue us in by starting each section with the character name, and all perspectives are told in the first person. Only a distinctive section break lets us know we are listening to a new voice, but for the most part each is individual enough that there is no problem telling who is speaking; only the siblings Wanda and Stepon, both uneducated, gave me any trouble. And of course, Novik brings the whole story to a close within 500 pages. 

I want to talk a bit about the ending, so even more spoilers after the break.

I only realised after finishing the book and reading some other reviews that it is marketed as Young Adult.  It does fit the description: nearly all the viewpoint characters are teenagers, and all stay chaste despite the the weddings that take place. Although there is plenty of suffering, only monsters die, and the other characters get a Happy Ever After. Most surprisingly, both awful marriages turn out well. Sarah Waites at The Illustrated Page had issues about the lack of consent here, but both heroines receive the utter capitulation of their husbands: ironically, the least free character is tsar Mirnatius, who is released from a life-time's extremely painful bondage to a demon only to find himself Irina's toyboy (not that he seems to mind). 

As Booksmugglers point out, there is a good deal of unreliable narration going on, with neither Irina nor Miryam revealing their true feelings for their husbands until their very last scenes. It seems that Miryam falls in love first of all with her husband's realm, just as Lizzy Bennet claims to have fallen for Darcy when she first saw his estate of Pemberley. But in truth the Staryk king is the distilled essence of Mr Darcy, and given that Naomi Novik is a self-confessed Austenite since childhood, I guess she felt no need to make his charms any more obvious. 

Irina's growing attachment to Mirnatius is detailed in much more depth, entirely by implication and significant omission. Leant irresistible glamour by her magic jewellery, no-one is surprised when Mirnatius weds her on the spot, but in fact he is the only one who can see her as she really is, and his motive for marriage is his demon's thirst for her Staryk blood. Despite her abhorrence for him, Irina always describes him as beautiful, and we see, through another's eyes that it's painful to her to find that his beauty is real and not merely the result of enchantment. She is reluctant to admit that her physical response to him has anything to do with desire, or that she is jealous of how the servant girls fuss over him. Mirnatius, meanwhile, is baffled that everyone thinks her beautiful, and becomes obsessed with her appearance. A talented artist, he sketches her again and again. If Irina, used to being unnoticed, cares about this, she doesn't mention it. Irina is focused on realities of medieval rule: the central importance of harvests, tax rolls and dynastic marriage, all of which goes quite over Mirnatius' head.  She plots to eliminate him and replace him with convenient Duke Casimir, whom she doesn't particularly like, and is nearly her father's age, but at least not a fool, or cruel. By the time her plans near fruition, she understands that Mirnatius is a victim, his deep cynicism his only defence.  She is now far less happy with the prospect of Casimir; she won't abandon her plan, which she sees as the only way to defeat the demon, but knows that

it would leave me cold inside [...] I couldn't let myself dream anymore, even half unwilling, of warmth in my own marriage bed.That was the only thing I could do for Mirnatius. I wouldn’t pretend to offer him kindness. I wouldn’t ask him again for gratitude or forgiveness or civility. And I wouldn’t look at him and want something for myself, like another hungry wolf licking my chops over an already-exposed red bone.

Up to this point she has mentioned no such dreams. So at the end, when she does rescue him and destroy the demon, it's a straightforward sex-role reversal: she is strong, ruthless, and competent, rewarded with a beautiful, intuitive and compliant partner.