FOUNDRYSIDE

When a plan comes together

Heists are great. Who doesn’t love a bit of high-stakes teamwork theft? (Apart from, presumably, the police.) Give us elaborate disguises, planning montages and death-defying stunts, and we’ll lap it all up.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s latest brings an intricate, sciencey magic system to the crime party. Scriving is a way of, essentially, fooling objects into acting contrary to reality: wooden posts made to think they’re rot-immune stone; missiles that hit with increased speed and force because they believe they’re falling from a great height; a bomb that detonates remotely because it’s been convinced it’s actually another, tiny explosive that’s just been set off 30 feet away.

The possibilities are endless, and Bennett has great fun showing us both his gadgets and the society around them. The richest merchant families and their dependents live in enclaves – campos – protected by scrived security, lit by scrived streetlamps, enjoying amenities designed by the most talented scrivers and luxury goods ferried in on scrived ships. In contrast, the poor – such as former slave and now thief-forhire Sancia – scrape by with jerry-rigged or stolen tech in fringe districts like Foundryside.

Bennett’s so in love with his delightfully inventive world that there’s quite a lot of exposition up front. Once characters have stopped telling each other things they already know, though, things speed up and the story bounces merrily between set-pieces and planning for further set-pieces, while an evil conspiracy rumbles along in the background. Having accepted a suspiciously lucrative job and ended up on the run, Sancia steadily and reluctantly accumulates a team, who bicker and mistrust each other, but – of course – start to gel nicely just in time for a climactic heist.

The dialogue can feel slightly awkward at times (choosing to include invented swearwords is rarely a good idea), but Bennett’s characters are good company, the action is energising, the story is self-contained, and the world is made of pure, gleeful imagination. Nic Clarke

The first spark for the book came when Bennett was reading Venice: A New History on a flight to New York.