SPINNING SILVER

This Woman’s Work

Fantasy queen Naomi Novik returns with a rather Grimm tale.

RELEASED 12 July 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Naomi Novik Publisher Macmillan

What do you do when you’ve completed a long-running and hugely successful series? For Naomi Novik, this question presumably came into focus when, with 2016’s League Of Dragons, she completed the ninth and final book in her much loved, Patrick O’Brian-meets-Anne McCaffrey Temeraire sequence.

At least initially, her answer seems to be to look to European folk tales for inspiration. Published before Dragons, the Locus, Nebula and BSFA Award winner Uprooted saw her drawing heavily on Polish folklore. Then Novik contributed a story loosely based on Rumplestiltskin to the collection The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales – “Spinning Silver”.

Clearly, Novik liked what she’d crafted, because fast-forward two years and she’s now expanded the story into a novel that’s by turns bleak, scary and uplifting. It centres on Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender who lives on the edge of an enchanted forest.

You might expect her to be spoilt, but her father is less loan shark than shy shirker, a kindly man who can’t bring himself to insist upon repayment of the capital he’s owed, let alone any interest for his family to live upon.

When her mother falls ill, Miryem sees no choice but to intervene and take over the family business. Taking after her well-to-do grandfather and understanding the language of money, the way finance can transmute silver into gold, she soon has the coffers filling up. Yet her talent for her new work lands Miryem in trouble when a boast attracts the attention of the Staryk, creatures that live in a cold land adjacent to our own world.

If this central story seems familiar, like a half-remembered tale from childhood, that’s presumably the point. Yet Novik isn’t content simply to offer up a new take on a familiar story. Instead, she gradually introduces different perspectives so that, for example, as Miryem grows more successful, she takes on a servant, Wanda. We also meet a noble’s daughter, whose fate will become closely tied to that of Miryem when both women find themselves in less-than-ideal partnerships.

These are characters who move through a man’s world that’s essentially feudal and agrarian. They’re never granted power, but instead have to rely on guile, emotional intelligence and an ability to plan – and see a plan through – in order to survive.

For the sake of shorthand, you could call this a feminist fantasy for the #MeToo era and you wouldn’t be wrong. Yet that’s also to oversimplify the book, because this is also a social fantasy (if social fantasy can be a thing, like social science fiction is) novel about the grinding effects of poverty; about the way that those with nothing can sometimes make the most of just half a chance because, after all, the world is never going to give them a whole chance all to themselves; and economic anti-Semitism – the way Jewish populations were historically pushed into marginal occupations, such as moneylending, deemed to be necessary yet viewed with distaste and considered to be of low social standing.

Throughout, Novik weaves these themes together without ever slowing her central narrative. Viewed purely in technical terms, this makes Spinning Silver a remarkable achievement. More importantly, it seems to confirm the huge step forward that Novik took with Dragons. She was a technically adept writer from the off, but if you were to criticise the Temeraire sequence, it would be for a certain dryness, even a sense that her novels were over-edited.

In contrast, Spinning Silver flows and shimmers with an energy that draws from folklore without being constrained by it. A beautiful and beguiling book that, all being well, heralds a new phase in Novik’s career. Jonathan Wright

A “dance theatre” take on Rumplestiltskin with music by Doctor Who’s Murray Gold is now on tour: www.bit.ly/rumpeltour.

Confirms a huge step forward for Novik