All right, it's been more than a little while and I'm more than a little behind. I had the best of intentions, but what happened was that I watched the fourth Rebuild of Evangelion movie, didn't like it very much, and was crafting a fairly epic level post about it for a chunk of early 2022, when I mistakenly ended up deleting my draft with no backup copies. When faced with that endless blank screen again I realized that not even I was interested in repeating my thoughts about Evangelion, although at some point I may do something along the lines of film critic vern's book Seagology about some Eva fanfictions that I read along the way. (Embarrassing as it might be, some of it is surprisingly good, or at least interesting.) Anyway, it just sapped my interest in writing anything else at the time, but I really want to get something up for 2022.
I have been keeping up my reading, though, and just got through with The Golden Enclaves, wrapping up the trilogy started by A Deadly Education (2020) and The Last Graduate (2021), both of which I'd read shortly after their respective releases and which I'd greatly enjoyed. After reading the third book I did something which I don't often do, which was go back and re-read the first two immediately. I still like the first one best overall for reasons I will explain shortly, but I'm pretty impressed by the level of detail and foreshadowing here.
The series is somewhat based on an old legend about the Scholomance, which was an underground school of magic run by the Devil where you'd have to stay for seven years and for which some number of students' souls would be taken as payment. I saw an interview with Novik which said that she'd read about this as a child, wondered why anyone would willingly attend such a school, and as an adult writer tried to come up with a plausible reason for it. What she eventually came up with is that being on the outside is even worse. In this setting if you're a born wizard, various horrible predatory monsters will come after you from birth to get the magic out of you, which usually results in death if you're lucky. However, babies and young children don't have much magic to speak of yet, and fully grown wizards are actually quite tough to kill. In the nature of real life predators who try to maximize reward and minimize risk, they accordingly focus on grade school age through teenage wizards, and only about one in twenty reaches adulthood.
Faced with such horrible attrition, the wizards of the world constructed the Scholomance to try and improve the odds of their kids surviving to adulthood. It's separated from the world as we know it aside from one heavily warded and fortified gate, and primarily exists in a formless void. Naturally, most of the safeguards failed almost immediately and the entry hall is now so monster-infested that no adult wizards even dare to go in there and try to fix it. Three-fourths of the students that teleport in for a four year stint in there die without making it back out again. And wizards all over the world are falling all over themselves to get their children admitted, since 1/4 is a hell of a lot better than 1/20. Somewhat amusingly, normal people don't really have to worry about this, since they don't contain magic the monsters don't want to eat them, and because magic works on the clap-your-hands-if-you-believe basis, they are generally even incapable of perceiving them.
Setting up this scenario takes up most of the action of the first book, which as I mentioned above ended up being my favorite of the trilogy, mostly because of its dark humor. We follow one Galadriel (yeah, she knows, it's why she goes by "El") Higgins, who has a knack for destructive and deadly magic, and who the school really seems out to get. At this point it's worth mentioning another central feature of the world, which is that you need mystical mojo in order to cast spells. One way to get this is by physical or mental exertion over time to generate mana, which you can store inside yourself to some degree or stash in receptacles such as crystals and the like. Mana is also transferable between wizards so long as it's freely given. Alternatively, you can steal energy from other sources, either from other wizards' stashes or even from life energy, ranging from plants to bugs to people. This is called malia. Going all-out down this path as a maleficer will render you unable to use normal mana and eventually kill you. However, this really only seems to apply if you are doing this to things that are sophisticated enough to care about it, or doing it very frequently - it does appear that most wizards will kill the occasional plant or invertebrate when they need a little extra oomph without really sweating it too much. Strict-mana wizards exist, but are noteworthy because it's kind of uncommon, maybe the magical equivalent of vegans.
El's a strict-mana wizard, somewhat grudgingly due to morality, but also as a practical matter because she's born to be a maleficer. Really, there's a dark prophecy about her and everything. She is constantly tempted to drain the lives out of everything around her and would be super effective at doing so, to the point where she realizes that if she started she'd never be able to give it up. It's also somewhat against her nature because she's got an affinity for the destructive, and the school tries to play this up by giving her all sorts of mass-casualty and general evil overlord types of spells.
The initial chapters all about the drudgery of the Scholomance are great and full of dark, dark humor. From when you get up and try to avoid being killed by something coming out of the air vent, to trying not to be the first in or last out of anywhere, and then getting assignments in six different languages, it's just a constant treadmill of the horrific. In many high schools, lunch table assignments seem like a matter of life or death, but here it's really true; one of the earliest events involves a student dying after being ambushed by something hiding under a serving tray. And then you know what you're in for when the other students just leave the body there, confident that something will have eaten it by the next mealtime.
There's a lot of other students, of course, given various levels of characterization, but a big one is Orion Lake, a kid from the New York enclave who is just a total monster-fighting weirdo. The enclaves are bases of magical power and have similar setups to the Scholomance itself; it's hard to get into one but if you do, this means more protection from stuff that's out to get you. The structures of the enclaves themselves are reminiscent of big law or accounting firms, where you have to work pretty hard to get in and spend most of your time making mana for people ahead of you in the hierarchy. Anyway, Orion just likes to slay monsters and he's freakishly good at it, having the totally unheard of ability to drain mana from the monsters he kills. He's probably the only student who has ever actually enjoyed his time in a monster-infested hellhole, and as a direct result of his actions, the currently attending classes have the lowest fatality rate of any students in recorded history.
This also triggers the recurring theme of coordination problems, because it turns out that bigger monsters eat smaller monsters, and by disrupting all the small ones that eat the students, the bigger monsters down in the pits of the graduation hall are beginning to starve, and that means that they're no longer content to just sit down there and wait for the senior class to try and run past them, and the existing seniors who are about to have to run that gauntlet are not happy about it. Now the seniors aren't saying that they'd like him to stop killing the monsters already and let them eat the other students, they just want him to understand their hints and do that so they don't have to say it. They are also contemplating possibly killing him themselves, if they can figure out how. Don't worry, this concept gets more play as we go through the series.
There are some evil characters in this series, don't get me wrong, but on the whole there's a lack of mustache-twirling villainy. Even most of the bad actors have reasonable goals and most people mean well even if they're adding to the total misery of the universe. This becomes especially significant in the third book where the costs of constructing enclaves become apparent. Without spoiling too much detail, it's really a prisoner's dilemma type situation where you and yours are safer if you are willing to be a little . . . shall we say, ethically flexible about the harms you cause to the world, and you're still better off doing it even if everyone else feels the same way.
Anyway, first book sets all this up, you get the problem with the very angry senior class, then they have to come up with a plan to make everyone happy except the big horde of monsters and screw those guys anyway. In the middle of all this one of the monsters that decides it's not happy to just sit and wait is an abomination called a maw-mouth, which is sort of a gelatinous blob covered in the eyeballs and mouths of its victims. They're possibly the creature that wizards fear most because if one catches you it endlessly digests you while you remain fully conscious and yet never die. Also the maw-mouths themselves are immortal and mostly indestructible; there are a couple of apocryphal stories of people in the past doing it, and the head of the top enclave in China also reportedly managed to kill one in living memory, but most people are too scared to even try. Despite this, El elects to try and kill it, and even more surprisingly does so.
I guess this is a good point to mention my actual biggest problem with the series here, which is that I'm not a huge fan of "chosen ones" at this stage of my life. Okay, she only manages to accomplish this due to her affinity for mass murder, but she keeps repeating this feat throughout the series, by the end refining it into a more-or-less routine matter. Admittedly this makes every magician in the world terrified of her because this is something that no one who has ever lived could consistently do, and I guess they say that once-in-a-generation magical talents similar to this happen - er - once or so a generation, but even so. Kind of a mismatch between the alleged threat and the effort required to overcome it after the first one. Also not a huge fan of fated romances, but don't get me wrong, I still liked it quite a bit overall.
Speaking of the fated romances, of course El and Orion get it together. They've both had pretty rough lives in different respects, and his particular tragedy is that he's great at killing stuff but not really that great at absolutely anything else, to the point that his mother had to drill him with flashcards so he'd remember the names of his neighbors. At first his compatriots from the New York enclave think El must have enchanted him somehow when he shows an actual interest in her, and when they realize that it's all him they basically offer her a bunch of bribes to come back to live with them and keep him happy.
But that's mostly left for the second and third books. The first one has a pretty harrowing fight to figure out how to get the seniors out alive, or at least mostly so, and then abruptly ends. The second one then picks up the next year after that, when our heroes have to deal with the consequences of success and what you'd call a robot rebellion by the school itself, and ends on a massive cliffhanger. The third one is really impressively tied in with elements of the first two, but also has a little bit of a lack of focus as they do some global traveling and then try to resolve a magical war. I'm torn between thinking that it wrapped up too quickly and advocating for a fourth book, and I suppose that in itself means that I was pretty well invested in it. At least you can tell that this is the end that Novik had in mind all along, she wasn't just winging it.
And not to give too much away here but one thing I especially appreciated about the ending was that El succeeded beyond her wildest dreams but still didn't manage to get everyone what they had coming to them, completing the idea that sometimes things just suck and you can't fix them. But of course this doesn't mean that you shouldn't at least try. Overall very good and if you're a fan of urban fantasy and black comedy I'd put it on the post-Christmas list.
