I finished Tasha Suri's
The Isle in the Silver Sea yesterday and I am wrestling with profoundly conflicted feelings about it. It's an interesting book, it's an ambitious book; it's a book with a great deal to say, sometimes with a sledgehammer; it went in places I didn't expect, and appreciated, and also I think it maybe fails at the central task it needed to succeed at in order to make it actually work for me as a book.
The premise: we're on an island, and this island is composed of Stories About Britain. London is there, constantly caught between Victorian London and Elizabethan London and Merrie Olde England depending on what sort of narrative you're in. The Glorious Eternal Queen reigns forever with her giant ruffs and bright red hair. Each bit of the island is tied to a bit of story, and that story attaches itself to particular people, Incarnates, who are blessed/cursed to live out the narrative and keep the landscape alive with it. At this point this has been going on for so long that incarnates are usually identified pretty early and brought to live safely at the Queen's court where they kick their heels resignedly waiting for their fate to come upon them.
Sometimes immigrants come to the island. When they come, they forget their language and their own stories in the process. They are not supposed to get caught up in incarnation situations, though -- in theory, that's reserved for True Born Englishmen -- but unfortunately for our heroine Simran, she appears to be an exception and immediately upon sighting the shores of the isle as a child also started seeing the ghost of her past incarnation, indicating that she is the latest round of the tragic tale of the Witch and the Knight, who are doomed to fall in love and then die in a murder-suicide situation For The Realm.
Simran's knight is Vina, the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy noble, who is happy to be a hot and charming lesbian knight-at-arms but does not really want to be the murderous Knight any more than Simran wants to be the Witch. However, the plot begins, Simran is targeted by an Incarnation Murderer who kidnaps her best friend and challenges her to meet him on her Fated Mountain, and they of course have to go on a quest where they of course fall in love despite themselves and also learn more about why the current order must be overthrown because trying to preserve static, perfect versions of old stories is not only dooming a lot of people to extremely depressing fates but also slowly killing the Isle. This quest makes up the first part of the book.
I am very interested in the conversation that Tasha Suri is using this book to have about national narratives and national identities and the various stories, both old and new, that they attempt to simplify and erase. Her points, as I said, aren't subtle, but given Our Current Landscape there is a fair argument to be made that this is not the time for subtlety. I also think there's also some really good and sharp jokes and commentary about the National Narratives of Britain, specifically (evil ever-ruling Gloriana is SUCH a funny choice and the way this ends up being a mirror image for Arthuriana I think is quite fun as well).
On the other hand, the conversation is so big and the Themes so Thematic that they do end up entirely overshadowing the characters for me, which I do think is also a thematic failure. The first part of the book is about Vina and Simran's struggle to interact with each other and their lives as individuals, rather than the archetypes that overshadow them, but as Vina and Simran they also never quite felt like they transcended their own archetypes of Cranky Immigrant Witch and Charming Lesbian Knight With A Hero Complex. Which startled me, tbh, because I've liked several of Tasha Suri's previous books quite a lot and this hasn't struck me as a problem before. But I think here it's really highlighted for me by the struggle with Fate; I kept, perhaps unfairly, compare-contrasting with
Princess Tutu, a work I love that's also about fighting with narrative archetypes, and how
extremely specific Duck and Fakir and Rue feel as characters. I finished part one feeling like I still had no idea whether Vina and Simran had fallen in love as Fated Entities or as human beings distinct from their fate, and I think given the book this is it really needs to commit hard on that score one way or another.
Part two, I think, is much more interesting than part one, and changes up the status quo in unexpected ways. If I pretend that part one landed for me then I'm much happier to roll with the ride on part two, though there is an instance of Gay Found Family Syndrome that I found really funny; you can fix any concerning man with a sweet trans husband and a cottage and a baby!
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genarti will argue with me that she thinks it was more complicated than that, to which I will argue, I think it
could have been more complicated IF part two had had room to breathe and lean into any of those complexities. Making part one half its length and part two double its length would I think fix several of my problems with the book. "but you just said that Vina and Simran don't feel specific enough" yes that's true AND they take three hundred pages to do it! I'd be less annoyed about them feeling kind of flat if we were moving on more quickly to other things ...
Anyway. I didn't find this book satisfying but I did find it interesting; others may find it to be both. Curious to talk about it with anyone else who's read it!
Sidenote: the Tales and Incarnations are maintained by archivists, who keep the island and the stories it contains static and weed out any narratives they think don't belong. This of course is evil. I went and complained about the evil archivist propaganda to
genarti, who read this book first, and she said 'read further.' So I did! It turns out that in contrast to the evil archivists, the woods are populated by good and righteous librarians!! who secretly collect oral histories and discarded tales that have been deemed subversive by the archivists but which of course the island needs to thrive. I do appreciate that not all institutional memory workers are Evil in this book and I understand the need in fiction to have a clear and easy distinguishing term between your good guys and your bad guys, but Tasha Suri, may I politely protest that this is in fact also archivist work --
Sidenote two: v. interesting to me that of the two big high-profile recent Arthurianas I've read the thing I've found most interesting about both of them is their use of the Questing Beast. we simply love a beast!!
