You All Everybody

As I’ve commented to several people already, The Incandescent, as a book about magical education written from a teaching perspective, feels precision-targeted to my exact interests. This writeup isn’t exactly a review as such; it’s more a discussion of my own very personal and idiosyncratic responses to this book. I have a lot of thoughts, and I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to shape them into a coherent form, but here goes.

The Incandescent is very clearly in conversation with other magic-school books (including the usual suspects) sometimes in a very pointed way, but it’s staking out some unique ground. I’m trying to think of another magic-school book I’ve read that features a teacher/professor as a major POV character, and that talks about pedagogy in a serious way, and nothing is coming to mind. Diana Wynne Jones’s Year of the Griffin perhaps comes closest, but that book makes it very clear that the students are the heroes here. There are definitely some sections written from the perspectives of professors—mostly Corkoran—but these are primarily focused on administrative tasks like fundraising, the sort of thing that also tends to be the focus of non-magical academic satire. When we do see Corkoran engaged in any teaching-related activity, it’s only to highlight what an absolutely dreadful teacher he is, as in the scene where he’s grading essays and giving everyone C’s for, basically, being too thoughtful and creative rather than regurgitating the same slop he expects. The Scholomance of course doesn’t have teachers at all aside from the sentient school itself, and we don’t get its perspective in canon. And don’t get me started on the thinness of the worldbuilding around the Hogwarts professors.

Our protagonist in The Incandescent is Dr. (not Miss! The struggle is real) Sapphire “Saffy” Walden, who teaches Invocation at the elite Chetwood School. Like Hogwarts, Chetwood is a boarding school saturated in its own history and legend; like the Scholomance, it’s home to teenagers who are prone to attracting horrific magical monsters. And it’s obviously pushing back against both of these examples. For starters, the numbers make more sense: it’s not reasonable that a school serving the entire magical population of the UK would have maybe 10 students per grade, or that only 20% of every graduating class would leave high school alive. But more importantly, Chetwood is run by competent adults. I mentioned in an earlier post that the Scholomance books solve the classic YA problem of “getting adults out of the way so kids can save the world” in a particularly drastic way. The Incandescent takes an even more radical approach, by having the adults actually stick around and do their jobs. One of the major themes here is the idea that being a grownup is in fact a good thing, pushing back against the Peter Pan concept that childhood is a special magical time that no one should want to leave behind.

Vaguely spoilery comments in relation to this

I was initially a little disappointed that Nikki and the rest of the Year 13 Invocation class didn’t get to play a bigger role in the final section of the book. They’re very talented! They have relevant skills! But as I consider it more, I think the role they played was exactly the correct one: to figure out the correct person to ask for help, and make the request. They’re still kids; it’s right and appropriate for adults to take the responsibility to protect them. So many children’s and YA books are centered on the premise of “we can’t possibly tell our parents/teachers/authority figures about this terrible problem”; it’s refreshing to see that get subverted a bit here.

I really liked the fact that Chetwood teaches regular academic subjects as well as magic. I suppose the Scholomance did this to some extent, but my impression there was that the other topics exist only in service to magic, like learning a language in order to cast the associated spells. I want to know more about how the magic and non-magic subjects interact. There’s a comment (in the context of Walden levitating someone) about magic like that having “really serious disagreements with physics,” but I don’t believe for a second that physicists, on observing a levitation, are going to sit back and say, “Oh, well, not our business.” Like, if it happens in the universe, it’s physics. We’d want our grubby fingers all over that. Kids in Mechanics 101 would be drawing free body diagrams of levitated objects. People would be writing papers about what kind of gauge bosons could transmit magical forces, and what fundamental particles demons are made of. And now you know what sort of thesis topic I would have chosen if I lived in this universe.

Many of the details about Saffy’s experience of teaching ring very true to me. Some are relatively mundane: procedural stuff about grading papers, such as starting with the stronger students’ work to give an idea of the scope of what can be expected, or going back through a weaker submission looking for opportunities to give more points and pick out useful ideas even if they got muddled in the final product. Or the experience of observing another teacher’s class and giving feedback—I’ve definitely never seen that in fiction before. And the imps and minor demons that infest copy machines and other electronic devices are supremely relatable. In my case they made me think of my office printer, which recently decided to complain of a paper jam after every single individual page, or the ceiling-mounted classroom projector that stopped responding to the remote and can only be turned on or off by manually pressing the power button with a 2-meter stick.

Other points of connection are more emotional for me. The comment from Saffy’s ex, Roz, about her being “wasted” as a teacher really hit me hard. I’ve gotten that exact comment multiple times (fortunately never from anyone I was especially close to). In most if not all of those cases, I think the person meant it as a compliment, but in fact it’s the opposite. Teaching is a skilled job, and an important one, no less so than other possible careers one might pursue with a PhD Doctorate in Thaumaturgy; implying otherwise is a direct attack on someone who has devoted their life to education. (Of course Saffy turns around and pulls the same thing on her love interest Laura Kenning, saying she’s too good to be in a “dead-end” job like campus security, and of course this underestimation is going to turn around and bite her later.)

Because I am me, I am always looking for Diana Wynne Jones connections, so this line jumped out at me: “Will Daubery, you have a charmed life.” I will eat my hat if that’s not a Chrestomanci reference. I know Tesh is a DWJ fan since I have been listening to the Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcast. In the episode on Charmed Life, there’s a discussion about how Chrestomanci represents the upper classes and traditional authority, while the upstart magicians and hedge witches working with Gwendolen to plot against him are a sort of working-class attempt at revolution. And there’s no question in Charmed Life about which side belongs to the bad guys. So I think The Incandescent is pushing back against this to some degree.

Putting this part under a cut–spoilers on a thematic level only:

So, okay, is Mark Daubery Chrestomanci? An outside consultant employed by a shadowy government-connected authority, who gets called in to investigate serious problems potentially involving misuse of magic? Who comes from a long line of powerful, wealthy aristocratic enchanters, who is good looking, extremely well-dressed and rather full of himself? Chetwood school shares a lot of DNA with Chrestomanci Castle, with its centuries-old traditions and architecture, the way its history (magical and otherwise) has soaked into the landscape and bled through into the parallel world of the demonic plane. The school is magnetically attractive to just about everyone in this book: Walden herself, random tourists who try to get onto the campus, parents who want to ensure their children’s future, and of course demons. Mark is there as a representative of all that: tradition, elite education, the Establishment; he’s superficially charming while concealing an unpleasant core. And he makes a good contrast: the exact opposite of Laura Kenning in every characteristic. So that’s what I think Mark is doing thematically in the book. (Plotwise, as others have pointed out, his role gets very confusing toward the end.)

And now let’s get into major plot spoilers:

I have a lot of thoughts about the Phoenix: first of all, how much do I want to read a description of Walden’s thesis defense? We clearly need an FAQ on the Snake Fight Demon Binding Portion of Your Thesis Defense. (Apparently my first thought about everything now is “snake fight crossover.”).

There were a number of things about the Phoenix that I liked a lot. When Walden first releases it in the confrontation with Old Faithful, it’s her secret weapon, but at the same time she is its secret weapon too: it has “Walden’s expertise, and Walden’s self-discipline, and Walden’s years of experience in outwitting schoolchildren.” And later, the Phoenix asks how to do “the thing you do”--how to help someone improve, how to teach. I love the idea of the demon as a student. It’s interesting that both the Phoenix and Laura (with her magic lessons from Roger Rollins) are setting out to learn new things, while Walden is resting on her own expertise just a little too smugly. This goes back to her observation of Ezekiel’s class, her disappointment that the topic is magical ethics because she expects it to be boring and perfunctory, and then the amazing discussion on whether a demon is a person. Walden is very comfortable giving her thoughts on this to the class, but she clearly hasn’t thought deeply enough about it for someone who is keeping a demon imprisoned on her own arm.

I do think the worldbuilding could be a little more clear as to how the Phoenix fits into the legal/institutional structure of magic. To what extent is it a secret? Is it completely aboveboard or is it pushing the envelope of what is allowed in the Invocation field? Obviously for us as readers it’s a complete surprise when the Phoenix is unveiled during Old Faithful’s incursion (which makes narrative sense.) From Laura’s reaction, we know it’s also a surprise to her, although she does say the Marshals keep track of the handful of people in the country who have the skills to summon higher-level demons (not necessarily the same thing as keeping a captive demon on hand–uh, on arm). When she decides not to wear her cardigan to the Christmas party, Walden reflects that her colleagues already know about her tattoos and the Phoenix, because they saw them on the night of the incursion–so does this imply that they hadn’t known prior to that night? Some of them must know. It was her thesis topic, which means she certainly would have written about it in her application, and probably talked about it in her interview. (I would totally read fic of her job interview, btw.) So the Headmaster would know, along with whoever was on the hiring committee. I have to assume they’d have had a conversation about it with whoever was head of the Marshals at the time, along with probably the school’s insurance company, legal advisors, etc. It’s not totally clear to me whether Walden is the first person ever to cage a demon in this way, or just one of a select few, but that’s the kind of research that makes a splash either way. She probably had a famous paper published in Nature, or whatever the magical equivalent is (Sorcery? Plane?). And the whole point about research in academia, as opposed to the military or the private sector, is that it’s shared and publicly available. People on campus would talk about this kind of thing–students, even. (Even my completely mundane, non-demon-involving thesis research has inspired a lot of unprompted student questions.) So it seems a little weird that Mark, on behalf of his shadowy government employer, wouldn’t have any other way to find out about the Phoenix and its capabilities than to hang around… surreptitiously luring in smaller demons to try to get the Phoenix to fight them? Anyway, I think this background could have been developed in more detail.

I still have more things to say, but this is already very long, so I’m going to cut myself off. In summary, I very much enjoyed this book and identified with it in multiple ways.