May Everburning Kos light your way ...
A massive energy corporation goes suddenly insolvent. The execs scramble to salvage what they can from the situation, hiring high-price outside consultants to manage the bankruptcy proceedings in the hope that a restructuring will be allowed, while an opportunist with illicit insider connections maneuvers his way into representing the claimants in opposition.
A government takeover of a public services corporation goes horribly wrong when it becomes clear that the whole situation had been arranged as a poison pill. Ideological revolutionaries use the chaos of the situation to unleash weapons of mass destruction, and the only thing stopping them is the disillusioned son of a reactionary cult leader.
An up and coming banker in an international tax haven is kicked out of her comfy corner suite and sent down to sales and marketing after she makes a last-ditch effort to save a failing investment vehicle. Unable to accept this demotion, and the implication of mental instability behind it, she dives into an obsessive investigation of the matter, throwing her into a world of shady characters, street kids, and foreign agents, who all have their own connection to the matter.
A new Grisham-alike? A non-fictional investigation into bankers behaving badly? Not quite.
When one looks to a fantastic genre to comment on trends in modern society, one usually looks to science fiction – but Max Gladstone’s novels of the Craft show that fantasy can be deployed just as adeptly. Starting with Three Parts Dead, Gladstone takes the 2008 financial crisis as inspiration for a rather unusual fantasy universe, where wizards fight with legal briefs, faith is the world’s currency, and gods and goddesses are more service-providing corporate entities than all-knowing and benevolent entities. The power company that went insolvent? That was actually the Everburning Kos, divine patron of the city of Alt Columb, and several scenes in the novel deal with the examination of his divine corpse.
Three Parts Dead focuses on Tara, a young woman who we first meet as she falls through the sky, thrown out of the preeminent institution of learning upon graduation for various unstated (for now) crimes of a rather violent-sounding nature. Tara has studied the Craft, the binding and manipulating of soul. In a world where soul energy both comprises the primary currency and keeps the lights running and the taps floowing, this is a pretty important skill. Half wizard and half lawyer, Tara returns to her hometown, helps her farmer parents and their neighbors with contracts both legal and spiritual in nature, and tries to put her life together again after being blacklisted by the people who had trained her. Time and a series of unfortunate events lead her away from the country life and into the employ of one of the world’s most notorious Craft Firms — Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao — which has just been employed by the High Priesthood of the Everburning Kos to help them deal with the death of their deity.
Such is her notoriety that Tara has only one shot to prove herself a worthwhile addition to the firm. Working alongside the senior partner who recruited her and the Kosian priest who witnessed the death of his god, she has to figure out what exactly killed Kos and figure out how much can be salvaged from his remains. Gods in this world live and die by the contracts they make — faith is turned into miracles according to their own idiom, and these miracles can be contracted out at negotiated rates of exchange, so long as there is enough juice in the tank to power them. Being a god of fire, Kos powers steam engines and offers gouts of incinerating flame on demand. Tara quickly stumbles onto a set of mysterious dealings made by Kos himself and some shady outside parties who took advantage of a …. temporary imbalance of funds …. to make a bid for a hostile takeover of sorts. To prove herself, Tara needs to insure that her clients are happy — which means that she and her boss need to fend off hungry creditors and ensure that Kos, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, is risen from the dead.
In this world, the Craft is most clearly magical (the first we see of Tara’s craft is when she raises and binds a pair of zombies for the defense of her hometown, and her superior rides a stormcloud across the countryside) and, at the same time, legal. The mundane details of legal discovery and courtroom battle become a form of wizard duel, and the final showdown before Justice is interrupted by pillars of fire. Gladstone’s central metaphor allows him to make constant commentary on the real-world events that have inspired his stories, most notably the world of finance and the 2008 crisis, while also empowering (some) of his characters to act at a scale that is simply impossible in our world — and giving him an excuse to throw in fights between gargoyles, vampires, superpowered police, and giant fire serpents.
It is hard for the fantastic genres to really get away from interpretations which read their fantastic or speculative elements as metaphors for situations or events in our world today. The mutant powers of the X-Men are a metaphor for adolescent awkwardness. Magic in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians has been interpreted as a metaphor for addiction, at least in the TV series.
I must admit, a lot of times this rubs me raw. I have always believed in the speculative dream, the idea that the fantastic genres might be able to do more than just comment on what we are, that they might be able to show us what could be – or that which can’t be, but would be totally awesome nonetheless. I often felt a bit deflated when it was pointed out to me that something I loved was really just a metaphor for something sad and boring in the real world. Perhaps the most common such experience is when a young reader learns that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was really all about Christ – though this never happened to me because my atheist parents kept those books away from me.
And yet, somehow in Gladstone’s books it all just worked for me. Perhaps it was because it was somehow possible to feel sympathetic towards characters in metaphorical finance – I am more inclined to give an immortal skeleton wizard the benefit of the doubt than I am to trust Gordon Gekko. Or, perhaps it was because Gladstone’s characters tended to be broken and disillusioned in a way that resonated with me. Good writing can do that, I guess.
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