Impossible Creatures
Katherine Rundell
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
This is what I get for just buying any old book my eye happens to land on, just because I happen to have a Barnes & Noble employee discount loudly begging to be abused. I get dragged into a new series somewhat against my will because goddammit I already have 33 series in my series-tracking database, I am a mess. I don’t mind too much in this case, though, because it has dragons and badass women and a grumpy Berserker with a heart of gold, and I will never say no to any of those things. (And in my defense, I actually started with a free ARC but realized about five chapters in that I was definitely going to buy it the next morning.)
I feel it’s a pretty well established fact that in any world there will always be that one asshole who ruins everything for everybody else, then fucks off before they can get stuck with the bill. In this case, that asshole is a man named Marik, a hundred years dead but still causing trouble literally only through his sheer absence. Born of the first apple of the first tree, acquainted with humanity from its first moment, Marik was an incarnation of the Immortal, a deathless soul who has been constantly born and reborn since the beginning of time. Though the Immortal’s soul cannot seem to die, its bodies are a different matter, and it has passed down from generation to generation with a fully intact memory of the life of every body it has inhabited. About 2,900 years before Marik’s birth, the Immortal was a woman named Heletha of Antiok, who used the magic of the world’s only Glimourie Tree to create a barrier to protect the islands on which she lived. Those islands are called the Archipelago, and they are currently home to a host of magical creatures, including unicorns, dragons, sphinxes, manticores, and more.
All of this is possible only because of the Glimourie Tree, whose magic has become concentrated around the Archipelago. Over time, however, humans have sought to plunder the magic of the Archipelago, making the tree a constant target. Thus, a later generation of the Immortal – by this time a man named Ahmed Telos – built a giant labyrinth around the tree with the help of Leonardo and Enzo da Vinci, which could only be solved by those who already knew the way. The da Vincis took a potion of forgetfulness, brewed by a centaur, while the Immortal carried the knowledge of the maze through its next several lives. Throughout the centuries, the Immortal has tended the tree, and magic has flourished in the Archipelago. Enter Marik, who grew up with thousands of years’ worth of memories and decided that was a stupid way to live, and therefore paid extravagant amounts of gold for a forgetfulness potion. Upon drinking it he of course forgot that he was the Immortal, but he also wiped the memories of every Immortal who came after him, with the result that there have since been other Immortals who had no idea that they were the Immortal. Without the Immortal to tend the tree, the Archipelago has become an uneasy place: the magic (referred to as “glimourie”) is beginning to die and the creatures it sustains are disappearing, and there is no one left who might know how to fix it. As for the unhappy Marik, he died young and at sea, so I guess he got his comeuppance.
In the present day, the Immortal is a twelve-year-old flying girl named Malum “Mal” Arvorian, and I have zero qualms about revealing that because the reveal – if it can really be called a reveal – was not even close to a surprise. Endowed with a flying coat by the itinerant seer who named her (not really clear why he had this flying coat to begin with), befriended by magical creatures everywhere she goes, Mal spends her first twelve years in ignorant bliss. As her mother died in childbirth, she has been raised by her great-aunt Leonor, her sole surviving relation, in the port town of Icthus, whose residents are by now so accustomed to her that they mostly just roll their eyes whenever they see her zipping around the local skies. Her tiny family recently expanded to include Gelifen, a baby griffin for whom I would die like I don’t want to be dramatic here but holy heck he is adorable, who as far as everyone knows is the last of his kind, and all in all life is good, despite Mal’s growing concerns about the changes she observes in the magical creatures she has known all her life. Matters finally explode big time when she is targeted by an assassin named Adam Kavil, who murders Leonor and almost succeeds in killing Mal as well.
Out in the non-magical world, a different kind of change is taking place. Raised among humans, befriended by animals everywhere he goes, English schoolboy Christopher Forrester visits his grandfather, Frank Aureate, and unexpectedly learns that he comes from a family of guardians who are tasked with the protection of the waybetween, the gateway between the human world and the Archipelago. The waybetween is normally closed, but it opens once a year for a week, at the fourth full moon. This is not that time of year, however, so it is alarming when Christopher comes face to face with Gelifen and Mal, who came through the waybetween to get away from Kavil. Following Mal’s impassioned plea for help, Christopher agrees to return to the Archipelago with her, and both children are swept into a whirlwind adventure that starts with them merely trying to survive the persistent Kavil but turns into a quest to solve the rapid disappearance of the glimourie. Along the way they are joined by Fidens Nighthand, an out-of-work Berserker who is tasked with guarding the Immortal but obviously has not recently had the opportunity to do so, and by Irian Guinne, a part-nereid marine scientist from the Archipelago’s University of Alquon. Irian gets stuck with them after they all butt heads with the Azurial Senate, which fails to take seriously their warnings that the creatures of the Archipelago are under threat; Nighthand lumps and grumps, but he can’t seem to tear himself away from the children, much though he complains about the trouble they cause him.
Meanwhile, Mal is quietly pursued by Kavil and other opportunists, and it is the tragic conclusion of this relentless hunt that finally forces her to accept that she is the Immortal. (I’m not revealing the tragedy. It still hurts, and I am PISSED. All I’m saying is it made me cry, and I curse everyone who had a hand in making it happen.) With the help of an untrustworthy centaur and the dryads of the island of Tār, Mal manages to regain the memories of the Immortal, but the process leaves her temporarily disabled. Thus, Christopher makes his way alone to the center of the labyrinth, where stands the Glimourie Tree. Here he learns that the Glimourie Tree was discovered some time ago by Francesco Sforza, another good-things-ruiner who followed the written directions set down by his bitter asshole ancestor Enzo da Vinci right before he took the potion of forgetfulness. Unbothered, moisturized, and completely out of his lane, Sforza has been happily sucking down the magic of the Glimourie Tree for decades, causing the aforementioned decline in Archipelagic creatures. Christopher is completely overmatched, but Mal recovers enough to help him cut Sforza off of the tree. Of course, that’s still not enough to shut him up, so she ends up having to fly him directly into the Somnulum, a sort of sun made of pure glimourie, ending both of their lives – but only for a little while.
After the funeral, the Archipelago begins to return to normal: the magic returns, and the Immortal is reborn within moments of Mal’s death. Unlike Mal, this Immortal remembers, and it drives its mother to distraction, though she loves it dearly just the same. Grieving but hopeful, knowing he will someday meet the next Immortal and that they will remember him when he does, Christopher returns to the non-magical world, to his anxiety-ridden father and grandfather, and tells them everything. (Oh, and Christopher is also still on the hook for the biography he promised to write about a tiny egotistical dragon he named Jacques – it’s a long story.)
I cannot say this enough: I loved this book. Rundell’s writing recalls the whimsical charm of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with the added bonus that her children actually talk and act like real children, unlike Rowling’s child-sized thirty-year-olds. The illustrations are wondrous and for the most part integrate seamlessly with the text, though there is one blotch that blocks out a couple of words on page 214 – we’ll call that a design oopsie-doodle. It’s not a huge deal, it’s not as if I couldn’t guess the words it was blocking. I am so in love with Rundell’s vision of this world, which has the standard-issue dragons and unicorns but also includes a number of weird, wonderful creatures of the kind that make me want to pack up my cat and move to the Archipelago posthaste. These include the al-mirajes, hares with horns of pure gold, who are capable of creating plants from barren earth and originate in Arabic literature; kankos, mouse-sized Japanese foxes with split tails and bioluminescent saliva; ratatoskas, green-furred squirrels with short horns and a penchant for inaccurate gossip, who come from Norse mythology; and much, much more. I have to admit that the ratatoskas are my favorite, mostly because of their adooooooorable speech pattern. (“She swam halfway out to Lithia, she did, in full evening dress; had to battle a nereid for it [Gelifen’s egg], she did”).
This is the part in the review where I normally would be wondering why only one race and one culture is represented in a world in which almost anything is possible, and it tickles me pink that I don’t have to do that for this particular book. Nor do I feel shortchanged by the relatively brief role played by most of the glimourie-dependent creatures who appear throughout the story, because they are so ubiquitous that their presence is impossible to miss. Besides, I just really like the human characters. Christopher is kind of more on the okay side – he’s not particularly memorable – but I love Nighthand and Ratwin, his little ratatoska navigator, and I LOOOOOOOVE the ferocious stubborn firecracker otherwise known as Mal. I love her scrappiness and her feisty charm, her compassion, her love for the magical creatures who make up so much of her world. I love that she never gets sidelined by Christopher: though he enters the center of the labyrinth alone, he needs her to save his ass, and that’s how it should be. There is no point at which he steals the show. She is the Immortal; he is the guardian. I am glad that the book is never confused on that point.
I also really love Irian, a brilliant scientist who doesn’t bat an eye when she gets hooked into a potentially fatal adventure, who is so passionate about the environment that those cowards in the Senate have to physically kick her out of the building after she hurts their feelings. I’ve really gotta admire that kind of stick-to-itiveness. And – surprisingly enough – I love her relationship with Nighthand, which starts out as speechless infatuation on his side and blossoms into the kind of romance I can actually tolerate. For all his rough edges and rough manners, Nighthand sees Irian exactly as she is (he admires her even when she starts talking about sea urchin excrement and its uses in potion-making, what a man), and vice versa. I don’t know who I’d cast as Nighthand in any future TV show (yet – oh lord have mercy, I’m starting to think about Henry Cavill), but I want Irian to be played by Lupita Nyong’o. She’d be perfect for the role.
All in all, this was a very fine beginning, and I have to say that this series looks very promising. It has magic and iron-willed women who are supported by their male companions and an absolutely lovely little found family at the heart of it, and a baby griffin who totally definitely 100% needs to be adopted by me, and there is nothing more that I want in this world. I am so glad that I bought this book even while my bank account was screaming that I should maybe probably wait for a real job before I started buying books again. It is so beautifully wholesome, despite its darker elements, and it definitely made me cry, but I’m not mad. I am still haunted by Mal’s goodbye, by her hard-won decision to embrace both the burden and the wonder of the Immortal – and, by extension, of the whole of humanity. If I was slightly peeved that she had to die, I was also comforted by the knowledge that this isn’t even close to the end for her. She’ll come back sooner than later, and both Christopher and I will be waiting for her when she does.
P.S. Marik’s name and general character are making me wonder if Rundell is also a recovering Yu-Gi-Oh! fanatic. Discuss.
