2019 fantasy. In Jazz Age Mexico, Casiopea Tun is a drudge working in
her rich relatives' house. But when she frees a captive Mayan god…
The most surprising thing about this book is how unsurprising it
is. It's not bad, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but in terms of plot
it's basically a conventional story of a downtrodden heroine who wins
through by out-thinking and out-morality-ing the opposition. If it
turned out to have been written in the 1990s, I wouldn't be surprised.
Where it goes beyond that is in its examination of romance between god
and mortal: how can it happen at all, what needs to be changed in
order that it make sense, and how does it affect both parties.
Casiopea picks up a shard of bone from Hun-Kamé, the usurped Lord of
Xibalba, and this pushes her up somewhat from conventional mortality,
at the same time as it begins to humanise Hun-Kamé hiself.
All of this is set against the backdrop of post-Revolutionary Mexico,
an under-explored milieu of contrasts between low-tech country living
(the old bosses are gone but plenty of people want to be the new boss)
and bustling modern cities, complicated by the unsuccessful
suppression of counter-revolutionary Catholicism.
But the majority of the book deals with the struggle between Hun-Kamé
and his brother Vucub-Kamé as seen through the eyes of Casiopea; the
background is drawn from the Popol Vuh but it's given interesting
twists rather than being infodumped.
The writing is lovely (with more narration than usual, but it works
well to create a mythic atmosphere, another culture's equivalent of
fairy tales); the characterisation is great; and the plot works, even
if it's one we've seen before. This is what Tim Powers should have
written instead of going increasingly up his own mythology, which
being the invention of one person is necessarily less interestingly
complex than the real thing. Looked at in the context of a possible
Hugo nomination, it doesn't bring something new and revolutionary to
the field, but it's a solid piece in its own right.
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