Three Parts Dead was good. This is better.
Max Gladstone returns to the contract-law-as-magic setting of his first book to give us a story about Caleb Altemoc, risk manager for a god-slaying lich, and his attempts to get to the bottom of a series of attacks on the company that provides water for the desert metropolis of Dresediel Lex – attacks which could have dire consequences for that company’s control over the divine serpents that sleep in magma and hunger for human souls. It’s a noir fantasy thriller again, but this time no one’s a straightforward villain: all the major characters are trying to save or improve the world but for each of them it comes with either routine mass human sacrifice, continued suffering of the poor and of enslaved gods with the hope that maybe things could be done better, or the collateral damage that comes with a revolution.
All of the good parts of Three Parts Dead – the strong plotting, the well-realised setting, the matter-of-fact treatment of wonders and horrors – are still here, and most of the problems I had with that book have been improved on. The characterisation’s still good, but this time all the characters are tied into specific aspects of the setting. And about the setting, rather than fantasy’s standard reskinning of Christianity and Western Europe, Two Serpents Rise features a setting and religion inspired by the Pre-Colonial civilisations of Mesoamerica, and I was impressed by how well it fit the established concepts of the setting. Mesoamerican religions shared a concept of giving of oneself to sustain the world, which contrasts effectively with the mechanistic exchange of Craft as the characters present their ideas of how to make the world a better place.
And speaking of making the world a better place, this book makes it clear that Craft isn’t just magical contract law: it’s late-stage capitalism – alienating, ecologically devastating, and callous. The city of Dresediel Lex may have overthrown a theocracy powered by human sacrifice, but as the priest Temoc points out, “You’ve not eliminated sacrifices, you’ve democratised them – everyone dies a little every day, and the poor and the desperate are the worst injured… [y]our bosses grind them to nothing until they have no choice but to mortgage their souls and sell their bodies as cheap labour.” Two Serpents Rise plays with heavier themes than Gladstone’s previous book – colonialism and the suppression of minority cultures are in here too – and it’s less feel-good as a result: everyone’s compromised and no one’s vision of a better world is free of suffering and death, but at the same time no one stops trying. Ultimately that’s what this book is about: doing your best to change things, and hoping your sacrifice is worth it.
What else to say about it? The prose is good and sometimes excellent; there’s a good balance between suspense and inevitability; and there are gay people in the cast, which is a good improvement on the previous book. Definitely recommended, though with a minor caveat: it’s technically stand-alone, but the amount of detail in the setting means it would probably help to have read Three Parts Dead beforehand. Still, I loved it nigh-unconditionally.
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