There’s one sub-genre of fantasy that’s been having a moment in the last few years that I have been really struggling to fully embrace and that is ‘dark academia’. You would think this might be kind of thing that I might be into given my background, but I’ve never really vibed terribly well with it.
I guess I don’t really feel the need to read something from the perspective of students these days?
That’s what made The Incandescent by Emily Tesh a little more appealing; it’s not written from the perspective of the students, but from one of the teachers. The school in question is also not a “magical school”, but a private school that happens to have a magical history; where magic is just one of the GCSE subjects on offer. It’s also, among other things, a story of burn-out. Doctor Walden (or Saffy to her friends) is an expert in modern academic magic and the Director of Magic at Chetwood School, a British private boarding institution. Prior to her taking this job, Walden completed her PhD in invocation, which involves dealing with demons.
You might think this a topic that might be too risky for high school students but demonic possession is commonplace in this world. Demons are attracted to complexity and to personhood. It doesn’t take much; if a demon is too minor to possess a human, it may chose an animal instead. And if there is no animal host to be found, some sufficiently complex technology may do the trick. This, as you could imagine, puts a whole new spin on school mobile phone policies. Or the utility of classroom clocks. Or gripes about the staff-room printer. This last one is not a joke: the staff call the machine a bastard when it fails to print? Congrats, it has a name now. Assigning something ’self’ or giving it an identity is a surefire way to make it more amicable to demonic possession.*
Demons are a consistent problem for Chetwood; not only does it have over 600 years of history , it has 600 years of teenagers and their angst to feed off. Chetwood is very much an establishment, and this in turn, does make it a prize for very large demons. Old Faithful, in particular, has been hanging around the School since the seventeenth century. While one way to remove the risk of demonic possession would be to move the school, this would only delay the problem, rather than fix it. (Regardless of where it is, Chetwood has an identity as a magic school.) So while Walden teaches students the theory, the Order of Marshals patrols the school in case an incursion were to take place.
Walden spends a lot of time here with a number of Year Thirteen students, who come from some very disparate backgrounds. Of the four main students, it’s Nicola Conway that gets the most attention. Nikki is one of the most talented students that Walden has come across in her career; she’s also a ward of the school after she accidentally caused the demonic incursion that had killed her family. At age seven. Black British and from a working class background, Nikki seems to be Walden’s—and indeed the reader’s— main reminder that Chetwood is an institution of privilege. Nikki was always going to butt heads with the higher ups. But add her history of demonic incursion, and poor Nikki is a target of the Marshals as well. I really felt for her, and there are some choices about her future that she grapples with that felt very real-to-life.
To reiterate though, The Incadensent is not so much a magic school story but the story of a teacher. It’s both a fantasy story and a character study. Walden has constructed a version or facade of herself that is all too high achieving, too highly focused and perhaps too responsible. But Walden spends little time reflecting about her personal life or her past as an alumna—until she has to. She dates, but I wouldn’t say there was any deep romance here—she doesn’t seem to give herself permission. Much of the book reads like a series of slice-of-life episodes revolving around Walden where the main plot—or what you think is the main plot—is pushed to the background. If you have worked in either secondary or tertiary education, there is a lot here that you will recognize.
I initially found the book’s episodic nature a little bit awkward; there was a point when I was about two-thirds of the way through the book where I was wondering whether or not it had been conceived as two separate novellas that had then been stitched together. But this feeling ended up being misleading; there is a a plot thread that is laced through the narrative since the start that only becomes apparent very late into the novel. I really didn’t pick up where the story was going to finish up until Tesh showed me. It’s clever, but it still feels disjointed.
But to get to the end though? You have to sit back and watch Walden make some rather ill-thought out decisions. I was probably more sympathetic to her than I perhaps might have been; I started reading The Incandescent not long after finishing The Annihilation Score. Which also features a woman on the edge of a work-induced burnout. Yes, it was frustrating; reading some of these chapters was like watching someone through a eye of a telescope or through a security camera; you could bang you fists against the wall, you could yell as loudly as you want. But the protagonist has no chance of hearing you, and you have no choice but to sit back and watch the incoming train wreck.
But i’ll confess, it probably would have been a more frustrating experience if I had been following a teen-or-twenty-something year old protagonist, as is more the norm in this genre. Not, you know, someone who is roughly my age and in an adjacent profession.
Overall though, I think the structure of the book is the only thing that I had trouble with. As a portrait of a single career woman on the edge of burnout, it works. As a criticism of the kind of institutions that are commonly glamorized in this genre? It works there too—at least from my perspective. (Which is limited as I am not a Brit and have never experienced the peculiarities of their school system first hand.)
For cbr18bingo, this one is Summer. Why? The ominous Summer Term.
