In Alex Pheby’s Novel Malarkoi, God Is Dead and Objects Are Alive
Death isn’t always terminal in Alex Pheby’s novel Malarkoi. Painful, yes. Gruesome, definitely. It’s just that, a lot of the time, it doesn’t quite stick. A main character is killed by his double, who then becomes him. A girl suffocates to death in a tangle of people with cow heads, then wakes up again, “alive for no reason.” This book is the second in a trilogy called Cities of the Weft; in the first book, Mordew, a boy from the slums named Nathan Treeves is crushed down so small that he fits into a locket. In this one, he is dead, technically, but it doesn’t mean much — he’s still able to call out to his dog. A meter is established: Someone dies. They return to life. Bones and flesh ooze back together.
This can be exhausting. It’s also exhilarating. Pheby is nothing if not generous with ideas: These resurrections happen in a world where nested pyramids stretch into the sky, where magic runs on the power of human sacrifice, and where the city of Mordew is built on the corpse of God. That is where the trilogy opens; the first book, published in 2020, follows Nathan, a destitute boy living on Mordew’s fringes. Nathan has something called a “Spark,” a magical ability that sets him apart from the other children in the slums. In Malarkoi, Nathan’s Spark has upended Mordew and his allies have escaped the slums — and are now being tailed by a team of assassins.
While Pheby is writing fantasy, it’s clear that his interests are political. A British professor of creative writing, he moved into genre fiction after publishing three other novels, all of which have to do with schizophrenia. These are books about the social dimension of madness, and they feel mad, too, with feverish descriptions of physical injury and terror. “If it was up to him,” one sadistic dentist thinks in 2018’s Lucia, a fictionalized telling of the life of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, “he’d anesthetize the lot of them and do what needed to be done.” Cities of the Weft, which has been received enthusiastically by U.K. reviewers, shares that grim interest in cruelty. But the two books published from the trilogy so far introduce joy into the equation. “In fantasy fiction, you can really pile on the magic, I think, and everybody likes it—and I like writing it,” the author has said.
The series’ visceral first book introduces the city of Mordew as a kind of nightmare version of Dickens’s London. Ragged groups of children roam the streets and beat dying firebirds with sticks. Eels are born with elbows and human teeth, and Nathan’s hovel is bare to the wind with lamps shining weakly through the gaps in its walls “as if light itself could be brought low by this place.” His father is dying slowly, painfully, afflicted by “lungworms” that he coughs up in several stunningly harrowing scenes. Nathan’s Spark gives him the ability to muster a violent surge of energy that he can direct at the world around him. Though his father has warned him against using it — it has grisly effects on his body and soul — Nathan summons his power to fish in the mud for small, squirming creatures to sell to the slum’s tanneries and merchants. Meanwhile, high above the slums lives the Master, a mysterious figure in a mansion who makes children disappear.
Pheby clearly enjoys the fantasy genre’s clichés, and he does funny things with them. Nathan is what you might call a chosen one. He falls in with a band of urchins: the Artful Dodger–esque Gam, feisty Prissy, and Joes, a strangely plural character who is both one person and two. (Pheby writes that “whether they were a boy or a girl Nathan couldn’t tell, since they seemed to flicker from one to the other in the light of the fire.”) But once Nathan is crammed into a locket at the end of book one, he becomes inert — and Pheby takes the loss of his protagonist as an opportunity to abandon his child’s-eye view, starting Malarkoi with 150 pages of interlude before reentering the main action. This section goes deep underground. It trails a lungworm that bites a child. One chapter describes “many aeons” in the life of Joes and their descendants in the city of Malarkoi — pronounced “malarkey” — a pyramid-filled place near Mordew that was built by a seemingly benevolent goddess. The world we were introduced to in the previous book has changed shape: We learn that the Master has grabbed the tip of Mordew and pulled it up into the sky, “like a cook pulls off the gelatinous skin from a cooled gravy.” Everything in the slums is stretched into uncanny new forms. Bricks are spread thin, rats are now as long as snakes, and a glass road becomes impossibly steep.
Often, in this book, human characters seem beside the point. Pheby’s real subject is objects. This recalls his 2015 novel Playthings, a fictionalized account of the life of schizophrenic German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, who came to believe that the people around him were machines or impostors and whose memoir was studied by Freud. In Pheby’s telling, Schreber sees a group of schoolboys and says to himself: “They are temporary things made up from the dirt.” Other people on the street are puppets: “Marionettes. Demons. Mechanical birds.” In order to avoid being brutalized by the authorities around him — his father, his doctor, the orderly at his asylum — Schreber must learn to dominate what he sees as sinister figures made of cogs and wheels and bellows.
Pheby’s trick in Mordew and Malarkoi is to extend this idea to a fantasy world and to let it play out as a drama of subjugation that sees dignity rather than menace in puppets, lockets, and worms. The most interesting moments in the series — the ones that really push the limits of imagination, of taste, of sympathy — have to do with things that are only sort of alive. A pair of mechanical mice wheel around the periphery of the Master’s mansion, cleaning up messes. A boy who’s confined to the form of a book can be closed by anyone who wants to shut him up. The Master was the one who built Mordew on the corpse of God, situating it on top of a thick mire that its residents call the Living Mud. It is filled with “dead-life,” elbowed eels included. Even the actual people in the story seem suspiciously like collections of objects: a criminal kingpin named Mr Padge is said to be shaped from “a block of butter gone rancid” and topped off “with ringlets shaved from hair-sellers.” Nathan’s mother seems to be made of “oddments of ribbon and irregular pieces of silk.”
Stasis can seem the fate of any middle novel in a trilogy. The important introductions are out of the way, the final battle is yet to come, and there’s a sense of killing time. Even as Malarkoi’s characters travel down into caves and up pyramids, time can seem to stand still — and sometimes does literally stand still. The book begins with an index of “unusual things” that readers will learn about, like “a near endless repetition of the same day.” One of Malarkoi’s most compelling plotlines has to do with the Master, who shuffles through dimensions where the hours pass at different speeds. These sections are mathy and dizzying, and you can sense Pheby’s pleasure in writing them, like this one describing a carefully calibrated wall of clocks, each of which represent a different realm: “The next four clocks were realms subsidiary to this realm where the passage of time was faster, and each by a multiple of the last … the third row continued these multiples, and the fourth began the same sequence, but slower rather than faster.” In one, you can live “ten lifetimes” without the minute hand making a single circuit.
This level of detail can make Malarkoi hard to keep up with. Pheby is smart enough to hint at the frustration of it all; at one point, when that book-boy is attempting to tell a story, one of the novel’s talking dogs says, “This is another inferiority that invention has over the real — it becomes necessary to interrupt the story to provide the information necessary to understand invented things.” (To which the boy flutters his pages in irritation.) Occasionally, story lines are smothered by explanations of Mordew and Malarkoi, their gods and their magic and their many rules and dimensions, and Malarkoi becomes more guidebook than narrative. Though Pheby’s world is an unrestrained imaginative spectacle, it follows recognizable rules; here, too, sickness, poverty, and injustice dictate the trajectory of lives. And if this world contains, as Malarkoi’s index reads, “a dog who eats a god’s face”? As a goddess says to a puzzled child: “Don’t think about it too much — it’s too confusing.”
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