I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like

I picked up an ARC of C.L. Polk's debut gaslamp fantasy Witchmark back at Murderbooze 2017, when it was in ARCs, but I only just got around to reading it last week, and damn, am I kicking myself for not pouncing on it earlier! 

 

I had heard it was good, and I think I had seen it pop up on a couple of queer fantasy book recs but since I'm not actually a romance reader that kind of went on my "Well, that's good news, politically" mental list instead of "That's a thing that really makes me want to read it more" list. I had not actually heard a damn thing about what the book is actually about? I gleaned it had bicycles in it because there's a guy on a bicycle on the front cover. I pretty much gravitated towards picking this up instead of any of the other hundred or so books on my "unread fiction" bookcase (yes, it's an entire bookcase) because it was short and not a series, and, well, I'd heard it was good. Maybe it would be light and fluffy; you can't get too dour with bicycles, yes? (Although I think I made the same assumption about circuses and Mechanique and was dead wrong.) 

 

Anyway, I started reading it during dinner on Friday, stayed up two hours later than I had intended reading, woke up Saturday morning, blew off doing yoga to just make a cup of espresso and read, took a short break for breakfast and a shower sometime around 11 a.m. because it had gotten hotter than 90 degrees and I hadn't noticed until the sweat literally ran into my eyes, and finished it sometime in the early afternoon, with the sort of book hangover where you're still immersed in the story and too dazed to interact with other people around you who haven't just been reading it. It has been a while since I've been that level of absorbed in a novel.

 

Witchmark is about magic, and, therefore, about power; in this case, it's largely about class warfare and elite impunity. In the world of Witchmark, a handful of very powerful families have magical powers; they call themselves mages, and they control the weather, the country, and sometimes each other--the members of these families with strong weather magic are Storm Singers, and the family members with any other kind of magical talent are all lumped together as "Secondaries," their individual talents dismissed as mere "tricks," and they are basically used as backup power centers for the Storm Singers. People who exhibit magical talents who aren't members of these families aren't mages, they're "witches," which is obviously different and means they are clearly insane and must be locked up in asylums. 

 

It is in this context that Miles, our protagonist, is in hiding, living under an assumed name as a doctor at a veteran's hospital. He is a Secondary, but ran away because he wanted to use his healing magic to actually heal people and not just be used as a human battery for his younger sister. He joined the Army as a combat medic shortly before the country invaded another country and became engaged in a World War One-esque war of protracted brutality. After having done a tour himself, Miles' time is now mostly spent trying to figure out what the hell is going on with a bunch of vets whose battle fatigue/shell-shock/PTSD seems to be manifesting in a sort of split personality, with a separate "killer" personality inside them, struggling to break out and murder everybody. A couple of veterans around the country have already done so. 

 

Miles lives in fear of having either is family find him or his powers detected. Some people with magical abilities can spot them in other people just on sight, like an aura; Miles himself can't do this--he has to be touching people to see anything--so he doesn't know who could possibly see him. If he's caught, he either has to out himself as belonging to his terrible family, or he'll be tried and incarcerated as a witch. Miles' family is so terrible that these are about equally bad outcomes.

 

Unsurprisingly, early in our plot, Miles runs into his little sister at a benefit luncheon and some rando comes right into the hospital and identifies him as magical. The rando promptly dies, having lived only long enough to scare the shit out of Miles and to insist that he's not sick, he's been poisoned, and he needs Miles to investigate his murder. The extremely handsome stranger who accompanied the poisoned rando to the hospital hears all of this; he is, fortunately, the only person who witnesses the whole scene. 

 

From this point we are on a rollicking adventure of a murder mystery, in which someone is mysteriously sabotaging Miles and Mr. Hunter's (Mr. Hunter is the handsome stranger, whomst does not stay a stranger very long, obviously) attempts to investigate whether the murder is actually a murder, both by destroying evidence and apparently by trying to get Miles murdered on the street during his commute by bicycle--twice. The timing here was perfect because I have been watching a lot of Good Omens lately and listening to a lot of Queen in my car, so I was able to mentally set these scenes to Queen's "Bicycle Race." It works wonderfully. 

 

The action never really stops. The subject matter does get very dark, especially near the end when we realize the full extent of what's really happening with the war and the rich people's exploitation of everybody else (there's some good metaphors about the human cost of "progress"/industrialization you could probably get into if you wanted to have a political discussion about it), but a lot of it is fun, accessible murder mystery goodness. The worldbuilding is basically "Edwardian England with the serial numbers filed off and the magic system integrated into it", which is just as delightful and vaguely steampunky as it sounds. The obligatory romantic subplot is quite well done--sweet, with well-paced sexual tension, and neither salacious nor tragic, which is sadly still not a given where m/m romances are concerned. (It seems to be to also still be rather rare to find stories where the protagonist's ORS is a same-sex romance, but it's still definitely a subplot and the story is still primarily in a genre other than romance.) There are some fun murder mystery tropes, like sassy journalists, illicit housebreaking for investigative purposes, lying to cops, a jerkface coworker who is On To You, authority figures blowing you off when you have figured out Something Very Important, a possibly poisoned teapot, and the like. There are some classic wish-fulfillmenty aspects, especially in the romantic subplot, the one of which struck me the most was MR. HUNTER'S HOUSE. I WANT TO LIVE THERE. I have already mentioned some of the fantasy/steampunk tropes that form the core of the book's genre classification--i.e., using magic to explore real-world questions about power, status, consciousness/mental health, industrialization, etc.--but there are also heaps of genre classics like a relentlessly controlling father, a nice but dead mother, stuff we thought was just a legend turning out to be real, adorably old-timey electrical gadgets (including a "coffee burper," which is dead on), a last-minute intervention by the queen, and some channeling of Big Magic through the power of friendship (or at least teamwork). All this comes together into something that hits a lot of familiar beats and is very easy to read, but mixed up into a refreshing new summer cocktail.

 

Possibly my favorite detail in the whole book is that when characters pick up the phone they say "Ahoy" instead of "Hello," which is actually the thing Alexander Graham Bell wanted to have be the standard phone greeting before Thomas Edison's "Hello" won out.

 

It turns out that I was also incorrect that this book was a standalone; it will, as the laws of fantasy publishing proclaim, be a trilogy, and the next book comes out in 2020. I'm looking forward to it.