What a world of solemn thought their monody compels

For reasons which are actually related to each other, in the wake of the Straight Pride Parade I decided it was time to take a week off Twitter and reread Garth Nix's Sabriel, the first book in his Old Kingdom trilogy, a trilogy which has apparently turned into five books while I wasn't looking.

 

Anyway, all I'd remembered about Sabriel was that it was good, it had a bunch of stuff in it about necromancy and also something about bells? The bells are on the front cover, so no points to me for keeping that in my memory.
 

 

Oh, and speaking of the front cover, the cover art for this series (my edition, anyway, and therefore the One True and Correct Edition) is by Leo and Diane Dillon, the most unparalleled fantasy artist power couple of the late 20th century. They also did the cover art for my beloved Wise Child trilogy and over the years I've come to love their style so much that I can no longer tell how much is because the art is good and how much is just because they've illustrated such incredibly good books.
 

 

While the most basic structural bones of Sabriel are a pretty comfortably familiar fantasy coming-of-age story--magical teenage girl at normal people school has to come into her powers and grow up fast when shoved into a crisis, acquires talking animal companion, learns about her heritage, has obligatory romantic subplot, saves the world--the magic system and the worldbuilding of Death make it quite an original story. The worldbuilding of Life is a bit more familiar, but fun: It basically consists of the 1940s-esque Ancelstierre, where Sabriel is at boarding school; the mystical Old Kingdom, where it is perpetually the pseudo High Middle Ages of so much secondary world fantasy, and a fun little border area where the one shades into the other in amusing ways and the modern technology starts to break down.

 

The magic system consists of the Charter, a very orderly form of magic (and implicitly the Good Kind), and Free Magic, the unruly stuff outside of the Charter (and implicitly the Bad Kind, although this gets a tiny bit more nuanced in the sequels). Sabriel is a Charter Mage, although necessarily a very young and inexperienced one, but fairly talented. Her father is the Abhorsen, which is a sort of anti-necromancer: When necromancers use Free Magic to raise the dead and form them into all sorts of weird horrifying creatures, the Abhorsen sends them back into Death where they belong.
 

 

Our Big Bad in this book is Kerrigor, once a human prince who got a little too into Free Magic and necromancy, and now a sort of weird undead demon being himself. He's been this way for almost two hundred years, after he overthrew his family, throwing the Kingdom into a Gondorian state called the Interregnum and using his relatives' royal blood to attack some of the seats of power of the Charter. After being magically bound for most of the Interregnum, Kerrigor is back and has trapped Sabriel's dad in Death, thus neatly combining Sabriel's personal quest to save her dad with her big magical heritage quest to become the new Abhorsen, save the Kingdom from being overrun by Dead things, and restore the monarchy. It's all very neat and satisfying, even if the obligatory romantic subplot is positively stuffed to the brim with cliches.
 

 

I feel like I don't have very much to say about this book in a review, although now that my memory is refreshed I'd be happy to chat about it with other people. It might be just that I now have the next two books taking up space in my head too and I think I might have more to say about the sequels, which are longer and more sweeping in scope. Sabriel is a complete story arc on its own and clocks in at just under 500 pages, which to me these days constitutes a short, tightly written, satisfying little story.