The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

I received this book, whose author I had never even heard of, from LibraryThing's secret Santa book exchange. I only briefly skimmed the blurb (just enough to figure out which genre tag to put on it), because on those rare occasions where it's possible, I like to go into a book blind.

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: December 2023
Read: February 2024

The Kingdoms is about a man who suddenly wakes up without a memory, in the late nineteenth century in a world that we slowly discover is one where the French won the Napoleonic Wars and thus conquered England (though not Scotland). The book benefits from a nice sense of double wrongness: Joe has no memory, so everything is new to him, but there's a different way in which everything is new to us, as we slowly uncover how this history differs from the one we as readers know. I like to say (I think I stole this from Jo Walton) that sf is a mystery genre, where the world itself is the mystery, and The Kingdoms captures that very well. I liked Joe a lot as a protagonist, in his slow, methodical nature, and I liked how that was mirrored by the slow, methodical way in which the story unspooled. Joe is sent to man a remote lighthouse whose operators have disappeared, but also one that seems to have some kind of connection to his mysterious past; the people he meets are strange and unsettling.

The book makes some major shifts after this point, and though they worked for me in the abstract—like, if you described them to me, I certainly wouldn't object to a novel in general, or even this novel in particular, going this route—I found that in their actuality, they kind of lost me. The clear throughline of the first part of the novel ends up dissipating, with a lot of embedded narratives, and the singular character focus of the first part is lost in favor of an expanding cast, many of whom never grabbed me as much as Joe did. In the end, I got a bit lost in the plot mechanics too—and I usually do pretty well by these things! Perhaps I was not giving the book the focus it deserved, but though I enjoyed it for much of its run, by its end it didn't seem that the attributes that made it initially appeal to me were still around very much. It may work very well for someone else, but not so much for me.