A Drop of Corruption is the sequel to last year's winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Tainted Cup, a novel that I enjoyed enough that I would have picked up the sequel even if it had not been a Hugo finalist. It's the second in a series of fantasy mysteries about speculative detective Ana and Din, who investigate crimes on the behalf of an imperial "Iudex." Massive creatures called leviathans affect their world; the empire defends people against them, but also extracts from them biological compounds that can be grafted onto humans to enhance them in various ways. Din, for example, has perfect recall, which he uses to aid Ana in her investigations.
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett |
 |
|
Originally published: 2025 Acquired: May 2026 Read: July 2026 |
The pleasure of these books is twofold. First, Ana and Din themselves are strong, fun characters. Ana is clearly derived from Sherlock Holmes, but distinct enough to be tremendous fun regardless; Din isn't really a Watson substitute, though, rather a young man with his own strong sense of justice and personal demons. I enjoyed this book's one-off third investigator, Malo, a lot as well, and I hope a place is indeed found for her in future books. The other pleasure is the richly evocative world, one of empires and grotesque experiments, of people who have been modified to be as bizarre as the world they inhabit. I really enjoy seeing all this, and as in more naturalistic settings, the detective's ability to move across the classes of society means we get to see a lot of different aspects of thi world, both inside and outside the empire.
Bennett seems to be up to some interesting stuff with the complexities of empire here, whose mental and cultural effects are paralleled to the biological modifications its subjects undergo; when Din thinks, "We built this... We have built this unnatural thing, and it has built us in turn" (342), supposedly he is thinking of the Shroud,* the empire's living research facility for grafts. But later, when he sees the Shroud in all its glory, he calls it "a construction vast enough to split any wave and seek any shore" (454). Surely that's what empire itself is—and thus surely also his earlier line is really about how empire shapes people, shapes our thinking and our abilities. It's a good example of how sf can take something metaphorical and make it literal; over in Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant novels, we see how empire reshapes the thinking of the main character to make her into its tool, here the empire's savants have had their thinking quite literally altered.
It's weird, then, that Bennett seems to think this book is up to something totally different! As I usually do, I read the author's note at the end sometime during the book (this is not always a good idea; it definitely spoiled something when I did it with What Stalks the Deep); there, Bennett discusses how the novel was meant as a critique of autocracy: "perhaps our fascination with kings and autocracies is more innate. As Sir Terry Pratchett once put it, it's as if even the most intelligent person has this little blank spot in their heads where someone's written: 'Kings. What a good idea'" (457). By a total coincidence, I happen to be co-writing an essay right now about the City Watch strand of Prachett's Discworld, which, like this book, uses the police procedural to interrogate ideas about fantasy kingship. There are two issues I see here. One, is that, to be honest, I don't think A Drop of Corruption is a good criticism of autocracy. While Pratchett makes what he's doing very obvious, especially in the first three City Watch novels, which are all about the Watch stopping people from putting a traditional fantasy king on the throne of Ankh-Morpork... I don't think anyone would ever read A Drop of Corruption and conclude it's an attack on autocracy. Though it has a king in it, the appeal of kings isn't really explored in any way, shape, or form as it is by Pratchett; yes, the plot turns on (in part) the succession of kingship, but this could just as easily have been the succession to a dynastic family or the inheritance of a large corporation. If he hadn't said the book was an attack on autocracy, then it would have been fine, but I feel like once he's told you it is, you'll come away disappointed.
The other issue as, as Chris Winkle has also pointed out, is that the people set up in opposition to kingship work for an empire with an unelected, immortal emperor! Now, to be fair, this is also a problem with the City Watch novels, whose systemic problems are usually resolved by an unelected autocrat... just one who happens to be nice. It's interesting that both Bennett and Pratchett use a police procedural format to critique the power of kings. Many scholars have criticized how the police procedural as a format normalizes the state's use of violence, but I do wonder if they overstate the case a bit, or at least haven't fully considered how putting violence in the hands of the police is better than putting it in the hands of a king! At least in our world, the police are in theory a democratic institution, in that ultimately their mandate derives from the people, and is designed to prevent corruption with the society it develops, something Ana highlights a couple times in A Drop of Corruption. She tells Din, "Yet this job is perhaps the most important [...], for without it, well... the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow [the novel's autocracy], where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check" (350). Later, she reminds Din that the empire has granted some of its people "[b]lessings of the flesh, the mind, the spirit. Any of these blessings might lead one to imagine that they are of regal element. And that is why we must have a watchman among us, to ensure that these folk never forget the truth. [...] That though a person's mind may be shaped differently, their hearts and souls are all too human" (452). The idea that society needs a watchman and the police are it is straight out of the City Watch books... it's just weird that in both of these books, the watchmen are not actually answerable to the people in any meaningful sense as they would be in a democratic institution. The people are thus entirely dependent on that fact that Ana, like Vimes, is a good person who would not misuse her power. Which is, you know, the myth of kingship! Like Pratchett, Bennett is maybe not capable of totally moving beyond fantasy's love of kings.
Yet, I am unpersuaded that "Bennett obviously loves Khanum and its emperor." This is only the second book, after all. Just because the character in this installment do not see the contradiction between criticizing the kingship of another country and serving an empire doesn't mean Bennett does not. After all, they have built this unnatural thing, and it has built them in turn. How can they see beyond it? The book is filled with people whose alterations allow them to see some things very well but cause them to totally miss other ones. Is Bennett actually not capable of totally moving beyond fantasy's love of kings? Or is he playing a long game.
I do think Pratchett was playing a long game; I kind of wonder if the City Watch book's patrician was being set up as a transitional figure, if at some point he would step down and allow the people to rule themselves, having carried out the necessary violence to effect the transition. (A trope seen, as Peter Paik identifies, in texts like Watchmen.†) Unfortunately, as Eugenia Pietralunga Biavati points out (in her forthcoming essay on the City Watch books for the special issue of Studies in the Fantastic I am co-editing about speculative detectives), even though the books feature a "continued interrogation of heroic fantasy violence... [the] undercurrent of dramatic tension [about fantasy violence] ... was never resolved because Pratchett died after writing the eighth City Watch novel." I would add the even the last two City Watch novels move away from this concept, I suspect because as his Alzheimer's got worse, Pratchett avoided some of the more complicated things he'd done in earlier City Watch novels. If Bennett, like Pratchett, is playing a long game with our love of autocrats, hopefully he is able to pay it off in future installments.
* It's presumably one of those weird synchronicities of culture that dog awards that is responsible for the fact that two of this year's Hugo finalists are about oppressive human institutions exploiting weird biological phenomena they have named "Shroud."
† My reading of Paik predates this blog, so I can't link you to a direct explanation of this idea, but I do have a post discussing his idea of the "shrug" in my review of the Legion of Super-Heroes threeboot.
No comments:
Post a Comment