Friday, April 2, 2021

The Unbroken - C.L. Clark


The Unbroken is, first of all, a hell of a story. It’s got magic. It’s got muskets. It’s got monarchs. It’s got rebellions and mysteries aplenty. But it’s also got a heck of a lot else going on, exploring the choices and consequences of colonialism, of conscription, and of the idea of agency, of choice. It’s a book with Big Ideas lurking like a crocodile beneath the waters of its heart-thumping narrative, ready to make you think, even as it dazzles, terrifies and delights in equal measure. It’s also unabashedly a queer story of love, and loss, and connection. It is, in other words, a book which fills every inch of its pages with wonder, and is really bloody good.

Emphasis on the bloody.


Touraine is the gyre at the centre of the story. Taken from her country as a child, after its conquest, she was raised by the conquerors, the Balladaire. Educated to be “civilised” by their lights. Trained as a soldier. Conscripted to lead her fellow dispossessed into the worst of the conflicts begun by their colonisers. Always left feeling under the weight of expectation, even from those Balladaireans who are willing to see her as something like a person. Touraine has trained herself to live a life of strict control, conforming to external expectations, forcing herself into the mould that her captors, her surrogate parents, her life, has prepared her for. And the story looks at Touraine, and asks her questions, and asks us questions. Touraine fights for Balladaire, partly because there are no other options, and partly because, embedded in their culture, she thinks they’ll win. And so she struggles to be more like them than they are themselves, trying to win her small command of conscripts room to breathe, maybe even room to choose.  There’s an old pain and old scars there, a code of submission and adoption, but also that sense of struggle. Even as she has fought Balladaire’s wars, she fights for her people, for the family that she has now, the conscript company under her.Trying to fit them into a world which aims to make them like itself, but denies them the opportunity to be equals. 


The Unbroken is often a painful, affecting read. In Touraine and her conscripts, we can see the face of a colonial past laid bare, a generation after brutalities and madness. Now the survivors are trying to find something to hold to in the rubble. Watching Touraine try to squeeze herself into Baladaire’s expectations, like a uniform a size too small, is painful. Watching her friends argue for revolution, or just to keep your head down, as things won’t improve, is painful - but it’s an honest pain, one which rings true. 


And as Touraine is trying to find an identity, she is flung back into the land where she was born. A land that seems familiar but isn’t. A land which has no place for those returnees walking the thin line between the conquerors and the occupied. Because the conscripts are sent back to their birthplace, to enforce the order of their colonial masters, and prove their assimilation and their virtue to those with the power to hold their reins. 


One of those is Luca, princess of Balladaire, and possibly its queen. Luca is interesting in herself. She struggles with expectations of her own, a permanent physical injury and her gender making her less than ideal monarch material, in a colonial polity recently ruled by her father, a conquering king. But Luca exists in a cloud of privilege. Her limitations are real, but her boundaries are wider; she twitches in pain from a ruined leg, but does so under silk sheets, while planning how to take her throne. And to do that, she’s come to this conquered corner of her kingdom, to settle a rebellion, and prove her right to rule in one stroke. Luca is incisive, intelligent, and, given the right circumstances, ruthless. She reads, a lot, in an effort to be a good ruler, to decide what a good ruler actually is. Luca is, by many lights, a good person, even if her kingdom is settled on old debts, paid in the blood and bones of the people whose land she now finds herself strolling through, with an armed guard. Because Luca wants two things. She wants magic. - old magic, from before this part of the world was a part of Balladaire - and she wants to solve the rebellion. And for that, she needs someone she can use to get inside. Someone like Touraine. 


The relationship between these two, the princess and the soldier, is a delight, and it’s at the heart of the story both in terms of the larger themes and the sheer emotional energy. Luca canb see strength and loyalty and courage in Touraine, but also looks at her as a tool, as someone she can love, but also someone she can use; and Touraine can admire Luca, can see that she is struggling to do what she thinks she must to build a better world in the long term, but can’t help but wonder what right she has to make those decisions. In a land in its second generation of occupation, are the reforms Luca plans genuinely good? Or are they sops to contain conflict, and, in any case, merely gifts given back to a people who used to own them?


In some ways they’re sweet, even cute. And you can feel the genuine chemistry, the bounded romance of the two leads as they try to feel their way toward common ground, toward connection. But Luca, even in her gifts, in her need, in her way of thinking toward Touraine, can’t help but take some of her choice, some of her agency. She gives things which help, which might be things Touraine has wanted - but they aren’t a path chosen, but one defined. And Touraine struggles with memories of the lash (real and metaphorical), trying to show Luca that this poart of her world doesn’t want her, that Luca’s steps toward peace are a bandage on a suppurating wound.  And while she does that, Touraine is trying to work out who she is, walking beneath a sky that is so strange but familiar from childhood, looking at faces in the street that might be family and never know it, looking at a people who are part of her, but no more accepting than those who tore her away from this place to begin. 


OK, I went on a lot here. 


But these two, they orbit each other. And they show us some of the roots of structural injustice in the way they act, react, speak, move. The way that a generation after horror, even the best of intentions may not move the needle. The future is paying the price for the transgressions of the past, and it may not even realise how its options are limited. 


I want to say more, but can’t spoil it. 


But I’ll say this. The atmosphere is right. The world is right. The way that there’s a rich class of Balladaire adventurers, profiting on the backs of a people now theoretically part of their kingdom, but never, never equals. The way that elite leans on the monarchy and their armaments to enforce a rule under the threat of blood and fire, and threatens its own crisis if not appeased. The way that the third generation are a hybrid, reaching out to the conquered, trying to make something new, but still so very scarred on both sides by the past. The way that acculturation has taken hold, in street signs, in a melange of language, in code switching, language switching. The way that certain neighbourhoods have silent lines around them, and the way certain people are punished while others walk away. It’s colonial power to a T. It’s an intricate, beautifully observed world, one that makes my bones ache with its familiarity and its injustices. 


And it’s a world of conspiracy. A powder keg, waiting for the right spark to throw it into something new. 


I haven’t said enough. 


But I’ll say this. The Unbroken is one of the most thoughtful books I’ve read in years. It’s a book with a world you can recognise, a world which does not compromise in what it shows you. A world that allows you to see real people and their relationships - family, friends, royalty, conscripts - and doesn’t wave away the costs that those relationships have, or the actions that brought them about. It’sa hard story, sometimes. But also one which feels true. It’s a story which held my heart in its hands, and which brought both sorrow and joy in its journey. 


It’s a damn fine book. It asks big questions, and refuses to give easy answers. It gives you fantastic characters, and asks you to see them as people, not archetypes. It gives you rebellion and revolution and magic and gods, and asks you to think about what happened to make it so, while the muskets crack and the blood falls to the floor. It’s a book that talks about identity, and faith, and family, and what those mean, and does so with an unflinching eye for truth as well as genuine warmth.


It’s great, is what I’m saying. Read it, right now.


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