The Wrack

by John Bierce

[HekArtemis]

I liked the Mage Errant series, but this was something else. This book is of course about a plague sweeping through a world, beginning in one city and the spreading out to the whole nation, the neighbouring nations, and maybe beyond. And when I say that the book is about a plague, I mean that. The plague, The Wrack, is the main focus of the story.

We have no true main character. We have a few characters who are POV more than once, but they are not really MCs imo. I didn't count them, but there has to be like 20 different POV characters. Most of the characters we get a POV of are only POV for one chapter, that's it. We hear from them never again, we might not even discover if they get the plague, survive the plague and its aftermath. We simply see a snippet of their lives during this horrific moment in time.

And that is what I loved about this book. The main premise seemed, to me, to be just to look at what life is like for people during such a crazy period of time. What they are dealing with is much worse and scarier than covid-19, and that makes these snippets of peoples lives all that more interesting. How much worse could it be than what we are dealing with in real life? So much worse.

Some of the stories are truly scary, or they were to me. The chapter with Deirdre and Annica was, heartrendingly terrifying. Wow. The way Deirdre kept pacing back and forth, counting her steps, needing to get that perfect number of steps each time. It felt so real. And the terror of Annica. The chapter about Ida, Otto, and the other guy whose name escapes me (ironic) was so amazing. Not scary exactly, but bittersweet in a way, it's not happy, or hopeful, it's quite depressing and sad, but it's also sweet. It's also one that really drives home the importance of the names to these people. The story of the kid in the tower taking down the names and then dreams of becoming more than he is, of actually doing something in life. Damn.

I found the magic system to be super interesting too, very rule based magic system and has consequences but is accessible to anyone willing to make a sacrifice. But more I really loved the way the naming of things was intertwined throughout the book. Part of the religious beliefs of most of the people in this story includes the need to record the names of the dead in certain special ways so that they can essentially reach the afterlife with their ancestors. Several of the stories look deeply into how important this is to the characters and you can really feel it, how much it matters. I cried, real tears, reading about people writing down names. How can that be so?

This book will not be for everyone. Not just because of the plague content, which of course makes it bad for a lot of people right now. But also the way it is written is probably not going to work for everyone. I realised near the end what it was that called to me so much about the writing style in this book - and why it won't work for everyone - and it's simply that it is a bit Tolkien-like. By which I mean, those parts near the end of LOTR where Tolkien goes super formal to discuss things like what Aragorn decides to do with Beregond and Faramir, or that chapter in the Houses of Healing. That dreamy formality is very present in The Wrack and it's probably going to turn off people who don't like that sort of thing. I happen to love it, when it's done well. And here I think it is done amazingly well, the story it is used with suits it perfectly. The focus of snippets of life suits it perfectly.

All that to say, I really loved this book, it was amazing and beautiful and sad and weird and depressing and sweet and it even made me laugh a couple times (the hen costume, man, that's so mean). Some people are going to love this book like I have, but some are not going to jive with it. I think this one could be very polarising in that way.

(The Wrack is part of the Mage Errant universe and I picked up on that immediately when I read the words "a twisting maze in the mist" out of which monsters come. Hmm what could that be?)