I Read Books: White Crow

White Crow is a compilation of three stories and three novels by Mary Gentle from the early 90s. Valentine White Crow, Scholar-Soldier of the Invisible College, and her lover/husband/pest Balthasar Causabon spend two stories and the first novel Rats and Gargoyles in a bonkers fantasy world filled with ideas from 17th century hermetic magic (and also elsewhere). So the city at the heart of the world has five cardinal directions, each at 90 degrees to each other; the extra direction, aust, allows every district to back onto the Fane, the home of the Decans, the thirty six gods who rule the world. The city is actually ruled by a rat king, and there’s a bunch of plotting between humans, human sized rats, humans from outside the city and, well, everyone and everything.

It’s a bit complex is what I’m saying.

The other two novels are Left To His Own Devices (Jacobean flavoured cyberpunk) and The Architecture Of Desire (rape and regret in a magic-flavoured English Civil War with gender-swapped King Charles and Oliver Cromwell). Valentine and Balthasar slip not-quite effortlessly through time and space, and much less effortlessly through their lives with each leaving and betraying the other at times, though they continue to find each other irresistible.

(The third story is about rats and the exploration of the East Pole, and does not have Valentine and Balthasar, but is clearly in (very nearly) the same world as Rats and Gargoyles)

This is visceral and brutal, and has an intense physicality. Balthazar in particular is both tall (six foot five, my own height) and enormously fat (not me, though I’m working on it), and continually eating and drinking; he always has some food in a pocket to chew on, except when he doesn’t and complains that he is hungry.

Read This: For complex, powerful fantasy that cares a lot about time and place, but not in the normal ways.
Don’t Read This: If violence, including sexual assault, and other outrages, described in intimate, shocking terms puts you off.