Review: Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For a genre that’s supposed to be – at some level – about unfettered imagination, an awful lot of fantasy is lock step and frozen. I grew up with a generation of Tolkien wannabes, like Stephen R. Donaldson, and then watched as the whole concept got frozen into something called “high fantasy” where some generic kingdom, governed by some gradually less obscure set of magical laws, played host to an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil. The “rules” of the game got so predictable, that we could hold it against the writers who broke them.

Meanwhile, the best of the genre – like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell or The Night Circus – is all about imagining fresh new contexts for fantasy, about taking original contexts and coming at them with fresh eyes and genuine originality.

Naomi Novi’s Spinning Silver falls between those two, but it’s closer to the genuinely original side of things, and I’m glad to see it. On the one hand, this does turn out to be a collision between fire and ice, an idea that goes only so far in this summer of Game of Thrones.

On the other, this is both distinctly Jewish and feminist in a context where it’s almost always male and Christian. Our heroine, Miryem, isn’t merely identified as Jewish, but her powers grow out of the stereotypes of the Jew. She is so gifted in commerce, in the ability to “spin silver” into gold through her transactions, that she turns out to be a “vessel of high magic” in the fair kingdom. And, analogously, this is not merely a story with female protagonists, but also with a feminist sensibility that prizes the acquisition of answers – the solving of riddles – over the quests and battles that conventionally follow acquiring wisdom.

This starts a bit slowly – know that if you give it a shot – but even that can be forgiven because you don’t ordinarily see this sort of novel set in a Russian-Pale-of-Settlement modeled world. It also becomes clear after a while that this is a fairy tale that’s playing out, so it falls short of a complete interrogation of its principles. That is, it refreshingly holds up different looking models for fantasy hero(ines) but it doesn’t do much to break the good/bad dichotomy that plagues the genre.

At a bottom line, though, I not only appreciated the ambition here, but I also enjoyed the story. It may be possible to do better in the genre, but with so many falling far short of this, I’m definitely considering the next one.

(As a final note, I have read an earlier Novik, which I recall mostly enjoying as well. In that one, she reimagined a Napoleonic wartime era with warships replaced by dragons so large that they require dozens of human crew members. This one seems so different that I didn’t initially realize it was the same author.)


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