(courtesy Penguin Random House)
If you’re going to make a fantastical world feel somewhat believable and authentic, and yes, fantasy needs to feel lived-in and humanly possible in some respects for the conceit to really stick its landing with readers, then you need three key things – taut, compelling and fully-formed world-building, robustly realised characters whose arcs matter and who feel informed by a driving, accessible humanity and a reason why a story drawn from a far-off fictitious world matters to you in everyday wherever-you-live.
The rooting of astonishingly magical and strange beasts and people and lands in something tangible and very human gives us an identifiable, meaningful entry point for a story, the sheer exotic nature of which might tantalise and entrance but never truly affect us were the more accessible elements not present.
The fact that Stacey McEwan manages to not just include all three elements in her two Glacian Trilogy books, Ledge and this year’s equally as compelling Chasm, but to go above and beyond in their execution points to just how good her writing is and how immersively mesmerising this series is overall.
There’s no doubt that the premise of the series is the very stuff of almost otherworldly fantasy perfection.
In the world of the Glacian Trilogy, two quite distinct races shares uneasy space – the fearsomely-winged, almost beast-like and ice-white Glacians who rule from a kingdom high in the mountains, and humanity who live in the warmer valley kingdom of Terrsaw below and, mysteriously, on an icy precipitous shelf known simply as The Ledge.
Hector and Gerrot will live out their remaining days hiding their true identity, lest any good folk learn that they come from the Ledge. Rivdan, Tasheem and Ryon will be attacked if found by humans and now likely Adrik, too, should he be inspired to descend from his perch. Salem, Esra and Baltisse will continue on as they have, hiding on the fringe of society.
And Dawsyn, she supposes, will need to fo something about it.
It’s not clear why a rump group of about 100 people battle it out for survival high atop the shelf where warmth is fleeting and food is a scarcity, save for some vegetables eked from the ground and food drop supplies from the Glacians from time to time.
Lest you think there’s some humanitarian element to the Glacians food drops, know that these nightmarishly cruel beasts exact a terrible price for their grudging generosity – the offering of human sacrifice which every family must make in a gruesomely dreadful act known as the Selection.
It’s a terrible way to live in every respect because whether you’re fighting for food or land or being eaten from the inside out by paranoia and fear of when your life might end in terror and great loss, nothing about your life has any real redeeming worth save for the spare numbers of friends and family you somehow acquire in spite of your horrific circumstances.
No one survives these periodic cullings until someone does, a feistily capable young woman called Dawsyn who stares down the impossible odds through inner tenacity and will to live, and the help of Ryon, a half-Glacian, who aids in her escape, make her way into climes more suitable to human habitation.
But Terrsaw itself has made a terrible bargain to stay relatively safe and unaffected and Ledge documents what happens to Dawsyn as she makes her way in a world which, on the surface feels welcoming and generous, but whose rulers have effectively sold their souls to buy peace, life and safety and who see Dawsyn as a threat to the status quo that must be extinguished.
As Chasm opens, Dawsyn sits imprisoned in the dungeon of the rulers’ palace, her fate decided.
She is to die at the hands of the autocrats who oversee Terrsaw, whose claim of selfless bargaining with terrible price to buy humanity’s relatively untroubled future has morphed into a mindset to avariciously cruel and self-serving that they don’t recognise that they are almost as much a threat to people as the Glacians themselves and that they have corrosively emptied out their humanity in order to save it.
Events conspire to ensure that Dawsyn doesn’t succumb to the fate ordained for her and while she mourns some great and terrible losses, she and her allies, whose numbers are small but mighty in intent and durable of purpose and action, begin to fight back not just against the Glacians and their terrible inheritors but against a mindset that has elevated survival above living and which sees nothing wrong with selling out everything that matters to buy a shaky and indeterminate caged future.
As fantasy goes, and it should be noted, the publishers of the Glacian Trilogy describe it as “romantasy” which exists in marketing speak alone, this series is in a class all its own possessed of world-building so fearsomely complete and expansive that it’s almost impossible not to be believe that the lands of Glacia and Terrsaw don’t exist somewhere just out there.
Equally, it possesses endlessly compelling characters like Dawsyn, who doesn’t need a man to save her – hallelujah for heroes who aren’t men and who can make it on their own, thank you very much – but who does benefit mightily from the sacrificial love and sacrificial support of the likes of gruff but loveable older inn keeper Salem, flamboyant black marketeer Esra and ancient mage with attitude Baltisse, all of whom feel wholly real and relatable despite their fantastical home and lives.
The Glacians are diving towards them.
It is an end so very like and unlike Briar’s.
An end filled with ice and fear.
But better than this. Better they go into the Chasm, than die at the hands of the enemy.
The lip appears before them, Dawsyn shuts her eyes.
Suddenly, impossibly, a hand clutches her wrist. And then the Ledge disappears.
Chasm also benefits from a robust fight for freedom, for self-determination and for truth, its narrative arc replete with the cruelty of autocracy and the violence self-interest over prioritising power acquisition and sustainability over the welfare of the subjects it purportedly exists to nurture and support.
You care about what happens to Dawsyn in Chasm not simply because she wants to fight this corrosively awful abuse of power but because she’s willing to do anything to learn how to harness the warring magical power within and to save her people from threats old, and yes just when you thought all the dominos of evil might fall, new, one of which is so horrific in its craven need to feed and be served that even pluckily determined Dawsyn, who endures a lot, a LOT, emotionally and physically in this book, begins to wonder if she is every going to get any sort of triumphant happy-ever-after.
It’s a rich and captivating story, and while is suffers a little, but only a little from The Empire Strikes Back-middle entry of a trilogy levels of lulls in action and drive, Chasm more than makes up for them with some truly intense and memorably affecting descents into the dark night of the human soul.
Chasm is fantasy done stunningly and beautifully wrought, its beguilingly readable mix of superlative world-building, fully-formed characterisation and narratively alive reason to be coming together with McEwan’s gift for remarkable rich and beautifully substantial writing to form a novel that is as far as you can get from a lacklustre sequel and which astonishes and entrances on every page and which makes the future arrival of the final instalment in the trilogy an imperative necessity that must happen yesterday.