The Unspoken Name

"This was the book that made me fall back in love with high fantasy. I used to love high fantasy and then I stopped reading it for years and years—maybe I overdosed as a teenager. The Unspoken Name is about a girl called Csorwe, who is slated to be sacrificed to the cult she was raised in. Instead, she decides to run away with this wizard who has turned up and offered to adopt her, by which he means he is going to be her employer. She works for him as an assassin. This book is about Csorwe trying to prove herself to this wizard. She’s got an adopted brother who is awful. She falls in love with an academic wizard, this nerd girl who is similarly marked for death. The best way I can describe it is, if people have come across Ursula Le Guin ‘s The Tombs of Atuan, but queer, and mainly about what happens after she gets out of that tomb. Larkwood is incredibly good at the sense of the numinous and terrifying divine powers. Also, it’s very funny. I like books with jokes. I don’t care how many skeletons or even gods there are, I like some jokes. On top of being incredibly funny, this book is immersive, creepy, and well-written. You could take out the queer relationship and you would still have a fantastic book, but with the queer relationship it is just so much richer and has so much more heart. I really love it when authors are able to invoke the sense of the numinous, because I think that is very difficult. Tolkien was extremely good at it, and he was a great deal better at it than some of his successors, who wrote Dungeons & Dragons-style pantheons, where the gods are understandable and do things that are mechanically predictable. This is not to say that everyone writing in the vein of Tolkien can’t do numinosity, but Tolkien was great at the concept that we cannot understand everything that is happening with these divine powers, neither should we be able to, but what they do will affect what happens to our characters. There is an amazing scene in this book where Csorwe goes up to be sacrificed. There is this procession, and she’s having complicated feelings about dying at fourteen, and, as a reader, you’re very immersed in this cult and this life. She goes to the mountain, and you get this incredibly quiet sequence of her going into the mountain, the emptiness of the cave she goes into, the very simple way that she summons the god, and how the god comes up. That, I think, is the mark of a consummate fantasy writer. You can make me feel that there is something here that I will never understand but has moved me deeply. I think so. I’ve dealt with this in the book I have coming out, where the main character encounters alien presences. I think we need some reaction on the character’s part to what they understand this to be, even if they don’t understand it at all. Even if, like in Lovecraft’s style, their reaction is horrible fear, we need them to signpost how it feels to interact with the numinous, with the divine, rather than explaining exactly what the numinous or the divine can do. I honestly aspire to be as good as Larkwood in this."