The Way of Unity

"The Way of Unity is a really interesting book. Sarah is an Australian writer. She read my first book a little while ago, and left a nice review on Goodreads for it. I looked on her profile, and noticed that she was an author as well – and she was a religious studies scholar as well, an academic. I really enjoy religious themes in my books. Religion is almost always a theme or an element in fantasy novels, as in real life – and fantasy mirrors real life. It turned out to be one of my favourite books of this year. It was brilliant. It’s from the perspective of a young woman called Sybilla, the daughter of a husband-and-wife pair of rulers called the Skalens. There are seven sets of Skalens around this seven-nation land of Velspar, which forms a religious confederation. And going around the land of Velspar is a psychic priesthood called the Intercessors, who take away what they call ‘red thoughts’: any criminal thoughts you have, or just anything that’s kind-of bad. They physically extract it from your brain, and they make you all nice and chilled out and sanguine. They worship these animals – in my head it’s a bit like a pterodactyl, but it probably isn’t, it’s probably like a massive eagle – that’s the god-father, Kshidol. Then they have Siatka, who’s the god-mother, and a sea serpent. They’ve taken these two real creatures and woven them into the story of their religion. That’s the premise. Then, in about the first ten pages, the Intercessors burn down Sybilla’s house with her family inside and kill all of them. Sybilla manages to escape. Her father had been quietly planning to purge the Intercessors – which is probably why they got murdered, to be fair – so Sybilla takes up the mantle, and she leads a pogrom of the Intercessors, and they’re all butchered. So this psychic priesthood evaporates. This all happens in the first twenty or thirty pages of the book. You don’t see this often in fantasy, because often what we’re concerned with is the big battle – especially in a series, you’ll have the antagonist and the good guys fighting and sparring and clashing and, eventually, you have the big denouement at the end in book three: the big climax. Then you always wonder, what happens after that? What happens after the big battle? Presumably, there’s a massive administrative burden that follows in the wake of it. What I really loved about this book was that we start at the end – they have this pogrom of all the Intercessors, it’s all very gruesome, and then suddenly they’re all gone. And what do we do now? Sybilla inherits this nation, which has hitherto had a very present, very visible priesthood, often close to members of the society or the village, who have performed acts of intercession and led them in worship. And people have gleefully slaughtered them. Everybody starts to think, “Oh… maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Actually, there are aspects of it I miss.” And of course, it’s all completely forbidden now on pain of death. It’s such a brilliant examination of a post-religious society in which they’ve had a bloodbath, and now have all the festering pockets of resentment. The author is brilliant, she’s thought of everything. The trade suffers – because they’ve killed off the priests, but they’ve also killed off all the people who still believed in the religion as well – so it’s a hugely decimated population. Trade is down because all the farm labourers have been killed, because they wouldn’t renounce. It’s a really skilfully considered novel. It managed the topic of religion in such a clever and nuanced way, and also made aspects of the religion very real and tangible. It wasn’t all just based on faith. There was a very real element to it, obviously fantastical, but the Intercessors could literally read and extract thoughts – so it was both about that, and about the power of belief."