2021/092: Spellhaven -- Sandra Unerman

'...that is how magic is done, by taming spirits?’
The mugs of ale rattled on the table between them and Violante’s head jerked as though at a tug on her hair. She said, calmly, ‘Tame is the wrong word. Learning to deal with the spirits, to humour and engage with them, that is what magic is.’ [loc. 598]

Summer 1914: Jane Fairchild, an accomplished flautist, receives an unwelcome approach from a strange young man -- and finds herself compelled to journey to Spellhaven, a magical island untethered from the world she knows. Spellhaven is sustained by the magic of bound spirits, the Unseen Audience who must be appeased with song, dance, art and theatre. Jane's role, like that of so many in the city, is to keep the Unseen Audience happy. But Jane is stubborn: she refuses a contract with Lucian Palafox, the man who brought her to Spellhaven, and instead makes a deal with Lucian's rival Bohemond. Jane agrees to serve the Audience, to be part of Bohemond's company, in exchange for being taught magic.

Naturally, this does not proceed as Jane had hoped. She comes to understand the bargains and bonds that maintain Spellhaven, and she encounters people -- beings -- who seem to exist outside those bargains. And when cataclysm strikes, she finds herself back in wartime England with a horde of refugees ...

I loved the worldbuilding here, the echoes of faerie isles such as Hy Brazil, the notion of art as payment for magic. There was a dreamy, unanchored sense of the passage of time, both in Spellhaven and after Jane's return to London. Sometimes an hour might pass between scenes, sometimes several months. However, I didn't really engage with Jane, whose angry detachment from Spellhaven life was entirely believable but also somewhat distancing. It wasn't always easy to relate to her emotions, or to understand her actions. And I was alienated by the way that she seemed to have no emotional ties in England: "Could she have written? Jane had never thought of it... She had not missed her family and she had not considered their feelings for a moment." [loc. 3551] When she does form an emotional bond, it seems to come from nowhere.

Despite these criticisms, and the occasional inelegant or unpolished sentence ('Jane put her fists in her mouth to stop herself screaming'), I enjoyed the novel very much, and was especially intrigued by the hints of Spellhaven's rich history, and the interactions with the 'real' world beyond the encircling mists. And I went straight on to Unerman's other novel set in the same world, Ghosts and Exiles.

Purchased 2019 after meeting (and being on a panel with) the author at Eastercon...