2022/123: Middlegame — Seanan McGuire

...if they wanted to control the elemental forces of creation, they shouldn't have turned us into people. People have their own agendas.[loc. 6181]

Roger and Dodger (yes, rhyming names suck) live on opposite sides of the USA. As children, they discover that they can communicate telepathically, or possibly by quantum entanglement. Roger is good with words: Dodger (who's a girl) is a maths prodigy. They want to meet up, but Roger's parents in particular don't seem at all keen on the idea. Only when they're in their late teens do they end up at Berkeley as post-grads -- and there they begin to realise that they are part of a vast alchemical experiment, an attempt to manifest the Doctrine of Ethos.

Of course there's more to it than that. Dodger's housemate Erin was also one of a pair, but her twin was killed by the project's director, James Reed. Reed himself is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, created by talented alchemist Asphodel Baker more than a century before Roger and Dodger were born. Baker was also the author of a beloved series of children's books, encoding her alchemical teachings in a fable reminiscent of Oz or Narnia. Of course her teachings were suppressed. Of course she was killed before her experiments could come to fruition. Of course Reed has twisted Baker's ideals for his own purposes. And of course he has a malevolent sidekick.

I enjoyed this novel immensely whilst I was reading, though I found myself skimming the chapters that didn't focus on Roger, Dodger or Erin. I began to have a suspicion about the structure of the narrative quite early on: Middlegame opens with what seems to be the end of Roger and Dodger's story, and we revisit variations of that scene throughout the novel. It's important to pay attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter, as the story moves backward and forward through time.

Middlegame is oddly insular. I don't think there's much, if any, mention of the world beyond the USA, and there's little reference to the major real-world' events of the 20th / 21st century (9/11, for example). I wasn't wholly convinced by the villains' goals or motivations; I found myself caring more about the fate of Bill the cat than about some of the human characters; and I found some of Roger's behaviour towards Dodger deeply unpleasant. He keeps walking away, breaking faith, prioritising his own belief that they're too dangerous to be together over Dodger's emotional attachment to him. There's a scene near the end in which Roger abuses his power over Dodger in a way that I found extremely unsettling.

All those criticisms aside, I found Middlegame fascinating, engaging and very moving. I'm planning to read the second in the series, Seasonal Fears, quite soon. (Also, Bill is fine.)

Fulfils the ‘Has the word “game” in the title’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.