2021/043: A Country of Ghosts -- Margaret Killjoy

"‘Hron’ means ‘ghost?’ Your country is named ‘ghost?’”
Nola nodded, but Sorros answered. “When it started, I think the idea was that the whole concept of having a name, of needing to name your country, really only mattered in the context of comparing ourselves with other societies. And what are ghosts? Ghosts are invisible and you can’t hurt them, but they haunt you by the memory of their presence. The refugees really liked that angle, the idea of being an invisible country that still affects those around it." [loc. 2022]

The setting is an imaginary world with a nineteenth-century ambience, and a journalist -- Dinos Horacki -- who is tasked with reporting from a war zone. Horacki's job is to write propaganda disguised as impartial reportage, focussing on war hero Dolan Wilder and his expedition to subdue the natives in a newly-conquered area.

What Wilder doesn't know (or doesn't care about) and Horacki only slowly realises is that these aren't isolated settlements but part of an anarchist non-country called Hron. When Horacki is captured by the militia, he gets to observe this loose confederation, this 'collection of people with a somewhat-shared culture who commonly defend certain rough borders and principles', at first hand. Unsurprisingly, he becomes a convert.

Hron is a kind of Utopia, and Horacki's journey, from outsider to someone who belongs, is familiar from other utopian works. Also familiar is the way that the characters spend pages describing the political and social mores of Hron, and the starry-eyed acceptance of our narrator. There is a lot here about how an anarchist country might work: and it's beguiling, not least because Horacki, betrayed by the country in which he was born, is very ready to believe in a better way of living.

Some very likeable characters, an intriguingly hinted backstory for Horacki, and some atmospheric scenes in the mountains that reminded me, more than anything, of the British resistance in novels of Roman Britain (especially, but not only, Rosemary Sutcliff). I am still thinking about why, but it might be the clash of Empire and loose confederacy ...

Fulfils the 'By a trans author' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.