In truth magic had always had a slightly un-English character, being unpredictable, heedless of tradition and profligate with its gifts to high and low. [p. 22]
I'd started this novel several times and hadn't engaged: it must have been a case of 'right book, wrong time' because when I settled down with it, I was delighted. Yes, the premise (Regency England, with magicians) is reminiscent of other works, most notably Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but the execution is very different. Cho's protagonists -- Zacharias Wythe, a freed slave who has become Sorcerer Royal, and Prunella Gentleman, a young woman whose English father and Indian mother are both dead, leaving her to assist at a school for 'gentlewitches' -- have to maintain good manners in the face of constant microaggressions. Their guardians (Sir Stephen, who purchased Zacharias -- though not his parents -- as a boy; Mrs Daubeney, who tells Prunella to eat with the servants) have given them some degree of social standing, but have also made it extremely clear that this kind benevolence is contingent on good behaviour. And both have secrets: Prunella's concerns the stones she has, more or less, inherited from her parents, while Zacharias has made a terrible bargain with his late master's familiar, the dragon Leofric.
British magic is draining away, a crisis that most members of the Society for Unnatural Philosophers blame on 'woolly Afric' Zacharias. Zacharias, having identified the proximate cause for the decline in magic if not the rationale behind it, is saved from a magical assassination attempt by Prunella. In turn, he agrees to bring her to London and help her learn magic -- an option not usually available to young women, since magic is very much a man's world in the British Empire. Indeed, the most-practiced spell at Mrs Daubeney's school is the 'seven shackles', which 'If practised regularly, the exercise will extinguish seven of the most common types of magic of which the mortal frame is capable'.
Enter Mak Genggang, a powerful witch who has come from Malaysia by way of Fairyland to confront the Sultan of Janda Baik about his attempts to enlist the Society's help against a group of female magicians. She provides Prunella and Zacharias with a great deal of food for thought. Not least among her pronouncements is that 'all the greatest magic comes down to blood,... and who knows blood better than a woman?': an axiom which enables Prunella to unlock the secrets of her heritage, and incidentally be one of the few Regency heroines to allude to menstruation.
The women in this novel are seldom helpless, and are determined to get what they want. Prunella, in particular, is ruthless and (according to Zacharias) amoral: there's one incident which made me queasy, where she's faced with a deadly choice and chooses the lesser (but in some ways less forgiveable) sacrifice.
Sorcerer to the Crown depicts a magical crisis and features a romantic sub-plot, but it also addresses colonialism, sexism and racism, There are some horribly credible period-typical attitudes here, and the measured cadences of Cho's prose don't make it any more palatable: but there is also an ending that is both traditionally happy and narratively satisfying. I'm now looking forward to reading The True Queen.
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