2023/088: Salt on the Midnight Fire — Liz Williams

“All the people in the otherlands seem so marginalised. Scraping together bits and pieces of territory to live in.”
“Not just the otherlands,” Serena said. “If you walk along Regent’s Canal, bang smack in the middle of the city, you’ll see people living in benders and tents.” [loc. 2962]

Fourth and final novel in the Fallow Sisters quartet: this is very much a summer book, and I was pleased to be able to read it on a hot summer afternoon. Ideally, of course, I should have been on a beach somewhere in the West Country ... Salt on the Midnight Fire deals with the ongoing struggle for leadership of the Wild Hunt, and with the magical abduction of a child by a chilly, red-headed personage, and with wreckers and pirates on the Cornish coast: the Morlader, a supernatural figure who preys on souls, is making a play for hunting rights over the Hunt's ancestral territory. ('Rights we have held since the end of the ice,' retorts the Hunt's leader.) Meanwhile the Fallow sisters deal with disappearances, childbirth, and a fearsome Flea.

I preordered Salt on the Midnight Fire, read most of it on publication day, and broke off to reread the previous novels in the quartet before finishing this finale. I enjoyed it very much: I like the sisters and their various friends and acquaintances; I am constantly surprised and charmed that the author notices things that matter to me (the Southwark Cathedral cat!); the otherlands are reminiscent of other protomythic realms such as Mythago Wood, but rather less brutal; Williams' descriptions of landscape are magificent ('the light pouring down onto the land as if from an upturned cup, leaching the fields and hills into a sequence of faded green and tawny and mauve, with the sea silver in the distance') and her dialogue comfortable with colloquial rhythm. This is not, quite, our reality. Brexit is noted as something not to be mentioned in Cornwall; the Ever Given's sojourn in the Suez is namedropped, but there is no Covid pandemic. Pratchett's novels exist, but while there's a gender-swapped production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'blockbusting fantasy TV series' that the Titania-actress starred in is certainly not Game of Thrones.

While the main plot threads are nicely (if sometimes rapidly) resolved, there are a number of dangling plot threads that I hope the author will weave into further works: Nick Wratchell-Hynes' romantic relationship (though it may be hinted), Nan's baby, Bill's household... The quartet is a delightful creation, and I really hope Williams returns to this setting.