A Queen Crowned In Flames, by Hazel McBride review: 'derivative'
The latest romantasy novel from Scottish author Hazel McBride reads a lot like some of the work that inspired it, writes Stuart Kelly
As a schoolboy, my class was taken to a local factory and the manager asked us what they made. We dutifully said printed circuit boards, to which he replied “wrong: we make money”. That resurfaced in my mind reading this novel. I should say at the outset that this is not so much a review as a diagnosis. “Romantasy” may be a relatively new phenomenon, but it is a remarkably successful one; splicing Tolkien – or rather the Peter Jackson cinematic version of Tolkien – with the slightly breathless erotica of Fifty Shades of Grey. I suppose there was a previous iteration in the gothic, with works like Twilight and the TV series True Blood. I’ve never liked the canard not to judge a book by its cover. Publishers don’t pay designers out of charity. Hazel McBride’s A Queen Crowned In Flames signals itself before you have read a word. If they were stripped of their titles and authors, I would be hard pushed to differentiate between this and any work by Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros.
I am well aware that I am probably not exactly the key demographic at which the book is aimed. If I didn’t have suspicions before, then reading the epigraph – “To all the women who were forced to dim their light, blind the f***ers” – rather confirmed it. So this is really an attempt to understand the phenomenon as much as judge its aesthetic merit.
A Queen Crowned In Flames continues and concludes the story which began with A Fate Forged In Fire. Our heroine, Aemyra Daercathian, has lost in her attempt to regain the throne and return the people of Erisocia to worship of the Goddesses. She has been tortured, lost her magic and her husband has betrayed her, to align with the theocratic forces of “the Savior”. It’s worth parsing some of these names. I am unsure if “Savior” is an Americanism or an orthographic nod at olde worlde otherness – the book does have messages sent to caisteals by swyfts. It is passing strange that some words aren’t made archaic. “Phuq” might have helped.
“Erisocia” is like a hybrid of Eire and Scotia, and the author is keen to stress her inspiration is taken from her “Scottish heritage and Celtic folklore”. (That might be why her dog is called Whiskey and not Whisky; and a note to publishers – “quirky” biographies are as irritating as circles rather than points over the letter “i”). As for “Aemrya Daercathian”: the “ae” is a clear homage to George RR Martin, with his Aemon and Aegon and Daenerys and Daemon; the surname has the same lilt as their surname, Targaryen. I haven’t even mentioned yet that she has a dragon, as has her enemy-to-lover-to-traitor husband Fiorean, whom she has vowed to kill. That McBride started out writing House of the Dragon fanfic is unsurprising, but having lines like “To stand up to death and tell Hela ‘not today’” seems insufficiently distanced from Syrio Forel in the original A Game of Thrones telling Arya Stark “What do we say to the Lord of Death? Not today”. I confess that McBride calling the tartan Taliban zealots “the Covenanters” irked more than a little.
This book does not – and I don’t know if this is a virtue or not – seem at all abashed at being derivative. It is not just Martin: different families can be bonded to different mythological creatures – phoenixes, chimeras, a throwaway reference to griffins – which has overtones of Philip Pullman, or even Katherine Rundell. The telepathic link between human and creature is also a convenient plot device to allow and validate certain perspectives. Something is indisputable if “seen” through other eyes. The fraught relationship between those with magic – the Dùileach – and those without is mirrored by Muggles and in works by Susannah Clarke and Charlie Fletcher. But the point about cliché is that it persists and survives because it works. The publisher’s motto is “Books That Break Rules”, but “Stick To The Formula” might be more apposite.
The plot has the usual reversals of fortune and archetypal encounters, with the emphasis of post-traumatic triumphalism. The “bi-furious” Aemyra is very much the girl-boss, saying things like “I no longer want anyone in possession of a cock making decisions” or “Going somewhere, boys?... Tell your Savior I say hello” before dispatching various priests. I suppose one could make a defence of righteous indignation, but in a world that increasingly requires subtlety, empathy and a rejection of strident polarisation it feels a little jejune; or more young than adult.
Nobody approaches these books expecting the prose style of Virginia Woolf, or even Lauren Beukes, but I do wonder about the extent of editing. In the first ten pages, “The cloying taste of blood painted the roof of Aemyra’s mouth” (the opening sentence), then “congealed blood painting the green scales of his neck”, then the dragon is “painting the clearing crimson”. There’s also a grammatical mistake: “the one who currently sat the throne”, p. 5. If anyone were to say that’s just pernickety and snobbish, I would counter that there is no need to flatter me.
A final note: I have never beforehand read a novel with a “trigger warning” from the author (“violence, off-page sexual assaults, as well as explorations of anxiety and panic attacks”). Curious that the text ends with “About the Type”, acknowledging Eric Gill for the Perpetua Font. Eric Gill, whose diaries record his incest with his sister, his paedophilic abuse of his daughters and acts of bestiality with the family dog. No trigger warning though.
A Queen Crowned In Flames, by Hazel McBride, Renegade, £25
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