The Costa-winning children’s writer Frances Hardinge is known for the fascinating strangeness of her settings: The Lie Tree’s stifling Victorian society conceals a plant nourished by deceit, and A Face Like Glass takes place in an underworld where wines can extract memories and perfumes enforce trust. Whether they are wholly invented or rippled glass visions of familiar history, however, her worlds are navigated by characters who stay human to the marrow – flawed, cowardly, doubtful, determined, unprincipled and brave. This remains true of her latest novel, Deeplight.
In the island chain of the Myriad, gods once rose from the weird waters of the Undersea, ravaging shipping and coastlines, devouring sailors. Razor-mouthed or glass-tentacled, they were a source of fear and reverence – until one day they turned on one another, and tore each other apart. Now “godware”, the powerful detritus of their corpses, is the basis of a thriving economy for those courageous and foolhardy enough to seek it in the depths.
On the island of Lady’s Crave, 14-year-old Hark scrapes a precarious living scavenging godware with Jelt, his unscrupulous best friend. When one of Jelt’s schemes misfires, Hark is left indentured to a scientist, and a new opportunity opens up for him: he might acquire an education, giving him agency, worth and independence. Jelt, though, is unwilling to let him leave, and during another reckless get-rich attempt he almost drowns, prompting Hark to deploy a dangerous artefact to save him, ignorant of what it might unleash.
Hardinge’s inimitable prose has the ringing clarity of cut crystal, whether in one-liners (“Hope reared its pitiless head”) or unnerving descriptions (“Talking to her was like accepting an invitation to someone’s house, only to find that the walls are made of teeth and all the doors lead to the moon”). Her layered, intricately textured world, peopled by smugglers, fanatics and priests, is filled with careful and absorbing detail; many of the Myriad’s submariners are “sea-kissed”, or deaf, for instance, necessitating a common sign language. The deftly drawn central relationship between Hark and the manipulative Jelt, impossible to refuse or leave behind, is as compelling as the widening, frightening ripple of revealed secrets about the nature of the gods and the reason they died. Like the subject of Ariel’s Song in The Tempest, Deeplight is headily “rich and strange” throughout, preoccupied with transmuted forms, the fearsome fascination of the sea, loyalty warring with self-interest, and the human yen to placate and venerate the monstrous.
• Deeplight is published by Macmillan (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
