The elevator pitch can be difficult for any book, but perhaps even more so for fantasy novels. It’s a significant challenge to boil down strange new worlds and intricate magic systems into an attention-grabbing sentence or two.
But allow me to present the best elevator pitch for a fantasy novel I’ve ever heard: Victorian missionaries endeavour to convert fairies to Christianity. A stroke of pure brilliance.
You might fear the execution could never match such a superb premise, but fortunately, Jeannette Ng delivers with aplomb – an especially impressive feat considering Under the Pendulum Sun was her debut, earning her what was previously known as the John W Campbell award for best new writer (now called the Astounding award for best new writer, thanks, in no small part, to Ng’s acceptance speech last year). It’s a twisted fever dream, a theological musing, and a remarkable homage to the gothic tradition.
As evidenced by the success of works by Holly Black, Karen Marie Moning, Julie Kagawa and Sarah J Maas, among others, the fae are the mythical creatures of the hour. Sometimes they’re portrayed as monstrous, sometimes as tricksters, sometimes as sensuous love interests. In Under the Pendulum Sun, the fairies are malicious, Unseelie types, with Ng pressing her own seal into them by intertwining Celtic influences with Abrahamic lore.
Ng is a careful, detail-oriented worldbuilder with a flair for atmospheric description. In her vision of the 19th century, humankind has a brittle relationship with the fae, who dwell in the eldritch land of Arcadia. Catherine “Cathy” Helstone sails for the enigmatic Faelands in search of her brother, the Rev Laon, who has vanished while trying to take the Word of God to Queen Mab and her deranged court. Upon her arrival, Cathy finds herself consigned to Gethsemane, an unnerving castle of mysteries, to wait for news of Laon. Her companions are the changeling Ariel Davenport and Mr Benjamin, a gnome, who is the Reverend’s only convert.
“Remember, no walking down the corridor when it’s dark,” he warns Cathy. “No looking behind the emerald curtain. No staring portraits in the eye. No eating things without salt. And no trusting the Salamander.” After weeks of suffocating confinement, Cathy finally welcomes Laon back to Gethsemane – and what follows is a slow unfurling of sinful desire, madness and murder, all haunted by the spectre of Mab, the devious queen.
Each chapter begins with an excerpt from an arcane text, including real Victorian texts that have been tailored to Ng’s alternate reality. Like Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Under the Pendulum Sun captures the tone and style of literature of the century it unfolds in; Ng credits the Brontë sisters and the Romantics in her acknowledgments. And the pendulum sun of the title, a great lantern that swings over Arcadia and makes time hard to reckon, is in itself a remarkable feat of worldbuilding. With her characteristic attention to detail, Ng sought advice from “the nearest approximation of a physicist” to nail down the specifics, which she details in an article called The Science of the Pendulum Sun – a read as fascinating as the book itself.
The stomach-turning twist at the end of the novel may leave you desperate for a shower, but also in awe of Ng’s masterful and inventive fusion of history, science, literature and myth. Like a ghost roaming the moors, it still haunts me – the mark of a true Gothic masterpiece.
