Books I Didn't Finish: Mordew

When it comes to books, I’m extremely basic. I have bought many books based solely on their nice cover designs, and I will likely continue to do this until the moment of my death. I wouldn’t say the actual contents of the book are completely irrelevant, but there’s a lot of leeway.

Mordew by Alex Pheby seemed like the best of both worlds: style and substance. Firstly, it’s got a really nice cover illustration, and it’s one of those ones that goes all the way to the edge of the cover, which I like. The book itself is pleasingly chunky and yet also compact, with a great hand-feel. A+ so far.

Then there’s the back cover synopsis. Check this shit out:

“GOD LIES DEFEATED, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew.

On the surface, the streets of this the sea-battered city are slick with the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns - creatures that die and are swept down from the Merchant Quarter by the brooms of the workers and relentless rains, where they rot in the slums.

There, a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud - until one day his mother, desperate and starving, sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew.

The Master derives his power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength – and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. If only Nathan can discover how to use it.

So it is that the Master begins to scheme against him - and Nathan has to fight his way through the betrayals, secrets, and vendettas of the city where God was murdered, and darkness reigns…”

Right? Doesn’t that sound interesting?

As an added bonus, the book represents a heretical crossing of streams, as it was published by an outfit better known for literary works and was longlisted for something called The Republic Of Consciousness Prize, which I gather is considered a fairly big deal; thus, there’s a bunch of hilariously snooty reviews from big-time litheads turning their noses up at this craven work of fantasy masquerading as a serious big-boy book. I was absolutely ready to like it, based on this alone.

Unfortunately I didn’t finish Mordew, because it’s extremely boring.

The book’s opening chapters are among the most promising I’ve ever read. Our protagonist, Nathan Treeves, lives in an utterly wild setting, a slum covered in “Living Mud” that births mindless fleshy homunculi, which the slum residents hunt and sell for subsistence. The massive sea-wall surrounding the city is constantly assaulted by firebirds sent by a mysterious Mistress, opposed to the Master who presides over Mordew. Said Master lives in a vast machine-mansion at the top of a winding road of black glass.

It’s completely demented, like someone trying to turn the absurd worlds of Little Nightmares or Limbo into a coherent fantasy setting. The early plot kicks off rapidly: Nathan’s Dad has been infested with deadly lungworm, they can’t afford medicine, his desperate mother sells him into the Master’s service. There’s a Dickensian trip up the glass road in the back of a cage, a big bucket that carries the boys up to a washroom, the discovery that one of the servant-boys is actually a girl in disguise...apart from the really strong middle-grade-novel vibes (more about that later), this is all highly entertaining.

Then Nathan stands before the Master, who...rejects him as a servant and sends him packing back to the slum, whereupon Nathan ends up right back where he started on page one.

Oh. 

Unfortunately this lack of narrative momentum isn’t alleviated by the next three-hundred-odd pages of relatively dense text, in which Nathan joins a gang and then bounces around having random encounters with mysterious unnamed characters, who say vague mysterious things implying that some sort of mystery is occurring and will be revealed, eventually, at some point. I got tired of this long before I found out what the mystery was.

Well over a third of the way through the book the story has essentially not advanced at all beyond the point where Nathan joins the gang; there’s no real plot, just multiple repetitions of the fact that Nathan’s “Spark” is special and connected in some way with Mordew’s past, and that the Master has some kind of interest in him because of it. Is that interest hostile or benign? No idea. Who’s the guy with the teardrop tattoo and why does Nathan’s mother know him? No idea. What’s with the ram’s-head motif Nathan keeps seeing all over the city? No idea. What’s the big secret Nathan’s parents are apparently keeping from him? Why do ghosts keep recognizing Nathan? Why did his dad warn him never to use his Spark? What was the scroll that Gam steals from a safe at one point, and why does he try to hide it from the others?

These are meant to be the questions pulling the reader through the story, but in the absence of anything actually happening they become the story. The specific point where I stopped reading came when Nathan, following yet another vague incident in which a character does something mysterious that they refuse to explain for unknown reasons, wanders back home for the fifth or sixth time because he has nothing better to do at that moment. The plot is something that happens to him, after all, so he just needs to hang around and wait.

This is the book’s biggest flaw, but it’s not the only one. At around the same time that the story momentum plummets off a cliff, the setting is revealed to not actually be as interesting as it appeared to be at first, as Mordew outside of the slums and the Master’s house is a fairly conventional 19th-century fantasy world with a smattering of magic and supernatural elements.

And when the book does introduce more interesting ideas, it doesn’t do a lot with them. One of the members of the gang Nathan joins is a pair of fraternal twins who occupy the same location in space simultaneously, which supposedly allows them to do neat things like duplicate items. But we never actually see them doing anything interesting with this, and then they die after having had almost no impact on the plot.

(Incidentally, this represents another instance of a character in a genre novel with they/them pronouns who’s some sort of supernatural or non-human entity instead of just a non-binary person; this may well have been completely unintentional on the author’s part, but it’s an unfortunate trend I’ve been noticing lately).

I mentioned earlier that the opening chapters felt like a middle-grade novel; I strongly suspect that Mordew was originally conceived as a children’s novel on the darker end of the spectrum, a la His Dark Materials, before being converted into an adult fantasy book via the application of grittier elements and the addition of about three hundred and fifty extra pages. My assumption is that in the original version Nathan wasn’t rejected by the Master and the story proceeded towards wherever it eventually ends up going at a much quicker pace, taking place more within the Master’s estate than the mean streets of Mordew.

This would also explain oddities like the character of Prissy. This is the girl Nathan meets in the Master’s house, who gets swiftly ejected from the servant lineup because the Master thinks girls have cooties. Nathan then meets her again when he joins the gang of ruffians a little later, as it turns out that she’s a member.

But here’s the thing: in the hundreds of pages following this, Nathan never asks her why she was trying to get herself hired by the Master as a servant. The reason is communicated to the reader, or at least implied (her sister is trying to force her to work at a brothel), but it’s still odd that her and Nathan never talk about it. In fact, they barely acknowledge that they’ve previously met; you could edit Prissy out of the scenes in the Master’s house and you’d only have to change a few sentences later on (actually come to think of it, you could excise the entire journey to the mansion with minimal editing; as it stands, its only function is arranging for the Master to become aware of Nathan’s existence, something that could have happened quite easily another way).

I assume this does eventually get addressed--it must, surely--but that really should have happened as soon as Nathan meets her again, especially since the circumstances raise all kinds of awkward questions. Like, one of the other boys making the trip up to the mansion is the gang’s leader, who is revealed to have been pulling some shenanigans with the “Fetch” responsible for rounding up boys for the Master; did he know Prissy was there in disguise? If he didn’t, why doesn’t he find it odd that she and Nathan already know each other? If he did, why was he so cavalier about her leaving the gang, given that he goes to quite a lot of trouble later on to keep her around?

Again, I strongly get the feeling that this is because Prissy and Nathan were both originally part of a much smaller story that was primarily about them having adventures as servants, which got crudely derailed in order to expand the plot into something much bigger and more adult-oriented.

Or alternatively, maybe I’m way off-base and Alex Pheby just thinks this is how you write a story. The screenwriters of Westworld did the same thing, and up until the third season everyone fell for it, so I guess some people find an endless succession of vague mysteries compelling.