Bacigalupi first came to the science fiction world’s attention with his debut “The Windup Girl” (2009), which followed a “calorie man” — a searcher for vanished foods — in a future Thailand. The novel won a mantelpiece’s worth of awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Campbell and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. International awards followed when the book was translated from English into other languages. Bacigalupi’s subsequent work — a diverse group that includes a second novel for adults, a YA trilogy, a story collection and a middle-grade book featuring zombie cows — received critical acclaim, but it’s been nearly a decade since he published a novel for adults.
In constructing the world of “Navola,” Bacigalupi follows the example of the Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay, who makes no effort to disguise his real-world inspirations and, indeed, hopes that our knowledge of Byzantium will enrich our enjoyment of his Sarantium, and that his Arbonne will make us book tickets to Provence. Navola, which sits on the northeast of a peninsula, is modeled on Renaissance Italy, Florence and Venice in particular. Similarly, the fallen Ammonese Empire resembles Rome; the menacing nation of Cheroux has a distinctly French flavor. The text is peppered with Italian-sounding words, like “catredanto,” a sort of cathedral, and “scriveri,” who are clerks and scriveners. Davico, our guide and narrator, is heir to the Regulai family, more or less his world’s Medicis.
Of course, not even Cosimo de’ Medici could boast that he possessed a dragon’s eye, as the Regulai family does. As a boy, Davico is entranced by the eye, which seems to hum with anger and power, but he has little time with it. Davico’s father expects him to inherit the family’s world-spanning operation, and so the boy must learn accounting, self-defense and, most important, faccioscuro, the art of hiding emotion and concealing intention.
The Regulai family strives to be charitable and generous, but its methods for maintaining power are ruthless. After an attempt is made against the family, the reprisal strikes terror throughout the city:
“Wives woke at dawn to find their husbands dead beside them, stilettos through their eyes, their heads pinned to the pillows. Sons clutched their throats and vomited black bile, mid-song in tavernae, surrounded by their closest friends.”
Davico has little desire for vendetta, but his father has decided that his sole heir will be a master of trade, politics and deception. The boy cannot resist and, so, for much of this long novel, Davico is surprisingly passive. He is trained, tutored and eventually tortured; he is outplayed at cards and conspiracy, and is alternately the victim and the beneficiary of serpentine plots, but never the instigator of them. His great passion is for his adopted sister, Celia, a vibrant and inscrutable young woman taken into the family after her biological father crossed the Regulais and was exiled for his trouble. But even Davico’s probably ill-fated pursuit of Celia is fumbling and erratic; only toward the end of this novel, wounded and alone, does he find the inner strength that will, presumably, propel him through subsequent books. That dragon’s eye, too, is sure to play a vital role.
The promotional copy for “Navola” unsurprisingly proclaims its similarity to “Game of Thrones,” but those comparisons may do it a disservice. Yes, as in Martin’s novels and HBO’s adaptations, there are betrayals, mutilations, retaliations, sudden deaths, miraculous reverses, plots and counterplots. The protagonist even has a dog named Lazy that is just as loyal as, but far less violent than, Martin’s direwolves. But though there are moments of brutality, Bacigalupi offers fewer Grand Guignol shocks; he proceeds at a statelier pace and with more elegant prose. “Navola” lingers on Davico’s privileged childhood and education. The first real glimmer of the plot occurs 40 pages in, and it’s another few hundred pages before we learn the extent of his father’s plans and the precarity of the Regulai family. But Bacigalupi writes well enough that the book would be commendable even if the protagonist’s idyll continued to its last page.
At the end of this first volume, Davico leaves the city of his birth in reduced circumstances and with much haste. Almost all of “Navola” takes place within the confines of the eponymous city; by the end, it seems that Davico will make his way through the wider world. Over the course of this long novel, Bacigalupi shares the names of many other invented cities and states, from Avillion to Zurom. We can only hope that each one of these locales receives a novel as rich and engrossing as “Navola.”
Matthew Keeley is a freelance writer who has written for Reactor and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
