Rob McMinn's Reviews > Navola

(This is a review of an ARC from Netgalley and the publisher Head of Zeus.)

A weird one this. I suppose you’d file it under F-for-fantasy: there is a dragon’s eye on the cover, after all. But in this world, which is something like Renaissance Italian City States through a glass darkly, the dragons seem long gone, and the eye is a relic, a fossil—or is it? The publishers call it “literary fantasy”, so this is like lit-fantasy or fantasy-lit(e).
It’s surprising, anyway, how many literary classics contain genre elements. Ghosts at windows, uncanny omniscience, time loops… For me, Navola resembles historical fiction. It’s like one of those recipes where you add a mere grating of truffle: historical fiction with a hint of dragon.
Our viewpoint character is Davico di Regulai, only son of a powerful family of bankers. (Think the Medicis, and Florence and plotting and poison and stilettos.) Navola is a city state republic, ruled by 100 prominent people, but the most prominent of them all is Davico’s father Devonaci, who plays 4-dimensional chess: not only does he manipulate you now, but he knows what you will do when you decide to defy him further down the line. The great banker has trusted friends: an assassin as well as an administrator on his staff, and soldiers, as well as a slave-consort who runs his household. On the other hand, he is surrounded by enemies, and you never know who is going to turn on you with poison, dagger, or poisoned dagger.
Davico is a reluctant heir; he’d rather be out in the woods gathering herbs and fungi and learning to be a physician. He reminds me of Prince Herbert in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“I just want to… sing!”). But a bodyguard follows wherever he goes, and learn the family business he must. Most importantly, he needs to learn how to read the people who will always be asking for money and looking for ways not to repay it. One worry he obviously has is who to trust. His father’s men protect him, but they serve his father—and who of his own generation will be as loyal and trustworthy? He is alone, frequently unhappy, and (as you might expect if you read a lot of fantasy) slow on the uptake. Like Fitz in Robin Hobb’s Farseer series, or Simon in Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. But at least those two have the excuse of being of “low” birth. Davico is one of those characters who stretches your credulity because you think, oh, come on, surely you’ve learned by now?
One noble who tries it on with Devonaci ends up losing almost everything, including his older daughter Celia, who is taken as a hostage and adopted as Davico’s sister. She is a pawn in the great game, of course, and about halfway through I started worrying for her future. I was thinking of Lucrezia de’ Medici, married at 14 to the Duke of Ferrara and dead shortly after her 16th birthday. Dead, according to Robert Browning, because she smiled too easily.
A feature of Navola is the frequent use of words and phrases which (forgive my ignorance) seem to be in a kind of mediaeval Italian dialect or kind-of Latin. You can usually tell what they mean from the context, or from repetition, or simply because they’re repeated in English, but I wonder if the final published version of this will have a glossary, or some kind of Author’s Note explaining the dialect. You get words like exomentissimo, which if you put in a space between exo and the rest means (in Latin) something like “I went out of my mind” or (from the context), “I was out of my mind”. I didn’t find it annoying, but curiosity did drive me to the Latin translator in the app on my phone rather than the built-in Kindle translator, which can’t manage Latin.
The (576 print pages) book feels like a labour of love, but here’s what I wonder. There’s been a lot of discourse lately about worldbuilding on the socials, with lots of back and forth about following rules, and so on. Someone mentioned M John Harrison’s (since deleted but much quoted) critique of world building, which seemed to be along the lines of: too much worldbuilding gets in the way of writing. The choice line is that worldbuilding is, “the great clomping foot of nerdism.” I do see the argument. I teach my students about how readers are the ones who create meanings, a theory that has had various names: reception theory, text world theory, and so on. The point is, that a writer can provide a mere sketch of a world and the reader can fill it in. The flipside of that is that the author can’t control reception, so what the reader fills in might be… different.
But epic fantasy tends to go in for hundreds of pages of expository world-building, giving us the history, the religion, the culture, and more. It’s what fantasy fans expect. There’s a scene early in Navola, when Davico’s tutor in all things banking, Merio, takes him outside for a look at a mural and an information dump of family history.
It’s a hard balance to strike. Here am I asking for a glossary of not-quite-Italian dialect (and I’d love a map, too), while at the same time wishing we could just be thrown into the deep end of the world and work it out as we go.
When I read Lord of the Rings, as I have done on several occasions, I know by now that I can skim/skip through loads of pages that deliver lore and history that I just don’t need. On the other hand, there’s power in letting the reader become familiar with the lead character and his world, and allowing the stakes and the tension to build up in what feels like a naturalistic way. We’re here to be in this fully-realised world and not charging full pelt for the ending.
So: I’d recommend this if you find many fantasy tropes overwhelming—or overused. As I said above, this feels like a historical novel that dips its toes in fantasy. Don’t come here anticipating magicians and portals; expect something more like Renaissance intrigue. For sure, there is that dragon’s eye (and on the very first page), but what it is and why it is there is something you will have to wait for.