Review: The Incandescent

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've heard this book referred to as "anti-Hogwarts": that is, a magic boarding school tale told from the viewpoint of the teachers, not the students. There have been a spate of so-called "dark academia" books recently, including R.F. Kuang's fantastic Babel and Naomi Novik's more YA-oriented Scholomance trilogy. But again, these books all carry the viewpoints and concerns of the students. This book, on the other hand, consistently reflects the problems and concerns of the teachers. It also was obviously written by a teacher, and it overflows with the care and love a good teacher has for her students.

And she deserved it. She was brilliant. It was hard to quantify the difference between a merely very intelligent student and a brilliant one. It didn't show up in a list of exam results. Sometimes, in fact, brilliance could be a disadvantage--when all you needed to do was neatly jump through the hoop of an examiner's grading rubric without ever asking why. It was the teachers who knew, the teachers who felt the difference. A few times in your career, you would have the privilege of teaching someone truly remarkable; someone who was hard work to teach because they made you work harder, who asked you questions that had never occurred to you before, who stretched you to the very edge of your own abilities. If you were lucky--as Walden, this time, had been lucky--your remarkable student's chief interest was in your discipline: and then you could have the extraordinary, humbling experience of teaching a child whom you knew would one day totally surpass you.

I'm not necessarily fond of the hoary old adage write what you know, but in this case, by doing that, Emily Tesh knocks it out of the park. Of course, most teachers aren't required to teach magical students whose very existence and power attracts demons. But in this magical alternate history, these students exist, and the centuries-old boarding school Chetwood (and isn't that just the most British name?) is where our protagonist Sapphire Walden lives and works. She is the school's Director of Magic, and this deliberate, slowly unfolding story tackles the aforementioned brilliant students and the demons they attract.

This world's magic system isn't bright or flashy, and sometimes borders on the mundane--that is, until it doesn't. This creates an interesting tension throughout the book, the juxtaposition of Walden's regimented everyday life and the wild uncontrollable presence of the demons she must defend the school against:

School and not-school, private and public, and most importantly land and water; The places we belong, Walden might have said to a class, and the places we do not. Magic followed logical, consistent, learnable internal rules--until it did not; until you ran into the woolly edges where everything depended on the perceptions of the magician. It annoyed some students immensely. Walden had always found it delightful: beyond all the rules and systems so carefully worked out by so many scholars over so many centuries, at the boundaries of knowledge, a space full of beautiful mystery.

There are a few scenes of magical battle, but this is mostly a slow-burning character study of Saffy Walden. A rather clever way to tip us off to the main character's interior changes is how she is referred to in the story: for most of it, she insists on being called Doctor Walden or just Walden. It's only at the end, after her own hubris regarding her abilities has brought her down, that the name she is called on the page abruptly shifts: now, she is Saffy. A Saffy who feels humbled and vulnerable, and ready to embark on a serious relationship with the demon-hunting Marshal Laura Kenning.

This primary emphasis on character, and grown-up characters at that, does mean that this is not a fast-paced story. If you're looking for something slam-bang and sulfur-tinged, this is not that book. (I also appreciated the fact that like her first book, the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory, this is a stand-alone, complete story.) But if you want a book suffused with the love of teaching and learning, where Saffy's core of being a teacher is the story's main theme (as she puts it in a striking conversation with a higher-level demon, the Phoenix: "I am a teacher," Walden said at last. "This is what I do. And I choose to do it well."), you might want to pick this up.

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