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Deborah Hewitt’s The Nightjar: A Soaring Fantasy Debut
The opening of Deborah Hewitt’s accomplished debut, The Nightjar, is comfortably familiar, despite the extremely uncomfortable and unfamiliar things that happen to the protagonist, Alice Wyndham.
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Like Richard Meyhew in Neverwhere, Alice is swept out of her ordinary life as a not terribly successful office drone and into a hidden, magical London known as the Rookery. After an old woman gifts her with a feather (and then, horribly, dies), Alice learns she is an aviarist, a person with the vanishingly rare magical talent for seeing someone’s nightjar, a sort of bird-avatar for their soul. The nightjars called to mind the dæmons of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, who were a manifestation of one’s inner self in animal form, though nightjars lack a dæmon’s ability to speak and reason. From this familiar beginning, Hewitt builds a fascinating, unexpected magical system and mythology, in a story that is both heartfelt and captivating.
For Alice, discovering she’s an aviarist is both a relief and an affliction. When she was young, her ability to see the soul creatures was treated as a mental illness; to learn that she hadn’t imagined the flocks wheeling over her classmates’ heads is reassuring. (Just a note for American readers: nightjars are more commonly called nighthawks in the States.) Because aviarists are so rare and their talents are so valuable, when she’s identified as one, Alice is targeted by a host of people and organizations with motives ranging from inscrutable to malevolent, and she is ill-equipped to deal: Not knowing their magical origin, Alice spent her life stifling her abilities. Now that she’s being pursued for her magical talents, she can’t actually use any of them.
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Moreover, she’s not sure she wants to: she lives a comfortable, if insignificant life in London; magical feats seem like too much excitement. But when her best friend Jen is grievously injured by one of the people pursuing her, Alice learns her skills as an aviarist might be able to heal her. Alice will do just about anything for Jen, who guided her through the worst of her childhood, and so throws herself headlong into this magical London.
The Rookery is London’s twin, but the cities are not a perfect mirror: Where Buckingham Palace stands in our world, Goring University lies in the Rookery. In our London, Goring House burned, to be replaced with the palace; in the Rookery, it survived, and evolved into a university. Built several hundred years before the novel opens, the Rookery (which by now favors retro, quasi-1930s styles, as tastes there change somewhat more slowly than in our world) houses a diaspora of magical people driven out of Europe during periods of religious fervency. The organization that evolved from these crusades, called the Beaks, is one of the groups pursuing Alice, and all magical people like her.
Her guide, of a sort, is the enigmatic Crowley. He arranges for her housing, lines up a job-cum-apprenticeship with the only other living aviarist (the old woman with the feathers was one too) and generally shows her the ropes. Alice is never quite sure of Crowley’s motivations, despite his good reputation among the people she meets in the Rookery. More than once, she enters into fraught situations only to discover he’s withheld a crucial detail. When she inevitably missteps, the merely fraught turns dangerous. It’s hard to say whether this is by accident or design; maybe he just doesn’t know what she doesn’t know about the world. Maybe he has a ulterior motive.
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
Philip Pullman
Hardcover
$40.00
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As Alice learns more about what it means to be an aviarist, the mythology of the Rookery deepens and becomes increasingly unfamiliar. Much of the terminology at play is drawn from Finnish folklore and mythology; it’s a rare source of fantasy worldbuilding, and everything from the language to the concepts were novel to me. But the magic isn’t just from there; Hewitt also mixes in everything from the history of London, to Abrahamic religious concepts, to pan-cultural conceptions of the avatar of Death. The Rookery is a sometimes beautiful, often dangerous place, which nevertheless retains the anonymous crush and prosaic annoyances of a big city, making it feel real and lived in.
Hewitt pulls off an expert misdirection in this novel, one I don’t want to detail too closely, but I will say the effect is devastating. All the pieces needed to solve the mystery of Alice’s magic, her relationships, and herself are right out in the open, but she (and us) are deliberately led to misinterpret several key facts. In the end, Alice suffers several shattering revelations, of a magnitude to reshape two worlds.
The Nightjar covers a lot of ground, performing a grand sweep of this magical city and its people, history, and traditions, but there’s so much more to explore. I haven’t been so thirsty for a sequel in a long time.