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In Decopunk Spy Drama Armistice, the Show Must Go On
Amberlough, the first novel in Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough Dossier series (and a 2017 Nebula Award nominee), ends on a down note that seems sure to slide lower, with no bottom in sight. In the sequel, Armistice, that prediction at first looks optimistic, then, blessedly, perhaps less so.
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The glittering decopunk city of Amberlough is a metropolis made of fool’s gold, full of marks and molls, teetering on the edge of an election that will become its last. The fascist One State Party, known as the Ospies, is in ascendancy in a neighboring province of Gedda, and the oil of their rule is soaking into Amberlough. The Ospies insinuate themselves into the intelligence apparatus of Amberlough through the careful compromising of agents such as Cyril DePaul. Cyril is riding a desk at the start of Amberlough, but political machinations soon put him out into the field, and then out to dry. His weakness is his lover Aristide, a stripper and smuggler, who holds court at the Bee, a nightclub in Amberlough’s flourishing red light district. Those the Ospies can’t compromise using the tools of the surveillance state—people like Aristide or small-time stripper and hustler Cordelia—are soon visited by the blackboots, who beat them down and burn them out. By the end of that novel, our principle characters are blown, beaten, on the run, or presumed dead, in no particular order. The curtain has fallen on this time and place, and fallen hard.
Armistice picks up three years after the Ospies’ takeover of Amberlough and, by extension, the country of Gedda. The jackboots are firmly in power, and working to extend their reach into neighboring countries and provinces. Aristide, ever the survivor, has wormed his way into the nascent film industry in a neighboring kingdom, Porachis. He’s directing something like propaganda films to tweak the Ospies, but only at the behest of his patron, Pulan; he’s otherwise working harder on drinking himself to death. Though Aristide is still the catty conniver we loved in Amberlough, he is also broken and grieving on a fundamental level. He’s in Porachis on the largess of the royal family, so they can thumb their noses at the Ospies at their gates. In other words, he’s a kept pet, and he knows to keep his head down.
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This changes when fate brings him back into contact with Cordelia Lehane, who stripped, smuggled drugs, and helped Aristide work his cons in the days before the Ospies took control; she was a Golightly gal of no particular depth, but a fair amount of grit. After she was taken and tortured, her theater burned, her friends and lovers scattered, Cordelia set her broken bones and her will toward taking the Ospies down. Three years into their reign, she’s built a resistance network called Spotlight that has already dealt a fair amount of damage. But the Ospies are closing in, which sends Cordelia out of Gedda and into Porachis to regroup. Trouble is, she doesn’t know the language and has no marketable skills, short of the usual ones for a woman alone in a foreign land. Meeting Aristide is a stroke of luck, in a way, but it also piques their grief.
The final point of view character is Cyril’s sister Lillian. Cyril is missing, presumed dead. Lillian works in the diplomatic corps for Gedda, and therefore for the Ospies, spinning their lies and crimes in Porachis, where she’s made her home for nigh on a dozen years. She works under duress for the Ospie regime; her boss, whether on his own or with the blessings of his superiors, has kept her son held hostage in a boarding school in Ospie-controlled Gedda. On orders from her superior, she works to insinuate herself into the royal family and the film industry of Porachis (which largely overlap) in order to save herself and her son. Her entrée into this world is her son’s father, an indolent cousin of the royal family, unable to claim his son due to cultural taboo.
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In Amberlough, we watched everything break apart. In Armistice, it all comes slowly, jaggedly back together—though not perfectly, and not for long. While the first novel had the feel of a spy thriller crossed with Cabaret (or the Isherwood novel The Berlin Stories, on which Cabaret was based, which is an even bigger bummer), Armistice is like Casablanca, set in places and among people teetering on the edge and penned in by brutality, but still wearily keeping on. And like that Bogie and Bacall classic, it is a story of grief and new beginnings, as its principles learn to walk on broken legs and pick themselves up after unspeakable losses. The bones haven’t set clean, and the scars are indelible, but the people—Lillian, Cordelia, Aristide, and even the lost Cyril—are all actors in one way or another, treading the boards in a burlesque for their lives. The show must go on, and on they go.