Smoke Puts All Your Darkest Sins on Display
Lust and sin, prim propriety, class inequality, and the roiling dirtiness of the industrial age are all themes ever so thoroughly explored in Victorian fiction. That fascination with wickedness finds new, more literal life in Dan Vyleta’s tightly plotted, expertly inventive Smoke.
Smoke
Hardcover $27.95
Smoke
By Dan Vyleta
Hardcover $27.95
In Vyleta’s alternative England, your misdeeds and ill thoughts plume off of you, issuing forth from your body as tangible smoke. As you might expect in a world where our physical beings telegraph our inner thoughts, the class hierarchy is clearly delineated. The aristocracy, who’ve found ways to master their smoke, use this alleged “purity” as justification for their right to rule. Meanwhile, London, teeming with lower-class workers and families, is cloaked in dense smoke and soot.
In this world, three youngsters—whose perspectives we get in rotating POV chapters—end up enveloped in a grand scheme far larger than themselves. Best friends and schoolmates Charlie Cooper and Thomas Argyle embark on a quest to better understand the secrets of their own smoke, and along the way uncover a conspiracy complicated by hidden laboratories and experiments, a monstrous school enemy, a grand estate filled with secrets, and Livia Naylor, a headstrong and pious young woman who mesmerizes both boys in different ways.
The story carries its characters from an upper-crust boarding school to a lush country estate to, finally, the very bowels of filthy, smoking London. Throughout, Vyleta’s strikingly original mixture of Victorian aesthetic and modern storytelling keeps the novel propelling forward, The plight of these Dickensian characters is heightened in its emotional resonance when the narration alternates fluidly between third and first person, gifting us full-bodied portraits of not only the central trio, but a number of characters we meet along the way.
While it never falters in delivering on its central concept, Smoke reaches its highest points when the story delves into the life of Charlie and Thomas’s rigid boarding school, which, at times, makes poor Jane Eyre’s Lowood School look like a Montessori preschool. Despite the revelations to come as the boys wind their way through the labyrinth of lies and deceptions behind the world they think they know, it is here, at the school, that we learn the most about how their world works, and how it mirrors and opposes our own.
For example, borrowing from Calvinism’s “total hereditary depravity,” Smoke’s (well-born) children are kept apart from the world for their first nine to ten years, lest they contaminate those around them. You see, kids haven’t yet learned to control their sin, and thus their smoke. They can’t be trusted in polite society until they’ve achieved virtue.
The boys at school typically arrive shortly after they turn ten, ready now to become good, unstained gentlemen. It causes a stir, then, when Thomas arrives at 16, apparently kept home with his family far beyond the usual age. As his fellow pupils wonder at what horrors could have kept Thomas hidden away for so long, so, too, does Thomas begin to wonder at his own nature.
Smoke and soot take on different textures; it’s speculated that the color, quantity, and appearance reveal the nature and the depth of the sin. Thomas’s is black as coal and suffocating, tinged with qualities that seem to fascinate some of his instructors and repel others. His struggle with the monster he fears is inside of him kicks off the larger mysteries of Smoke: why do people smoke? Is it a sickness or a curse? Can it be cured, and should it be? Though these questions are above their pay grade, Thomas and Charlie are confronted with them all the same as they become further entwined with Livia—so desperate to maintain her cold purity—and her mother, who coos and calculates with the same enigmatic intensity. Each child struggles under the weight of the revelations they uncover, and each responds in a unique way.
There’s a deep humanity at the heart of Smoke. Even the most villainous of characters is driven by the emotional trauma of the smoke. The book has a cross-genre appeal that will satisfy readers across constituencies, ensnaring fantasy fans with its bold concept and YA readers with the respect it affords its young protagonists. As the book’s pupils learn to say early in their education, “We thank the smoke.”
In Vyleta’s alternative England, your misdeeds and ill thoughts plume off of you, issuing forth from your body as tangible smoke. As you might expect in a world where our physical beings telegraph our inner thoughts, the class hierarchy is clearly delineated. The aristocracy, who’ve found ways to master their smoke, use this alleged “purity” as justification for their right to rule. Meanwhile, London, teeming with lower-class workers and families, is cloaked in dense smoke and soot.
In this world, three youngsters—whose perspectives we get in rotating POV chapters—end up enveloped in a grand scheme far larger than themselves. Best friends and schoolmates Charlie Cooper and Thomas Argyle embark on a quest to better understand the secrets of their own smoke, and along the way uncover a conspiracy complicated by hidden laboratories and experiments, a monstrous school enemy, a grand estate filled with secrets, and Livia Naylor, a headstrong and pious young woman who mesmerizes both boys in different ways.
The story carries its characters from an upper-crust boarding school to a lush country estate to, finally, the very bowels of filthy, smoking London. Throughout, Vyleta’s strikingly original mixture of Victorian aesthetic and modern storytelling keeps the novel propelling forward, The plight of these Dickensian characters is heightened in its emotional resonance when the narration alternates fluidly between third and first person, gifting us full-bodied portraits of not only the central trio, but a number of characters we meet along the way.
While it never falters in delivering on its central concept, Smoke reaches its highest points when the story delves into the life of Charlie and Thomas’s rigid boarding school, which, at times, makes poor Jane Eyre’s Lowood School look like a Montessori preschool. Despite the revelations to come as the boys wind their way through the labyrinth of lies and deceptions behind the world they think they know, it is here, at the school, that we learn the most about how their world works, and how it mirrors and opposes our own.
For example, borrowing from Calvinism’s “total hereditary depravity,” Smoke’s (well-born) children are kept apart from the world for their first nine to ten years, lest they contaminate those around them. You see, kids haven’t yet learned to control their sin, and thus their smoke. They can’t be trusted in polite society until they’ve achieved virtue.
The boys at school typically arrive shortly after they turn ten, ready now to become good, unstained gentlemen. It causes a stir, then, when Thomas arrives at 16, apparently kept home with his family far beyond the usual age. As his fellow pupils wonder at what horrors could have kept Thomas hidden away for so long, so, too, does Thomas begin to wonder at his own nature.
Smoke and soot take on different textures; it’s speculated that the color, quantity, and appearance reveal the nature and the depth of the sin. Thomas’s is black as coal and suffocating, tinged with qualities that seem to fascinate some of his instructors and repel others. His struggle with the monster he fears is inside of him kicks off the larger mysteries of Smoke: why do people smoke? Is it a sickness or a curse? Can it be cured, and should it be? Though these questions are above their pay grade, Thomas and Charlie are confronted with them all the same as they become further entwined with Livia—so desperate to maintain her cold purity—and her mother, who coos and calculates with the same enigmatic intensity. Each child struggles under the weight of the revelations they uncover, and each responds in a unique way.
There’s a deep humanity at the heart of Smoke. Even the most villainous of characters is driven by the emotional trauma of the smoke. The book has a cross-genre appeal that will satisfy readers across constituencies, ensnaring fantasy fans with its bold concept and YA readers with the respect it affords its young protagonists. As the book’s pupils learn to say early in their education, “We thank the smoke.”