A Weapon Straining Against Its Nature

Shinjini Dey reviews Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Navola.”

By Shinjini DeyNovember 4, 2024

• SF

• Fiction

YEARS AGO, a friend of Paolo Bacigalupi’s invited him to Italy, and he was enamored. Years ago, Jonathan Strahan asked Bacigalupi to write a story about dragons, and he stalled. For years, Bacigalupi has only been writing about future worlds altered by climate change, but now, in this summer’s Navola, he has moved back in time to the Renaissance with a story set during a moment when the ice caps were “un-melting” and credit notes had just started to exchange hands.

Navola is Bacigalupi’s latest—albeit his first adult fantasy series—and it doesn’t quite possess the inventiveness of his science fiction novels The Windup Girl (2009) and The Water Knife (2015). Navola also diverges from Bacigalupi’s YA fiction, eschewing narratives of dystopia, postapocalypse, and the heavy-handed fist of conflict driven by systems collapse. With Navola, Bacigalupi turns instead to history and lush indulgence as the novel reimagines the Medicis—fictionalized as the Regulai family—through the eyes of the heir apparent, Davico di Regulai.

The book’s first indulgence is its length: its 560 pages are in many ways only a set-up for the grandness of a sequel. The second indulgence is tradition: Navola is high literary, high epic fantasy (the likes of which are relegated to television scripts today), and high Italian Renaissance. It traffics in the historical intricacies of the Italian city-states: we encounter shrewd and ruthless bankers, Florentine-esque art, meticulous account-keeping, death, seductions, and violence.

The Renaissance setting immediately recalls Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky (2016) or Tigana (1990)—or, as the blurbs claim, The Godfather (1969). The historical set piece and scope have already drawn comparisons to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996– ), even to Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (1961–75). I’d even go as far as comparing it to Nicola Griffith’s Hild (2013) and Menewood (2023) for the gradual arches and sharp drops of narrative that describe the world through bildungsroman, a series that itself draws on Patricia A. McKillip’s work.

There isn’t much magic, but there are dragons, announced in the bombast of the opening line—“My father kept a dragon eye upon his desk”—but those dragons are dead, relegated to legend, made historical in the morose note of nostalgia for a time of greater power and magic. It is better to say: There are dragons to come. More historically still: The invented language of intimacy and violence of its city-states are given heft through terms like “exomentissimo” or “faccioscuro,” more pidgin than Italian, more Latin than Italian itself. History—whether that of fantasy narrative or of the Renaissance—is a skein to draw from.

And so, Bacigalupi’s latest fable lines itself with tradition, calls it influence; instead of the originality of possible futures, we have the fail-safe of history. The fantasy can’t help but be about resurrection. The dragons will come.

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Navola treads slowly. It follows the heir Davico as a young child, bored by incessant and too-precise accountancy (“scriveri”), sneaking into his father’s study to gaze upon the memento mori on his desk: the dragon eye is “an orb larger than a man’s skull, gone milky and crystalline but still burning with inner fire as if it retained life.” Davico is enticed by legend and mystery and, despite all his protestations, seduced by the power he is to inherit. The magic promised by legend appears wispily, less a system than an atmospheric sensibility, following its own unnatural laws. In magic’s absence, the narrative deals in intrigues that are given their own tongue, the play of “faccioscuro.” “Twisty twisty,” the Navolese citizens are chorally announced, known to determine plots and plans through gestures, to make art of manipulation and to rule by such masquerades. Armed with these masks, the Regulai family have become bankers for merchants, controlling trade: spices from Zurom, furs from Wustholt, silk from Xim, “up and down the fishhook of the Cerulean Peninsula.” All this Davico must preside over, with his father, Devonaci di Regulai at the helm. Davico is less an heir than a weapon learning to strain against its nature. He chafes, runs, avoids, and mangles the art of faccioscuro, then faces his father’s disappointment.

Faccioscuro is at the heart of Navola, both the city and the novel. The only historical corollary of this invented practice is Machiavellian virtù, a necessary characteristic of rule or power, citizenship, and, subsequently, masculinity. But unlike virtù, faccioscuro is the art of manipulating appearances, hence the linguistic relationship to the artistic technique of chiaroscuro (manipulating light and shade); even so, it borrows a relationship to power discursively from Machiavelli and his handbook. Navola’s rulers must possess art and money, and these stand in for magic’s own surprises, producing the court and city of fantasy fare. Faccioscuro’s dependence on appearances makes it inclusive; women, like Davico’s adopted sister Celia, or the non-Navolese can master it equally. The metaphor of masking and manipulation as art is common to narratives set at a court, or sword and sorcery narratives, but Bacigalupi’s telling comes off as egalitarian intrigue—the court and sword belong to all.

Nonetheless, it takes a while for the novel to shed faccioscuro’s relationship to seduction and, in the historically accurate patriarchy of Navola, for women not to wield it best. Davico’s own burgeoning sexuality, his Peeping Tom proclivities, his tendency to mix desire for power with sex, and his extreme pubertal scrutinizing sustain the reader in a faccioscuro that is still immature. As Davico locks into his drama of personhood against father, country, and sexuality, the novel plays at faccioscuro with the reader, which is also to say it suspends belief through suggestion, layering one episodic narrative over another skillfully.

Davico watches as his father brings down the noble Balcosi, adopts their eldest daughter, and makes her sister to Davico. He sits at his father’s table as Devonaci unblinkingly manipulates the Callarino, elected leader of the city council. He hears of trade agreements, wars, ship routes, slaves traded for notes, and the exchange of secrets, and comes up heady with boyhood emotions. Davico takes the path of least resistance, absorbing the plotted world like a sponge, letting it breathe through him. The bildungsroman, for readers are trapped in one for a long time, masks a narrative of mercantile chess, obscuring the set piece of nobles, judge, jury, army, foreigners, neighbors, and enemies of state. Before you know it, Navola has turned into a novel about civil war benighted by childhood’s naive moralities. Coming-of-age has been crowned with willful ignorance on its generic head.

None of this would be possible without faccioscuro’s metaphors. Where Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series, with its similar courtly dramas, is sexual politics as art told through a sex worker’s labors, Navola resides in the Renaissance’s greatest gimmick: convincing modernity that art’s origin and genius reside in its calculating bosom. Navola, as a series, is a promise to negotiate with the Renaissance as the historical capital of art and finance. If the city’s faccioscuro is the art of appearances, the novel deals in overwhelming you with its picaresque.

Yet this only becomes apparent in the last quarter. Davico’s adventurous bildungsroman; his unimaginative watch over ruthless politics; his nonspeculating conviction in his roguish father’s invincibility; and his unseeing perspective of past, future, and present keep readers at bay. It is not until his father falls and Davico loses his eyes that the narrative alerts us to faccioscuro’s personification: mythical blindness. The magic of appearances is undone by a gradually escalating narrative of disappearance, darkness, ostentatious filth, amnesiac knowledge. We are suddenly thrust into the world of Trimalchio’s Satryicon, a picaresque come alive from the ashes of a bildungsroman. Two textual myths (chapters titled “The Story of King Nemaius” and “The Myth of Erostheia”) foreshadow this change, but shock and awe augur this genre’s twisting turn.

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The dragons resurrect here, magically speaking to Davico, resuscitated when the picaresque no longer required it, when the tale had built its own nonmagical delights. In lending disembodied sight to a blind Davico, the dragon’s eye progresses the narrative but belies a trope where disability enables a subversive power, allowing triumph over the body. For all the sensuality of description it enables or all the shifts in epistemology it uncovers through a visually impaired faccioscuro, Navola’s last act follows in the tradition—from Socrates to Aldous Huxley—of blindness as second sight. Only time will tell whether disability is allowed more room.

For now, two resurrections stay the narrative of Navola: the return of magic and the return of sight. The resurrections are domestic, part of a schema where it is lost only to be found, made impotent only to be discovered anew. Its place in a narrative so imbued with history, so dependent on it, keeps only the future. History holds us at a remove from Davico, from the intimacy of personal historiography, for he is a vehicle of Navola’s history—told with brutal and suspenseful aplomb. Navola reveals only nostalgia and wish fulfillment. Its saving grace is tradition’s legacy.