J. Alexander Cohen’s Talio’s Codex is a fantasy that begins by asking not “what if there were a world with magic?” but “what if there were a world where everything and everyone is subject to a complicated, intentionally opaque surveillance and regulatory regime?” it is a fantasy about the law, the practice of law, and the purpose of law. it is in some ways quite obviously a fantasy about debates about the constitution of the United States — a supporting character is at one point described as a “strict constructionist” — but it is also a fantasy about the relationship between the law and the possibility of social and political change more generally.
ten years ago, the magistrate Talio Rossa’s legal codex was stolen, and he was caught in bed with another man, destroying his marriage to his wife. after ten years in self-imposed exile as a scavenger in a border town, his ex-wife shows up to ask him to return to the city, take up law again — as an “advocate” this time, rather than a magistrate — in order to defend one of her former students. Talio and the student, Pazli, an Incarnite — a member of a marginalized new religious movement with a difficult relationship to the state’s surveillance and regulatory regime — become partners in a law firm, and Talio finds himself caught up in several strands of legal and political mystery: the theft of his codex; the social, economic, and legal marginalization of the Incarnites; the institutionalization of “reform”; the strict demands of Merin’s surveillance regime, in this case via a case about gender identity; and a growing, uneasy awareness that something about the legal system as a whole is wrong. against this backdrop, Talio is also caught between his desires for two men: Pazli, of course, and Cale, the man he was in bed with ten years before when his codex was stolen.
I’ll start by getting the bad out of the way. one of the threads of Talio and Pazli’s legal practice vis-à-vis the Incarnites is an attempt to introduce the concept of intellectual property law into Merin’s legal system. the proposal is ultimately rejected, but it’s clear that the narrative expects us to regard this as a disappointing failure and not Merin narrowly dodging a bullet. particularly egregious is the fact that one of the points of contention in the discussion of the legal status of “intangibles” is whether or not an idea can be legally understood as property and so as stealable. this is a dangerous, virulently anti-culture position, but Talio attempts to argue for it, and the narrative clearly expects us to see him as correct in this. big yikes!
setting aside its politics, which I’ll return to in a moment, the novel’s structure is also a bit unfocused. much of the text is occupied by a series of legal proceedings — preparation and then arguments in court — punctuated by some meetings. the result is that the narrative is a bit meandering, and while most of the legal proceedings (other than the intellectual property dispute) do directly bear on the novel’s concern with social change and the idea of “progress”, the result is a bit scattered. another way to put this might be to say that the novel is not altogether successful in balancing its interest in Talio’s romantic and sexual life with its interest in the law. the legal cases bring him into contact (of various kinds) with both Pazli and Cale, pushing the romance plotline forward, but they do not always feel like they move the legal plotline forward.
the novel’s politics might be broadly described as “liberal”, but while its uneasiness about the nature of legal “reform” never quite coheres into an outright revolutionary position (I would place it perhaps alongside Bendi Barrett’s Empire of the Feast in this respect), even its resolution remains skeptical — though cautiously optimistic — about the prospect of change from within. insofar as the novel has a thesis about the law, it is: the law must be a living document, able to move and change not only with the times but even ahead of the times — Cohen is certainly conscious of the extent to which law as one of the basic structures of social and economic organization can create attitudes even as it also reflects them. I would say the novel itself is idealist, but it might be open to a materialist reading focused on the interrelations between laws and their social and economic context.
as this review has likely made obvious, I really appreciated the careful attention to law and the practice of law. if part of the resolution of the legal plot(s) was predictable, that didn’t make it at all unsatisfying. but I also wanted to highlight Cohen’s world-building work more generally. part of what is at issue with the Incarnites is that adult Incarnites are expected to cover themselves fully — save their hands — at all times, or at least not to be seen, even by other Incarnites: when Pazli and Talio have sex, for example, Talio must wear a blindfold. the state, however, depends on a strict system of identification, particularly on the basis of appearance, meaning that Incarnites have had to seek legal accommodations — identifying tattoos, for example. there are obvious echoes in the treatment of the Incarnites both of antisemitism (an Incarnite is lynched off-page on the basis of a blood libel, for example) and of course of contemporary Islamophobia with regards to veiling, but Incarnites challenge the state’s legal regime in other ways, as well: one of Pazli and Talio’s cases concerns a child who does not with to legally identify or be identified as male or female, forcing Talio to confront and work through his own preconceptions and presenting a challenge to a legal system that relies on sorting everyone into discrete, gendered subject positions.
also at issue is the Incarnites’ god: they worship Sif, the fire god denigrated by mainstream society, which is devoted to the water god Felle. water and rituals around water are an essential part of the texture of day-to-day life, something that Cohen is very attentive to: when entering a building or meeting someone, people are expected to ritually wash or at least rinse their hands, and this influences the rhythm of everyday tasks — Talio must occasionally wait in line for water access when entering a building, for example, and when he visits the Incarnite temple he is momentarily taken aback by the absence of ritual water. other aspects of everyday life — like the use of lockboxes to deliver messages — were also, I thought, well-integrated. the effect is a world that, while mostly only sketched in the background, nonetheless retains a feeling of social depth.
this is further helped by the novel’s attention to other kinds of social marginalization. it was a nice change of pace to read a novel where there’s a queen regnant that doesn’t pretend that having a queen = gender equality at all levels of society. institutional sexism remains alive and well, and the novel specifically points to this as a blind spot on Talio’s part — yet another prejudice he must begin to unlearn over the course of the book; homophobia and transphobia are also present. neither is the focus here (aside from the legal case about the nonbinary child), but I appreciated the book’s handling of Talio’s perspective: he sees himself as someone who Understands Marginalization, and Cohen does a good job of both allowing Talio to genuinely understand sometimes while also presenting challenges to Talio’s assumption that his experience provides a universal template for all experiences of marginalization.
after a number of recent books that were quite poorly written and/or edited, it was also just really refreshing that Cohen’s prose is so smooth. I wouldn’t describe it as groundbreaking, but it definitely helped my overall enjoyment of the book. I will say, the inconsistency of name aesthetics bugged me a bit — Talio is “Talio Rossa” and his ex-wife is “Gawani Balsamo”, both of which feel like they’re reaching for Italian, but then Pazli’s surname is Mecomb and a number of other characters have similarly non-Romance-sounding names.
the romance plot is I think pretty classic, but the handling of Talio and Pazli’s relationship, in particular, stood out, in that the arc of their relationship does not rely either on Pazli compromising his faith and religious beliefs or on Talio instantly (or, indeed, ever) overcoming all of his prejudices against Incarnites: it is a slow process, and by the end of the novel Talio is by no means perfect — but he’s consciously trying to do and be better. Talio and Cale’s relationship felt a bit less developed, but I also appreciated that the narration is up-front about the fact that a big part of it is the fact that Cale is incredibly hot, without moralizing about this, either by making a big deal about Talio learning to see below the surface or by linking Cale’s physical appearance to his other characteristics; he’s simply a hot guy who also happens to be very smart and charming. if the resolution of the romance angle was a bit predictable, again, I didn’t mind.
all in all, then, despite some relatively minor hesitations, I quite enjoyed this book!
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