the first problem with J.A. Mortimore and Penelope Hill’s The Harlequin: The Draper’s Reel is the second paragraph:
I’d invoked Ffonig, you see. That was my big mistake.
presumably “Ffonig” is just meant to read as a Welsh-looking name. unfortunately, it’s a real Welsh world, meaning “phonic” (as in “phonics”, as in the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in literacy pedagogy). my main association with this word is all of the ads for Hooked on Phonics that used to be on TLC / Discovery / the History channel when these were mostly airing, respectively, home improvement shows, science shows, and Titanic documentaries rather than reality TV dramas and ancient aliens. you will perhaps understand, then, that I find it a bit jarring to be presented with Phonic as something big and dangerous (a god, we subsequently learn) in a fantasy world. like. lmao, okay.
the second problem is of a different kind but still related to “Ffonig”: while the protagonist, the retired “trickster” (apparently a formal profession of sorts, distinct from “thief”) Jack Rich, insists that he is bound by divine oath to steal the titular Reel — a reel of thread belonging to a god of cloth named Pardeem — in fact the oath that appears on the page is:
“By Ffonig!” I yelled at them. “If I wanted to filch Pardeem’s Reel, I’d filch it!”
the terms of this oath are very clear: if Jack doesn’t want to steal the Reel, he’s under no obligation to do so, divine or otherwise. he very clearly does not want to steal the Reel. the narration insists, however, that he must:
Still, I had invoked my god, committing myself to the deed, and I coud not turn back what had been said.
bro. you did not say anything of the kind. so the entire premise of the novel falls apart. if you’re going to write a setting where divine oaths are binding on pain — presumably — of death or other divine punishment, you need to actually think about the oaths your characters swear and whether or not they are, in fact, bound by them to do anything. certainly characters in such a setting would be thinking about this! the climax of the novel actually even points this out, which makes the use of this line as the inciting incident all the more perplexing.
speaking of setting, let’s talk about names. in the first chapter we get the personal names Jack Rich and Phoebe; the theonyms Ygrathel, Ffonig, and Pardeem; and the place-names Emor (city-state), Emoria (larger region of which Emor is the spiritual center), and Ancona (another city-state). there is no indication of significant linguistic or cultural variation across Emoria, so what is going on here? why would you name one of the city-states after one of the Italian merchant republics in a region where “Jack” and “Phoebe” are apparently normal names and gods have the obviously “Welsh-inspired” names “Ygrathel” and “Ffonig”? (no idea what’s supposed to be going on with “Pardeem”.) it does not feel like it should be so much to ask fantasy writers for just a bit of linguistic consistency, and yet here we are.
the writing is, at least, technically solid, with small slips here and there (“increasingly more tedious”; “one or other of the rumours”; the consistent misuse of “temporal” to mean, apparently, “spiritual”) but overall engaging. Jack’s narrative voice is consistent if rather generic, as is his character in general — what you’re imagining when I say he’s a “retired ‘trickster’” is precisely what you get. abandoned on the street, adopted by a prostitute, raised by a master thief: tale as old as the coalescence of the fantasy genre at the turn of the ’70s. “rather generic” is, ultimately, kind of the novel’s main selling point(?): it is a fantasy heist, and it unfolds much as you would expect a fantasy heist to unfold, save that Jack undertakes the heist essentially solo. Jack returns to his old haunts, interacts with (but does not enlist the assistance of) some old acquaintances, and he does a heist, which, predictably, goes awry.
one mild (but ideologically dubious) novelty is that Jack is really into the virtues of hard work, an element of his character that we’re introduced to immediately in the first chapter through his dismissive assessment of the god Ygrathel as a god of laziness and of — verbatim — “the Great Unwashed”. it is, then, not a surprise when it is revealed that Ygrathel’s followers (and, indeed, Ygrathel himself) have betrayed him. the climax of the novel is an affirmation of the edifying value of Work and Duty. “don’t ever belief you’re entitled to a free ride,” Jack is enjoined, and other gods inform Jack that from their perspective Ygrathel is actually the god of deceit.
another, much more interesting novelty is that the first way the heist goes awry is that Jack realizes he’s going to have to travel to the otherworld-slash-afterlife that the gods inhabit in order to steal the Reel. that’s the one genuinely cool thing about this book — conceptually, at least. in practice, I unfortunately just found it kind of boring, though parts of it are clearly intended to be bewildering and/or wondrous. only at the ~90% mark does the heist begin in earnest. a solid quarter of the novel is just Jack meandering through the afterlife. the actual theft is a blink-and-you-miss-it single sentence (I did miss it and had to go back and reread to find it).
there are women in the book, technically. two of them are thieves, one an aspiring trickster Jack regards as a dilettante who is unlikely to amount to anything and the other the head of a thieves’ guild whom Jack regards with open disgust. one of them is a brothel operator who is, of course, extremely fat (Jack regards her with a mix of mild affection and disgust). one of them is a “plain” spinster whom Jack regards as pitiful. the rest are prostitutes or otherwise presented as sex objects. the spinster is excluded from this category despite her obvious interest because Jack doesn’t want to take advantage of “those on whom the gods have already visited a hardship”, namely being “plain”:
What a waste, I thought sorrowfully – a truly nice lady suffering under the misfortune of an uninteresting exterior.
it’s not a good look, no pun intended.
the world-building is generally a bit underwhelming, both in its genericness and in that — for example — it posits a world where religion is highly institutionalized and formalized but where the protagonist implies — essentially outright states — that nobody practices theology as a scholarly discipline. hello? more broadly, the book suffers from feeling like a novelized Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, complete with items like a “cravat of charming” and other specific phrasings like “a detect spell”.
the world-building is generally a bit underwhelming, both in its genericness and in that — for example — it posits a world where religion is highly institutionalized and formalized and gods are active interveners in day-to-day affairs but where the protagonist implies — essentially outright states — that nobody practices theology as a scholarly discipline. hello? more broadly, the book suffers from feeling like a novelized Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, complete with items like a “cravat of charming” and other specific phrasings like “a detect spell”.
ultimately, though, I’m just back to: this book kind of bored me. it was a slog to get through. not great for a heist narrative. the end of the book is obviously setting up the possibility of a sequel or series; if it comes, I will not be reading it.
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