Mordew by Alex Pheby
Review by Gary Kaill
‘(THE) LIVING MUD’
God should live in the heavens where his native power makes few changes, but if and when he comes to Earth, his magic leeches through the weft into the material realm around him. Any matter nearby undertakes the properties of creation, whuch is God’s province. The slum dwellers of Mordew call this material the Living Mud, which is known for its ability to generate dead-life and living flukes. The Living Mud lacks God’s will, so its creation is random and aimless. Should a god attempt to exceed godhood, then only energy is created, though this might be seen by some to be a thing in and of itself, energy being the perfect representation of power: the warp, which is creative potency existing with no debasement through form, free of the weft.’
In other words: um, don’t go getting ideas above your station, Sonny Jim.
There are a multitude of entries as ominous as this in Mordew’s sprawling Glossary. The main narrative complete, here is where your faith is tested. Fittingly, these copious endnotes do read very much like a sermon: fashioned minus any hint of self-regard, they define a belief system robust enough to sustain the world (and the story) they so resolutely annotate. You’ll need them, for sure.
Alex Pheby’s darkly magical tale of a world teetering on the brink of a physical and existential crisis stakes much of its claim on its creator’s ambitious and thorough detailing. At the very least, this additional insight provides, for the unsated reader, a bucket-load of material via which they might re-enter a world they have no wish to leave. For many, they will operate as a genuinely practicable set of notes with which to anchor and inform their reading. A third option exists for those of us whose heads are still spinning after five hundred pages of Mordew’s labyrinthine narrative: the opportunity to further marvel at the head-spinning audacity of Pheby’s invention, and the unfathomable boldness of his world-building. (It is not just the passage above that will cause the reader once distracted by substances renowned for, ahem, fuelling creativity, to see if they’ve kept certain phone numbers in their contacts.)
Our hero is young Nathan Treeves: ‘a womb-born boy’, we learn on page one. There is more than one way to enter — and to exit — this world, Mordew teases from the off. And indeed, as Nathan will come to learn, significantly more ways to occupy it, as his hum-drum life of scavenging within the slums for food, medicines, and saleable goods, is upended and replaced by a quest as murky as it is troubling.
As he strives to maintain his fragile family unit (his mother uses their pinched dwelling as a brothel, his father is laid low by the dreaded lungworm), Nathan finds himself caught up with a thieving band of ruffians: the effortlessly streetwise Gam Halliday, the ‘two children in one’ Jerky Joes, and Prissy — a downtrodden victim of her cruel surroundings, gifted complexity and agency by Pheby’s careful characterisation. Working for the devilishly drawn Padge (‘Still, I don’t suppose you are as comfortable as we are, in this place, being, as you are, demonstrably scum. Not you, Prissy dear. You are merely a slut.), who in turn is ultimately revealed to be in league with a greater foe, their travails advance against a vivid and enveloping backdrop. That of Mordew: a city with roots oddly familiar to the reader, surrounded on three sides by sea, protected by mountains at its rear. A city presided over by The Master, whose plan for its down-at-heel inhabitants is couched in menace, and yet…
Mordew has seen readers and critics reach almost instinctively for comparisons with other series (two sequels will continue and complete the saga) of similar stock-in-trade: fantasical world-building; arch-enemies battling across realms both material and immaterial; a young protagonist called upon against his will, barely aware of his power and importance; the positing of faith and belief as worthy opponents to violent oppression — even though, in this world at least, God is most assuredly dead.
But Pheby’s first foray into fantasy — a jolt, no doubt, for fans of his work to date, not least the intimate and beguiling personal history Lucia — has little in common with those hefty fantasy sequences, and instead finds kinship with works both left-field and classic. Certainly, the exquisitely blackened slums from which Nathan emerges bring to mind the hellish mudscapes of Aleksei German’s 2013 ersatz sci-fi epic Hard To Be a God. But, in how Pheby corrals this vast and complex set of characters, his bulging plot ultimately has more in common with Dickens, the master of artful logistics. Old Charlie would surely have approved of such a colourful cast — headed by a boy newly adrift in a life of crime, led astray by a career criminal, exhausted by ailing parents, befriended by a big-hearted prostitute, and attended to by a powerful benefactor… well.
There is so much to admire here. Amidst the multi-layered, crazed invention — expertly fashioned magic systems, a deeply embedded seam of spirtuality, a lengthy and delightful ‘Interlude’ narrated by a talking dog — Pheby’s prose allows the hooked reader to progress at speed. Whether in his painstaking sketching of our irresistible protagonist — ‘He moved constantly, like a flea on a bedsheet’ — or a mastery of comic dialogue that adds lavish shading, Pheby’s confidence leaps from the page into the reader’s lap. Ending on a perfectly delivered cliff edge, Mordew is a dark wonder: an epic tale, as thematically rich and as it is politically astute. Less an exercise in escapism, more a potent and prescient reminder that, in this world or not, power continues to corrupt, and that those who dare to oppose that power are forever the best kind of hero.
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Mordew is published by Galley Beggar Press, 13th August 2020