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Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat
Oct. 3rd, 2021 09:48 pmI don't think I've ever read another book where the first half gave me such a completely different reading experience from the second half.
Before this book came out, I told my friend (who got me into reading C.S. Pacat in the first place, exactly ten years ago, when Captive Prince was still being posted chapter-by-chapter on livejournal): "I've realized how much I really am only interested in Dark Rise on the strength of having already read and loved Captive Prince. Nothing about the book's own description or marketing has pinged me as anything other than 'yet another chosen one good vs evil story.' If I were encountering it in the wild with no context, absolutely nothing about it would have grabbed me." The tagline I kept seeing, "The Dark will rise. Who will fall? Who will stand?" seemed totally generic. My friend and I agreed that there must be more to the books than the marketing materials made it seem—based on our knowledge of her other work, there couldn't not be. The description says it's a "thrilling story of friendship, deception, loyalty, and betrayal" and I know from Captive Prince how well Pacat can write those things, deception, betrayal, tension, surprises, so: the book must be going to surprise me.
Starting to read the book didn't go much better than my initial impressions. The only thing that really kept me going was meta knowledge I had from outside the book. The above, of course, but also, Pacat has talked about how, when she got the idea for these books, she knew she didn't have the skill to write them yet, so she wrote Captive Prince as "practice" books to prepare for writing these. I kept finding myself thinking, "This is the book that took more skill to write than Captive Prince? Really? Why?" I thought sometimes of how Audrey Niffenegger started writing The Time Traveler's Wife as a side project when she regarded The Three Incestuous Sisters as the main project she was working on, and wondered if this might also turn out to be a case where people prefer the "not-real" project to the "real" one.
Sometime during the first half I, I came across this tweet thread from the author, which I hadn't seen before, and the next linked tweet, which quotes Pacat:
"#DarkRise is my agonised love letter to these English pastoral fantasies that child-me loved - loved though they excluded me, loved though they told me and others that we could never be the hero....What happens when you grow up told that you are destined to be the villain? Will the story of the past play out again, or can you fight your fate and forge a new path? These are the questions #DarkRise wrestles with....And so I came to write #DarkRise, an act of love and agon, to show how the adventure might be if it were experienced from the other side. It has all of my yearning towards those heroic English tales, yet it has the way they hurt, too - you yearn for what you want but can’t have....What is it like to really find yourself in a battle of dark and light, when the roles start to destabilize? I want to explore these questions and I invite you to come with me to find out."
https://twitter.com/cspacat/status/1433974764394070021
"I want them to never look at villains the same way again."
https://twitter.com/TheBooktopian/status/1443062997782601731
These tweets both made the book seem far more intriguing to me than at least 90% of the actual marketing...and did not seem to resemble anything I had read so far. I didn't see anything in the first half of the book that looked like it was going to complicate the depiction of good vs evil very much at all. The Dark King seemed very straightforwardly evil; killing/enslaving humanity to rule the world sure is evil, so of course opposing him would be good. The book leaned hard into all of the Stewards looking "noble" to anyone who sees them—whatever the fuck that means (me, repeatedly: "Looking noble isn't a thing!")—and also blood/heredity as fate (for instance, a character says that a Steward-in-training undergoing the test to become a Steward proper won't falter because "his blood is strong.") Yes, Violet chooses to join the side of the Stewards instead of fighting on the side of the Dark King per her familial inheritance, but she still has her actual powers of extraordinary strength due to her "blood". And besides, someone learning for the first time what's true about the "good" side and immediately joining it doesn't terribly complicate the relationship of good and evil, either.
I totted all these things up and kept concluding: there must be more to it, then. There must. I'll keep going.
"She must not know what she is doing! No. I know what I am doing," one of the tweets says. She does. All of this is deliberate, and at pretty much exactly 50%, the entire reading experience changes.
The first half does deceive you. It shows you a surface, and then you see underneath. It sets up the pieces, then everything starts getting turned over. The first half is the long slow climb up the first hill of a roller coaster, and halfway through you crest the top of that hill, and everything after that is hurtling through all the rest of the ride's twists and turns.
50% is also where protagonist Will interacts with antagonist James in person for the first time, which is electrifying. The whole book comes alive when James is on the page in a way it hadn't done up to that point.
James. Who is James? To call him this book's Laurent would probably be a little reductive, but he is this book's blond, blue-eyed beauty, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, apparently ruthless, a little shit, both intolerable and compelling. There's an intensity to their scenes together that's fascinating the first time around, and gains even deeper meaning with what you've learned by the end of the book. (In fact, there are some lines between them that were already pretty fraught the first time through that get SO MUCH MORE SO in retrospect that I think I'll do a separate spoiler-cut post discussing those in particular.)
I don't want to describe much of the second half of the book even generally, but I finished wanting to immediately read the book again (which I am about to, once I finish writing this review!) so I could see more of the layers at work this time. And if you had told me that while I was reading the first half... well, I would probably have added it to the list of reasons to keep reading rather than disbelieving you, but it certainly would have seemed unlikely at the time. I also wanted to immediately read the second book (which doesn't even have an announced release date yet!) because I have no doubt that the next two books will continue to reveal even more secrets in what I've already read.
Before this book came out, I told my friend (who got me into reading C.S. Pacat in the first place, exactly ten years ago, when Captive Prince was still being posted chapter-by-chapter on livejournal): "I've realized how much I really am only interested in Dark Rise on the strength of having already read and loved Captive Prince. Nothing about the book's own description or marketing has pinged me as anything other than 'yet another chosen one good vs evil story.' If I were encountering it in the wild with no context, absolutely nothing about it would have grabbed me." The tagline I kept seeing, "The Dark will rise. Who will fall? Who will stand?" seemed totally generic. My friend and I agreed that there must be more to the books than the marketing materials made it seem—based on our knowledge of her other work, there couldn't not be. The description says it's a "thrilling story of friendship, deception, loyalty, and betrayal" and I know from Captive Prince how well Pacat can write those things, deception, betrayal, tension, surprises, so: the book must be going to surprise me.
Starting to read the book didn't go much better than my initial impressions. The only thing that really kept me going was meta knowledge I had from outside the book. The above, of course, but also, Pacat has talked about how, when she got the idea for these books, she knew she didn't have the skill to write them yet, so she wrote Captive Prince as "practice" books to prepare for writing these. I kept finding myself thinking, "This is the book that took more skill to write than Captive Prince? Really? Why?" I thought sometimes of how Audrey Niffenegger started writing The Time Traveler's Wife as a side project when she regarded The Three Incestuous Sisters as the main project she was working on, and wondered if this might also turn out to be a case where people prefer the "not-real" project to the "real" one.
Sometime during the first half I, I came across this tweet thread from the author, which I hadn't seen before, and the next linked tweet, which quotes Pacat:
"#DarkRise is my agonised love letter to these English pastoral fantasies that child-me loved - loved though they excluded me, loved though they told me and others that we could never be the hero....What happens when you grow up told that you are destined to be the villain? Will the story of the past play out again, or can you fight your fate and forge a new path? These are the questions #DarkRise wrestles with....And so I came to write #DarkRise, an act of love and agon, to show how the adventure might be if it were experienced from the other side. It has all of my yearning towards those heroic English tales, yet it has the way they hurt, too - you yearn for what you want but can’t have....What is it like to really find yourself in a battle of dark and light, when the roles start to destabilize? I want to explore these questions and I invite you to come with me to find out."
https://twitter.com/cspacat/status/1433974764394070021
"I want them to never look at villains the same way again."
https://twitter.com/TheBooktopian/status/1443062997782601731
These tweets both made the book seem far more intriguing to me than at least 90% of the actual marketing...and did not seem to resemble anything I had read so far. I didn't see anything in the first half of the book that looked like it was going to complicate the depiction of good vs evil very much at all. The Dark King seemed very straightforwardly evil; killing/enslaving humanity to rule the world sure is evil, so of course opposing him would be good. The book leaned hard into all of the Stewards looking "noble" to anyone who sees them—whatever the fuck that means (me, repeatedly: "Looking noble isn't a thing!")—and also blood/heredity as fate (for instance, a character says that a Steward-in-training undergoing the test to become a Steward proper won't falter because "his blood is strong.") Yes, Violet chooses to join the side of the Stewards instead of fighting on the side of the Dark King per her familial inheritance, but she still has her actual powers of extraordinary strength due to her "blood". And besides, someone learning for the first time what's true about the "good" side and immediately joining it doesn't terribly complicate the relationship of good and evil, either.
I totted all these things up and kept concluding: there must be more to it, then. There must. I'll keep going.
"She must not know what she is doing! No. I know what I am doing," one of the tweets says. She does. All of this is deliberate, and at pretty much exactly 50%, the entire reading experience changes.
The first half does deceive you. It shows you a surface, and then you see underneath. It sets up the pieces, then everything starts getting turned over. The first half is the long slow climb up the first hill of a roller coaster, and halfway through you crest the top of that hill, and everything after that is hurtling through all the rest of the ride's twists and turns.
50% is also where protagonist Will interacts with antagonist James in person for the first time, which is electrifying. The whole book comes alive when James is on the page in a way it hadn't done up to that point.
James. Who is James? To call him this book's Laurent would probably be a little reductive, but he is this book's blond, blue-eyed beauty, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, apparently ruthless, a little shit, both intolerable and compelling. There's an intensity to their scenes together that's fascinating the first time around, and gains even deeper meaning with what you've learned by the end of the book. (In fact, there are some lines between them that were already pretty fraught the first time through that get SO MUCH MORE SO in retrospect that I think I'll do a separate spoiler-cut post discussing those in particular.)
I don't want to describe much of the second half of the book even generally, but I finished wanting to immediately read the book again (which I am about to, once I finish writing this review!) so I could see more of the layers at work this time. And if you had told me that while I was reading the first half... well, I would probably have added it to the list of reasons to keep reading rather than disbelieving you, but it certainly would have seemed unlikely at the time. I also wanted to immediately read the second book (which doesn't even have an announced release date yet!) because I have no doubt that the next two books will continue to reveal even more secrets in what I've already read.