TITLE: The Ill-Made Mute (#1 Bitterbynde Trilogy)
AUTHOR: Cecilia Dart-Thornton
GENRE: Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 03/05/2001
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review: This. This is what the fantasy genre has been missing. Or possibly what it’s lost, considering that this was written over a decade ago now.
The Ill-Made Mute opens with a young child falling into a patch of poisonous plants that horrifically scar its face. The child has no memories of its life before, nor a voice; although it retains a kind of muscle-memory that allows it to function, it doesn’t even know which gender it is. Nor does it remember language, having to learn (or relearn?) the speech of those around it after it is rescued. Raised without a name, plenty of abuse, and believing himself a boy, the child eventually escapes the castle of his childhood to traverse the land in hopes of finding someone who can heal his face and restore his memories.
That doesn’t encompass even a fraction of what this book is about, and what it is.
For a start, the land of Erith is incredible. Dart-Thornton’s world-building is beyond reproach; although she’s populated her world with faerie creatures that are taken almost directly from European myth, and although it incorporates more than one Celtic fairytale, there is so much that makes it unique. Sildron, a metal that actively repels gravity, has influenced a great deal of the culture; sky-ships are hulled in it, and ecotaurs, winged horses, have sildron horseshoes. The implications and effects of this are beautifully thought out, including the various limitations; a sky-ship cannot go up, for example, once it has set sail, meaning that if it runs into a mountain it has to go around instead of flying across it. This attention to detail is something that I loudly applaud in my fantasy, and Dart-Thornton has applied the same level of care to everything in her world; from the shang wind that recreates emotionally charged scenes from the past down to things like clothing and pets. (Tame lynxes! I want one!)
Plus, there’s a unicorn. Any book with a unicorn in it gets my attention immediately.
The Ill-Made Mute is like a dream, beautiful and magical and exquisitely complex, with concepts, ideas and images that embody the true ideal of fantasy – something that is utterly different from our own reality. Dart-Thornton’s imagination is something else, and her writing! Reminiscent of Patricia McKillip, her writing made me swoon; almost every page of my copy is covered in highlights, especially beautiful descriptions and images caught for me to remember later...
Freckles foxtrotted across a face
a rose petal of light
Clotted-cream clouds
A cat of a wind sprang up during the night, playing with the forest giants as if they were skeins of yarn
Water chuckled in rivulets, rolled its glass beads along glossy leaves, strung necklaces on spiderwebs and silver chains down from the drooping ends of branches
Fantasy novels are a very hard thing to get right: put too much into the world, but not enough into the story or characters, and it fails. Put too little into the world, and it barely feels like a real fantasy. Fantasy should sweep you away and make you gasp with wonder, should infect your dreams and make your heart ache. The Ill-Made Mute accomplishes all of that. Opening the pages is like stepping into another world, another universe, one that’s full of real magic. Magic doesn’t always have to be good, and I suppose it doesn’t always have to be beautiful, either – but I’m tired of modern fantasies where magic is like math, where a simplistic, blunt writing style is hailed as ‘gritty’, and unabashed violence and gore is somehow applaudable. By all means, bring in your villains; let there be pain and suffering and fear. That makes a good story. There is a great deal of pain in The Ill-Made Mute, and many people die – including people the reader has come to love. It’s not escapism in the sense that nothing bad ever happens. It’s just…
Lush. And gorgeous. Complex. Rich. Beautiful. I guess I’m old-school: I want my fantasies to be beautiful, even when they are terrible (in the terror sense, not the badly-written sense). I want my fantasy novels to capture the sense of what magic is, what it’s supposed to me: not mathematics, but something impossible and amazing and glorious even when it’s terrifying. It sometimes seems to me that modern fantasy is bent on sucking all the magic out of magic. The Ill-Made Mute breathes it back in, and I’m so grateful I found it when I did, because this is a book to kill cynicism and grown-up-edness. It’s not a story for children, but it is a fairytale. It’s a book to bring the wonder back.
a clover-field of stars
The sky opened out, a hemisphere of rich lapis lazuli lightly frosted with cirrocumulus in vast, sweeping bands
Willow leaves floated like the torn and jaundiced pages of antique books
Are you impressed at how much I’ve managed to write, without really talking about the book at all? That’s because if I say anything – anything – I’m liable to spoil something. There are so many threads in this book, and they are all interwoven with each other. I want everyone to read this and I want them to do it unprepared, so that each revelation comes as a surprise, the way it should. I want this book to unfold in your mind the way it did in mine, slowly making me smile wider and wider because it was just so perfect. So exactly what I’d be longing for so badly.
It doesn’t pull any punches. Dart-Thornton does not once play down for the reader’s intelligence. I read this on my Kindle and was glad for the Kindle’s inbuilt dictionary; there were many, many words I didn’t know. Nor is the story itself at all simple. Maybe my summary above makes it sound like a quest fantasy: it isn’t. There are at least half a dozen stories wound into this one, far more than one adventure, one quest.
The sun rose incarnadine
The sky was a sheet of bleached satin
A thick dough of silence fell, heavy and deafening.
This is a book about growing into yourself. It’s about body-image and self-discovery. It’s about disability – the main character is mute, after all. It’s about politics and faeries, the old kind who can bless or destroy. There are ships shaped like giant swans and rooks that were once boys. It’s about love and honesty and courage, honour and intelligence and idiocy. Kindness and cruelty and what it means to be human, a person. It’s about magic. It’s all about magic.
This is real fantasy, the kind I read the genre for. If you’ve been looking for magic too, well – here it is. I hope you love it like I did.