Basilisk by NM Browne

     I know that what I’m about to say isn’t in the Christmas spirit, but I have to say it anyway. I feel like this book was tailor-made to piss me off. Maybe I’m writing this because I have a migraine, or I had a crappy year altogether, but no. I just hate this book. There’s no other way to put it.

       There’s this city-state called Lunnzia that’s divided into an “Above” and “Below” society. The Above people, who are called Oppidans for some strange reason, live above street level, and the Belowers (combers) live in the sewers and caverns. Why? Never explained! The two sides hate each other and that’s all you need to know. Well that and there’s a freezing cold winter and famine and half of the population is off fighting a war in the land of Who-Cares. The leader of Lunnzia is a dictator named the Arkel, or Pavenos to his friends. He set up this law called “The Humble Way” where nobody owns any possessions. In other words, the worst kind of communism. There are dozens of other characters, or rather I thought there were because it’s really just five other people with fifteen names apiece. I’ll just use their most commonly used names: there’s the Low Lady Estelle, former courtesan and assassin, Grimper and Scrupper, twins in her criminal enterprise (or one on each side of the Above/Below dichotomy), Capla, an Inquisitor for the Arkel, a bunch of “Esteemed Doctors,” Immina, a mute noblewoman high on drugs, and Barna, a loan-shark turned rebel leader. You got all that? Good, because none of these people are the lead characters. That would be Donna, an Above-citizen who works as a scribe and is the Low Lady’s daughter, and Rej, a Below citizen who’s really good at climbing and inventing goofy swear words (what is a “twazzock?” It sounds like some kind of roofing tar). Donna has to write notes for Dr. Melagier, an asshole that’s keeping his sister Immina drugged up and placated. Turns out the guy is making a doomsday device, so of course the best thing to do is hire a complete stranger to copy his notes verbatim while his sister keeps writing her “help me” notes in her own blood. That seems trustworthy.
    Meanwhile Rej finds one of the doctor’s rivals murdered in the sewers. He doesn’t know that Doctor Doom killed the guy, but he vows to get revenge for the poor bastard because he’s got nothing better to do this weekend. So he escapes Above-ground, runs into Donna (or gets introduced to her), and they run into the Arkel’s great conspiracy to kill everyone.

        I’ll try to sum up, but bear in mind that the plot is drenched in page after page of pseudo-poetry and gibberish terminology that makes it almost impossible to follow. Not to mention that every second chapter or so Browne stops the action to talk about the weird dragon-related dreams the two kids are experiencing. The kids find out about this by rescuing a slave and locking him in a panic room “to keep him safe.” The poor guy starves, almost freezes to death, and then gets stabbed to death anyway. Oops. Then Melagier gets stabbed by the Arkel’s agents. It all centers around the Arkel commissioning the two doctors, Melagier and the dead one, to make a machine called “The Basilisk Contrivance” to summon an enormous dragon from the Between world, or the world of dreams (I hate books that use dreams as a main plot point. It just annoys me to no end, and here all the dragon dreams boil down to “Flying around as a dragon is pretty”). It’s supposed to just scare people to death. Not burn or eat them. Scare them. It’s the magical equivalent of the Scarecrow’s gas from the Batman comics. He’s going to use it on the Below people because…reasons. It turns out that Donna is related to practically every other character in the novel, except Rej because that would lead to incest. I swear, through the course of the book Browne gives Donna like five different sets of parents, including the Arkel, the Low Lady, and evil Dr. Melagier, and the entire Lunnzia volleyball team. Immina is her sister/aunt/second-cousin/Girl-Scout leader/etc. I lost track, and members of the family can all share dreams. Rej is just some dude who also shares the dreams because…reasons. I think my migraine is coming back.

      I forgot to mention all the weird, nonsensical terms that Browne uses, which is one of the worst things I hate about fantasy literature. People think that making up words is the same as making up a world. No, it just fills the book with gibberish. There’s no substance behind each word, or connection to the world at large. The worst had to be Janny Wurtz, the author of To Ride Hell’s Chasm. She used a made-up word for EVERY GOD DAMN NOUN IN THE BOOK. It was impossible to read!
      Much as I love their works, I think a lot of fantasy writers take after Tolkien, Frank Herbert, and Lewis Carrol, but there’s a reason why they made it work and Browne can’t. Tolkien was a linguistics professor before he was a writer. He knew how languages and foreign grammar worked and he put that to good use when he invented Elvish. Herbert used a plethora of words to describe poisons, but that’s all the reader really needed to know: it was just different synonyms for one thing. Meanwhile the story could go on without it. And Carrol wrote nonsense words for the sake of nonsense, because Wonderland was satirical nonsense for kids, who appreciate that kind of thing. Back to Browne. She seems to just throw in goofy words for simple concepts and, while it is possible to grasp the meaning after a while, it still stalls the flow of the story with, “What the hell is that?” For example, there’s this stuff called ajeemabor. It’s a purple colored poison. Or it’s a sedative. Or it affects your dreams. Or it…look it has like half a dozen different functions. My point is there is probably a real life substance (or a couple of substances) that can do all of that. We live in the world of internet search engines. How hard is it to look up something like that?
     In Browne’s case she seems to be so interested in her own fictional vocabulary that she forgets what real words mean. Remember how the Low Lady used to be an assassin disguised as a courtesan? She knew the Arkel just as he was rising to power (I’ll get to this in a minute), and she knew he was turning evil. So why didn’t she do anything about it? Does Browne know what courtesans or assassins do for a living? No, but she knows the correct usage of the words “scrottle” and “carga.”    
   
     Onto the next cliché that I hate about fantasy/young adult books. The bad guys aren’t evil. They’re just rude. Sure the Arkel and his henchman Capla have big plans to kill half of the city, but why do it? How is destroying fifty percent of your population, even the undesirable half, going to help your goals? What’s step two? How did he come to power? That question I can answer, but it makes even less sense than the “kill all Below people” plan. The Elder Dr. Melagier, a woman (and one of Donna’s many moms), used to date the Arkel back in his college days. She was responsible for taking care of six kids that you will never hear from again. They all took ajeemabor and had dreams in the Between world one night, and died. So the Arkel put her to death and in his grief the rest of the city elected him to power so that he could declare that all physical possessions were illegal. And now he’s the dictator. I swear to God that’s his backstory. Six nameless dead kids, he puts his girlfriend to the axe, absolute power, declares that nobody can own jack shit, and now plans for genocide. The biggest plot hole is that he knows that nightmare creatures in the Between world can kill people, not the ajeemabor or Dr. Melagier’s negligence. So there you go, stupid! Freddy Kreuger got those kids! Case closed. What the hell is wrong with you?
    Then he hires Capla as his lead torturer/inquisitor. He captures Donna, but since she’s Browne’s personal avatar in this fantasy world (and the publishers would probably frown on torturing an underage girl), instead of giving her the hot irons, he TELLS HER THE ENTIRE EVIL PLAN THEN TAKES HER OUT TO DINNER. He even gives her a beautiful dress out of the Arkel’s personal closet (Wait, why does the Arkel have a closet full of women’s, correction, young women’s clothing?). I’ve never tortured or interrogated anyone in my life, but aren’t you supposed to get info from the captive instead of giving it to her on a silver platter? With some food literally on a silver platter?

     So Donna is the Chosen One that can summon the big dream dragon and she gets strapped to the Basilisk Thing-a-Jig to unleash the monster. Of course she is. Why the hell not? Rej finds, or gets introduced to the rebels lead by Barna the loan shark. He makes peace between the Above and Below people in a snap. They have fun storming the castle, and Rej watches the Low Lady and the others rescue Donna. He just arrives in time for her to wake up. Oh and now all the bad guys are dead and the Basilisk What’s-it gets destroyed. Oh happy day.

    Now I need to get to the biggest, most serious problem that I have with this book. The cardinal reason why it’s crap. Donna and Rej do nothing so they need the grown-ups to do everything, including moving them from one scene to the next. The only things that they did by themselves were lock a poor slave in a room so he could freeze, and Donna flirted with a guard to (not) get into a locked room. Rej stabbed a prisoner to death because the Low Lady told him to. Seriously, that’s it.
     Young adult novels need to tap into some aspect of teenage life, some facet of the adolescent mind, if they want to succeed. I love Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, because they tap into the rebelliousness and righteousness that many people feel, especially in their teenage years. I hate Meyers’ Twilight series because it taps into the lazy and whiny selfishness of that age group. It’s a commercial but not literary success because of it. NM Browne chose, or maybe experienced, a third aspect of that life: the dumb “I don’t know what to do so I’ll let the grown-ups do it” aspect. I figured out why I hated Donna and Rej so much by about half way through the novel. They reminded me of the dumb high school kids that I used to teach. Rej is a bumbling idiot that would rather run away, stare at his feet to avoid the teacher’s eyes, or just break some shit in frustration. Donna is vapid. She just wants to lay her head down on her desk and sleep while everything happens around her, but then she wants the pretty dresses and five-star meals as a reward for just being there. Both of these morons are dumb students that just trudge from one classroom (or chapter) to the next, space out when the teachers or their parents start talking, and then beg those same adults to do all the hard work for them. When it comes time to test their character and ingenuity, they fail and people die, and Browne probably just wants to shrug her shoulders and say, “What do you expect? They’re kids?” No, they’re failures, and so is this book.
                                           F.
I’m sorry to sound like a Scrooge just before Christmas day, but damn it this book sucks. Basilisk belongs on the Yule log instead of under the tree this year.