I still remember falling under the magic spell of 'The Bear and the Nightingale', five years ago as I was wrapped up in a warm bed retreating from what laughingly counts as winter in Phoenix, not remotely like the snow-drenched steppes of the land in the book that would later become Russia. I devoured that and the rest of the Katherine Arden's 'Winternight' trilogy, but I haven't read any of her books since then, albeit because I haven't had the opportunity to dive into 'Small Spaces', a YA series. When this arrived, I was happy to leap in headlong.

The 'Winternight' trilogy was historical fantasy, in which Arden placed mythological characters in a real historical setting, so phrasing the birth of Russia through folk tale. This is historical fantasy too, but this time it seems much more historical than fantasy because the setting is alive and the supernatural elements are fleeting. I've read that Arden struggled with this book. She "didn't so much write it as hunt it down, through darkness, and drag it, both of us bloody, into daylight." It's almost appropriate that it be a struggle, because it's primarily set in Belgium during World War I and everything was a struggle, to which a potential end seemed further away each day.

Regardless of where we spend most of it, the book starts out in Halifax, Nova Scotia, cemented by a historical event, the explosion of the Mont Blanc cargo ship, packed with high explosives, in the Halifax harbour, after a collision with another vessel. That explosion, entirely accidental, was the largest human-made at that time and its impact took down a swathe of the city, killing seventeen hundred people and injuring nine thousand more. It's in its aftermath that we meet Laura Iven, a Canadian military nurse who returned home from the front with a bad shrapnel wound in her leg, only to lose both her parents and her house in the explosion.

This whole book is about loss and trauma and it's Laura whose loss and trauma we see first. She's served in Belgium, working field hospitals on the front, so she's experienced plenty, but this new trauma is even fresher and more personal. Then comes the news that her brother Freddie, who's also served in Belgium, is missing presumed dead. Given that his jacket and dog tags were found and returned to her, there isn't a heck of a lot of hope. So Laura has lost everything and now lives with the Parkeys, three old women who give séances. It's during one of those that a sliver of hope emerges and off she goes to Belgium again to find her brother.

What she doesn't know but we do, as Arden alternates Laura's chapters with Freddie's, is that he is very much alive, even though he came close to death. He was buried under a pillbox in another explosion, but finds himself alive and sharing what little space there is beneath this mountain of dirt with an enemy, Hans Winter. They're both close to the edge, Freddie especially verging on an overt descent into madness, but they keep each other sane and find a way to escape. From there, they team up, two soldiers from opposing sides, both presumed dead but alive and struggling to survive in no man's land.

As you might have guessed, there's a subtle supernatural element present in the séances, which Laura initially assumes to be fake but seizes on anyway because she has nothing else to seize on. Everything else is historical until we meet Faland the Fiddler, who's quite obviously something a long way beyond mere human. What he is I can't really say, because I can see half a dozen viable ways to explain him. He's an energy vampire. He's banished Fae. He's the Devil himself. I couldn't ever be sure what he is or indeed precisely how he feeds, but he clearly does feed on soldiers like Freddie who have been deeply impacted by their experiences and dearly want to forget.

I was delighted by 'The Bear and the Nightingale' and enjoyed the other two books in its trilogy, but this is a wildly different experience. It has a real weight to it, because Arden has no interest in telling the big story of how the world was thrown into conflict and so many of its people likewise. We see very little actual fighting, instead focusing on what it leaves behind, the broken and the dead, mostly from a not very safe distance at Mary Borden's hospital behind the front. We don't see what the soldiers are doing in the war so much as we see what the war has done to them and that's where the pain and loss and hope manifest. The pain is obvious and the loss not far behind it, but the hope must remain or else there's no reason to go on.

More than anything, this book is about going on and there are many ways to do that. Laura clings to the hope that her brother is alive and, once she starts to actually believe that he might be, to the effort of finding him. Freddie has other ways to go on and Faland, who we can't fail to see as the villain of the story, is in his way also its most obvious hero. He obviously takes from those who are hurting the most but he also gives them what they may desire the deepest, escape from what they've gone through, even if it's through oblivion.

I don't believe, from a token Google search, that Faland the Fiddler is a character Arden built on. I believe she created him out of whole cloth, albeit against a backdrop where soldiers conjured up all sorts of things to save and protect them. Arden certainly didn't invent the Angels of Mons but weaved them into her story, along with the explosion of the Mont Blanc, the sinking of the Titanic and the arrival of Halley's Comet in 1910. There are characters here who I know are real historical figures, like Madame Curie, Empress Sisi of Austria and, most obviously, Mary Borden, a novelist who wrote about her experiences as a war nurse. Maybe others are too.

My favourite moment of real history here is one that's promptly dismissed as having no relevance to the characters who bring it up. We know differently, of course, and it's a wonderful example of how Arden can balance the brutality of war with a snippet of humour when needed. It's Laura and Freddie in a memory by the former. She thinks back to 1914, when she had just passed her nursing exams and the two of them walked in the park wondering about the how the world was changing, what with flying machines, phonographs and moving pictures. They decide on a whim to buy some ice cream.

"Did you hear?"said Freddie. "A poor archduke was shot last week in Sarajevo. His wife too."

"How dreadful," Laura answered. "Vanilla?"

'The Bear and the Nightingale' camps out in my brain as a set of feelings. I remember the brutal cold of it, but the magic of it too. I have a feeling that this will do the same, even if the particular feelings will be different. It's a haunting book, one that never dips into shrieking terror but only because its characters find ways to avoid it. The biggest question for me throughout the book was whether those ways were worse. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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