If there was any abiding doubt. Nghi Vo is my favourite writer who's alive and working today. 'The City in Glass' was my second favourite book of last year and 'Siren Queen' my absolute favourite of the one before. I'm sure I didn't appreciate 'Don't Sleep with the Dead' enough in April because I haven't read the book it spins off from, but it was powerful and enjoyable nonetheless. This is the sixth in a series of novellas about Cleric Chih and I haven't read any of the previous five, but it's a stunningly original vision that's tender and beautiful and searing and traumatic and clearly I now need to read the other five, along with everything else Vo has written.

I couldn't tell you any of the usual things about Cleric Chih: age, gender, even nationality, though the flavour here is Asian, especially Chinese, and the pronouns used are they/them. They fit into a long line of wandering clerics in Asian culture, who I believe are typically Buddhist and monks; I'm not sure whether Chih is either. They're also usually studies of calm in a volatile climate, though a mastery of martial arts is commonplace too. Chih is certainly the former but there's no sign of the latter here, not that it was needed. They're based at the abbey at Singing Hills and travel around with their companion, a talking hoopoe bird called Almost Brilliant, on missions to record stories told by the people. Both do that, I should add, as the hoopoe is also a neixin, or memory spirit.

As this sixth book in the series is my first, I couldn't tell you if there are any connections to earlier novellas, beyond the current mission being assigned in Jintao, possibly after another story, and a mention of the Empress of Salt and Fortune, which is the title of the first book. However, what I do know about the series is that these novellas can be read in any order, which seems fair. I felt like I was missing something when I read 'Don't Sleep with the Dead' and I'm sure I was because it was a spin-off of 'The Chosen and the Beautiful', her re-telling of 'The Great Gatsby'. Here I don't feel as if I'm missing anything. I'll find the others and read them in publication order, because I do that as a matter of course, but it sounds like I don't need to be that strict.

The mission in this novella is to look into the famine that struck Baolin eighteen years ago, which lasted for three more and devastated the city. It played to me primarily like old school fantasy, a term intended to conjure up 'The Arabian Nights' rather than Tolkien. Really old school fantasy. Of course, it's Asian in flavour rather than middle eastern, so maybe 'Journey to the West' would be a more appropriate comparison. However, both are fundamentally concerned with stories and storytelling, 'The Arabian Nights' comprised of daily stories told by Scheherezade and 'Journey to the West' an episodic epic to collect Buddhist scripture.

However, as it rolled on, it moved more into horror territory and it doesn't hold back. After all, a city suffering under famine is a horrific place to be and the stories of that experience inevitably venture into darkness. The overall tone remains fantasy though and the horror is kept at the sort of polite distance that Victorian writers stayed behind. There's no gore and no gratuitousness, as Vo descends into the depths very subtly. In fact, while it isn't in a particularly horrific section, one subtlety almost escaped me until I realised what she was saying in context.

The most obvious positive, among many, is the language. I've experienced this before from Vo, of course, as this is my fourth book by her, but she has a mastery of language that always reminds of cartoonists who draw the simplest characters with very few lines but somehow endow them with deep meaning and personal connection. Anyone can draw lines. Few can draw the right lines. Very few can draw the right lines and make it seem utterly effortless. The same applies to words. Nghi Vo has a stunning economy of language that gives her the ability to tell the story of an entire city in fewer than a hundred pages. These words mark the best use of language I've experienced this year and I just reviewed a book by a poet. I read some of these passages aloud just to hear them.

The most obvious negative, in fact the only negative I can conjure up, is a reliance on convenience. However, with fewer than a hundred pages to work with, I guess that's an inevitability. Certainly Vo adheres to the principle of Chekhov's gun. So, when I tell you how this begins, you can be sure it has meaning later. As our wanderers approach Baolin, Almost Brilliant digs up ants to eat and, in doing so, finds bone. Taking a look, Chih sees teeth. Human teeth. They pray over the remains. As they walk into the city, they're joined by a white kitten. I had no idea what these meant and I feel sure that you won't either, but all those details are there for a reason, that only becomes clear as the final story is told and the mission is completed.

This is a story of class and power, epitomised in the two places that Chih and Almost Brilliant visit and the people they meet there. Their first stop is to sample Baolin pork at a small restaurant, a delicacy known far beyond the city's borders, and Li Shui serves it up for Chih, along with a side of story that constitutes chapter three. It's about the night people and the Great Houshun and how his mother sated the needs of the famine demon with a dream of her Baolin pork. It's told simply but with wonderful effect and, once more, it gains further meaning when the mission is done.

Li offers Chih a room, but an invitation arrives from Magistrate Liu, who has ruled over Baolin for twenty-two years, including the three under famine, and that invitation isn't one to decline, even if Chih is initially unsure if he's a guest or a prisoner. Of course, being the established magistrate, Liu's household is well to do and the stories told there wear different clothes. However, it's when Madame Liu, the magistrate's wife, tells hers that the mystery of the famine starts to be solved. Again, Vo keeps the horror polite and distant but it's also unmistakable. No wonder the Lius have been vegetarians since the famine.

I adored the simplicity here, because it's an essence that has to be distilled down to. Entire layers need to be uncovered and moved past to get to that essence, but the answer is sometimes there in front of us without us realising. How did the people of Baolin survive the famine? It's fair to say that laughing bottles of rice and dust cookies are a valid answer. But why was a famine demon in Baolin to begin with and, being a physical creature, who did it talk to and what about? There are answers here and questions and they each lead to each other.

This is a pristine novella just on its own merits. Now I get to find out what else it is when seen as a single part of a series. I haven't felt this optimistic about a character since Othala Celehar in 'The Grief of Stones' by Katherine Addison, ironically also not the first in a series that I'm exploring in the wrong order. Vo is a gift that keeps on giving. I'm trying to think who else might qualify as my favourite author of today and I'm coming up completely dry. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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