Diversity and Focus

[mtvessel]

Jul 2021
The True Queen - Zen Cho – Pan, 2019
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Diversity is a hot topic in media circles at present and that is clearly a good thing. Of course any consumer of films, TV and books should be able to find in them characters with whom they can identify, and far too many minorities are still under-represented. However, diversity does raise questions of narrative, particularly when applied to novels. How can you represent the full diversity of human experience when you have to focus on a limited cast of characters? Who do you leave out?

Sadly the answer to that has typically been: complicated women, people whose skin colour is not white, people with disabilities, those in the lower social orders, and queer people. Which is why the latest wave of diverse authors to have entered the SF/fantasy genre is exciting. Zen Cho is one of these and in her second novel she has pleasingly upped the ante on the diverse approach to fantasy and regency romance fiction that marked her first book by deliberately choosing to make all the main characters female and by expanding the milieu to include her own Malay heritage. But there has been some cost in the plotting and worldbuilding.

This is a sequel to Sorcerer to the Crown though you would not know it from the first few chapters. We are introduced to Sakti and Muna, two sisters found washed up on the beach of Janda Baik, a (fictitious) island in the Straits of Malacca ruled by Mak Genggang, a witch. Both have lost their memories - Sakti has magic, but Muna does not. The girls are under a curse which Mak Genggang cannot fathom, so she sends them to her friend the Sorceress Royal in Britain. But en route, Sakti is kidnapped. Muna sets to work on rescuing her while trying to hide her lack of magical acumen from her British hosts.

The meld of Malay and British folklore is interesting but for me it doesn’t quite work. The link between the two is made by nagas, which are treated as fairies with the ability to assume draconic or human forms. But for someone with my cultural baggage, dragons are solid and present physical threats while fairies are ethereal, so the combination is jarring. It felt like the Malay elements were being shoe-horned in to the magical systems established in Sorcerer to the Crown for the sake of creating a sequel when they deserved their own space. In fact, setting the whole story in Janda Baik would have worked better all round. While it is nice to meet up with Zachary and Prunella again, the former has only a couple of brief appearances which are more frustrating than gratifying, and the latter is such a force of nature that she has to be kept implausibly off-stage at vital moments to stop her taking over the plot.

Nonetheless, the characters at Prunella's Academy for the Instruction of Females in Practical Thaumaturgy are engaging and the Georgette Heyer-like comedy of manners is charming. However, the plot lacks the drama and sense of high stakes that the first book had, in part because its focus is not in the setting where the majority of the story takes place. It does not help that Cho has developed a bad habit of telegraphing her plot twists, reducing their impact.

And while I can completely understand the decision to sideline the men, given the overwhelming number of novels that do the opposite, I don't think it's an effective way of addressing the problem of fair representation. Indeed, I have to wonder whether it actually indicates a weakness in Cho's character-writing. Zachary Wythe was not a convincing male character in the first book and there are none in this one. This doesn't particularly detract from the story, but it's a shame in a book that is otherwise pretty exemplary in its thoughtful diversification of its genre predecessors.