Some years ago, I used to put together a reading challenge each January. One year, it was rereading a science fiction novel each month I remembered fondly from my teen years, and had not reread since. Another year, it was the first book of twelve different fantasy series I’d not read before. And another year, it was a novel each month from a different country, a country I’d never read any fiction from before. Some of these challenges were more successful than others. (I never completed the fantasy one.)
I stopped the reading challenges in 2012. I forget why. But I still continued coming up with book-related New Year’s Resolutions I could use to guide my reading during the following twelve months, with varying degrees of success. And then I sort of stopped doing that too. But, for some reason, prompted I think by a comment on Twitter, I decided, for 2022, each month I would read at least one book by an author I had never read before. It seemed an easy enough resolution to keep. In fact, looking back at 2021, I apparently read 22 books, out of 139, by authors I’d not read previously.
In January, my “new” author was Johannes V Jensen, whose collection The Waving Rye (1958, Denmark) I read (see here). This month, it’s The Kingdoms (2021, UK) by Natasha Pulley. It was on offer on ebook last year and sounded interesting enough to be worth a go. The author’s name was new to me, although The Kingdoms is her fourth novel; and while not published by a genre imprint, it did seem to be a genre novel. The description of The Kingdoms brags it has been “long listed for the British Science Fiction Award Best Novel”, which is not quite the coup the publisher’s marketing department seem to think it is. (The long list is a spreadsheet, and people suggest eligible titles, which are then added to the spreadsheet. So any book could end up there.)
The basic premise of The Kingdoms is simple: there are two pillars in the sea near the Isle of Lewis and Harris, and, depending on which way you go between them, you either go back, or forward, in time by ninety-three years. (Their origin and workings are never explained.) The novel opens near the end of the nineteenth century in a London very different to that in our history books. And that’s because the French won the Napoleonic War and conquered Britain. London is now Londres, the British Isles are ruled by France, everyone speaks French, and written English is illegal. Joe finds himself on a platform at Gare du Roi, having apparently travelled from Glasgow, with no memory of his past.
Joe learns he is a slave — the French Empire still practices slavery — and his owner comes to collect him. With Joe’s wife. Some months later, Joe is manumitted and gets a job at an engineering workshop. Two years later, he is asked to travel to the Outer Hebrides to fix the steam engine powering a lighthouse (the keepers have disappeared, but everyone seems strangely unconcerned by that.)
Joe learns the ship which built the lighthouse inadvertently travelled between the pillars and so built it in 1797. The lighthouse is a ruin in 1890, when Joe visits Lewis and Harris, but he travels between the pillars back to 1797. Another ship from 1890, the Kingdom, a paddle-steamer, also made the same mistake a year or so earlier— and then sailed to Southampton, still in 1797, and was captured by the French. Who had then interrogated its crew, and so gained knowledge of future events and technology.
Hence Britain’s defeat in the Napoleonic War.
Which is all very interesting as an alternate history. But Pulley can’t decide if her story lies with her invented nineteenth-century Britain, her alternate Napoleonic War, the relationship between Joe and Missouri Kite (the improbably-named eighteenth-century Royal Navy officer central to events), or the fates of the seven crew-members of the Kingdom, who provide the book’s title — not to mention that a paddle-steamer with a crew of seven, of which only two are actual sailors, seems improbable at best.
Further complicating matters is Joe himself. He can’t remember his past, or indeed anything prior to his arrival in the Gare du Roi. A postcard sent to him, held at a post office since 1797, leads him to suspect he’s actually one of the seven crew of the Kingdom. But which one?
Missouri Kite clearly knows. As does his sister, Agatha (the surgeon aboard Kite’s frigate, but also an heiress and peer). But no one else who should know him, once the narrative finally reveals his identity, seems to recognise him. Which makes no sense.
Which is, I suppose, one way of saying that nothing in this novel really convinces. The fact the “gate” is never explained is irrelevant, but everything else needs some grounding. And it doesn’t have it. I’ve read enough novels set in Georgian England to spot that Pulley completely fails to evoke it. The Kingdom travels from Lewis and Harris to Southampton without realising what has happened to it, which seems implausible. Further, in 1797, France was unlikely to be seizing English ships just off the southern coast of England.
I like the central idea of a time gate in the Outer Hebrides, and Pulley cleverly plays off her 1797 England against her Imperial France of 1890. There’s a good scene where Kite and his crew investigate the ramifications of time travel using four giant tortoises. But there’s a sense throughout that Pulley is not entirely sure where the heart of her story lies. It feels like she wants it to be the romance between Joe and Kite, but it’s played so flat, especially given attitudes at the time — at both times! — to homosexuality. Instead, we’re repeatedly told that Kite can’t be alone in a cabin with a man, but never told why, or who proclaimed this.
To make matters worse, Kite’s characterisation is all over the place. The strong female characters are well-drawn, but Kite is almost impossible to decipher because he changes from page to page. Partly it’s because he’s seen through the lens of Joe’s own emotions, which change frequently; but given that it takes 90% of the novel before Joe even realises he is himself in love with Kite, well…
The final scene, where the two at last come together, drags in yet another alternate 1890, which only further confuses things.
Then there’s the writing. Which is not actually that good. It’s not bad, and it’s certainly not the sort of bland anodyne prose normally found in genre fiction. But much of it is confusingly phrased, and a lot of it is anachronistic. The dialogue is almost all inappropriate and uses present-day speech patterns . I think, for example, it’s safe to say no one in 1805 England ever said, “Grow the fuck up”. Perhaps this is why the novel fails so badly at evoking its historical periods.
I like what The Kingdoms actually is, but I think it has far too many distracting flaws. It tells an interesting story, it just doesn’t tell it well enough. Joe is mostly a cipher, and while the story requires him to be such, Kite is just as important but comes across more as an embodiment of what the plot needs at certain points than an actual character. The alternate history presents some interesting world-building choices, but they needed to be better grounded in order to convince.
The end result is a novel which comes across as too lightweight for the story it purports to tell. Some readers may prefer that. I’m not one of them. When I read a historical novel, even one with genre elements, I want an actual historical novel.
Sadly, The Kingdoms makes a better fist of its genre elements than it does its historical ones.
