We all have our guilty reading pleasures, and for many years mine has been the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer. They’re sharply-written, witty, and a great deal of fun. But... They’re also about the “Quality”, the aristocracy of Regency England, a far from admirable group of people. The Quality are the epitome of privilege. And the books revel in that. Add in the often young ages of the heroines, and the age-gap, frequently decades wide, between the heroines and the male romantic leads… Well, now you can see why they’re a guilty pleasure.
Heyer is credited with creating the genre of Regency romance, which is now a staple of romance imprints such as Mills & Boon, Harlequin and Zebra. I’m not sure when the Regency fantasy, as a category science fiction and fantasy subgenre, first appeared, but certainly an early work — if not the actual first — was Sorcery & Cecelia (1988, USA) by Patricia C Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. There have been many such books since, including two sequels to Sorcery & Cecelia (although not until over a decade later). Perhaps, initially, Regency fantasies tried to ape the mannered style of Regency romances, but with fantasy tropes included. The True Queen (2019, Malaysia) by Zen Cho, the sequel to Sorcerer to the Crown (2015, Malaysia), however, is more of a fantasy novel that happens to be set in Regency England.
In Sorcerer to the Crown, the son of an emancipated slave, who had been adopted by the Sorcerer Royal, had to fight to keep his position as the new Sorcerer Royal — not just because of his race, but because the title typically went to the most powerful and best-known magician in England and he was neither. In this sequel, he has passed on the title to his wife — these two novels are as much about shattering social barriers as anything else — who is the first ever female holder of the title. In fact, women are not even accepted as magicians, and her hold on the title is precarious at best. She has also started a school to train girls with talent in magic, an unpopular move.
The True Queen, however, is only peripherally her story.
Sorcerer to the Crown introduced the Malaysian country of Bandar Jaik, whose powerful witches were instrumental in the plot of that novel. In The True Queen, the chief witch of Bandar Jaik sends her two adopted daughters — found on a local beach some months before, with no memory of their lives prior to that — to England to learn English magic at the Sorceress Royal’s school. While travelling through Faery, one of the sisters disappears.
It’s all to do with the rightful queen of Faery, who was deposed by her sister. There’s an important talisman the current queen intended to consume at an upcoming celebration, but it has gone missing. A powerful family of dragons with ties to England are involved, as are the two young women from Bandar Jaik.
Sorcerer to the Crown played clever games in repurposing Regency comedy of manners tropes as fantasy tropes — one of the dragons, for example, reads like the sort of overbearing dowager aunt who frequently appears in Regency romances. The True Queen extends the world-building, but more on the fantasy side of things than the Regency England side. It’s an entirely understandable direction for the sequel to take, so it would be churlish to complain The True Queen doesn’t feature quite enough comedy…
Both Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen work well as fantasy novels, but the real appeal to readers such as myself, who are familiar with Heyer’s oeuvre, is more the Regency setting than the fantasy elements. Both novels handle it well. They manage the style of dialogue, mostly, and any missteps are trivial. If The True Queen has a problem, it’s in the plot, inasmuch as the resolution is not much of a surprise: the real queen of Faery is called Saktimuna, and the two amnesiac sisters at the heart of the story are called… Sakti and Muna.
It all feels somewhat predictable, and what little jeopardy exists doesn’t have much sting. England, we are supposed to believe, may be destroyed. The future of women magicians is also at stake. Yet the former seems a mere side-effect of the future of Faery, which is not really in doubt, and the latter seems to be well in hand for much of the book.
Which is not to say The True Queen is a bad novel. It seems odd to praise it as a good example of its type when it’s likely sui generis… But while it succeeds as both a Regency comedy and an inventive fantasy, it never quite excels as either.
I am not, I admit, a fan of fantasy (that is, high fantasy: heroes and dragons, and all those associated tropes). There are a number of such works I admire, but I have a generally low opinion of the genre. So when I find fantasy novels I think are good, it’s more than just a pleasant surprise. Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen have an advantage in that they’re set in Regency England — cf my comments earlier about Georgette Heyer — but… Cho’s novels may not have the wit of Heyer, but they’re still great fun — and the fact they’re fantasy novels seems almost incidental to their enjoyment.
Yes, the books have dragons and magic and Faery and so on, so they’re clearly fantasy. And yet, the Regency England setting… Which begs the question: which is more important to readers in fantasy fiction? The fantasy setting or the fantasy tropes? Is it the invented semi-mediaeval country or the magic system? Is it the tropes, the way the tropes are handled, or the way the tropes are integrated into the setting?
I’ve argued previously that setting a story aboard a spaceship is not enough to make it science fiction — soap opera versus space opera , so to speak— and there’s a similar argument at play here. Do the fantasy tropes extend the story, or do they enable the story? Here, yes, undoubtedly it’s the latter.
Which makes The True Queen both a good novel and good fantasy.
