Incarceron and Sapphique by Catherine Fisher
I can hardly say enough good things about these books. Love love love love LOVE.
I’ve read a lot of Fisher’s other books* and have always found her stories engaging—she builds good worlds, and then she plonks interesting people in these rich and fertile earths, and I want to know what happens, and I don’t want to stop reading just because a four-leg needs hurtling or the village fete needs chocolate chip cookies or the dentist needs another £1,000,000 of my blood and tears.** My US publisher also publishes Fisher*** and this summer they sent me a lovely big box of books including INCARCERON and SAPPHIQUE and I thought, oh, Catherine Fisher, excellent, I’ll save those for a while . . .
Listen to me. Don’t save them. INCARCERON came out the beginning of the year and SAPPHIQUE is out any minute†. They’d make great holiday reading.
INCARCERON begins with one of the major characters—maybe he’s the hero and maybe he isn’t—almost getting killed:
‘Finn had been flung on his face and chained to the stone slabs of the transitway. . . . He felt them before he heard them; vibrations in the ground . . . Then noises in the darkness, the rumble of migration trucks, the slow hollow clang of wheel rims. . . . the parallel grooves in the floor arrowed straight under his body. He was chained directly across the tracks. . . . The grinding of machinery shuddered the floor. It whined in his bones. . . . He waited, forcing his terror down, second by second testing his nerve against death, not breathing, not letting himself break, because he was Finn the Starseer, he could do this. Until from nowhere a sweating panic erupted and he heaved himself up and screamed, “Did you hear me! Stop! Stop!”
‘They came on. . . . ’
Finn and his band of bandits live in Incarceron. Incarceron is a vast, a world-vast prison; it contains not merely cells and shafts and tunnels but cities and forests and mountains—and millions of little red blinking electronic Eyes, which are the Prison, watching its inmates. Finn again: ‘. . . That was the first time he had heard the Prison laugh. He shivered, remembering it now, a cold, amused chuckle that had echoed down the corridors. . . . The Prison was alive. It was cruel and careless, and he was Inside it.’
There is a myth about the Prison—that beyond its ringing metal walls and unreachably high but closed and solid sky, there is Outside. One man, it is said, found the way Out: Sapphique. He promised that he would return and free the other Prisoners; and while that was a long time ago, they still tell stories about him, stories which some of the Prisoners believe: ‘There was a man and his name was Sapphique. Where he came from is a mystery. Some say he was born of the Prison, grown from its stored components. Some say he came from Outside, because he alone of men returned there. Some say he was not a man at all, but a creature from those shining sparks lunatics see in dreams and name the stars. Some say he was a liar and a fool.’
There is an Outside. We the readers meet it in chapter two: ‘The oak tree looked genuine, but it had been genetically aged. . . . She sighed and leaned back against the trunk. It looked so peaceful. So perfect in its deception. . . . ’ Claudia is the daughter of the Warden—the Warden of Incarceron, who lives Outside, and who may or may not be able to enter—and therefore to leave—the Prison he administers, if ‘administer’ is the word for watching over a living, conscious, malicious, jealous, ambitious, sealed world. Claudia, her father, and the Realm they live in exist under the Protocol: ‘We will choose an Era from the past and re-create it. We will make a world free from the anxiety of change! It will be Paradise!’ You don’t need me to tell you that it is not Paradise—and it will perhaps not amaze you to hear that Incarceron was supposed to be Paradise too—another Paradise.
The Warden is the second most important person in the Realm, second only to the Queen. Claudia is to marry the Queen’s son, Caspar: ‘[The Warden] walked to the panelled wall and looked up at the portrait there. . . . “Caspar, Earl of Steen. Crown Prince of the Realm. Fine titles. His face hasn’t changed, has it? He was merely impudent then. Now he’s feckless, brutal, and thinks he is beyond control. . . . A challenge, your future husband.”’
Claudia wants to escape her politically expedient marriage; Finn wants to escape Incarceron. All the Prisoners want to escape Incarceron—but Finn has memories, if they are memories and not madness, of things that cannot have happened in Incarceron, and a mysterious tattoo on his wrist that may indicate an origin outside Incarceron—which may in fact indicate a connection with the Realm’s ruling family—the Realm’s ruling family which lost its elder son in mysterious circumstances and left Caspar, his half-brother and only son of the ruling Queen, to be Crown Prince. If Finn’s memories are true, it would mean that it is possible to breach Incarceron’s walls. If Claudia’s suspicions are true, then Giles, Caspar’s elder brother, was murdered. But what if he wasn’t murdered, exactly. What if he was . . . .
There is no neat and tidy conclusion here—SAPPHIQUE is so open-ended that I had tentatively assumed Fisher would be going on with it, although she calls it ‘two books’ like that’s the final word on the matter on her web site.†† The open-endedness is a good thing—there’s no way these complex characters in their complex and abundantly populated storylines—Claudia and Finn are only the beginning—would have gone quietly into a squared-off and all-questions-answered happily, or even unhappily, ever after. One of the best things about these books is the way the characters are never quite what you think they are: INCARCERON starts with a shocking betrayal, and you will probably assume, as a result, that you know who these people are. You’d be wrong. Let it be a warning to keep your wits about you. And have fun.
* * *
* Not all. But at the end of SAPPHIQUE I hit the Book Depository and ordered everything I didn’t recognise.
** Especially tears, as I sign the fourth mortgage.
*** Note that they’re reissuing THE BOOK OF THE CROW next year some time, which is—or rather are, there are four of them—another page turner, although of a very different sort than INCARCERON. I’ll try to give you a heads up at a suitable moment. . . . My relationship with time being a trifle nonstandard, as you know.
† The ARC unhelpfully says ‘December’. The Penguin site advertises it as 28 December.
†† http://www.catherine-fisher.com/index.asp But I recommend you don’t read what she says about INCARCERON and SAPPHIQUE till after you read them.
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