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The Etched City by K.J. Bishop
01/07/2006 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Bantam Dell. 382 page enlarged paperback. Price: $14.00 (US), $19.00 (CAN). ISBN: 0-553-38291-8. Buy The Etched City in the USA - or Buy The Etched City in the UK  check out website: www.bantamdell.com
Years after fighting in a failed rebellion army together, the world-weary physician Raule runs into her old compatriot, debonair gunslinger Gwynn, in the broken-down desert of the Copper Country. As several corpses are involved in this particular reunion, it's not long before the pair are once again forced to elude the fanatical General Anforth and his Army of Heroes. Via a neatly timed encounter with some high explosives, they make a break for the fin de siecle civilisation, awaiting in one of the sub-tropical cities up on the Teleute Shelf. But their destination of Ashamoil, baroque, crumbling, heaving with life and rotten to the core, is even more deadly than the life they are leaving behind...
While Raule is forced, through a lack of recognised local credentials, to work in a slum hospital treating the lowest of the low, Gwynn performs his customary trick of landing on his feet. This time in the employ of local crimelord Elm and his gang of elegant, dandied thugs. Strange things are abroad in Ashamoil and as life there drives Raule and Gwynn even further apart, reality and dreams begin to have a curious habit of merging.
Bishop has been much-compared to China Mieville on the strength of this, an eloquent and deceptively languid first novel and whilst you can see where the comparisons are coming from, in many ways it's really not the case. This is fantasy with an authentically Australian influence for once, though, shot through with a decidedly dark post-colonial flavour that's more Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness' than it is fantasy's reigning Tolkien ethic.
What sets it apart are the unusual little touches so rarely seen in this genre. Not only do Raule and Gwynn not fall into the inevitable romance you would expect from lead characters, but neither are particularly pleasant or sympathetic people. Gwynn is charming, erudite and fascinating but also a cold-blooded and decidedly efficient killer who doesn't tend to have a problem with anything he has to do to survive. Raule is oddly emotionally distant, prone to a kind of cynical, doomed idealism that makes her despise and avoid Gwynn's company much of the time. She also gets sidelined for much of the latter half of the book, perhaps to the narrative's detriment. Whilst there's a wickedly keen vision governing most of the story, it also has the sense of allowing itself to wander off into the side-streets and labyrinthine alleyways of the plot. There's the slight sensation that Bishop doesn't know quite what to do with Raule once she's established the set up of her Ashamoil life. As Raule appeared to be ostensibly the reader's way into the story at first, this gets a little disconcerting.
Gwynn, as always, has far more fun and a far higher body count. There's a convoluted romance with the enigmatic, not-quite-human artist Beth Contanzin (which hints at something far darker and more disturbing) mixed in with all the necessary dirty work of being a bodyguard and assassin to the most ruthless man in all of Ashamoil. Not to mention a deeply surreal séance, a trip down the river and into the jungle that Colonel Kurtz himself would be proud of.
The characters themselves are, on one level, merely acting as guides and introductions to the city itself, though and what a city it is. Like Mieville's New Crobuzon, it's a place where the fantastic merges seamlessly with the more modern urban mundane, but with a subtropical, Pacific twist. Relentless humidity, heat and tropical rainstorms are pulling the crumbling buildings apart at the seams, with an unknowable jungle emerging inexorably through the cracks. Bishop's writing slides neatly around the atrocities and absurdities of casual colonial violence, tribal warfare, the politics of monied slave trader crimelords and the careless brutality of street gang brawling with a sharp and slyly detached narration, skirting a thin, careful line between pathos and deadpan black comedy. For all its musing on art and life and dreams, the decadent richness of Ashamoil seeps through the cracks. This is relentlessly bleak stuff.
Curiously, it does read better a second time around when you've had a chance to set aside all expectations that genre books embed in your brain and accept 'The Etched City' isn't going to take you anywhere you may have anticipated going. Not for those who like their fantasy bland and safe, but then reading this is somewhat akin to being led down a dark and tangled jungle path, it helps to keep your wits about you or risk losing your footing...!
Jennifer Howell
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