My expectations going into Jay Lake’s Trial of Flowers were extremely high. The front cover has a quote from Jeff VanderMeer, author of one of my favorite books City of Saints & Madmen. Awesome. The summary on the back cover compares this book to the likes of the aforementioned City of Saints & Madmen, one of my other all time favorite books, Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, and The Etched City (which sadly I haven’t read yet). Awesome yet again. Maybe my hopes were too high going into this? I don’t know. Let’s do a little examining.
Like VanderMeer or Miéville’s novels, Trial of Flowers features a unique city as its setting. In this case, it is the City Imperishable, whose motto is: “The City is.” It has everything you’d expect from a city in this genre. Squalor and riches side by side. Gas lamps and electric lights. Corrupt government in the form of the ineffective Assemblage of Burgesses. And a “gross-out” type of character. In this case that space is occupied by the dwarfs, while Saints & Madmen had the gray caps and Perdido had all the different xenian races.
The dwarfs are people who are put into boxes as children to stunt their growth, much like veal. Their lips are sewn shut, and they are forced to learn pretty much everything — making them indispensable members of the business community because they are so well versed in commerce and mathematics.
All in all, the setting is vibrant and lively, and it should be accompanied by a weird, haunting, thought-provoking plot. That’s where the trouble starts. The plot begins simply enough with the three principle characters.
Jason the Factor (a type of manager at a shipping firm) is working for the Second Counselor, trying to secure help from mercenaries to protect the city from approaching enemy armies. His master goes missing, and Jason spends most of the first half of the book trying to figure out what happened to him.
Bijaz is a dwarf and the leader of the Sewn (dwarfs who keep their mouth stitches and are loyal to the city). He works for the Assemblage, trying to advance the rights of dwarfs. His story is the most disturbing and hard to follow of the three. After suffering a terrible, terrible rape, he finds himself befriending another dwarf, the godmonger named Archer. Together they try to find out what is causing the noumenal attacks around the city. The words noumenal and noumena are never explained. Thus only through context is the reader able to find out that they have to do with magic, demons, and spirits. That bit of difficulty is only one of the things that pulled me out of the story.
Finally, there is Imago of Lockwood, a disgraced noble who is about to go to Debtor’s Court because of well…debts. He uses his skill as a lawyer to find a loophole in the city’s laws. Using this loophole, he tries to get himself appointed Lord Mayor of the city — in an effort to wrest control away from the squabbling Assemblage that accomplishes nothing except placing the city on a course for ruin.
The three stories start separate, but begin to intertwine, and this is where things get weird. By their actions, the characters accidentally release the city’s Old Gods. There are philosophical bits about diffuse and concentrated power, but they’re vague and come across as less than perfectly explained.
To me, the latter half of the story was just a mess. Concepts are introduced that are never get properly explained. In order to try and save the city from the Old Gods and the approaching armies, Bijaz contacts a group of other deities called the Numbers Men who espouse some more philosophy about power and luck. They were never mentioned earlier on in the story, so their appearance feels a little bit like a deus ex machina. Their role in the story is never clearly explained. I guess I was supposed to just read them as an entity that exists and does things, and just leave it at that.
What started out as a story about political intrigue and war set in a wonderful, living setting devolved into a strange tale about Gods and power. The ending felt really abrupt and not as full as it could have been. There are aspects of Jason’s story were left dangling. The same thing happens with Imago’s story too. The whole thing felt unfocused and less polished than I expected.
This is sad because the last book I read by Lake turned out similarly, but I’ll save that for another post. The story had such potential, but ultimately it failed to capitalize on its potential.
One small, happy note — Lake included a shout out to fellow author Jeff VanderMeer inside the text. On page 237, the dwarf Saltfingers is describing the types of beasts he normally sees in the city’s sewers, and he says, “There’s them freshwater squid what come up from somewheres time to time through the DerMeer springs…” I laughed out loud when I read that little bit. Anybody who has read City of Saints & Madmen will understand why Lake has included freshwater squid originating from a place that is clearly named after VanderMeer’s last name.
Even that little interesting bit wasn’t enough to save this book though. Recommended if you’re a fan of the New Weird, or don’t mind a little more style than substance.
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