Highlights

~don’t trust the forest ~weaponise that womb ~time…to not kill a king? ~misogyny will be your downfall ~let’s all give a middle finger to the Christian Right

A Snake Among Swans is a very different beast from Godkiller and its sequels. Snake is much darker, takes place in a setting rotted through with misogyny and religious bigotry. I didn’t know that going in – and to be honest, I’m glad, because if I had known about all the sexism these characters would face I might not have picked this up. And that would have meant missing out on an incredible book.

Tuathilde is a Merovian princess by courtesy, sort-of-heir to a conquered queendom. But rather than inherit, she marries the conquerer-king, with every intent of killing him, even if she dies in the process. That the king is expecting this isn’t what makes this book unusual; what does is that just before she leaves to be married, Tuathilde’s mother tells her not to do it. That killing the king now won’t fix things. That what Tuathilde must do instead is carve a place for herself in the court, gather allies and acclaim and support, and when she strikes, to not go down in a blaze of glory, but take out the king and all his heirs at once. Leaving Tuathilde to step into the power vacuum.

This is not a hunt, Tilde. This must be a massacre.

It’s a reminder, and an acknowledgement, that doing something like overthrowing your oppressors can’t be done in a quick, clean instant with dramatic music playing in the background. It’s a long game, one that costs, one that stains. It’s so much easier to die gloriously than to live long enough for a chance at really fixing things. Tilde’s handmaidens, especially her best friend Marolyn, are not really on board with this long-term approach; the scenes where they argue against it are heartrending and grief-full, but also make you want to shake the handmaidens.

I was willing to die for them, but were they willing to live for me?

Kaner handles the reality of what this long-term approach means for Tuathilde – the repeated marital rape – adeptly and respectfully. We’re left in no doubt that it’s happening, we see the effect it has on Tuathilde, but the moments of physical violence are allowed to fade to black. Having those scenes on-page wouldn’t add anything to the story; they would just be gratuitous, and I’m extremely glad Kaner made the decision not to go into graphic detail. It’s hard enough to read as it is!

The only thing keeping me from giving this five stars is the comma issue. There are countless instances in this book where a comma is used where a semi-colon is needed – or, especially in dialogue, when a comma is absent from a place that really, really needs it. I thought maybe this was just a copy-editing issue with my early reading copy, but I bought the UK edition of Snake when it came out earlier this year, and no, this is a problem that made it into the final, retail version of the book. It’s constantly jarring, breaking the (otherwise exquisite) writing rhythm on nearly every page. That’s not something I can ignore. It’s also not something I noticed in any of Kaner’s previous books, so I’m not sure what the problem is – did Snake ‘just’ get less copy-editing than the earlier books did? Has Kaner’s writing style changed? No idea, but because it’s so prevalent, I was never able to get over it, the way I could if it was just an occasional hiccup.

That is literally the only thing I have to critisise about this book, though. In all other ways, the writing itself is gorgeous; Kaner remains excellent at crafting worldbuilding-appropriate metaphors and similes, at inventing in-world idioms and proverbs that make the setting feel vividly lived-in. The prose is…I want to call it delicate, like silk, like a gold thread made so finely it’s weightless. Elegant and precise and beautiful.

He had not shaved, and silver shone at his chin, like the frosted shavings from a weapon’s whetting,

Our other POV character is Elise, a princess of the Cynghal conquerors. In a stroke of pure genius, Elise’s chapters are written in third-person, in contrast to Tilde’s first-person – even in a meta sense, Elise doesn’t have a voice, can’t speak for herself! (The way I FLAILED when I realised that! It’s such a simple thing to do, but it says VOLUMES, it’s so freaking CLEVER, ahhhh!) She gives us an insider’s perspective into the Cynghals – and to be blunt, it’s no better than what Tilde sees and experiences. Elise is so little regarded she’s basically a non-entity in her father’s court; even her 10-year-old little brother thinks she can’t be or do anything important, because ‘you’re a girl’; and her father forbid her access to any books at all, for some unspecified transgression. Honestly, her perspective is deeply chilling, because Kaner writes ‘brainwashed’ very, very convincingly, and being in Elise’s head was often enough to make me feel sick. The faith of the Wing – the Cynghal religion that is extremely bird-themed, though never cartoonishly – makes an enormous deal of ‘sins of the mind’ – thought-crimes, basically, and Elise is wracked with guilt and shame for hers, even self-harming as a way of punishing and regulating herself.

Even before Tilde and Elise begin to grow closer, though – and that doesn’t happen for a good chunk of the book – it’s not hard for the reader to see Elise’s frustration, the inner certainty that she is not worth less than her brothers (for all that she tries her best to drown out that inner voice). Elise is extremely faithful, but the misogyny of the Wing is something she can’t quite accept or agree with. Since this is a sin of the mind, she punishes herself for it, but bit by bit the pressure gets too much. There’s a wonderful scene where she is practising her archery alongside her youngest brother – and she gets fed up of making herself shoot badly to make him feel better, and wipes the floor with him. It’s such a powerful moment that I wanted to cheer!

She had stood so calmly among the baying wolves of court, like a cut gem: shining and voiceless.

Tilde’s presence, and living example, is an inspiration to Elise, but Tilde isn’t the one who makes her strong – she is that already. Her father and brothers, on the other hand, don’t value either of them, and the princes take Tilde’s arrival as a pretty personal attack – they know that the king intends for his child by Tilde to inherit his new empire. They move like sea-monsters through the narrative; at first we can only see the disturbed water they leave in their wake, trace their movements therein, enough to understand that they are moving, they are hunting. When they surface, they do so quickly and dangerously. As the book continues, they are more and more present (and more and more obviously a threat to Tilde). Worse, each prince has his own faction; several of them have their own miniature armies, and all of them have their supporters. A good bit of the active plot focuses on this power-struggle, especially as it involves Dagobert, the high priest, who is clearly unhappy with the king’s plan to sire a child on Tilde.

There’s so much intrigue; between the princes; around Dagobert; among the court’s women. Tilde has to fight hard for any crumb of support. But there’s a secondary plotline that I found even more interesting. This trilogy is called The Wing and the Ways, and even though Tilde leaves her home in the first chapter, the Ways are never far enough away to be forgotten. The Ways are power, the magic of the lost druidim to bargain with and channel the kithwood, a sacred forest at the heart of the Merovians’ land. One of the first things we learn is that the kithwood talks; Merovians believe their dead kin become part of the forest, but they don’t harbor any love for their living relatives, instead trying to seduce them close enough for the forest to kill them. Tilde is one of the rare few who can hear the kithwood into adulthood – everyone can hear it when they’re little, but most grow out of it – but there’s nothing she can do with that ability. The druidim are gone. Anyone who could have taught her the Ways is long dead.

taut as a bowstring, a loom-string,

Of course, things aren’t that simple, and that’s revealed very early in the book, before Tilde reaches her new husband. The kithwood, the Ways – their plotline is a powerful one, all tied up in reclaiming a people’s lost heritage, lost power. (Interestingly, it wasn’t being conquered by the Cynghals that lost the Merovians the Ways; they were lost centuries before.) And, while I don’t know if Kaner intended this, pitting the Ways against the Wing not (just) as enemies, but as contrasting faiths. There’s no getting around the fact that the kithwood is objectively real, and responds when humans interact or communicate with it. But the Wing? There’s no evidence that the Wing ever existed, or that it cared about humans; Elise’s prayers never get any kind of response, and neither do any others we know of. It makes the religion of the Wing look…pretty stupid, honestly? They’re talking to an imaginary friend; the Merovians and their allies have a power that answers them.

Albeit, not always as humans would like, and the Ways don’t seem to be worship. Merovians don’t worship the kithwood the way the Cynghals worship the Wing. And it being objectively present and real isn’t always a good thing; the kithwood is extremely scary, not at all safe for humans.

But it also doesn’t try to make laws for the Merovians to follow. On balance, the Wing as a faith does far more harm; the kithwood doesn’t demand war, or sacrifice, or decree everyone with a uterus lesser. As far as we know, the Merovians never went and conquered anybody on the word of the kithwood. Whereas the Wing – or maybe I should say, its human representatives – demands all those things, and practices slavery.

Again, I don’t know if this was Kaner’s intention – but my impression was that on the whole, the Merovians are what I’d consider civilised, and the Cynghals are not. The misogyny would be enough all by itself, but the Cynghals’ methods of execution, their extreme classism, the slavery – all of that adds up to a civilisation I can’t but hold in fucking contempt. And with how similar the faith of the Wing is to Christianity (right down to the persecution complex!) this part of the book feels like a middle finger to the kind of fascists that use Jesus as an excuse for their bs.

(Insert here a thesis’ worth of taking apart how the Cynghals view pregnant women as holy and not-to-be-harmed, coupled with their everyday misogyny, and comparing that to the forced-birth ‘movement’. I am not actually going to write that up, because I will write myself into a rage and I’m not up for that today. But. IT’S RIGHT THERE. HARD TO BELIEVE IT’S AN ACCIDENT. And given the way the narrative pits the reader against the Wing… I am so fucking here for it. BURN IT DOWN, TILDE!)

A woman’s words are feathers, only rarely meant to touch the earth.

Snake feels like a book written by someone who has watched the rise of misogynistic fascism in the US and elsewhere, and had to write or scream. It’s not a book that lectures the reader, but my gods, it is furiously, righteously angry. It never falls into the trap of ‘all men are evil, all women are good’ that so annoys me about some ‘feminist’ fiction – all the women in this book, right down to the most minor of characters, are fully-realised, complex people trying to survive a dangerous situation; few of them could be described as uncomplicatedly ‘nice’. Most of them would probably be called collaborators, by a certain kind of rebel. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to notice how the narrative lambasts virtually every male character; not in an annoyingly simplistic way, but it still feels pointed. This man is blind, this man is pathetic, this one is a traitor – you get the picture. I think the only men not lambasted by the narrative are the bard who writes catchy propaganda-songs for Tilde (to make the common people love her), and the physician who helps take care of her. And I’m not certain about the latter; there’s definitely hints that could be read as him being deeply amoral. Purely good men don’t seem to exist around the king’s court – which makes perfect sense to me, because you can’t be part of the power-structure (this power-structure specifically? Or all power-structures ever? HMM) and be Good. Good men wouldn’t support this king, so naturally there are none to be found here. Something about the way that’s done is so…Kaner never draws attention to it; it’s something I didn’t notice until I was thinking over the book after I finished it.

There are no good men, because good men wouldn’t let this happen, perhaps.

And if there are no good men, it follows that the only other person who could get the job done is a bad woman.

This, I think the narrative does try to draw attention to: over and over Tilde is abused – not just by others, but also within her own mind – for seeming to collaborate with the conquerors. And yet, she is the only one whose efforts accomplish anything. When we meet the rebels, they are poorly organised, and though their efforts are sometimes dramatic, they’re neither sustainable nor enough to cause change. The ‘clean’, straightforward kind of resistance – with blood and blade – demonstrably doesn’t work. It requires something most of us find harder to swallow than ‘simple’ violence; the role Tilde plays, the play-acting, the sexual violence she endures. None of it is something a typical ‘warrior’ type of man could stomach, or pull off if he tried. It takes a ‘bad’ woman.

Partly because what Tilde is doing is weaponising womanhood, which is not an option available to most men. Specifically, Tilde is weaponising the oppressor’s version of womanhood – her own culture views women very differently. She uses ‘soft’ power, the kind most men are never aware of, and wouldn’t respect if they did: yielding in order not to break. Weaving relationships, making a place for herself among this new community. Giving the court reason to like her, respect her. Even her uterus is a weapon for Tilde, and that is such a powerful thing – surrounded by people who view her as a walking womb, it feels – daring, provocative, ground-breaking to watch Tilde make a weapon out of that part of her.

The only thing the Cynghals value about her is her womb – and she uses that as a weapon. Just. Sit and think about that for a minute.

She put her hand over her belly. Who knew such a gesture of protection could also be a declaration of war?

Chef’s kiss, no notes, magnificent.

I want to go back to the point of, Tilde is weaponising the Cynghals’ version of womanhood. I feel strongly that this is pointed, extremely deliberate; not just to show how brave and smart Tilde is, using the oppressors’ bs against them, but also… To demonstrate how this makes the Cynghals weak. Vulnerable. They have every reason to respect and suspect Tilde – she’s literally the princess of a conquered enemy! Her culture has woman kings and warriors! Anyone with half a brain cell would understand that that means she might have a royal’s education, might have been trained to fight, might be dangerous. But absolutely no one considers her a threat. Even Liran, the king, who does expect Tilde to try and stab him on their wedding night, is contemptuous of any danger she might pose to him. The Cynghals’ misogyny blinds them, and it will be their downfall.

It’s hard to fathom, honestly. Imagine thinking that a conquered princess does not have every reason to take you down. Imagine thinking that regularly raping her would not make her hate you and your people even more.

‘Some men carry hatred to their grave,’ said Odon.

‘I am not a man,’ I said. Hadiah, at last, looked impressed with me. I was not a man: I would carry it beyond my grave, into the forest, into death. But he did not know it yet.

I’m not good at talking about romance; I rarely care about it in the books I read. But I did think Tilde and Elise’s relationship was brilliantly believable, from start to finish. Elise growing into her sexuality was poignant but not overdone, and the way both she and Tilde viewed their relationship was…fabulous? Elise is guilty that she’s having such thoughts about her father’s wife; Tilde thinks of it as winning something from the Cynghals, and they’re both right. Really, it’s barely a romance in the usual sense; the reader will recognise Elise’s feelings far faster than she does, because it’s just not straight to obsess over your stepmother like that, Elise – but she and Tilde have very little time to act on it, to develop real feelings for each other. And Elise’s arrogant naïveté about it is…very realistic, very in-line with her character, but it did make me like her a fair bit less. She never considers Tilde’s position as a foreigner in a court that hates her, a member of a conquered people, constantly under siege from Elise’s own family! It takes privilege to be that kind of blind, and it’s a reminder that Elise has that, has privilege. It’s a deft demonstration of intersectional feminism – that Elise and Tilde are not oppressed equally, for all that Elise is subject to her family’s and the Wing’s misogyny. And it’s also, I think, a reminder that Elise is not innocent just because she suffers.

The air sang like a bowstring, and they were all aiming at each other.

All of it is subtle. Kaner never lectures us, never grandstands or batters us with Moral Lessons. You can’t miss the misogyny of the Cynghals and the Wing, but if you don’t pay careful attention to the details – if you don’t pause to think about them, consider them, turn them over in your hands like jewels with far more facets than expected – you can ‘just’ read A Snake Among Swans as an exciting, intense story about royal intrigue, and still have an excellent time.

You’d be missing out, though. This is definitely a book that rewards ‘brain-on’ reading. The more I think about it, the more different details click together into new shapes, the more brilliant subtlety I see in the writing, the more I’m impressed.

I loved it, and I’ll be pouncing on the sequel when it comes!