tamaranth | 2025/201: Skyward Inn — Alisa Whiteley (Reply)

2025/201: Skyward Inn — Alisa Whiteley

‘I put my hands in the mud and it said to come here. Mud, speaking to me in my head. They had a word for that when I was young: touched, they would have said. But here I am, and I’ll be touched if that is what’s next, because I felt certain it was Tom’s voice. Can you tell me—was it Tom’s voice? I suppose it couldn’t have been.’ [loc. 2155]

By the author of Three Eight One, this novel is set in the aftermath of interplanetary war. Two veterans of the war, Isley and Jem, have returned to the Western Protectorate (Devon and Cornwall: 'a small area of a small country that decided to secede from modern life, from space flight, from the Coalition and the conquering spirit of the new age') to run the Skyward Inn, née the Lamb and Flag. Jem is human, and comes from the nearby town, where her brother Dom (the Mayor) looks after her estranged son Fosse. Isley is a Qitan, from the side that lost: he's in charge of preparing the Qitan drink, 'brew', that the pub serves. It may be addictive, and it is certainly popular.

Things are changing, though. There are incomers at the deserted farm where Fosse hangs out, and they claim they can do magic. There's another stranger, a friend of Isley's, stranded and hiding in the cellar of the Skyward Inn. Outsiders threaten the precarious post-apocalyptic peace of the Protectorate, and raise issues of xenophobia, isolation, colonialism and the impossibility of communication between species -- or even between people, human people, who have every reason to yearn for mutual understanding.

I loved the wildness of the setting; was uneasy at the invasion of Fosse's private place, because it reminded me of my own childhood; and was deeply unsettled by the climax of the novel. Whiteley's prose is beautiful and her characters, though not always likeable, are solidly constructed with emotional depth and unspoken histories. I'm still not sure I liked this book but I found it fascinating and impressively understated.