The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

How a book can be an uneasy delight?

This happened to me as I was reading “The Witness for the Dead” by Katherine Addison.

Her novel creates a strange and original world, so strange and original that while immersing into it, you have to recall, sooner or later, LeGuin’s Earthsea and Robin Hobb’s Realms of the Elderlings. Not because those settings are similar to the one created by Addison, but because they are so much the worlds on their own, without unnecessary and crude references to our own circumstances.

Addison setting is of that kind, with its own customs, prejudices, rituals, and terms. Oh yes, terms. Maybe the book was, as I’ve said, an uneasy delight, because of the fictional language? Even Addison’s equivalents of Mrs. or Mr. can be confusing, believe me, but only at the beginning. Once you cope with it, you have to face other words which don’t make sense off hand, they make it only in context.

So, let’s start with the protagonist, an elf called Thara Celehar. Thara is a guy, and well, we are rarelly accustomed here in the so-called West, to guys’ names ending with an “a”, are we? Those are the kinds of surprises which Addison gives us, and I don’t say I’m not impressed. I am. But sometimes I was also a bit confused while reading her novel.

Ok, let’s… start again?

The protagonist, Thara Celehar, lives in a provincial city of Amalo because he’s decided himself to leave the Great Politics. He is the so-called Witness for the Dead, a person who can learn from the deceased what their intentions had been, how they’d died, and so on. As you can guess out, such paranormal skills are useful when it comes to murders or quarrels over one’s last will. And the murder of an opera singer, and the mystery around it, becomes the main fuel of the story, but there are other threads: about quarreling rich families, about strange deaths of young pregnant wives, about pacifying a ghoul in a town nearby. Sometimes it feels more like a set of novellas bound together by certain characters, but it isn’t a bad feeling, by no means. Each of those threads goes to a satysfying conclusion, except to the… main one. Because in my opinion, the resolution of Opera Murder thing was somewhat… chopped? We could have learnt it earlier, or in a more detailed way, really.

I know that some reviewers have found the formula of this novel too scattered, but I’m not a one of them, and I don’t have much complaints about the plot especially when the surroundings and the customs are so thoroughly explained. You can feel the atmopshere of Amalo, the vibe of the towns nearby, the messy splendour of the opera and the danger hidden in the channels. There are also gas-lamps, airships, boarding houses, and frock coats, so you are given something between steampunk and a honest evocation of the nineteenth century, which, sursprisingly, reminds me more of Dostoevsky’s or Tolstoy’s Petersburg than Balzac’s Paris. Maybe it’s about the crime threads, or maybe it is because tea-houses and boarding houses? I don’t know, but it’s a refreshing feeling, that’s for sure.

Some things, like naming, and sume customs, like the aforementioned “speaking” for the dead, remain utterly strange to the reader, and that is the moment, where, honestly, I hoped for more meta-comments, in all those social questions. Or more meta-critic on the world Addiosn depicts.

It’s, for example, quite clear that her setting remains patriarchal, and that women rely a lot on the perspective of a good marriage. It’s also clear that in the society of elves and goblins, elves are still privileged, and goblins or “mixed-race” people rarely can achieve a success. And maybe I am too accustomed to the protagonists who defy the established order more openly, because I am not satisfied with the way it is handled in the book. Surely, you can write your story without some external reflection on the society you are depicting. But such reflections aren’t always crude or anachronistic. Especially that even in our world, marginalized ethnic groups and women often have had an awareness of being opressed. It isn’t that Addison is racist or sexist. Of course she isn’t, neither she nor her book. But I’m a spoiled postmodernist brat, and what can I say except that I like when your setting goes meta-critic🤷‍♂️?

Stil, it’s a book certainly worth reading, with its focus on daily life and daily investigation, and with the challenge it poses to the reader, the challenge of naming, customs, and enviornment so different from the one of ours that you’ll be either immersed into it or unprepared for it.

I was unprepared, but I ended immersed.