What Is Wrong With Some Books I Like

and why it doesn’t matter very much

I have probably read Naomi Novik’s Scholomance books more times than anything but Lord of The Rings, most recently falling asleep to the audiobook versions; falling asleep to an audiobook works better if you already know it, can tie your mind to the familiar words while gradually letting consciousness slip away. It works with recordings of my books too. Novik, even at her best, is not in Tolkien’s class, but the books are strangely addictive, more so than her Spinning Silver which I am inclined to rate in other respects a better book.

One result of reading a book many times is that I start looking at the world and the plot for internal consistency. By that criterion they are very bad books, internally inconsistent in multiple ways, starting with the demographics of the wizard population.

Scholomance Demographics

Adolescent wizards are targeted by maleficaria, magical wildlife, which prey on them for their mana. Adult wizards are powerful enough to defend themselves, a fourteen year old wizard, about the age at which they get enough mana to be really worth killing, are not. The solution is the Scholomance, a magically shielded boarding school built into the void. Wizard children are teleported in at fourteen, fight their way out at eighteen through the horde of mals that have gotten through the shielding and accumulated in the graduation hall, the lowest and least well shielded level of the school. The Scholomance does not have room for all the wizard children; the books do not give exact numbers but it sounds as though only about half get in. The mortality rate from fourteen to eighteen is 95% outside the school. Inside the school it is 75%; one student in four survives the four years.

Any wizard parent can save their kid from any one mal. But when mals come fifteen a day, sooner or later one of them is going to slip through your wards and shields and gates and get the tasty treat you’re hiding from them. And that’s why we get crammed in here instead, past the guarded gates and only reachable through the narrow pipes covered with wards, and why we spend a healthy chunk of our formative years in a prison out of nightmares.

To see the implications of those numbers, start with 400 wizard children. 200 get into the Scholomance, 50 come out. 200 don’t get in, ten of them survive puberty, so of 400 fourteen-year-olds 60 make it to eighteen. If the wizard population is just replacing itself, the 400 children are the offspring of 30 couples, so the average couple is having 13 1/3 children.

The wizard population is not just replacing itself but increasing Some children, such as the sister of Adhya, one of the major secondary characters, are killed by mals before they are old enough to enter the Scholomance. So an average wizard couple is probably producing more than 14 children.

That is not impossible, biologically speaking, especially with the advantage of magical health care, but we see references to quite a lot of families over the course of three books and none are close to that large. The protagonist, El, is an only child, as is her boyfriend Orion, Adhya one of two. I think there is one reference to a family of six, but the usual pattern the book seems to assume is families not much bigger than in the real world the author grew up in.

Being Stupid to Set Up a Scene

[Spoilers]

The final chapter of the second book is the culmination of a scheme to get all of the students out of the Scholomance, lure most of the mals in, and send the school into the void, getting the death rate outside the school low enough that the Scholomance will no longer be needed. The plan depends on two once-in-a-generation talents, El an extraordinarily powerful enchanter, her boyfriend Orion who kills mals for fun and has single-handedly held the Scholomance death rate well below its usual level by doing so. El has a honeypot spell, a spell that lures in mals; one of the other students has designed magical speakers to transmit it. Put a string of speakers on a cable with El and a microphone at one end, the largest speaker at the other, located next to the gates through which the mals will be lured. As a mal gets close to one speaker the sound it hears switches to the next, luring the mals along the chain of speakers farther into the school. When the school is packed with mals and the students gone El is supposed to cast her supervolcano spell to break the school off from the world and, just before it goes, jump through the gates back to the world.

There is one problem with the way they are doing it. The string of speakers goes all the way to the library at the top of the school then back down to the graduation hall; the mals follow it. So the horde of mals lured in, minus those killed by Orion or other mals, ends up coming back down to the graduation hall:

First there were two or three, and then there were ten, and then almost instantly there was a solid thrashing wall of malice backed up, roaring and hissing and clawing each other in their hunger to get to Orion, and through him to us. Everyone still in the room tensed, and if they hadn’t been packed into the queue by then, with a torrent of mals going by on the other side, people would have broken; I’m sure of it. We’d hoped, we’d planned, for Orion to hold the barricade for just a minute or two, no longer, but we still had more than a quarter of the queue waiting, and it wasn’t possible for anyone to hold off that mass. It wasn’t the graduation horde, it was orders of magnitude built upon it, unstoppable, and he’d simply be smothered and overrun.

It makes a dramatic scene. By continuing the spell El is powering the torrent of mals that she is certain will destroy the man she loves. If she stops, the most recently arrived mals will be released from the spell, free to turn on her and the remaining students.

It is also entirely unnecessary for any purpose other than that scene because there is no reason to have speakers on the second half of the cable, the part leading back to El and the microphone she is singing the spell into. There is no need to lure the mals back down and obvious reasons not to.

Those are the biggest and most obvious problems. Here are some more:

At the beginning of the second book, Orion raises the question of whether the seniors who just graduated made it out or got devoured by the graduation hall mals, relevant to how their class will do when they graduate. El responds:

“We’ll find out at the end of term, when it’s our turn through the mill,”

And ads

“And since we can’t find out sooner, there’s absolutely no point brooding about it,”

They not only can find out, they should have found out already. The new Freshmen are teleported into the Scholomance later in the same day that the seniors graduate; they will come in knowing whether their siblings and enclave mates came out.

El has gone to considerable effort not to let people know whose daughter she is, never using her last name; when the fact finally comes out at the beginning of her senior year, her closest friends are astonished:

“Yes, your mum, Gwen Higgins,” Aadhya said, even more coolly. “Who you’ve mentioned so often to us all.”

Except that somehow the students from her dead father’s part of India know not only who she is but that her father’s family rejected her, know it at the beginning of her freshman year:

Back at the start of freshman year, when all of us who weren’t enclavers ourselves were in the first frantic rush of trying to make friends, the other kids started going to lengths to avoid me by the second time meeting me. But the kids from Mumbai would literally pick up and move away from me without another word as soon as they heard my name.

Why It Doesn’t Matter

It would be nice if Novik paid attention to the internal consistency of her story and world; it is, after all, supposed to be our world plus the wizards and mals that the rest of us don’t know about. But it doesn’t really matter, because factual consistency is not what the books are about. Novik is a painter, a very good painter, and she is painting in emotions. It would be nice if she had found a way to justify the layout of cables and speakers that brings the horde of mals back into the graduation hall in the final chapter of the second book but ignoring the problem, knowing that most readers won’t notice it, is better than losing the scene, and similarly for the other internal inconsistencies.

The clearest example is Gwen Higgins, El’s mother, the background of her life. Gwen is both a world famous healer and the creator of multiple spells used by other wizards. She gives away both healing and spells, makes no use of money.

Somehow it works:

If she needs to go somewhere, she thumbs a ride, and someone stops for her. If she’s hungry, she just asks the universe if there’s anything to spare, and more often than not, someone going by will pause and offer her something to eat or invite her to their house for dinner.

…

“No, you aardvark, it’s one of my mum’s healing circle spells. You don’t get any return at all.” That’s not true, at least according to Mum: she insists that you always gain more than you give when you give your work freely, only you don’t know when the return will come and you can’t think about it or anticipate it, and it won’t take the shape you expect, so in other words, the return is completely unprovable and useless. On the other hand, no venture capitalists are lining up to give me rides in their private jets, so what do I know?

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