Waterblack, the final book in Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft trilogy, is a remarkably self-aware piece of fiction that shepherded me out of a long medical convalescence into a strange new year. It has much stronger and more repetitive didactic currents than its predecessors, and contains one of my favorite storylines across the series. Like Malarkoi, Waterblack employs the same dramatic prefacing and presentation techniques with neat (and very necessary, especially if it’s been a while) summations of previous events, explicitly and almost passive-aggressively warning the reader that their preferred characters may not get their time in the sun, and that secondary characters will now come to the fore, whether the reader wants to get to know them or not. And while I closed the book on this trilogy with mixed feelings of relief and exhaustion—this is often the way with dense, ambitious stories because they correctly demand commensurate amounts of curiosity and brain juice—its world still endures in my head.
Like the other two books, a good portion of Waterblack is a coming-of-age story that amplifies the texture and density of Pheby’s already-impossibly-rich narratives. The first part of the book belongs to Sharli, whom we know as an assassin, but who was born in Malarkoi as an unremarkable child with an unremarkable outlook. Her journey is marked by a string of strange and unfortunate events, quite different in tone and framing from the arguably sadder and more unfortunate events that befell Nathan Treeves in Mordew; Pheby’s unsubtle loaded hints about Sharli’s “sudden” significance in this particular book make her story initially feel important, but her section of Waterblack also felt like the strongest; it is perhaps, at least on the surface, the most faithful to the idea of a Pygmalion-esque evolution of a rough nobody into a polished somebody, but a closer reading yields a much more complex and gratifying picture of Sharli as well as the worlds she moves through.
What follows Sharli’s backstory is Nathan’s ascension to his birthright—the titular third city in the trilogy—and finally, a great clash of everything and everyone and the consequences of so many actions and pre-planned games of dominoes. It is big and messy and epic in scale. There are footnotes and appendices. There are extremely dry, almost sociopathically clinical interludes that outline the teachings of the militantly atheistic Assembly, so dogmatic in their mission that their crusade becomes a religion of its own. There is a bit of a Jesus moment, and a side quest that borrows a bit from Animal Farm. There is everything a marginalia-freak would want, except the neatness of closure, because Pheby isn’t that kind of writer, and this isn’t that kind of story.
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As with all bildungsromane, Waterblack is about the education and miseducation of its young characters, and the difficult but rewarding struggle towards some sort of maturity. But it is equally about the struggle and growth of the reader; the narrator, more so than in the other two books, is noticeably more forthright about the reader’s proclivities toward linearity and the hero’s journey. Pheby, throughout all three books, has used the narrator as a vehicle for his own sort of Socratic method: posing rhetorical questions, offering anecdotes, using characters in specific scenarios to work said questions. Waterblack doubles down on this formula, which at times feels bloated and repetitive and an echo of one too many foundation courses in classical philosophy. This is most evident in the Anaximander/Sirius/Anaximenes side story: On one hand, an endearing and fun detour into weft worldbuilding and vengeance and Orwell, and on the other, so heavy on tautological rhetoric and circuitous instruction and repetition that it borders on the kind of training that one employs in rote learning.
But the thing about this approach is that no matter how tedious they might seem at the time, for the right kind of reader, they endure. They work. And what they reinforce is a more conscious level of close reading, which invites drifting, ambient thoughts about the kind of stories we’re used to, long after Waterblack et al. have been put aside. Six hundred-or-so pages is a lot of pages to ask the reader to expand their horizons and accept that sometimes shit happens and that reading a well-crafted novel means being given a story to actively digest, not satisfying a passive need for all fiction to be delicious and go down easy. But if a reader has made it this far in the series, all the way to Waterblack, they should already know that. It might even be tempting to align Pheby and the narrator as one and the same (and there is a little potential hint of this in the appendices, for the art history freaks), but my mind turns to Dashini, who has all the time in the world to think (something that all working writers would love to have more of); to paraphrase the narrator, if one has a mind, one can always think.
Nathan was perhaps always doomed to be the least interesting protagonist (like all main characters), buffeted by winds that, a reactive child without direction or guidance, to be made an example of. Towards the end Pheby indulges in a fantastic, wildly visceral description of Nathan’s bloodied and scabbed body, the fabric of his clothes pitifully glued to the dried blood of these scabs, tethering his shirt to his thin, bony body as the wind picks up and blows. This is the essence of his character. The didactic overtones of the book only increase as we burrow further into what Nathan might deserve or what he should be doing in his own self-interest, or what might be satisfactory to the reader. While this isn’t a departure from how the previous books—or rather how the unseen narrator—have carried themselves, these are the types of rhetorical proddings designed to push the reader toward some kind of begrudging admission or overdue epiphany about their own expectations and assumptions, and they require stamina and perseverance.
Waterblack is a lot, and it is admittedly not my favorite of the three. But it’s a work that can push a receptive reader toward a better and weirder strata of fiction, and in this formidable finale, Pheby has given this subgenre a master class in what it means to create and own a wholly original world without compromise.
Waterblack is published by Tor Books.
