Nataliya's Reviews > Middlegame

“You can’t skip to the end of the story just because you’re tired of being in the middle. You’d never survive.”

Middlegame was a strange book which left me a bit torn. I really liked the middle of this story, its “middlegame” so to say - the journey through the lives of unfortunately named Roger and Dodger, but the resolution and all the alchemy framework and the Impossible City left me a bit cold.

“[…] Can anything really be ridiculous when your starting point is “we’re secret twins who found each other across a continent through quantum entanglement, which is slightly more useful than a telephone, without being as good as telepathy”? Everything about them is ridiculous. It always has been.”

In an attempt to control the universe, a mad scientist-type evil sadistic rogue alchemist and his henchwoman find a way to embody the Doctrine of Ethos, specifically the Language and Math that manipulate reality and time itself. The result of the alchemical engineering is the existence of twins Roger (language incarnate) and Dodger (math incarnate), separated after their birth and raised on opposite coasts, just to find each other over and over again (for instance, telepathically at age seven), regardless of physical separation and timeline resets — and just to lose each other again and again and again.

“You’re late,” she says. It’s not “hello,” but it’s the only thing she feels: he’s late. He’s seventeen minutes and five years late, and she’s been alone too long.”

All while people are murdered and cities are destroyed and Hands of Glory are lit, and suicides are attempted, and chess is played, and earthquakes shatter cities, and the Doctrine is waiting to manifest.

“They destroy themselves every time they destroy the world. Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.”

I loved the journey of Roger and Dodger, their attempts to grow into their own abilities while trying to be somewhat normal children, often painfully lonely until they find a way to connect. I loved how they stumbled through childhood, adolescence and youth, how they reconnected each time, how they learned to trust despite betrayals and hurt. I loved how they found their missing halves in each other and formed the strange supernatural connection between them. I loved the SF elements of their “quantum entanglement” and especially Dodger’s way of seeing and using math all around her.

I loved how much of the book took place in Berkeley and even the mention of Berkeley’s evil squirrels (seriously, those monsters will mug you to get at any food scraps. Beware!)

Life Sciences Annex at UC Berkeley and a bench where I’m sure they had the “weird DNA” conversation by Strawberry Creek.

“Sacrifice. That’s what they’ve each done, at least once: they’ve sacrificed the other for their own protection.”

Even the somewhat repetitive nature of their encounters and separations felt organic, felt like it fit well into the framework of the story and their lives. And it was wonderful seeing siblings as protagonists, with love and connection that does not need to be romantic — because let’s face it, having a male and a female central characters in most novels would lead to some sort of romance, so avoiding that cliche by introducing a sibling pair was refreshing (because luckily Seanan McGuire is not George R.R. Martin).

“He can’t be real, because if he’s real, she’s a monster for what she did to him.”

And I started to care about those two, the geniuses who were perhaps because of it even more vulnerable and often ridiculous in their decisions, and so incomplete on their own, and so painfully clueless about them being pawns for sinister forces — and I wanted for them to find each other and fix what was cruelly ripped apart when the twins (and the two halves of the Doctrine) were forcibly separated. Dodger, the live wire always on the verge of being tripped, and Roger, just wanting to find normalcy and yet often so scared. They grew on me, those two lost vulnerable prodigies.

“I’m saying if they wanted to control the elemental forces of creation, they shouldn’t have turned us into people. People have their own agendas. Mine doesn’t match theirs anymore.”

Sutro Baths in San Francisco, 1896 and current ruins.

What I did NOT care for was the alchemy framework, and the fuzzy idea of the whole Impossible City with its improbable roads which all remain beyond unclear, and all the references for children’s stories that supposedly hold the clues to the alchemy principles. The logical jumps that require connecting the main SF plot to the children’s story fantasy setting via alchemy required more grey cells or perhaps suspension of disbelief than yours truly can master. To me those were stuttering stops in the narrative, unwelcome and unwanted. Perhaps it’s because I still felt that any of those parts were very undeveloped and unclear even at the end of the lengthy tome. I know there will be sequels, but still it helps to have at least some clearer understanding of the antagonists motivations and reasons, which even for me were much too vague and too muddled to make much sense.

Or perhaps because the antagonists were so clearly *antagonists* drawn without even a suggestion of moral greyness, unquestionably and simplistically evil and flat (imagine a moustache-twirling cartoon villain commanding a bunch of henchmen/minions, and you’ll be right on the money). Luckily, at least the protagonists Roger and Dodger were allowed complexity and unlikability that made them feel more real and rounded instead of caricaturish.

“They’d been working for the glory of the cause, working for citizenship in the Impossible City, and they had made her the kind of weapon that could be used to change the world.
The trouble with weapons is that they can be aimed in any direction.”

All that said, the good certainly outweighed the bad annoying. The protagonists were complex and developed, and the language and writing were evocative and at times spellbinding, and settings were immersively atmospheric, and suspense built well, and the relationships between characters drawn with good understanding of human desires and motivations. And what I’m going to remember is the story of the twins and not the unsatisfying framework.

So to me it was really a weird and fascinating story about two flawed and unusual people finding each other and forging a strange bond through thick and thin and quantum entanglements, trying but failing to avoid sharp corners of life, caught up between confusion and fear and trust, learning to make a new whole out of broken bits — with some other stuff in the background that remained a bit vague and irritating.

I read two other books by McGuire before, both from the Wayward Children series. This one is very different in style and language — and I liked that she pulls it off. Not everyone can comfortably work in several different genres, but McGuire certainly can.

“Magic doesn't have to be flashy and huge. Sometimes it's the subtle things that are the most effective of all.”

It’s not perfect, no, but I feel just fine rounding it up to 4 stars.
——————

My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...