Lessons in Magic and Disaster

I have been reading books by Charlie Jane Anders for some time now. They have always been heartfelt, entertaining, and sometimes clever (less so in the YA, because one is not supposed to do deep philosophy in a YA book). Lessons in Magic and Disaster may sound like another YA novel, but trust me, it is anything but.

The first thing to note is that this book is very much a novel of character. Yes, some of the cast do magic in a limited and folky way, much in the fashion of Tim Powers’ Fault Lines novels, but that’s not what is really important. This is a novel about Jamie Sandthorn negotiating her place as a trans woman in an increasingly transphobic world, and negotiating her relationships with her mother, Serena, and her partner, Ro.

However, that isn’t all that the book is about. Jamie is a postgraduate student at an imaginary Boston college. She is doing a PhD on 18th century women novelists. In order to make this believable, Anders has to know something about the subject. It turns out that she knows a heck of a lot. The list of academic references at the back of the book is impressive.

I am by no means an expert on this. I know a bit about the characters in question because of my work on the life of la Chevalière d’Eon. But my eyebrows shot up at random mention of Christopher Smart, a lesser known poet and satirist of the era. Smart has crossed my radar because he had a Welsh mother, and a queer connection. He can perhaps lay claim to being Britain’s first drag queen, which I knew, and I suspect Anders does too even though it is never mentioned in the book.

In order to get this right, Anders not only has to know the characters involved, she has to be able to write convincingly in the style of 18th century fiction, and she has to be familiar with academic discourse about the novels of the period. Again this is way beyond my level of competence, but it all seems very impressive to me.

The ambition of the novel doesn’t end there. Because Jamie is a trans woman academic, she exists in the very precarious environment of present-day American academia. The primary villain in the book is a right-wing podcaster who specialises in getting students to report ‘woke’ academics so that he can launch social media hate campaigns against them. I wonder who that reminds me of…

Anders makes the point, which I think is a fair one, that 21st century social media has a lot in common with the gossip culture of 18th century London.

Finally, Jamie is also a witch. Growing up she mostly does small magics, but she decides to teach her mother her skills as a way of reconnecting. Serena is a feisty, lesbian civil rights lawyer who, having seen the potential of magic, wants to use it for much bigger things. Consequently there is a whole lot in the book about the ethics of witchcraft. Again this is somewhat beyond my area of expertise, but having read a lot of books by the likes of Starhawk, Margot Adler and, of course, Liz Williams, it seems authentic to me.

To sum up, this is a really ambitious book, grounded in solid scholarship about 18th century British society and literature, but also firmly rooted in today’s desperate political crisis. And it still manages to come through with a message of hope. I was seriously impressed. I hope other people are too.

Title: Lessons in Magic and Disaster
By: Charlie Jane Anders
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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