Smoke

Starred review from February 15, 2016
Vyleta’s latest is a fiercely inventive novel set in a late Victorian Britain at once recognizable and intricately transformed. Best friends at an elite boarding school, Charlie Cooper and Thomas Argyle accept the way their world works: dark thoughts and deeds immediately cause black “Smoke” to emanate from human bodies, and the upper classes rule by virtue of being visibly more pure than the lower. Then the friends spend Christmas at the baronial home of Thomas’s uncle Baron Naylor, and everything changes. They are both attracted to his daughter, Livia, and her half-brother, Julius Spencer, Thomas’s cousin and a prefect at their school, hides a violent soul behind an irreproachable persona. Meanwhile, Lady Naylor is conducting secret research that throws everything they believe—from the texts of the Bible to the very nature of Smoke—into doubt. After investigating her laboratory and being attacked by an unknown assailant, Livia and the boys make for London, where they risk their lives for the chance to change their nation and themselves. Though its pacing falters a bit mid-book, Vyleta’s (The Crooked Maid) bold concept and compelling blend of history and fantasy offer a provocative reflection on the nature of evil, power, belief, and love. Dickensian in its imaginative scope and atmosphere, Smoke will have readers glad that a sequel is already underway.

October 3, 2016
Corduner has been a fixture of British television and stage since the 1970s, and he brings that wealth of experience to Vyleta’s Dickensian fantasy of a 19th-century England mired in a class struggle that is symbolized by “smoke”—physical tendrils of smoke that humans emit whenever they sin or think sinful thoughts. The saga opens at a quintessentially brutish boarding school where Charlie, an unusually kind teenage boy, befriends Thomas, his abruptly honest peer who is a little rough around the edges. Corduner takes his time with the novel’s characterizations, from the gruff and low voice he uses for Thomas to the self-consciously prim tones he reserves for Livia, a young kinswoman of Thomas who accompanies the two protagonists on their ensuing adventures. Considering that this story hinges so utterly on class tension, it’s crucial that the narrator also voice its many working-class characters with variation, believable accents, and dignity—and Corduner comes through with flying colors, making it easy to get lost in the capacious urban landscape of Vyleta’s imagination. A Doubleday hardcover.