Emma Törzs
Penguin Random House
Otago Daily Times, October 10th 2023
It may be a cliché, but sometimes a book hooks you right from the first page. So it was with Emma Törzs’ diverting debut, which opens with the blunt and memorable declaration, “Abe Kalotay died in his front yard on a late February, beneath a sky so pale it seemed infected.” The cause of death, as his daughter Joanna will shortly discover, is the book by his side, which has sucked every last drop of blood from his veins.
In Törzs’ novelistic world, magic, in the form of the written word, lingers at the edges of a contemporary society that is largely ignorant of its existence. Although anyone who happens across a spellbook could activate it, few can sense their power, and even fewer write them. Those that remain are sequestered in private collections and shielded behind powerful wards, and people are prepared to kill to obtain them.
Joanna, who can hear the magic in the codices her father spent his life collecting, longs to know how they are written and why and how her father was killed by one. But the answers remain elusive. In the meantime, she lives in self-imposed isolation in her Vermont home, tending his books, terrified that someone or something will come for her too.
Nicholas Maxwell, meanwhile, lives a privileged existence in his Uncle’s London mansion, which houses the largest magical library in the world. As possibly the only person alive with the ability to create new texts, which his Uncle sells on commission to the rich and powerful, he is a most precious commodity that must be hidden and protected from the world.
And then there is Esther, Joanna’s older sister, who is immune to magic in all its forms. She has spent the last 8 years transiently, moving from place to place on the 2nd of November each year on her father’s instruction. She does not know why she is running or whom she is running from, but bitter experience has taught her the necessity of flight. But this year she has tarried, putting herself and the woman she loves in danger. And now someone – friend or foe she cannot say – is trying to tempt her home, taking Nicholas with her.
Although the slow revelation of the true source of the danger they face is carefully and effectively played out as the novel progresses, it is Törzs’ concept of magic I most enjoyed. Written in the blood of scribes and with effects that range from delightful to deadly, a spell exists only between the covers of its book. Even the most basic is many pages long and must be read in full, and its evocation requires the caster to share their own blood in return. The metaphor may be obvious, but it speaks to the power of the written word for good and ill. The transformation that occurs when one surrenders oneself to the story, co-creating reality with the author, is something every avid reader will recognise.
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