Song of Silver, Flame Like Night - Amelie Wen Zhao

 

About the Book

Lan spends her nights as a songgirl in Haak’gong, a city transformed by the Elantian colonizers. Her days are consumed by the search for knowledge about the strange mark—an untranslatable Hin character—burned into her arm by her mother in her last act before she died.

Zen is a practitioner—one of the fabled magicians of the Last Kingdom. He’s never seen anything like Lan’s mark, but he knows that if there are answers, they lie deep in the pine forests and misty mountains of the Last Kingdom, with an order of practitioning masters planning to overthrow the Elantian regime.

Yet, both Lan and Zen are hiding secrets—secrets that are buried deep within them. Secrets that even they have still to unearth. Both hold the power to liberate their land, if they don't destroy it first.

Now the battle for the Last Kingdom begins.

480 pages
Published January 3, 2023

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While I don't typically gravitate to wuxia and xianxia stories, it isn't as though I inherently dislike them. If the story sounds interesting, I'll read it, even if it isn't in the genres or subgenres I tend to prefer. This was the case for me with Song of Silver, Flame Like Night, which thoroughly impressed me with its story and commentary on colonialism and cultural identity.

Set in the Last Kingdom, an analogue for China that never once tries to be anything but that, Song of Silver, Flame Like Night follows the dual perspectives of Lan and Zen, both trying to survive as best they can at a time when their heritage is under threat from colonial invaders. Lan is a songgirl, an entertainer in a city largely given over to the invading Elantians, who steals moments here and there to investigate an invisible scar left on her wrist by her mother, many years prior. Zen is a practitioner, a student of the last hidden martial arts school, someone who can manipulate qi but who has to hide that around Elantians, lest they find the school and wipe out the last holdout of the country's old ways. Their stories converge, with Zen agreeing to help Lan find the secret to her mystery scar, and Lan getting training in her own newfound ability to manipulate qi, what the book calls "practitioning."

I often ended up pausing in my reading to contemplate Daoism; it was never called such in the novel, but the spiritual practices were also a clear analogue for something in the real world. Arguments ran around in my head. "If demons and such are born from high concentrations of yin energy, is there a corresponding bad thing born from higher concentrations of yang energy?" "What right do humans have to eliminate yao and other such creatures, if the Way is balance; shouldn't those yao also be part of the balance?" "If plants and animals can be surrounded by enough energy that they can gain sentience and become yao, then did humans start off as monkey yao?" By the end, I felt like I had so many questions that I'd need to find a whole panel of Daoist scholars so I could pick their brains! As I said in my review of David Walton's The Genius Plague, sometimes the best books are the ones that make you stop and really think about what they're saying.

I might have gone a bit overboard with that sort of thought process here, as Song of Silver, Flame Like Night holds no answers to such questions, but merely introduces some basic concepts of Daoism and lets the reader absorb them as part of the story. But I find that books which present me with a lot of food for thought are the ones I enjoy most, the ones that stay with me over the years.

Also of note was the way the novel subverts expectations in multiple small but important ways. Lan, for instance, masters practitioning techniques far quicker than most people do, but there's an actual reason for that beyond, "She's just that awesome." I hesitate to explain what those reasons were, for fear of spoiling too much of the later parts of the book, but rest assured that there is a reason. Too many books have phenoms for protagonists, and that's fine, but sometimes it's nice to see someone who's a rising star for reasons beyond being just naturally so much better than everyone around them. 

I will say that there were some aspects of the book that threw me out of my reading groove, though they were all related to the writing rather than the story itself. Multiple little niggling things that came through as carelessness at some part of the writing or editing process (I don't know which, and couldn't even hazard a guess). Things like an entire room being lit by the tiny glowing embers of a couple of sticks of incense, or a room being completely dark and yet characters can somehow see what's in there. A character calling someone "the Winter Magician" since childhood, but being being surprised that magic might exist at all. Little things like that, things which don't ruin the reading of a book but that did take me out of my immersion whenever I happened to notice them. 

Song of Silver, Flame Like Night walks a fine line between question and answer, between history and progress, between cultural change and cultural destruction. It asks the reader to consider whether it's worth it to return to old ways, whether doing so is even possible, and who has the right to decide whether things stay as they are or whether they change. It's a good book, one that manages to juggle action and introspection quite well. I'm interested in reading the sequel, when I can, since the ending of this book was such a cliffhanger. I went into it thinking it was a standalone novel, only to realise near the end that there was no way the story could wrap up before the final page. But not once did the story feel bloated so that the author could squeeze out a second book where a single book would have been fine. The pieces were right where they needed to be.