The Incandescent (Tesh)
May. 20th, 2025 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn4+/5. So in retrospect it may not have been the best idea, if I wanted to be unbiased about this book, to start reading The Incandescent the same day that my college advisor had a retirement celebration (that non-locals were able to attend via zoom, hurray for zoom). I certainly had no shortage of professors in college for whom I would have no particular incentive to attend their retirement celebration even through zoom, but this professor was special -- as evidenced by how all the people who spoke (and there were a fair few, it was 2 1/2 hours long) spoke of him -- many of them spoke about how brilliant he was and his brilliant research, which is of course a big part of who he is and was, but almost all of them treated this as adjunct to talking about how committed he was to helping as many people as he could, as much as he could. I remember him as taking great pains to make sure that as many undergrads in the department as possible had as friendly a time as possible, and as being a champion for women in physics before it was cool. (During my time there, there was a surge in physics majors in general and also a much larger percentage of women physics majors than other technical majors had, and while it was not solely because of him, it had a lot to do with his efforts and the example he set.) After my time, he was a House Master -- sorry, Faculty Dean -- which means he and his wife headed up one of the, let's call them dorms, and were responsible for the few hundred undergraduates (and some grad students) who resided there. There were several people who talked about his House work, including one of the staff members, which I thought was utterly fantastic. A couple of people talked about how every year he would get the list of rising sophomores who would enter into his House, about a hundred of them I expect, and he'd learn all their names pretty much overnight. Another former student talked about how he'd pulled strings when he found that the student had become homeless, so that he had a place to stay. There were stories after stories about how he'd helped and supported so many students.
Anyway -- so I was already primed to be feeling very emotional about teachers and students and how teachers stand in a pastoral role with respect to their students, and then I started this book. It takes place in a posh English boarding school, Chetwood School, that teaches magic alongside the more usual A-levels subjects, and where demons of various sizes are attracted to the magic of the adolescents.
...So, of course, if you've read the Scholomance books, this is sounding rather familiar, and yes, this book is clearly situated in a post-Scholomance world, with the boarding school's demons clearly based (superficially) on the Scholomance mals. But that being said, it's a very different book with a very different set of concerns, and the demons aren't like mals on the fundamental Scholomance-spoilery level, although there are sideways nods to that in the resolution of this book.
In the Scholomance, as well as in its own predecessor the Harry Potter books, teachers are an afterthought (HP) or not even present at all (Scholomance) in terms of the action, which is all driven by the students (as in, indeed, most boarding-school books). Furthermore, both sets of books are almost aggressively not interested in pedagogy as an element of a school, much less an important one. But here, Tesh has reversed all that. Teachers and teaching, what it means to teach, what it means to be part of a school as an adult: these are the main characters and themes. What does it mean to be a good teacher, and how does one go about it? What responsibility does one have to one's students, both pedagogically and otherwise?
In The Incandescent, Dr. Sapphire "Saff" Walden, 37 years old, teaches A-levels on the invocation of demons. The book is largely from Walden's point of view, and she drives the majority of the action of the book; she herself was a brilliant student at Chetwood twenty years before, with accompanying backstory, and passed up a lucrative job in US defense to instead teach. (We are told that demon invocation is good for only two types of jobs: academia and military. Ha ha Tesh yes I see what you're doing there, although I actually don't think it really makes sense in her world; surely someone in this AU has figured out how to monetize demons at this point...) Her A-level class is made up of four students: brilliant Nikki, with her own backstory; careful Aneeta; careless Will; and intuitive Mathias. Her teaching of this class, and what comes out of it, are central concerns of the book, though there are other central strands as well: how she interacts with various colleagues, like Ebele Nwosu, the pastoral deputy head (what at my high school we would have called the head of Residential Life), or Marshal Laura Kenning who is the head of the Marshals protecting them from demons, or another magician who comes to work at Chetwood, Mark Daubery.
Walden isn't like my advisor, who I think is just naturally really nice and really interested in people. Walden is a bit cold, quite introverted, often more than a bit arrogant. She has reasonable social skills (most of the time) and excellent teaching skills, but those are all learned rather than innate. In other words, I really enjoyed being in Walden's POV and identified with her a lot :P And still, and still, she loves and cares for the children entrusted to her, and works tirelessly -- well, no, that isn't quite right, she is tired a lot, but she works a huge amount anyway -- to make those children their best selves academically and in all the other ways she can.
The book is not meant to be overridingly plot-driven and/or character-arc-driven, as Some Desperate Glory is intensely driven by both; nor does it set out to makeover the universe, as SDG does. Incandescent does have an important plot and arc, and changes in the world, but more incrementally; I felt that this book has theme and rumination as a much greater component than in SDG. Which is very fitting in a book about academic learning, at that. It's a little slower-paced, a little more about the journey and a little less about hurtling off to the next thing (which both Kyr and SDG were rather more like).
It is interesting how different in very many ways this is from SDG, which I thought was great (I love when authors experiment). It's even very different stylistically, which makes a lot of sense.sprocket observed to me that SDG has almost no semicolons. (Maybe none?) The thing is, Kyr thinks in a very straightforward, blunt way. This type of POV is amenable to short, straightforward sentences. Walden is an academic, though as a teacher a more practical one than, say, a research-only academic; her sentences are longer and more leisurely, though not to the degree where you might sometimes call it flowery (as you might find, for example, in Possession, when Byatt is mimicking various kinds of academic-speech). It's really pretty great (and hamsterwoman, you know the counterexample I was thinking of :P ). But it does mean that I suspect a lot of people who loved SDG might actually not like this book, it's so different in some profound ways.
One of the themes that runs through the book is an acknowledgement of the problem of elite schools. On one hand, the students who get to go to the elite school can be helped enormously, including under-resourced students on scholarship who are now able to get access to resources and teaching that can literally change their lives. On the other hand, the whole milieu of the elite school (and thus also the boarding-school/elite-school book) is inherently classist and unfair; some kids, not all but mostly rich kids, get to experience all this, and other kids just don't, even though they would love it just as much or more, even though they need the help just as much or more. The book acknowledges this tension, and incremental progress is made, but it doesn't claim to solve it really at all. And I think that for a world that's much more grown-up than a YA novel, that makes sense; much as it would be nice to solve all the problems of inequity in a single book, these are hard problems.
I will say that I continue to think endings and explanations are not quite Tesh's forte (to figure out the motive in one particular place, I had to read the relevant section three times), but the book still very much worked for me anyway.
One minor spoilery thing: It seems like suddenly Chetwood School is like, hey, let's use some of our endowment to fund programs for deserving child magicians? I appreciate that Tesh tried to at least make a nod to the thread on school inequity... maybe I missed something but this seems like it came out of the blue and also seems like a weird thing for a school to do right after presumably a lot of parents were upset and pulling their kids out and so on and so they might have other needs for the endowment?? Did I miss a really large donation by someone?
Anyway...hidden_variable and K, I spent this entire book thinking, you should absolutely and positively read this book!! (And many of the rest of you should too -- crystalpyramid, I think this is also directly relevant to your interests -- though I also don't think everyone who liked SDG will like it.)
Anyway -- so I was already primed to be feeling very emotional about teachers and students and how teachers stand in a pastoral role with respect to their students, and then I started this book. It takes place in a posh English boarding school, Chetwood School, that teaches magic alongside the more usual A-levels subjects, and where demons of various sizes are attracted to the magic of the adolescents.
...So, of course, if you've read the Scholomance books, this is sounding rather familiar, and yes, this book is clearly situated in a post-Scholomance world, with the boarding school's demons clearly based (superficially) on the Scholomance mals. But that being said, it's a very different book with a very different set of concerns, and the demons aren't like mals on the fundamental Scholomance-spoilery level, although there are sideways nods to that in the resolution of this book.
In the Scholomance, as well as in its own predecessor the Harry Potter books, teachers are an afterthought (HP) or not even present at all (Scholomance) in terms of the action, which is all driven by the students (as in, indeed, most boarding-school books). Furthermore, both sets of books are almost aggressively not interested in pedagogy as an element of a school, much less an important one. But here, Tesh has reversed all that. Teachers and teaching, what it means to teach, what it means to be part of a school as an adult: these are the main characters and themes. What does it mean to be a good teacher, and how does one go about it? What responsibility does one have to one's students, both pedagogically and otherwise?
In The Incandescent, Dr. Sapphire "Saff" Walden, 37 years old, teaches A-levels on the invocation of demons. The book is largely from Walden's point of view, and she drives the majority of the action of the book; she herself was a brilliant student at Chetwood twenty years before, with accompanying backstory, and passed up a lucrative job in US defense to instead teach. (We are told that demon invocation is good for only two types of jobs: academia and military. Ha ha Tesh yes I see what you're doing there, although I actually don't think it really makes sense in her world; surely someone in this AU has figured out how to monetize demons at this point...) Her A-level class is made up of four students: brilliant Nikki, with her own backstory; careful Aneeta; careless Will; and intuitive Mathias. Her teaching of this class, and what comes out of it, are central concerns of the book, though there are other central strands as well: how she interacts with various colleagues, like Ebele Nwosu, the pastoral deputy head (what at my high school we would have called the head of Residential Life), or Marshal Laura Kenning who is the head of the Marshals protecting them from demons, or another magician who comes to work at Chetwood, Mark Daubery.
Walden isn't like my advisor, who I think is just naturally really nice and really interested in people. Walden is a bit cold, quite introverted, often more than a bit arrogant. She has reasonable social skills (most of the time) and excellent teaching skills, but those are all learned rather than innate. In other words, I really enjoyed being in Walden's POV and identified with her a lot :P And still, and still, she loves and cares for the children entrusted to her, and works tirelessly -- well, no, that isn't quite right, she is tired a lot, but she works a huge amount anyway -- to make those children their best selves academically and in all the other ways she can.
The book is not meant to be overridingly plot-driven and/or character-arc-driven, as Some Desperate Glory is intensely driven by both; nor does it set out to makeover the universe, as SDG does. Incandescent does have an important plot and arc, and changes in the world, but more incrementally; I felt that this book has theme and rumination as a much greater component than in SDG. Which is very fitting in a book about academic learning, at that. It's a little slower-paced, a little more about the journey and a little less about hurtling off to the next thing (which both Kyr and SDG were rather more like).
It is interesting how different in very many ways this is from SDG, which I thought was great (I love when authors experiment). It's even very different stylistically, which makes a lot of sense.
sprocket observed to me that SDG has almost no semicolons. (Maybe none?) The thing is, Kyr thinks in a very straightforward, blunt way. This type of POV is amenable to short, straightforward sentences. Walden is an academic, though as a teacher a more practical one than, say, a research-only academic; her sentences are longer and more leisurely, though not to the degree where you might sometimes call it flowery (as you might find, for example, in Possession, when Byatt is mimicking various kinds of academic-speech). It's really pretty great (and hamsterwoman, you know the counterexample I was thinking of :P ). But it does mean that I suspect a lot of people who loved SDG might actually not like this book, it's so different in some profound ways.One of the themes that runs through the book is an acknowledgement of the problem of elite schools. On one hand, the students who get to go to the elite school can be helped enormously, including under-resourced students on scholarship who are now able to get access to resources and teaching that can literally change their lives. On the other hand, the whole milieu of the elite school (and thus also the boarding-school/elite-school book) is inherently classist and unfair; some kids, not all but mostly rich kids, get to experience all this, and other kids just don't, even though they would love it just as much or more, even though they need the help just as much or more. The book acknowledges this tension, and incremental progress is made, but it doesn't claim to solve it really at all. And I think that for a world that's much more grown-up than a YA novel, that makes sense; much as it would be nice to solve all the problems of inequity in a single book, these are hard problems.
I will say that I continue to think endings and explanations are not quite Tesh's forte (to figure out the motive in one particular place, I had to read the relevant section three times), but the book still very much worked for me anyway.
One minor spoilery thing: It seems like suddenly Chetwood School is like, hey, let's use some of our endowment to fund programs for deserving child magicians? I appreciate that Tesh tried to at least make a nod to the thread on school inequity... maybe I missed something but this seems like it came out of the blue and also seems like a weird thing for a school to do right after presumably a lot of parents were upset and pulling their kids out and so on and so they might have other needs for the endowment?? Did I miss a really large donation by someone?
Anyway...
hidden_variable and K, I spent this entire book thinking, you should absolutely and positively read this book!! (And many of the rest of you should too -- crystalpyramid, I think this is also directly relevant to your interests -- though I also don't think everyone who liked SDG will like it.)
no subject
Date: 2025-05-21 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-21 04:35 am (UTC)LOL, I do! :D
A friend (who really liked SDG and Silver in the Wood) read this book and has some sort of spoilery gripe with it, which so far I've decided not to be spoiled for, so I don't know what it is, but it made me interested to read the book, and your write-up even more so :)
(K)
Date: 2025-05-21 05:52 am (UTC)I really loved everything up to the point where Saffy makes the horrible mistake not to call Ramamurthy or Laura and ask for help. Right at that point I put the book down for 48ish hours and then came back tonight once I had accepted that it was all going to be excruciating. (See previous comment about Act 3; this is a bit like that.) I agree, Tesh could be better at endings.
But all the rest of it was so so much like my privileged private school, plus all the lovely absurdities of college house life. And the copier! I felt seen to the point of nakedness. (I know you need to copy 20 problem sets in the next 5 minutes before class starts. But I need staples. and toner. and more paper. and a paper jam fixed. and my hole punch tray emptied. and blood. finally you're running to the copier on a different floor.)
Wikipedia says Tesh is a classics teacher. I do wonder if she's still teaching -- and how much Saffy is like her, and how much she's created from other teachers Tesh is observing. If I were Tesh's department head or division head, I'd be feeling doubly self-conscious right now :)
no subject
Date: 2025-05-21 10:20 am (UTC)A while back, a comment - somewhere, somewhen - about a book involving magical academia made an impression. 3-4 months ago, I picked up a different book that I thought was that one... and I really, really enjoyed Blood Over Bright Haven, but it puzzled me that I remembered a comment about sapphic romantic arcs, because Blood Over Bright Haven does not have any f/f romantic or sexual interactions.
I now think the earlier comment related to The Incandescence.
Anyway I'm 40% in and having a great time. Thanks!
(You might also enjoy Blood Over Bright Haven, which involves an embattled young magician in a solidly-drawn higher academia magical setting.)