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: 2025-06-08 09:36 pm (UTC)A. is very much an introvert, which bothers me a bit as I can see a lot of places where his social skills are a little off because he just doesn't talk to people enough, even as it is. I suppose the odds are he will be just fine and I am being an over-worried parent :) A. does also have a church youth group as a social group, in theory, though he hasn't really jelled with the group at this point -- though to be fair they do a lot more stuff together starting in a couple of years.
Your mom sounds awesome! I don't think I'm nearly as awesome as your mom, though I guess I do a couple of similar things -- I did organize our school's math team for both the local competition and (when E was doing it) the Mathcounts competition -- but to be honest it was more "I think my kid(s) would enjoy doing this" and less trying to make social opportunities for them ;)
I'm glad you had the online outlet as well. (Ha - I'm just enough older than you that at that age we had letter-writing, which was quite a bit less efficient!) A. does have two online friends he does Minecraft with, although even there I have to keep prodding him to actually talk to them and not wander away and work on his own Minecraft creation by himself!
Thanks again <3
no subject
Date: 2025-06-10 12:25 pm (UTC)My mom is pretty awesome, and I'm not as awesome as her either! When I told people that I was homeschooled I would get a lot of "your mom must be very special", which I mentally rolled my eyes at because (a) I was a teenager, lol, but also (b) I was a very self-directed learner and didn't think of myself as being taught by my parents (I preferred, and to some extent still do, to describe myself as a "homeschooler" rather than "homeschooled") (c) my mom is very good at convincing other people that yes, they can homeschool their kids, even if they don't have the impressive CV that she had before learning academia to become a stay-at-home parent. But actually my mom is special, it's just that as a teenager I didn't see the ways in which being a homeschool parent is hard (and I feel like a lot of pro-homeschooling dudes on the internet don't either) -- not all of which came easily to her either, but she did her best. I think that being part of a homeschooling newsgroup, and the online friends she made there, was very helpful for her -- I think homeschool group drama is like small private school drama only worse because all the adults involved are parents (ETA: and because homeschooling parents are more likely to be strongly opinionated and uncompromising), and it's useful to have other homeschooling parent friends to bond with who aren't directly involved in that drama.
(I'm old enough that I did have penpals, even after I got an e-mail account, but the internet was just a lot more efficient!)
no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 04:53 pm (UTC)Haha, yeah, I appreciate my own mom a lot more now that I'm no longer a teenager! I wasn't homeschooled, but my mom was a stay-at-home mom who did spend a lot of time and energy on figuring out how to make the most of the resources that she/we had available, both academic and social. (I like to talk about how, in high school, when we saw kids my age while out and about, they'd say hi to my mom enthusiastically before they'd say hi to me as an afterthought -- it's a bit of a joke, but not really.)
(and I feel like a lot of pro-homeschooling dudes on the internet don't either)
Haha, quoted for truth! (D and I talked about our kids being homeschoolers and ultimately decided to put them in school, but before we came to this conclusion we had some talks about it which made clear that he had never really thought about what would ideally go into it. And actually there are things I never really thought about at the time either, like follow-through -- I'm pretty confident in my academic ability to teach my kids stuff on a day-to-day basis, but following through to make sure that they learn consistently and not just once a month or so is something I'd have to really work at, though now that they have all these curricula and the charter homeschool framework and so on, I think that part has been made easier.)
Oh gosh, it didn't even occur to me that homeschool group drama would be like small private school drama, though that makes A LOT of sense! (The teachers are driving some of our current drama, but it's the parents who are really fanning it into flames, in my opinion.) Hm.
(And I'm young enough that by the end of college I had moved to more email than paper letters, though I sometimes still did some of the latter!)