Reading The Ursula K Le Guin Prize - The Siege of Burning Grass
- Publisher – Solaris
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £18.99 hardback | £9.99 Kindle
Premee Mohammed is an author I've been meaning to read for a long time and for some reason I've never got around to. Sometimes, when an author already has quite a large back catalogue, I find myself a little paralysed by choice and don't know where to start. Thankfully the Ursula K Le Guin Prize has come to the rescue and gave me The Siege of Burning Grass to read.
Here's what it's all about:
The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.
Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.
Ordered to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.
He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?
There's a quality shared by some books I really love. They have this sense that they're constantly building to something, that the plot hasn't quite started yet but that it'll kick in soon and in the meantime we're laying the groundwork for things. We're meeting characters, and meeting the world, and establishing the stakes, and slowly settling into a lovely warm bath of story. Then you look up and you've read 300 pages of the book, and you realise that the plot has been here all along, you've just been too absorbed to notice. This is one of those books.
Fantasy and science-fiction present us with stories of war regularly. Big battles are staples of the genre, played out in epic sequences across tens of thousands of words of violence and glory and bloodshed and heartbreak. Very few of those books are quiet, introspective, or mournful. The Siege of Burning Grass is all of those things.
Alefret is a pacifist, the founder of the Pact that resists a forever war that has blighted his country and the floating cities of The Enemy. Grievously injured by the bombs of his own side, imprisoned, tortured, and experimented on, he's convinced he's going to die for his cause. Then he's given a choice that isn't a choice at all - travel with one of your torturers to the floating capital of the enemy, infiltrate the city, and bring an end to the war. Thus begins a long, arduous trek across the war-torn country, on a journey that tests Alefret physically, mentally, and morally.
There is no glory in Mohammed's war. We begin with the torture of a conscientious objector and move through famine, child soldiers, and a government willing to salt its own earth and starve its own people in order to keep its resources out of the hands of the enemy. The senseless waste of it all is front and centre on every page, and the futility of it is only highlighted when Alefret reaches the floating city and discovers that "the enemy" never needed the resources his government was keeping from them - and their own people - the whole time.
Mohammed's writing is stunning. It's lush and vibrant but stark and violent at the same time, showing us the beauty and weirdness of her world with one hand while hitting us across the face with the banal brutality of it with the other. I could read her prose all day, and she slips from contemplative introspection to thrilling action with ease. And even the action is beautiful here; the sequence where the army stages an illusory dogfight so that Alefret and soldier/zealot Qhudur can cross the walls of the floating city is one of the most imaginative, stunningly-realised sequences I've ever read. It's one of those scenes that only takes up maybe a page in the book but which looms large in my memory of it. I know that when I reread this over the coming years - and I'll definitely be rereading it - I'll be perpetually surprised that this sequence isn't longer.
Although the war looms large over the narrative here, the central conflict is much more personal. Alefret spends every page of this book grappling with his dedication to his path of non-violence. There's a complex philosophical question at the heart of the novel - when is violence justified? Can it ever be justified? If your non-violence causes more suffering than an act of violence would, does an act of violence become an act of grace? - and it's given the space it needs to be thoroughly explored in way that never feels like sermonizing but that feels like an integral part of who Alefret is as a character.
This is a wonderful novel, and one I'm going to come back to again and again. Highly recommended.
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