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The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
I had seen this historical fantasy novel recommended for its good handling of a First World War setting, supernatural elements and a canon m/m pairing, and it was very conveniently available at the local library, so I immediately put it on hold...
The Warm Hands of Ghosts (2024) opens, not in the midst of the war, but in the wake of the peripheral disaster of the Halifax Explosion (Halifax, Nova Scotia; the name always trips me up for a moment). Laura Iven, a nurse invalided home with shrapnel in the leg, has just lost both her parents in the explosion; as if that wasn't enough, she then gets the news that her beloved little brother Freddie, a soldier, is missing following the Battle of Passchendaele. Due to some oddnesses connected with this news, she decides to go back to Flanders—accompanying a historical nurse and hospital founder—to investigate what's happened. Interspersed with chapters following Laura, other chapters show us what has happened to Freddie: this starts with finding himself in a desperate post-battle situation from which he escapes with the help of an enemy soldier, and then gets... weirder.
Right, let's get the griping about modern prose out of the way first. I can only assume that Arden was given a strict word count limit for this novel and, having inevitably found that her draft went over it by some way, solved the problem by going through and removing subjects, verbs and conjunctions from a hefty proportion of the sentences. Occasionally actually obscured the meaning a bit. Sprinkled a few more full stops through the book too. For good measure. Look: short, choppy, grammatically-approximate sentences are just really not my thing; this style combined with a close third person POV made the whole thing feel far too fast-paced and immediate for me, and took away from what was otherwise an enjoyable read. There are also a couple of actual word choice errors, which surprised me in a published novel ('credible' for 'creditable' and 'palpitate' for 'palpate'; problems with words with 'it' in the middle in particular, apparently???). One lovely romantic scene is sadly interrupted by the cliched fanfic error of 'blown pupils'.
*removes snob hat*
So, that canon m/m pairing! This is between Freddie and Hans Winter, the German with whom Freddie escapes from an overturned concrete pillbox after Passchendaele; they travel together across the ruined landscape, keeping each other going, trying to solve the problem of finding a destination safe for both of them. In theory this is exactly my kind of thing: situational enemies brought together in a deadly peril, who get to know each other better, throw aside previous loyalties to be obsessively loyal to each other and end up utterly devoted to each other to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, yes please, I would like about fifty of this, thank you. And some bits of it were indeed really, really nice and I liked it very much... but I felt that there was just never enough substance to it to get properly into it: I didn't get enough of a sense of who Winter is, especially, and how he and Freddie go together as people beyond the first immediate peril. The close third-person POV, which only ever follows Freddie and Laura, probably didn't help here. How does Winter feel about abandoning his own side in the war, or about apparently not getting to go back to Germany and see his family and friends at the end? We don't know.
In contrast, 'weird supernatural enchantment dubcon in which one character slowly consumes the other's identity' is not my kind of thing, so it was a bit of a pity that Freddie/Faland seemed sometimes so much more substantial and compelling. (If you like Stephen Black/the gentleman with the thistledown hair, you may like Freddie/Faland.) I really liked Faland as a take on the Devil and what he might have been doing in WWI, feeling rather overtaken by the scale of horrific human evil and yet finding his own place in it very naturally. And the idea of stealing a person's soul by taking their memories one by one like a twisted Scheherazade set-up is very good—I was really distressed by what was happening to poor Freddie.
I liked Laura very much, tough, traumatised, competent, darkly funny and not quite letting herself acknowledge how stubbornly hopeful she is. She has a love interest too, a surgeon called Stephen Jones who by his pioneering of blood transfusions shows Laura how there's still hope and brightness in the ruined world; as het goes it's all right, but I was much more interested in Laura's relationship with Pim, the widow who goes with Laura and Mary Borden to find out what's happened to her soldier son. Pim is the novel's big plot twist, and in hindsight Laura/Pim would never have done given what happens (/what, we learn, has been happening all along) with Pim... and yet, all that hair-cutting and bed-sharing and unlikely sympathy, sigh.
Arden has clearly done her historical research, and I enjoyed all the historical detail in the book, even down to vocabulary (she uses contracted 'have' as a non-auxiliary verb much more than a modern American author usually would, one small detail which I liked). The themes of the book and its historical setting—the incomprehensible horror of the war, and its scale and inhumanity, and how although the old world has ended in such an apocalypse, there is still a new world and still a life to live in it—definitely work, and again this goes very well with the use of the Devil! The 'ghosts' side of the worldbuilding didn't work so well for me; I thought it sat oddly alongside Faland and all the worldbuilding around him, not really working in harmony.
Also I feel I should be more compelled than I am by the concept of ghosts having warm hands. No, sorry, it doesn't work: ghosts being cold and insubstantial but present is the appeal, for me.
Some elements of the ending, I liked very much indeed. 'The OTP are utterly devoted to each other to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, and this is observed by an outsider POV' is again very much my cup of tea, and the bit where Laura leaves Winter alone with Freddie to comfort him and 'there was utter silence from the room next door', augh. But I don't like jealousy, even between different types of relationships that don't need to interfere in theory, and I did not enjoy Laura's feeling of losing Freddie, and I didn't think it was even really necessary. Also the pacing of the ending: I think about my fave Alan Garner, who would have ended the book immediately after the Pim revelation and gone 'that's it, that's all you're getting, work the rest out for yourself', and I think this book is in the awkward middle ground between that and actually writing out the rest of the story in the detail it needed in order to work as Arden wants it to. I wanted to see more of Laura retelling Freddie his lost memories, and Freddie and Winter figuring out what their relationship is going to look like in peace, and them all adjusting to life back in Canada.
Perhaps fic would help with some of these problems... Anyone thinking of nominating this for Yuletide?
The Warm Hands of Ghosts (2024) opens, not in the midst of the war, but in the wake of the peripheral disaster of the Halifax Explosion (Halifax, Nova Scotia; the name always trips me up for a moment). Laura Iven, a nurse invalided home with shrapnel in the leg, has just lost both her parents in the explosion; as if that wasn't enough, she then gets the news that her beloved little brother Freddie, a soldier, is missing following the Battle of Passchendaele. Due to some oddnesses connected with this news, she decides to go back to Flanders—accompanying a historical nurse and hospital founder—to investigate what's happened. Interspersed with chapters following Laura, other chapters show us what has happened to Freddie: this starts with finding himself in a desperate post-battle situation from which he escapes with the help of an enemy soldier, and then gets... weirder.
Right, let's get the griping about modern prose out of the way first. I can only assume that Arden was given a strict word count limit for this novel and, having inevitably found that her draft went over it by some way, solved the problem by going through and removing subjects, verbs and conjunctions from a hefty proportion of the sentences. Occasionally actually obscured the meaning a bit. Sprinkled a few more full stops through the book too. For good measure. Look: short, choppy, grammatically-approximate sentences are just really not my thing; this style combined with a close third person POV made the whole thing feel far too fast-paced and immediate for me, and took away from what was otherwise an enjoyable read. There are also a couple of actual word choice errors, which surprised me in a published novel ('credible' for 'creditable' and 'palpitate' for 'palpate'; problems with words with 'it' in the middle in particular, apparently???). One lovely romantic scene is sadly interrupted by the cliched fanfic error of 'blown pupils'.
*removes snob hat*
So, that canon m/m pairing! This is between Freddie and Hans Winter, the German with whom Freddie escapes from an overturned concrete pillbox after Passchendaele; they travel together across the ruined landscape, keeping each other going, trying to solve the problem of finding a destination safe for both of them. In theory this is exactly my kind of thing: situational enemies brought together in a deadly peril, who get to know each other better, throw aside previous loyalties to be obsessively loyal to each other and end up utterly devoted to each other to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, yes please, I would like about fifty of this, thank you. And some bits of it were indeed really, really nice and I liked it very much... but I felt that there was just never enough substance to it to get properly into it: I didn't get enough of a sense of who Winter is, especially, and how he and Freddie go together as people beyond the first immediate peril. The close third-person POV, which only ever follows Freddie and Laura, probably didn't help here. How does Winter feel about abandoning his own side in the war, or about apparently not getting to go back to Germany and see his family and friends at the end? We don't know.
In contrast, 'weird supernatural enchantment dubcon in which one character slowly consumes the other's identity' is not my kind of thing, so it was a bit of a pity that Freddie/Faland seemed sometimes so much more substantial and compelling. (If you like Stephen Black/the gentleman with the thistledown hair, you may like Freddie/Faland.) I really liked Faland as a take on the Devil and what he might have been doing in WWI, feeling rather overtaken by the scale of horrific human evil and yet finding his own place in it very naturally. And the idea of stealing a person's soul by taking their memories one by one like a twisted Scheherazade set-up is very good—I was really distressed by what was happening to poor Freddie.
I liked Laura very much, tough, traumatised, competent, darkly funny and not quite letting herself acknowledge how stubbornly hopeful she is. She has a love interest too, a surgeon called Stephen Jones who by his pioneering of blood transfusions shows Laura how there's still hope and brightness in the ruined world; as het goes it's all right, but I was much more interested in Laura's relationship with Pim, the widow who goes with Laura and Mary Borden to find out what's happened to her soldier son. Pim is the novel's big plot twist, and in hindsight Laura/Pim would never have done given what happens (/what, we learn, has been happening all along) with Pim... and yet, all that hair-cutting and bed-sharing and unlikely sympathy, sigh.
Arden has clearly done her historical research, and I enjoyed all the historical detail in the book, even down to vocabulary (she uses contracted 'have' as a non-auxiliary verb much more than a modern American author usually would, one small detail which I liked). The themes of the book and its historical setting—the incomprehensible horror of the war, and its scale and inhumanity, and how although the old world has ended in such an apocalypse, there is still a new world and still a life to live in it—definitely work, and again this goes very well with the use of the Devil! The 'ghosts' side of the worldbuilding didn't work so well for me; I thought it sat oddly alongside Faland and all the worldbuilding around him, not really working in harmony.
Also I feel I should be more compelled than I am by the concept of ghosts having warm hands. No, sorry, it doesn't work: ghosts being cold and insubstantial but present is the appeal, for me.
Some elements of the ending, I liked very much indeed. 'The OTP are utterly devoted to each other to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, and this is observed by an outsider POV' is again very much my cup of tea, and the bit where Laura leaves Winter alone with Freddie to comfort him and 'there was utter silence from the room next door', augh. But I don't like jealousy, even between different types of relationships that don't need to interfere in theory, and I did not enjoy Laura's feeling of losing Freddie, and I didn't think it was even really necessary. Also the pacing of the ending: I think about my fave Alan Garner, who would have ended the book immediately after the Pim revelation and gone 'that's it, that's all you're getting, work the rest out for yourself', and I think this book is in the awkward middle ground between that and actually writing out the rest of the story in the detail it needed in order to work as Arden wants it to. I wanted to see more of Laura retelling Freddie his lost memories, and Freddie and Winter figuring out what their relationship is going to look like in peace, and them all adjusting to life back in Canada.
Perhaps fic would help with some of these problems... Anyone thinking of nominating this for Yuletide?