Navola

What is the fantasy genre? It is not just one thing. You can have elves and orcs battling against the backdrop of high wizardry, but you can also write something simpler. Low fantasy is getting so low that it starts to feel like alternative medieval history. Like why write about real history when you can make up your own? This type of fantasy often feels like an alternative English or German medieval history, but what if you wrote a fantasy version of a world that tips its hat to the Italian Rennaissance period. What Paolo Bacigalupi’s Navola loses in the fantastical, it makes up in rich world building. 

Davico di Regulai is the only heir to one of the most powerful families in Navola. He has been trained his whole life to take on the mantle of the head of the family, but fate and politics have other ideas. The other families in the city have ambitions of their own and they have allies further afield. While Davico is distracted by the dragon’s eye kept on his father's desk his enemies are plotting to overthrow the di Reguali family. 

Reading Navola feels like a feast, but not a fantasy one. Bacigalupi has produced some evocative world building. The city of Navola and the surrounding countryside steps off the page the way that Bacigalupi writes them. The story is told from Davico’s perspective, a privileged boy, but also one with an eye for detail. We learn about the city and the politics at the same time as Davico does. The story is told in a non-linear way so when the twists appear you learn they are routed in the past. 

With a complex web of lies and politics, Navola does have that Game of Thrones feel to it. The book is not as violent and is centered on fewer characters, but it does have lots of intrigue. The politics in the book will be too much for some, it makes for a slower read and goes into a lot of detail. The action is sporadic and the fantasy light. For large parts of the book the only fantastical element is the inert dragon’s eye, but as Davico comes to learn, there may be a spark of life in a dead dragon’s eye. 

Having read Navola and several other alternative fantasy novels in recent years, I do think it is time for a new genre to arise. One that allows a writer to play in a fictional historic setting, without it being based on reality. Navola is a fantasy in its nature as it is an imaginary land, but it is not Fantasy as I understand it. It reads more like Bacigalupi wanted to write about their love of Renaissance Italy without being constrained by the history. The dragon element of the book fades into the background. This is a beautifully written book with some deep world building that draws a reader in, but who is that reader? Fantasy lovers will be confused by the lack of fantasy and getting general historic fiction readers to try a made-up place could be tricky.