Review - The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Note: I'm still working out what kind of details I want to go into re: spoilers in my reviews. This is light on specific details but nonetheless references the events of the novel; if you care about being surprised, avoid this!

The Incandescent is a really emotionally affecting and intricately crafted story about a middle aged schoolteacher at a magical private school that's beset by demons. It's also a book about burnout, but I'll get to that later.

That's a really short summary of everything going on in this book, so I'll entice you further: this is a sapphic romance where the main character is actually bisexual rather than her bisexuality being off-handedly mentioned through a relationship with an ex that didn't quite pan out. It's a really, really English book with lots of specific details that make it feel very lived in. It's a book about having a vocation which involves responsibility for keeping teenagers safe, except those teenagers can set each other on fire even more easily than normal. It's about which people with privilege keep which of their morals and principles intact and the evils of Britain's particular class obsession and the perils of education being treated as a business. It's also about how fifteen year olds might summon a demon to silence a vape detector. Yet despite all of this, I wouldn't say this book has range; it's so delightfully focused that it has depth instead.

There's a point in this review where I need to leave a disclaimer that I am chronically unable to be normal about the British education system. There's a scene in The Incandescent where Saffy, our main character, sits down with her star pupil, Nikki, who she thinks is incredible and talks to her about whether she's going to Oxford or not. I thought about how I was going to write about this in a review several times and failed utterly because every time I try to write about Oxford and feelings I end up making a fool of myself. I went to Oxford; it was bad for me and I remain traumatised. That scene gave me a lot of big emotions.

I would have been unhappy with the conclusion this book came to about Oxford University as a happy ending for a traumatised teenager with low self esteem unless I hadn't been convinced by the whole of the rest of the book that Tesh does, in fact, see the British education, class and political systems for the interlinked, monstrous horror it is - and, more importantly, that she so ably communicated it on the page. I was so utterly unsurprised to learn that Tesh was a teacher when I reached the end of this book, because it absolutely bled off the pages. She gets it! (I inevitably read a lot of American SFF. It's really good to read high-quality work that uses fantasy to shine a light on the England I know and loathe.)

This was a theme for me in this book, because there was another narrative choice I found pretty disappointing. It's a personal preference, mostly - I don't really like it when a bisexual romance (inadvertently or not) sets up one gender as 'the bad partner' and another gender as 'the good partner'. This book does do that - it's a sapphic romance and the alternate male love interest is shitty - but once the setup for all of that was done, I was satisfied with what happened and how it serviced the wider plot of the book.

Because, as I mentioned: this book is about burnout. Yes, the cover is a phoenix because Saffy has a phoenix 'friend'. But to me, the phoenix was about something else entirely. It's about a woman who evidently struggles with forming deep, long-term relationships with people and, therefore, finds herself without confidants as various factors make her life invisibly spiral out of control. She's living on the site of the foundational trauma of her life. In being over-qualified, she's under-resourced enough that she can't pay attention to every fire she needs to put out. She cares so, so deeply in a structure that's practically designed to paper over its fault lines with the care it doesn't pay its employees to show.

That care is easily the best thing about this novel, by the way (or, at least, it was the thing that affected me most deeply). It's abundantly clear how at home Tesh is in writing about teenagers; the dynamic of the classroom, the little ways that all of the students have their own lives (but often fit into patterns Saffy has seen before). I'm a bit of a sucker for storylines about protecting and mentoring children and teenagers, so every moment of crisis had me totally hooked. Care is the heart of the novel for multiple reasons, and it really shines.

One final thing I wanted to highlight about the book that I adored was its structure. Initially, said structure doesn't seem all that significant and just aids in establishing the time of year and the rhythm of the pacing. For a book with a school setting, it helps the reader (especially a reader who doesn't know the structure of the British school year) orient themselves within a different calendar than the one they might use to track their own life. And then the final segment of the book rockets that out of mundanity and into an affecting shorthand for something going terribly, terribly wrong. Coupled with the way the perspective changed, the book so quickly turned from 'this is good but has made some choices that annoy me as a reader' to 'oh holy fuck I need to read the rest of this right now'.

In essence: this is a great book and I'm so happy to have got my hands on it. Tesh has a few published works already and I'm going to keep an eye on what she has coming out in the future.