“Just because you are a weak card in someone else’s hand, does not mean that they will not play you.”
In Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi, Davico di Regulai has never seen himself as a true Navolese. He is intelligent but not cunning. He wears his feelings on his sleeve, like a lamb among the wolves that inhabit the city of Navola, and he prefers the weave of nature to the trickery that keeps his family’s banking empire alive. It’s a precarious business, but Davico’s father is a master of reading the unwritten and hearing the unspoken, and he hopes to train Davico to one day ascend to the Regulai mantle. But even though Davico cannot don a mask as well as everyone around him does, he has no freedom to leave the dreaded path of politics—and in Navola, innocence and belovedness are not enough to save those inept at navigating its deep waters.
What makes this novel so horrifying and riveting is that it treats the reader like Navola treats Davico. More than half of the book follows Davico as a child and into his teenage years, and while the twisted nature of Navolese politics and the enormity of his father’s scheming is alluded to, Davico is shielded from the worst of it. Bacigalupi writes literary coming-of-age like a master. At first, I doubted that Navola would become as twisted as the characters said it was, because I saw through Davico’s eyes—Davico, who treats politics like homework to be completed and then set aside, who doesn’t realize how his refusal to harden his heart could cost him. But we were both caught off guard.
I’m more jaded than most when it comes to characters’ fates in fiction, but what happens to Davico in Navola truly shocked me, both for the tragedy of its themes and for its violence. It’s a brutality that preys upon everything I had known but not really recognized about Davico for the 400 pages I had accompanied him—a failure that is exactly the reason why Davico himself goes through what he does. It’s done with such subtlety and Navolese deception that it’s like a fourth wall break without a real fourth wall break. It violates the unspoken rule in fantasy that gives the main character space to make mistakes and still succeed. I’m telling you, it’s chilling. And it’s tragic.
Bacigalupi’s prose is beautifully vivid and immersive. It takes its time to build a rich world that feels both wonderfully and frighteningly real. It’s also clever enough to sell the twistedness of Navola and its characters. Bacigalupi is great at writing side characters I distrust but also love and understand (for example, Celia, Davico’s adopted sister). The moments of tenderness and irreverence balance the darkness and anxiety remarkably well—it’s truly an emotional journey, and not all those emotions are painful. It just feels human.
Be warned that Navola is both very gory and excessively sexually explicit (its greatest flaw, in my opinion). It shies away from nothing—or, more accurately, leans into everything—in a way that is sometimes disgustingly effective (as in the last quarter of the book) and other times uncomfortably uncensored or complete overkill (as in the descriptions of female characters). I’m inclined to believe Davico when he says he withholds nothing about himself in this narrative, for better or for worse.
Navola is an extremely gutsy novel and an exceptional show of skill from Paolo Bacigalupi. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.
