Historical fiction readers, if I said “Regency novel” to you, what comes to your mind? Elegant dresses, lavish house parties, coffee house meetings, callous whispers behind elegant manners and Jane Austen, perhaps?
Well – hands on the table, it did to me. I will go further and say that it’s not normally my sort of thing to read – why should I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when there are other books more to my taste? However, Seeker does that difficult thing of taking a Regency style setting and making it into a fantasy story – a flintlock fantasy, if you like. The two shouldn’t work together, and yet here they do, admirably.
Shay Bluefaltlow has for many years been brought up by Ridley Fassinger, a surgeon and doctor, along with the young deaf Peck in her home city of Fivedock. This is generally a happy existence, if somewhat sheltered, until Shay is indentured to Penelope Etherington.
So far, this reads like Dickens’ Great Expectations (I know: later age, but even so..), the story told in the first person about a young person’s rite of passage. It is at this point, however, that things become more fantasy like. We learn that Etherington is Fivedocks’ Chief Archivist, charged with keeping records and monitoring for the Sentinels for the nation. She is told that the Sentinels are ancient leviathans, not seen for hundreds of years, but whose records show that if they return, devastation will result.
Shay’s new occupation is to train to be an assistant to the Sentinel Archivist as a Seeker, a role that involves monitoring for Sentinels as well as maintaining and deciphering some of their old records, using scent song to understand their speech. She takes to her new duties in this Age of Enlightenment with a passion, even though it means that she must take a poisonous elixir in order to decipher the scents of the ancient creatures.
The story here revels in the scientific wonders and the joy of knowledge that Shay experiences at this point.
Although some of the minor characters are a little unsubtle, Shay herself is an interesting character. Clearly young, she is impetuous, rash and immature. She makes mistakes, but generally learns from them the hard way. This makes her endearing and irritating at the same time, a cause of frustration to the more experienced, less impetuous adults. Her reckless nature also has life-changing consequences for more than one person close to her.
Away from Shay’s new world, things are also changing in the wider world. A war seems to be brewing between different political factions, with neither particularly concerned about the signs that the Sentinels may be returning.
When Etherington is called away on official duties, Shay finds herself put into the position of covering for the Sentinel Archivist and also having to negate a possible coup by negotiating the dangerously civil world of the influential elite. In the finest tradition of regency novels, Griffin presents Regency style soirees as some sort of battleground, a sneakier, subtler version of what happens on the high seas.
Shay is, of course, an outsider, a fish out of water who would rather be with her books and her studies rather than having to navigate around the barbed conversations of societies’ elite.
The end of the book finds Shay dealing with many issues all at once – tangled with the impending return of the Sentinels, involved in the middle of a sea battle and also attempting to foil a power coup attempted by some of the government’s enemies.
The book’s inner cover describes the book as “Robin Hobb meets Georgette Heyer meets Bernard Cornwell”. To me, it is more like “Jane Austen meets Godzilla”, where regency manners meet legendary monsters. Although the Sentinels only really appear at the end of the book, I’m sure that we’ll read more about them in future books.
Lastly, a mention of the book itself. Shay’s story is illustrated throughout by some lovely black-and-white illustrations by Jonas of Stardust, which add to the story and show us some of the instruments used by Shay in her work. They are not essential but do add to the setting enormously.
It’s always good when you find a book to be more than you hoped it would be. And so it was with Seeker. An unexpectedly good read, and I look forward to reading more stories set in this world in the future.
SEEKER by Samuel Griffin
The Sentinel Archives, Part One
Published by Panthe Press, May 2024
ISBN: 978 1 838 021 221
292 pages
Review by Mark Yon
