Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire: Making Faerie Fairer

Cover image: Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire, published by DAW Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Faerie is not fair. It has never pretended to be, and in Seanan McGuire's Chimes at Midnight, October Daye increasingly finds herself asking why everyone else has tolerated that unfairness for so long.

Faerie is beautiful, ancient and governed by rules, but rules are not the same thing as justice. Purebloods live for centuries. Changelings occupy an uncomfortable space between worlds. Power is inherited more often than earned, and those who possess it have had a very long time to become comfortable with arrangements that work rather well for them. Toby, naturally, is having none of it. By oak and ash, she may die trying, but she seems increasingly determined to make Faerie at least slightly fairer than she found it.

Somewhere around Chimes at Midnight, an awkward question becomes difficult to ignore: why does it always have to be Toby?

Goblin Fruit and a Three-Day Deadline

The seventh October Daye novel begins with goblin fruit flooding the streets of San Francisco. For pureblood fae, goblin fruit is essentially a recreational drug, pleasant and relatively harmless. For changelings, it is catastrophically addictive. A single taste can be enough. People disappear into pleasant dreams while their bodies waste away.

Changelings are dying, and Toby wants it stopped. She does what should be the sensible thing and takes the problem to the Queen of the Mists.

This goes approximately as well as anyone familiar with Toby's relationship with the Queen would expect. Rather than solving the problem, Toby finds herself banished from the Kingdom of the Mists and given three days to leave. There is something almost reassuringly October Daye about the setup: Toby once again has an impossible problem, an absurd deadline and opponents with vastly more institutional power than she possesses.

The solution, once the legitimacy of the Queen's rule comes into question, seemed rather obvious to me: stage a rebellion.

That might sound like an enormous escalation for most protagonists. For October Daye, by this point, overthrowing the government because she has been given three days to leave town feels strangely plausible. Identifying the solution and actually carrying it out are, of course, two different things. McGuire has always been good at making Toby's apparently straightforward objectives accumulate complications, and Chimes at Midnight is no exception.

From this point onward, it becomes almost impossible to discuss the novel meaningfully without revealing significant events.

Spoilers for Chimes at Midnight from here onward.

Why Does Nobody Else Fix Anything?

Toby is surrounded by people who are older than her. Many are substantially more powerful. Some have been alive for centuries. They know vastly more about Faerie's history, laws and institutions than she does. Yet when something is fundamentally wrong, Toby is remarkably often the person who actually does something about it.

The Queen of the Mists is hardly a newly discovered problem. Her contempt for changelings is not subtle, and her rule has been tolerated for years despite the damage she causes. Once questions about her legitimacy begin to surface, the inertia surrounding her becomes harder to excuse. The Luidaeg knows things. Sylvester has influence. Tybalt commands power of his own, even if the Court of Cats stands partly outside the political machinery Toby is confronting. None of them is simply free to depose a monarch, but Faerie contains no shortage of people older, stronger and better connected than Toby.

And then along comes Toby, who has spent much of her life belonging properly to neither the human nor faerie world, and decides that perhaps people should stop dying because the powerful find their deaths convenient.

There is an obvious narrative explanation: Toby is the protagonist. A series in which competent ancient immortals quietly resolve structural problems before October notices them would be considerably shorter. But there is also an interpretation that works rather well inside the story. Toby may act precisely because she has not had centuries to become accustomed to Faerie.

Institutions do not need everyone inside them to be cruel. They merely need enough people to accept that this is how things are. An injustice that would horrify an outsider can become background scenery to someone who has lived alongside it for three hundred years. Toby has spent too much time among humans, and too much time experiencing Faerie from the precarious position of a changeling, to possess that kind of detachment. She keeps applying a moral intuition shaped by both experiences to a society built around bloodlines, hierarchy and ancient obligations.

That may be one of her most disruptive powers. Not blood magic, not being Amandine's daughter, not her growing collection of titles, allies and supernatural abilities. She hasn't learned to stop being offended.

The Most Predictable Pie in Faerie

Unfortunately, the Queen understands exactly where Toby is vulnerable. Goblin fruit is harmless to purebloods and devastating to changelings. Toby is a changeling investigating a goblin fruit epidemic. We can all see where this is going.

The moment the fruit became central to the plot, having someone force it on Toby felt like the most predictable move available. And sure enough, that is what happens. Predictability is not necessarily a flaw here, because the interesting part is what McGuire does with it.

Goblin fruit does not simply poison Toby. It changes what she wants. Under its influence, the artificial human life created for her becomes attractive. Faerie recedes. Her magic recedes. Even the urgency of escaping begins to lose its meaning.

That makes this one of my least favourite kinds of plot to read: the loss of control that becomes a loss of self. I do not mean that as a criticism of the writing. Quite the opposite. It is unpleasant because it attacks something more fundamental than Toby's physical safety.

When the Character Stops Wanting to Escape

I recently encountered a different version of this loss of self while rereading Patricia Briggs' Iron Kissed. The circumstances are very different, but what disturbed me in both cases is the same underlying violation. Physical imprisonment can leave the self intact: a character can be trapped, injured or overwhelmed while still remaining internally opposed to what is happening. Compulsion is different. It interferes with the authorship of the self.

Goblin fruit does not merely prevent Toby from doing what she wants. It interferes with the wanting. If someone locks Toby in a room, there is still a Toby inside the room who wants to get out. If something changes her desires until she no longer cares whether she escapes, where exactly has Toby gone?

For me, that makes these plots considerably more uncomfortable than straightforward physical danger. Oddly, the fact that this is the seventh book in a long-running series makes it easier. We know, at least probabilistically, that Toby is going to remain Toby. There are more books. The series is called October Daye. Narrative structure itself becomes a kind of reassurance.

This is the familiar problem of plot armour, but plot armour is not always an enemy of storytelling. Sometimes knowing that a character probably survives allows a story to put them through experiences that would otherwise be almost unbearable to read. The same thing may help explain why rereading can be comforting. On a reread, uncertainty has disappeared. The frightening parts remain frightening and the painful parts remain painful, but we are no longer trapped inside the character's uncertainty. Part of what we seek when returning to familiar books may be not merely nostalgia, but danger whose boundaries we already know.

Changing Everything Without Changing Too Much

Chimes at Midnight also performs another manoeuvre that long-running fantasy series periodically need: it violently shakes the board. The Queen of the Mists has been part of the political landscape since early in the series. Removing her is not equivalent to solving another murder or rescuing another missing person. It potentially alters the structure of Toby's world.

A series cannot repeat the same configuration forever. Characters accumulate allies, knowledge and power. Mysteries become familiar. Threats that once seemed terrifying become understood. If the world itself never changes, eventually the protagonist begins running increasingly elaborate laps around the same track.

McGuire has shown a willingness to disrupt Toby's circumstances before. The problem is that some of those disruptions have proved less permanent than they initially appeared. Toby became Countess of Goldengreen, for example, only to give the position away. Major changes occur, but the series has a gravitational pull toward restoring Toby to something resembling the familiar configuration: knight errant, private investigator, reluctant hero, perpetually surrounded by people who would really prefer that she stop bleeding on the furniture.

There is an interesting tension here with the goblin fruit plot. Goblin fruit tries to restore Toby to an artificial version of a simpler human existence, while the mechanics of a long-running series exert their own pressure toward a familiar status quo. In both cases, change can be dramatic without necessarily being permanent. Chimes at Midnight clearly changes the Kingdom in the Mists; what remains uncertain is how much that upheaval will change the fundamental structure of Toby's life.

Human, Faerie, and the Convenient Space Between

The same tension appears in Toby herself. Her identity has always rested uneasily between human and faerie. Earlier revelations have already complicated what being a changeling means in her particular case, and Chimes at Midnight pushes that uncertainty further.

Goblin fruit and the blood magic surrounding it move Toby dramatically toward humanity. Escaping its effects then pulls her back toward Faerie. For a while, the novel seems to be forcing her toward the choice that has haunted much of her life: human or fae?

McGuire rather elegantly refuses to make the choice permanent. Toby changes, but she remains Toby. The series explores the boundary without requiring her to settle permanently on one side of it, and the tension is probably more interesting than either answer. A fully human Toby could no longer move through Faerie as she does. A fully assimilated faerie Toby would lose some of the outsider perspective that makes her interesting in the first place.

Her unstable position between the two worlds is not a problem waiting to be solved. It is one of the engines of the series.

There Is, However, a Power Problem Developing

Toby's blood magic is also becoming increasingly cool. It is one of the more distinctive forms of magic in the series, particularly because McGuire has gradually expanded what it can accomplish rather than presenting us with a complete list of abilities at the beginning. Toby discovers what she is capable of alongside us.

There is a danger here. Blood magic is becoming useful for an increasingly large range of problems. That is satisfying in the short term—watching a protagonist discover new abilities is fun, particularly when those abilities emerge from earlier revelations about who she is—but versatile powers create a structural problem for a long-running fantasy series.

Every new thing Toby can do risks removing another category of obstacle that once threatened her. This does not mean she needs to stop becoming more powerful. Seven books into a series, refusing to let the protagonist grow would create its own kind of stagnation. But power needs to generate complications as quickly as it eliminates them.

What interests me now is less how powerful Toby can become than what becoming that powerful will cost her. Politically, she is becoming someone capable of overthrowing queens. Magically, she is becoming someone capable of rewriting things that once seemed fixed. Both developments make her more capable of changing Faerie, while making it harder for her to remain merely October Daye, knight errant and reluctant problem-solver.

The Woman Who Keeps Saying No

That is what I found most interesting about Chimes at Midnight. The novel contains rebellion, addiction, blood magic, hidden heirs and the increasingly complicated mythology of Faerie. It moves quickly, and McGuire once again demonstrates how effectively she can take an apparently impossible deadline and make Toby's situation considerably worse.

Underneath all of that is a simpler pattern. Faerie tells Toby that something is simply the way things are. Changelings die from goblin fruit. The Queen rules the Mists. Purebloods have power. Ancient customs must be respected.

And Toby keeps saying no.

There is something slightly absurd about the fact that a comparatively young changeling repeatedly has to point out obvious moral failures to beings who have had centuries to think about them. But that may be precisely why she can do it. Longevity does not necessarily produce wisdom. Power does not necessarily produce responsibility. Tradition does not necessarily produce justice. Sometimes it merely gives unfairness enough time to become normal.

Toby has many increasingly impressive powers. Her most dangerous one may still be that she has not been around long enough to accept that.