Jelt had saved Hark’s life, but that didn’t mean Hark owed Jelt his life. Maybe you couldn’t ever owe somebody your life, not really. You couldn’t let anyone else decide what you did with it. You had to live it yourself, as truly as you could.” My own invention," explained Dr. Vyne with surprising warmth, turning a large wheel to lower the sub into the water. I call her the Screaming Butterfly. She's a prototype." Our protagonist is Hark, a rough-and-tumble orphan who brought himself up on the beaches of Myriad. He's caught during a heist, talks his way out of a brutal sentence, and ends up as an indentured servant of the priesthood. Myriad was once a land of terrifyingly present sea gods and the priests who sacrified to and appeased them, but now the gods are dead and the priests are old and dying. It does get quite dark in places and there's not really any humour in it, but it raises some really interesting ideas and provides some wonderful characters for us to judge with all of our perfect righteousness (note sarcasm). I feel quite justified in calling Jelt a jerk, though. It's been a while since I hated a character this much. The worlds she creates are so unique, so truly different, so vibrant, so well fleshed-out that most other writers would have set as many stories as possible in such a place - but Hardinge instead with every story tirelessly creates a completely new and completely *alive* universe, with its own rules and settings and fabric, and none of those are repetitive, and all are a bit strange and beautiful at the same time.

The world building in this story is incredible. It's limited to the Myriad, and while there is talk of 'the continents', they don't feature in this book. This is all about Hark's tiny world and it is full of the most amazing details. It's an interesting blend of science and mythology - I want to say magic but it doesn't feel like the right word here. It's more like ... the science in this world is just really different to the science of our world. These gods were real things and their makeup has provided advanced technology to those who have scavenged parts and experimented with them. It provides a lot to ponder.

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Though I mentioned some of the subtext at work in this book, what sustains the narrative and concludes it so beautifully is the fact that this tale is all about stories. Our hero, Hark, makes his living, and often saves his own life, by telling them. Stories are everything. They can assuage a god or calm a friend. Politicians can use them to spread lies and malarkey or unbelievable truths on a wide scale. Left untold they can eat away inside of you until you’ve curdled and changed. It’s a true mark of personal growth then when, near the end, Hark comes to understand that sometimes it’s even more important for him to listen to the stories of others than to tell them. The very last scene involves a storyteller making the choice to listen to others before they toss their own tales out there for others to hear. We make sense of our lives through storytelling. For this reason alone, people like Frances Hardinge (and, let us be truthful, there is no one out there like Frances Hardinge) are amongst our most valuable. Whenever I have a chance to get my hands on a new book of hers it’s only because I want one thing: to be told a story I’ve never heard before. Deeplight fulfills that wish and a lot more besides. My sole regret is that I only get to read it for the first time once. It took a few chapters for it to grab me, but in the end I really enjoyed this story. At first, I was a bit disturbed about the 2 main characters' relationship, but as the story unfolded, I knew it was going somewhere I could accept.

I thought Hardinge handled the the situation and its pacing extremely well. Hark makes slow but steady progress in his journey towards self-discovery and self-respect. At first, I shouted at him to abandon the bully, but, as with all these things it's easier said than done, particularly for the individual required to do the doing. But even bits of the dead gods have power and value, and when Hark comes across a strange, pulsing, perforated object on the ocean floor, he doesn't realize what consequences it will have for him and his friends, for Myriad and its dead gods. However, 14-year-old Hark has more to fear from people than from the sea. Hark and Jelt have been friends, close as brothers, working together to survive on the islands. Jelt however keeps demanding more and more from Hark, and to see Hark slowly become more certain of himself and his unhealthy bond with Jelt is very admirable and brave.What I might've been left missing still was maybe some added 'edginess' somewhere - in the story, the dialogue, or with certain enhanced character dimensionalities? Not quite sure. The marine magic, lore and setting kept alternately reminding me of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, Rivers Solomon's The Deep, and strongest of all Robin Hobb's Liveships. All of which have in their part helped keep one encouraged to dwell into these fantastical realms for the occasional catch. This now included. Deeplight is part adventure story with deep sea diving and sneaking around, plus a mad scientist and the very weirdest submersible I've ever come across (operated by producing notes at the precise resonant frequency of godglass) :

The elite divers are the ‘sea-kissed’, who have lost their hearing to the depths. One such sea-kissed smuggler is called Selphin. She’s my favourite character. Selphin doesn’t have time for foolishness, especially not the main character’s creepy godware business. I love how blunt, stubborn and fiery she is. Besides being a cool, complex character, she’s also an authentic representation of deafness. She communicates through sign and speech, as do almost all the Myriddians. The sign for ‘jellyfish’ in their sign language is the same sign they use for an insult meaning ‘spineless’. Deeplight was without a doubt one of my favourite books of 2019. This is the kind of book that made me fall in love with fantasy in the first place: magical, unforeseeable, one of a kind, entirely addictive. Hark could see the stories they yearned to tell, glimmering in their eyes. They could be coaxed out, with a little effort. That said, this book is a slow burn, and does take quite a while to get going. The story takes its time to develop, the characters are slowly drawn until they feel lifelike, the world is vividly painted in all its weirdness until it feels real and lived-in, the stakes are established and the chessboard is set for the payoff. And the entire second half provides a great payoff to all the careful and elaborate set up. But what else would you expect from a Hardinge story?When Frances Hardinge writes fantasy, it is a true fantasy indeed, in the most sincere meaning of the word - a crazy flight of imagination, an inventiveness of the strangest kind. It means that every voyage is a safety test, and it'll be scientifically fascinating if we die in her," Vyne answered cheerfully. I’ve always said Francis Hardinge’s imagination is unrivaled, and Deeplight was another dark delight. This time, we are transported to the Myriad archipelago, home to a people who worshiped a pantheon of terrifying, monster-like gods that would rise every so often from the Undersea and wreak havoc on the islands. But just three decades before, something strange happened. The gods turned on each other, and no one knows why. Hark and Jelt had been orphaned by the same bitter winter, and this had somehow grafted them together. Sometimes Hark felt they were more than friends – or less than friends – their destinies conjoined against their wills.' Hardinge fleshes out fully a cast of characters for whom the bonds of family and friendship are a source of both strength and devastation, laid bare and tested to their limit.

I admit I didn't absolutely LOVE this book until we were getting to the big action near the end, but between that and the final resolution, I was VERY satisfied. It pushed all my buttons. That is our fault – the fault of the priests. It is a fantasy we sold to the people of the Myriad so that everyone’s oppression would be more bearable. We let everyone tell themselves that they were watched over by gods rather than terrorized by monsters.” But this is not only the story about the Gods. It is also a story of much more mundane evils. People can create monstrosities most evil with the everyday actions, evils so repulsive precisely because of their ordinariness. Ironically, for a book in which the characters are constantly at risk of drowning, Deeplight is the first Hardinge book I've read that doesn't feel like I am drowning in it. The elaborate similes and stylized language are considerably toned down; the growing sense of paranoia and destabilization present in all Hardinge books is tempered by an odd note of nostalgia and trustworthy friends. Instead of immediately plunging into a world in which Things Are Wrong And Getting Worse, this book starts in a more mundane place and takes a while to really get going. This is a story about friendship (the toxic kind), sea monsters (the dead kind), secrets (the very secret kind) and deep sea adventures (the kind that will get you killed almost definitely).

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I'm glad I went to the trouble of getting the signed Waterstones Exclusive edition as it is nothing less than what this tale deserves. Relics from the gods are valuable. The typical collectors' items, coveted by the rich (and thus traders). But one day the two boys meet the real deal and it's much more than they bargained for, changing Jelt in a way nobody really understands. Except for an old priest, maybe, whom Hark had befriended earlier.