What if the very act of studying something could have magical ramifications? That question has informed books as stylistically diverse as R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World, and Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft trilogy. Now, with The Naming Song, Jedediah Berry had offered up his own take on what a world where understanding something forever transforms it.
I’m going to take a quick moment here to say that this is an especially challenging review to write. More than most books I’ve discussed in this space, part of the appeal of Berry’s novel is figuring out precisely how this world works, and certain details don’t come to the forefront until later on in the book. Unfortunately, discussing what’s most interesting about this novel, as well as its flaws, requires some recounting of those plot points. All of which is to say: Spoilers follow.
The Naming Song is set in a world that could be called post-apocalyptic, though the nature of that apocalypse is ambiguous. A few stories have endured from the pre-apocalyptic times—which is to say, from our own world—and, as in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, there’s a certain pleasure that comes from parsing out how some familiar stories are remembered in this new landscape.
The act that ended the old world, the Silence, eradicated all words from the human landscape. This didn’t just end society as we know it; it also, at least temporarily, removed the concepts of sex and gender. And the setting is at a strange technological level, with several prominent railroads factoring into the plot along with more futuristic flying machines. Here, too, the act of naming something can alter it, from the routes the novel’s protagonist takes to escape her enemies to the occasionally hidden compartments and cars on the aforementioned railroads.
When we’re introduced to our protagonist, a nameless woman known as “the courier,” it’s in the context of her work, which is to say: delivering new words to the world around her. In doing so, Berry also reveals much about the way this world is governed, and why the courier’s work is important:
Her committee employed diviners to find the words in their quiet chambers, using tools and methods known only to them. Couriers to deliver the words into the world. Committee pages to add the words to the next broadsheet, to print and carry copies to every place with a name. To Whisper, home of the sayers. To Hollow, the largest city of the named, with its booming factories. To Tooth in the Well-Named Mountains, and to Tortoise on the shore of the lake. To the cities built on top of cities from before; to the towns cobbled long ago from the nameless nothing; to the new towns on the borders, where settlers waited anxiously for words, because words were a better defense against those for whom the watchers watched than all their guns and palisades.
Gradually, we learn more, about the place of nameless people in this world, about the courier’s own personal history, about her periodic relationship with a diviner named Beryl, and one of the other properties of this world: that people can create monsters from the act of dreaming.
The courier is concerned about growing activity among the nameless, which suggests to her that they’re planning some sort of violent action against the power structure of this society. The head of her committee, Book, continues giving her words to deliver, but she becomes aware of something more going on—including secret meetings between Book and Ticket, the courier’s sister. There’s intrigue aplenty here, and that’s before the courier’s dreams bring a monster that resembles her sister to life—and before she goes on the run, one word still remaining to be delivered.
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The courier’s route takes her into the orbit of the Black Square Show, a kind of traveling theater company in which the social hierarchy is very different from the larger society. Here, humans, monsters, and ghosts are on equal footing; here, too, all are given titles based on the card they’ve drawn from a deck. There’s something tarot-esque about it, albeit with very different suits: Stones, Leaves, Shovels, and Trees. (This is not the first time Berry has ventured into the world of tarot for inspiration.) Her time spent on the rails with them puts certain elements of her own history in a different light, and also reveals new dimensions to the patchwork ghost, an old friend of hers.
There’s one especially noteworthy thread that runs through the book. The courier winds up acquiring an animal companion early in the book, a creature referred to only as “the stowaway.” From its behavior, it seems pretty clear that this is a cat—but that particular word is never used, presumably because that word has not yet been (re)discovered. It’s a small yet elegant way for Berry to convey precisely what living in this world is like.
As befits a book about names and recognition, much of The Naming Song abounds with moments of realization and revelation. (The latter is intended in a religious sense as well; this is, in its own way, a creation story and a tale of Original Sin, though it’s not always obvious as such.) And, like a linguist, the courier must think back over the words that she’s delivered and muse on their effects on the world. The whole thing is heady and frequently gripping—palace intrigue plus long-buried secrets plus a setting that feels genuinely new, all with a defiant and forceful character at its heart.
There is a lot to like and admire about The Naming Song. And besides the ways in which Berry blends a high-concept setting with a thrilling narrative, there’s also the ambition that’s clearly at work here: Berry has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how language shapes the way humans encounter the world and how that could make for a compelling story.
Here’s where it gets a little thornier. Early in the book, Berry supplies a list of characters, including a few described as ghosts and monsters. The ghosts do seem to be, well, ghosts; at one point, a supporting character dies and his ghost appears, still a tactile presence but seemingly deprived of the ability to speak. As the novel continues, Berry reveals more about the lot of ghosts in this world, including the fact that the authoritarian villains burn them for fuel and that they can be bought and sold. There’s also a secretive movement devoted to getting the ghosts to safety, far from the oppressive society that seeks their enslavement or destruction.
Reading this, it seemed as though Berry was looking to establish the ghosts as a metaphorical stand-in for oppressed groups; the aforementioned rescue efforts seemed to evoke both the Underground Railroad and the Kindertransport, which felt like a really big swing on Berry’s part. Still, if you’re writing about the sheer power of language, the role that it can have in denying people their own humanity is certainly on the table. (Magnus Mills’s Explorers of the New Century does this in an exquisitely chilling manner.) But at the end of the day, that isn’t quite what Berry is up to here. For all of the powerful metaphorical imagery Berry has put on the table, these ghosts are, at the end of the day, ghosts. There is a payoff, but it zeroes in on a very different element of ghosts’ presence in this world.
That Berry doesn’t do more with some of the metaphorical baggage he’s accumulated here is somewhat frustrating—but in a novel with as many big ideas as this one, it isn’t unexpected to see some get less developed than others. The Naming Song has big ambitions, a compelling protagonist, and an immersive world; all of those qualities make it eminently discoverable.
The Naming Song is published by Tor Books.
