Review: 'The City in Glass' by Nghi Vo
Pub. Date: 01/10/2024
Publisher: Tordotcom; Tor Publishing Group
A demon. An angel. A city.
The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.
And then the angels come, and the city falls.
Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.
Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.
The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.
Worldbuilding is essential, not just to fantasy but to narrative in general. In Narratology, the study of narratives, we work with something called the "storyworld", which is, to quote Arkady Martine 'a possible world constructed by, not only the narrative on the page, but the cognitive results of the process of comprehending the story, cued by the author and experienced and completed by the reader' (Source). A narrative creates a storyworld (sometimes also called a Secondary World) through the words on the page but, as Martine notes, just as important is the cognitive work a reader does by filling in the gaps and adding their own lived experiences to this storyworld. A storyworld is never complete, in the sense that no author is able to cover every single aspect of a possible world in detail. Rather, an author cues their readers to import elements from the Primary World (i.e., our world) to the storyworld, either wholesale or with slight adjustments. For example, an author might mention a church and a reader will then fill that in with their own experiences of Christian churches. If an author mentions a church but states that it has no roof, then the reader knows to imagine a church similar to the ones in the Primary World, but with a few elements changed. All this on storyworlds is a little preamble to discuss how loosely yet strongly Nghi Vo crafts her world in The City in Glass. The novella does not tell us what the strife between angels and demons is, whether such a thing as God exists, if Hell is real, or even in what kind of continent or world Azril exists. It begins with a demon and an angel and a beautiful city, and Vo trusts her readers to take what she writes and complete it with their own knowledge, thereby creating a storyworld that felt incredibly solid and real to me. Over the following 200-odd pages, Vo slowly but surely shapes both the imported knowledge from the readers and the knowledge she gives until something truly stunning emerges, which is both new and exciting and somehow familiar and known.
Vitrine is a demon in love with a city. Azril is a beauty and she has crafted in slowly but surely over centuries. All that joy comes to an end, however, when a group of angels comes and decimates the city and all its inhabitants. In a rage, she casts an evil part of herself into one of the angels and begins the slow process of sorting through the remains of Azril. Bound, by their very natures, to be enemies, the Angel nonetheless returns, drawn by Vitrine's curse and he witnesses not just the slow rebuilding of Azril, but also Vitrine's love for the people that lived there. As the years, decades, and then centuries pass, Vitrine and the Angel slowly, and combatively, shape a new Azril. But is this new city built to last? I saw some reviewers who felt that nothing really happened in the novella, neither in the plot sense nor within the characters. While, in a way, the plot truly is minimal, The City in Glass is a deeply character-driven work. Not because either Vitrine or the Angel are going to be totally different characters by the end, but because through their actions and interactions we get an insight into the conflicts that lie at the very heart of them. Also, the city Azril should really be seen as the third main character, one who experiences all the love, destruction, and change either Vitrine, the Angel, and time are capable of. In that way the novella is as much an ode to the passage of time as it is an exploration of different kinds of love.
This was my first Nghi Vo book, although I also had a review copy of Siren Queen, which I read next and also loved. Vo grabbed me almost immediately, with the vibrant description of Azril and the obvious joy and pleasure that Vitrine took from it. I also felt her rage at its destruction, at the waste of all that beauty for no apparent reason. While the beginning is very exciting and dramatic, it does also set you up for the almost meditative quality of much of the book. Vitrine spends seasons standing in a river gently asking it to flow more strongly and cleanse her destroyed city, for example. Years and decades pass in a sentence and rather than this feeling rushed, it allows the novella to contemplate entire life cycles, how individual humans can both change everything and yet be a mere blip in the life of a city. The people who populate Azril, old and new, are largely seen through small glimpses, taking up a brief moment in the centuries-long existence of both demon and angel, and yet I was fond of each and single one of them. The relationship between Vitrine and the Angel is also one made up of tension, as Vitrine's fierce and possessive love for her city clashes with the Angel's distant love for humanity. As the years pass, there is give on both sides as a new Azril grows. There is love there, but it too is a different kind of love, as much composed of hate as of gentleness. I feel like I have many more thoughts about this book but I think most of them are not easily put into words. The City in Glass is a beautiful, sumptuous book which made my heart ache.
I give this novella...
5 Universes!
I absolutely loved The City in Glass and do not know why it took me so long to get to it. Nghi Vo has won herself a spot in my heart with this one and I'll be likely to read anything she writes next. Her back catalogue is already on my list!
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