High Times in the Low Parliament
by Kelly Robson
2022
High Times in the Low Parliament was nominated for Nebula and Aurora awards, and NPR and Autostraddle both shortlisted it as faves, so clearly there are people who love this book, but I'm not one of them. My favorite part of it was the cover.
Lana, a slacker with good handwriting, gets tricked into volunteering as a scribe for the Low Parliament, a fantasy EU set up and administered by fairies. The fairies, who are universally bitter and vicious, want humans to talk through their disagreements to prevent any more wars. But it takes a ⅔ majority to pass anything, so parliament has been hung by a series of non-passing majority votes, and if they don't get their act together in a month, the fairies will use magic to have the whole giant edifice flooded by the ocean, drowning everyone. Also no one can leave without permission, or they'll also drown. Lana spends the book getting high with the fairy Bugbite and lusting after French parliamentarian Eloquentia, while barely paying attention to the impending doom. At the last minute, Lana starts to care, makes an impassioned speech, gets Eloquentia to do a little dance for parliament, (no, I'm not joking), and miraculously saves the day when there's a unanimous vote in favor of the dance.
So, it's like a fantasy novella that's a political satire, but with the plot structure and main character from a teen stoner comedy. If the finale was 'and that's how Lana got elected class president, therefore earning a A in poli sci despite flunking every test,' that would've been the appropriate stakes for both the (lack of) seriousness with which anything is treated, and the quality of the satire.
Also, arguably what really saves the day is a very timely political assassination. Because while the deadlocks are sort of the result of European (and perhaps universally human) difficulties in getting along and agreeing on things, and also by the stupid supermajority voting rules, it's also ALSO being sabotaged by the various Anglish delegates who secretly want the fairies to drown parliament because they hope then humanity will rise up and throw off fairy rule. I assume this is a Brexit metaphor. But in the last few pages, the fairies straight up murder the chief Anglish belligerent right there on the floor of parliament, thus clearing the way for Lana's 'technically there's no rule that say's a dog can't play basketball' buzzer beating victory speech. I'm not sure if Robson intended for 'political assassination accomplishes its goals, if we want functioning democracy we should kill all the populists and demagogues' to be the moral of her story, but the only other candidate is 'procrastination works, it doesn't matter if you don't care or even know what's going on for as long as possible, you still can accomplish something at the last second without really trying that everyone else has been working hard on and failing at this whole time.'
So like, honestly, the only things I really want to say about this book are all complaints, but to make sense of a few of them, I guess I need to give a little more background. Despite the back-cover blurb saying that the book takes place in the 18th century, Robson establishes early on that it's set in 1916. We learn early on that the fairies established Low Parliament in 1666, and that it's given Europe 250 years of peace. So the fairies conquered us, but mostly just force us to govern ourselves. One consequence is that there are no large nations or empires. The Anglish are just one of the occupants of the British Isles, not its imperial conquerors. Eloquentia represents Provence rather than France because there is no such unified country. I can't totally tell from reading this if Robson is an expert on early modern provincial history, or looked up a list of old principalities on Wikipedia. Both are plausible.
There are literally only women in the book, and presumably anywhere in Europe. Babies come from a fairy delivering an infant daughter to an aspiring mother who petitions her, and there are seemingly no men at all among the human or fairy populations. No reason for this is ever stated, no one seems to remember or contemplate an alternative. It's a fact that functions basically as window dressing.
Which is sort of surprising when you consider that in the 1600s, killing off all of Europe's men would've eliminated essentially all government officials and soldiers, as well as all the formal leaders of Christianity, collapsed society, and forced a near total rebuilding - which is never mentioned. Maybe the adult men died off naturally and just were never replaced by male infants after the fairy conquest? There's also no church or religion mentioned anywhere in the book. All this might go a long way toward enforcing peace! In the real world, 90-95% of the assaults and murders that are reported to the police are committed by men. A world where those guys don't exist, because no guys exist, would not be violence-free, but it might be a lot calmer, with or without a continental governing body. I mean, I don't know what would really happen, but a world without men is a classic thought experiment, dozens of authors have tried to imagine it, and Robson's answer is basically a shrug. It's a consequence of rule by fairies, something the reader notices but is never explicitly mentioned in the text, and seemingly has no additional effects of its own, beyond that nobody objects to or really even notices Lana's thirsty lesbianism.
The way Robson presents facts mainly as aesthetics, with no implications or consequences, might be a recurring theme of my problems with High Times. Lana's only two interests are sex and drugs. She gets tricked into becoming a scribe for parliament because a pretty girl offers to kiss her; she only notices Eloquentia because she's crushing on her. We don't really know what Europe's ubiquitous homosexuality means to anyone else, but for Lana it means that she's continuously horny, though in perhaps the most chaste way possible. She thinks a lot about wanting to kiss people, she notices when other scribes are kissing each other. But actually, we get almost no descriptions of her feelings of desire, no lingering glances, no staring. The book will state that two young women are making out, but Robson declines to tell us what it's like to sit next to them and try to take notes while they're going at it.
And for a drug novel, there's also surprisingly little description of the drugs of what it's like to take them. In the same way that the main function of the sex is to give Lana a reason to try to befriend Eloquentia, the drugs serve as a shorthand to establish her friendship with Bugbite. Lana and the fairy are mutual stoners; every morning they consume some of Lana's baker's yeast, every evening they eat a few flakes off one of Bugbite's mushroom caps. No, I don't know why Robson claims that yeast is a hallucinogen; I briefly wondered if she was thinking of ergot, but it might also be as simple as yeast being an ingredient in beer, and either Robson or Tor being unwilling to include actual real-world drugs in this, for whatever reason. Each time Lana takes a drug, we get like, one sentence informing us that she sees flower petals or some other hallucination, but there are no lengthy descriptions, no trouble telling visions from reality, no problems of any sort caused by tripping twice a day indefinitely. It feels like Robson was aiming for the cleanest possible PG-13 her premise would allow, like it'd be PG if she could get it, and the book is worse for it.
I'm not asking for purple prose here, or gratuitous dream sequences or sex scenes that stretch on forever, but I really wanted the book to at least pretend to care about its own subject matter. If Lana's high as a kite and horny on main all the time, then, I don't know, maybe tell us more about that as more than a simple statement of facts. Show us what she's looking at. Let us feel what she feels. Yes, go on about it! At least a little bit. Flex your literary muscles and write the kind of looping, whirling, flowery sentences that show us that something's important. Get rhapsodic! Give us a bit of poetry!
If everyone in your book is living under the shadow of death and nearing or surpassing their psychological breaking points from the tension, maybe show us that too. Even an amiable idiot like Lana should notice that everyone's terrified of dying, and that should show up on the page as something more than bland assertions that fear is being felt. Write, godammit!
Instead of using your 150 pages to repetitiously list the same handful of actions over and over, undertaken without the slightest sense of urgency, compose a smaller number of vivid, impactful scenes. This doesn't need to be a slow burn while the world's dimmest detective very slowly accumulates clues in spite of herself. This book should be a fever dream, and instead it's a made for tv movie, an after school special, conforming to strict broadcast standards. The longer I spent reading it, the more I wanted it to be something more than what it is.
Lana, a slacker with good handwriting, gets tricked into volunteering as a scribe for the Low Parliament, a fantasy EU set up and administered by fairies. The fairies, who are universally bitter and vicious, want humans to talk through their disagreements to prevent any more wars. But it takes a ⅔ majority to pass anything, so parliament has been hung by a series of non-passing majority votes, and if they don't get their act together in a month, the fairies will use magic to have the whole giant edifice flooded by the ocean, drowning everyone. Also no one can leave without permission, or they'll also drown. Lana spends the book getting high with the fairy Bugbite and lusting after French parliamentarian Eloquentia, while barely paying attention to the impending doom. At the last minute, Lana starts to care, makes an impassioned speech, gets Eloquentia to do a little dance for parliament, (no, I'm not joking), and miraculously saves the day when there's a unanimous vote in favor of the dance.
So, it's like a fantasy novella that's a political satire, but with the plot structure and main character from a teen stoner comedy. If the finale was 'and that's how Lana got elected class president, therefore earning a A in poli sci despite flunking every test,' that would've been the appropriate stakes for both the (lack of) seriousness with which anything is treated, and the quality of the satire.
Also, arguably what really saves the day is a very timely political assassination. Because while the deadlocks are sort of the result of European (and perhaps universally human) difficulties in getting along and agreeing on things, and also by the stupid supermajority voting rules, it's also ALSO being sabotaged by the various Anglish delegates who secretly want the fairies to drown parliament because they hope then humanity will rise up and throw off fairy rule. I assume this is a Brexit metaphor. But in the last few pages, the fairies straight up murder the chief Anglish belligerent right there on the floor of parliament, thus clearing the way for Lana's 'technically there's no rule that say's a dog can't play basketball' buzzer beating victory speech. I'm not sure if Robson intended for 'political assassination accomplishes its goals, if we want functioning democracy we should kill all the populists and demagogues' to be the moral of her story, but the only other candidate is 'procrastination works, it doesn't matter if you don't care or even know what's going on for as long as possible, you still can accomplish something at the last second without really trying that everyone else has been working hard on and failing at this whole time.'
So like, honestly, the only things I really want to say about this book are all complaints, but to make sense of a few of them, I guess I need to give a little more background. Despite the back-cover blurb saying that the book takes place in the 18th century, Robson establishes early on that it's set in 1916. We learn early on that the fairies established Low Parliament in 1666, and that it's given Europe 250 years of peace. So the fairies conquered us, but mostly just force us to govern ourselves. One consequence is that there are no large nations or empires. The Anglish are just one of the occupants of the British Isles, not its imperial conquerors. Eloquentia represents Provence rather than France because there is no such unified country. I can't totally tell from reading this if Robson is an expert on early modern provincial history, or looked up a list of old principalities on Wikipedia. Both are plausible.
There are literally only women in the book, and presumably anywhere in Europe. Babies come from a fairy delivering an infant daughter to an aspiring mother who petitions her, and there are seemingly no men at all among the human or fairy populations. No reason for this is ever stated, no one seems to remember or contemplate an alternative. It's a fact that functions basically as window dressing.
Which is sort of surprising when you consider that in the 1600s, killing off all of Europe's men would've eliminated essentially all government officials and soldiers, as well as all the formal leaders of Christianity, collapsed society, and forced a near total rebuilding - which is never mentioned. Maybe the adult men died off naturally and just were never replaced by male infants after the fairy conquest? There's also no church or religion mentioned anywhere in the book. All this might go a long way toward enforcing peace! In the real world, 90-95% of the assaults and murders that are reported to the police are committed by men. A world where those guys don't exist, because no guys exist, would not be violence-free, but it might be a lot calmer, with or without a continental governing body. I mean, I don't know what would really happen, but a world without men is a classic thought experiment, dozens of authors have tried to imagine it, and Robson's answer is basically a shrug. It's a consequence of rule by fairies, something the reader notices but is never explicitly mentioned in the text, and seemingly has no additional effects of its own, beyond that nobody objects to or really even notices Lana's thirsty lesbianism.
The way Robson presents facts mainly as aesthetics, with no implications or consequences, might be a recurring theme of my problems with High Times. Lana's only two interests are sex and drugs. She gets tricked into becoming a scribe for parliament because a pretty girl offers to kiss her; she only notices Eloquentia because she's crushing on her. We don't really know what Europe's ubiquitous homosexuality means to anyone else, but for Lana it means that she's continuously horny, though in perhaps the most chaste way possible. She thinks a lot about wanting to kiss people, she notices when other scribes are kissing each other. But actually, we get almost no descriptions of her feelings of desire, no lingering glances, no staring. The book will state that two young women are making out, but Robson declines to tell us what it's like to sit next to them and try to take notes while they're going at it.
And for a drug novel, there's also surprisingly little description of the drugs of what it's like to take them. In the same way that the main function of the sex is to give Lana a reason to try to befriend Eloquentia, the drugs serve as a shorthand to establish her friendship with Bugbite. Lana and the fairy are mutual stoners; every morning they consume some of Lana's baker's yeast, every evening they eat a few flakes off one of Bugbite's mushroom caps. No, I don't know why Robson claims that yeast is a hallucinogen; I briefly wondered if she was thinking of ergot, but it might also be as simple as yeast being an ingredient in beer, and either Robson or Tor being unwilling to include actual real-world drugs in this, for whatever reason. Each time Lana takes a drug, we get like, one sentence informing us that she sees flower petals or some other hallucination, but there are no lengthy descriptions, no trouble telling visions from reality, no problems of any sort caused by tripping twice a day indefinitely. It feels like Robson was aiming for the cleanest possible PG-13 her premise would allow, like it'd be PG if she could get it, and the book is worse for it.
I'm not asking for purple prose here, or gratuitous dream sequences or sex scenes that stretch on forever, but I really wanted the book to at least pretend to care about its own subject matter. If Lana's high as a kite and horny on main all the time, then, I don't know, maybe tell us more about that as more than a simple statement of facts. Show us what she's looking at. Let us feel what she feels. Yes, go on about it! At least a little bit. Flex your literary muscles and write the kind of looping, whirling, flowery sentences that show us that something's important. Get rhapsodic! Give us a bit of poetry!
If everyone in your book is living under the shadow of death and nearing or surpassing their psychological breaking points from the tension, maybe show us that too. Even an amiable idiot like Lana should notice that everyone's terrified of dying, and that should show up on the page as something more than bland assertions that fear is being felt. Write, godammit!
Instead of using your 150 pages to repetitiously list the same handful of actions over and over, undertaken without the slightest sense of urgency, compose a smaller number of vivid, impactful scenes. This doesn't need to be a slow burn while the world's dimmest detective very slowly accumulates clues in spite of herself. This book should be a fever dream, and instead it's a made for tv movie, an after school special, conforming to strict broadcast standards. The longer I spent reading it, the more I wanted it to be something more than what it is.
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