The West Passage
by Jared Pechacek
2024
The West Passage is a very weird, very medieval fantasy novel. Jared Pechacek has written something bizarre and fascinating, and I'd recommend it to almost anyone who likes adventure stories. Our viewpoint characters are a pair of young people, entrusted with adult responsibility to soon, who are sent on different errands following the death of the old Guardian of the West Passage. To these two, the palace is their whole world, but they've never really seen it before, except for their own little section. As they travel, the see the sights, meet people, learn history, and accidentally become involved in the machinations of the palace rulers, and as they do, we learn things too. Almost all the worldbuilding in the book is accomplished via sight-seeing, which allows the palace and its utter strangeness to emerge at a manageable pace.
As a book, The West Passage is structured and decorated like a much older story. It's divided into eight parts and many chapters. Each part is named for the primary character we're following and has an illustrated frontispiece that depicts part of the palace or one of its Ladies; each chapter has a title that lists the events that will happen during it and has an illustrated header showing some characters or a scene. Pechacek's illustrations look a lot like the art from medieval illuminated manuscripts, especially the weird little guys that show up in the doodles monks used to draw in the margins of their very serious books. These illustrations are one of first clues we get to the strangeness of the world. Yes, the Ladies really are as tall as towers; yes, they have too many limbs; yes, one has the head of a bird, another has a stone building for a head. Yes, some people have spines, others rabbit ears, others various animal parts.
The world of West Passage is medieval in other ways as well. Not just because it's set entirely inside a city-sized palace, or because its godlike rulers are called Ladies, or because of the style of clothes or level of technology, although all those things are indeed like the Middle Ages. But what truly feels pre-modern is the crushing, stultifying weight of history and tradition, that bears down on everything, smothers everything. The palace was founded during the Rose Age, which lasted hundreds of years, as did each subsequent dynasty, for over a millennium, each Age ended by the appearance of the Beast.
Every task is performed by a guild, and adults have a Name, a title that's determined by the office the hold. (Even their adult gender is determined by their Name; a more strict and severe version of the sort of rule that made Christina the king of Sweden, rather than its queen. The palace is matriarchal, so most Names are women's.) Every little task throughout the day is performed according to tradition, there are songs and litanies to help remember them all. Certain offices receive wine or honey or other gifts from the Ladies, rewards for the deeds of office-holders generations ago. There is, seemingly, no room for self or individuality, only duty and tradition, only doing the same things as they've always been done.
At the start of the book, the Guardian dies, and the Women in Grey perform her funeral. We follow Pell and Kew. Pell is an apprentice to the women, who will become Yarrow, the mother of the women, when the old mother dies. Kew is the sole apprentice guardian, who wants to become the next Hawthorne now that his master is dead, but cannot, because she died without elevating him, and because old Yarrow refuses. Grey House is severely depopulated, nearly empty; the farms and villages of Grey are nearly as sparse. For generations now, there have been no doctors or tutors, for example, because the last ones died with no replacement, their tasks simply never performed again. It's a place of loss, a place that seems almost dead. All of this is contained within the palace - the gardens and orchards are courtyards, all the housing and other structures built within the circumscribing walls.
Kew sets off to warn Black Tower that the Beast is rising again, and to ask for his adult Name. Soon Pell will become Yarrow and set off to petition Black too, to tell them that an early winter sits over Grey, freezing their crops and risking starvation, to beg them to turn the Great Wheel that controls the seasons, and bring back the spring and summer they're owed. The simplicity of their quests, and the obvious, understandable urgency of their needs help to ground the book in reality. The palace may be a place where building-sized Ladies exude holiness that compels worship and obedience, where a lost panacea of human flesh in honey can cure any wound, where lanterns filled with liquid light travel overhead on rails, propelled by gears and the sound of whistling - it is still also a place where people grow weak and feel pain from hunger, where they faint from lack of water on long walks, where they need chamberpots because there's no plumbing.
A pivotal scene for me involved seeing one of the kitchens of Black Tower, seeing how much wealth could be concentrated in one place, how much waste that entails, and how that must be the cause of privation elsewhere. Pell and Kew aren't unusual within the palace for being devoted to their duty, even for risking their lives for it. But they are unusual for being kind, for being willing to defer their missions to be nice to someone else, rather than pointing to tradition as an excuse to enjoy being cruel. The pair's quests send them across the palace where they intersect with revolutionary changes afoot at the end of the Age. But Pell and Kew each change the palace, change the world, not by siding with one coup or usurpation over another, but by showing human kindness to someone in need. From those small seeds, world-changing consequences bloom.
The world of West Passage is medieval in other ways as well. Not just because it's set entirely inside a city-sized palace, or because its godlike rulers are called Ladies, or because of the style of clothes or level of technology, although all those things are indeed like the Middle Ages. But what truly feels pre-modern is the crushing, stultifying weight of history and tradition, that bears down on everything, smothers everything. The palace was founded during the Rose Age, which lasted hundreds of years, as did each subsequent dynasty, for over a millennium, each Age ended by the appearance of the Beast.
Every task is performed by a guild, and adults have a Name, a title that's determined by the office the hold. (Even their adult gender is determined by their Name; a more strict and severe version of the sort of rule that made Christina the king of Sweden, rather than its queen. The palace is matriarchal, so most Names are women's.) Every little task throughout the day is performed according to tradition, there are songs and litanies to help remember them all. Certain offices receive wine or honey or other gifts from the Ladies, rewards for the deeds of office-holders generations ago. There is, seemingly, no room for self or individuality, only duty and tradition, only doing the same things as they've always been done.
At the start of the book, the Guardian dies, and the Women in Grey perform her funeral. We follow Pell and Kew. Pell is an apprentice to the women, who will become Yarrow, the mother of the women, when the old mother dies. Kew is the sole apprentice guardian, who wants to become the next Hawthorne now that his master is dead, but cannot, because she died without elevating him, and because old Yarrow refuses. Grey House is severely depopulated, nearly empty; the farms and villages of Grey are nearly as sparse. For generations now, there have been no doctors or tutors, for example, because the last ones died with no replacement, their tasks simply never performed again. It's a place of loss, a place that seems almost dead. All of this is contained within the palace - the gardens and orchards are courtyards, all the housing and other structures built within the circumscribing walls.
Kew sets off to warn Black Tower that the Beast is rising again, and to ask for his adult Name. Soon Pell will become Yarrow and set off to petition Black too, to tell them that an early winter sits over Grey, freezing their crops and risking starvation, to beg them to turn the Great Wheel that controls the seasons, and bring back the spring and summer they're owed. The simplicity of their quests, and the obvious, understandable urgency of their needs help to ground the book in reality. The palace may be a place where building-sized Ladies exude holiness that compels worship and obedience, where a lost panacea of human flesh in honey can cure any wound, where lanterns filled with liquid light travel overhead on rails, propelled by gears and the sound of whistling - it is still also a place where people grow weak and feel pain from hunger, where they faint from lack of water on long walks, where they need chamberpots because there's no plumbing.
A pivotal scene for me involved seeing one of the kitchens of Black Tower, seeing how much wealth could be concentrated in one place, how much waste that entails, and how that must be the cause of privation elsewhere. Pell and Kew aren't unusual within the palace for being devoted to their duty, even for risking their lives for it. But they are unusual for being kind, for being willing to defer their missions to be nice to someone else, rather than pointing to tradition as an excuse to enjoy being cruel. The pair's quests send them across the palace where they intersect with revolutionary changes afoot at the end of the Age. But Pell and Kew each change the palace, change the world, not by siding with one coup or usurpation over another, but by showing human kindness to someone in need. From those small seeds, world-changing consequences bloom.
The West Passage is one of the most D&D-like fantasy books I've read. The palace is like a megadungeon, complete with color-coded regions, and aside from the four great Passages between levels, it can only be navigated like a maze, detouring around locked doors and crumbled ceilings, cutting through abandoned and repurposed rooms and hallways. We learn the history of the palace much as D&D players do, finding paintings and murals, hearing several versions of the same stories, trying to piece together the truth in the overlap. The people have unusual bodies, obsessive interests, and eccentric mannerisms. Much of the magic in the place resides in ancient items whose original purpose is now obscure, like the legless automaton who walks on his hands and carries deliveries on the platform of his back. More than anything else they do, Pell and Kew explore and learn, and eventually get the chance to exercise a bit of outsized agency by being in the right place during unsettled times and making educated, unexpected actions that defy tradition. I don't mean to suggest that this is a good book because it reminds me of D&D, but it is a very good book, and also, it reminds me of D&D.
