Robert Jackson Bennett's The Shadow of the Leviathan

A Drop of Corruption is an excellent second entry

The second book in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan series, A Drop of Corruption, is out this week, and it continues the excellent quality of the first (The Tainted Cup). At its core it is another fantasy mystery; Nero Wolfe (Ana) and Archie Goodwin (Din) in a biohacked, equivocally benevolent empire set up to protect its peoples from the annual attack of giant, unknowable kaiju from the depths of the sea.

This is a hell of a setup, but without good execution, a great setup is wasted. And SFFnal mysteries are really hard to execute well. Having the whodunnit be resolved entirely with the logic you’d expect in a straight mystery renders the SFFnal elements window dressing, while leaning too heavily on unexpected or unrevealed aspects of SFFnal worldbuilding makes the ‘game’ of the mystery feel unfair or arbitrary to the reader.

It’s a tough needle to thread, but happily Bennett does so expertly; A Drop of Corruption is a hugely enjoyable narrative. We move from Ana and Din investigating corruption and murder on the walls which protect the Empire from the titans to a puzzling murder in the client kingdom where dead titans are carefully (carefully!) dismantled for the compounds essential for the biohacking the Empire relies on.

The mystery plot is multilayered and compelling, and (when revealed) entirely makes sense within the logic of the setting. The character work is fantastic; the dynamic between Ana and Din has deepened with several months more working together and, beyond the Nero Wolfe vibes I mentioned above, I’m starting to get echoes of my all-time favourite detective duo, Barry Hughart’s Master Li and Number Ten Ox. The new major supporting character, Malo, is also excellent (and I hope we see more of her in future books). The worldbuilding is also deployed to great effect in this character work. A particular example is the impact that the short, but intense, relationship Din gets into with a soldier at the end (points as well, for our boy Din’s clear depiction as a Kinsey 4 or 5 bisexual man, a species of queer almost unheard of in modern SFF). Din is an Engraver; he’s been biohacked to be literally incapable of forgetting anything he has experienced. That being the case, Bennett asked, what is the emotional impact of a relationship that, yes, was short, but was really meaningful and where every moment spent together is burned into your brain? I think it’s a fascinating piece of social speculation, and we see that poor Din is Not Dealing Well.

So; I enjoyed this book, I enjoyed the first one, and I’d pretty unhesitatingly recommend them. But I want to shift from a bare recommendation to dig into something with my work hat on: it’s Time For Law! In my day job I’m neck deep in constitutional theory and public administration, and wouldn’t you know it but two books into the series and it’s very clear that Bennett is playing in both those pools. (Nothing plot critical, but I will be quoting from both books below, so if you’re spoiler hypersensitive and haven’t read both books, look away now).

Time for some constitutional theory (1/432)

The (admittedly not particularly subtle) clue on the constitutional theory front is in the title of the series. “The Shadow of the Leviathan”, you might reasonably think, refers the giant kaiju that are the primary factor shaping the setting. And it does, but it also refers to the Empire itself; Ana makes this point explicitly, saying “...I have always rather thought the Empire was wrought in the image of that which it was made to fight.” (The Tainted Cup, Ch 42).

A society compared to a Leviathan leads us inexorably to Hobbes. But where Hobbes argues that an absolute sovereign is by far the most viable way to protect against ‘the war of all against all’, Bennett says “fuck you and the King you rode in on”. That this is his intent is made most clear in the author’s note to A Drop of Corruption, which is an extended diatribe against the Hobbesean hardon for kings that is the default register of epic fantasy. The note concludes:

And this isn’t just word of God-as-in-author; it’s also word of in-universe God(king). The letters of last (immortal?) God-Emperor of the group which founded the Empire are, Federalist papers-like, a foundational text for the now democratic Empire (said God-Emperor retreated to a bunker centuries ago and has remained silent ever since; 40k-like, it’s left ambiguous as to whether he’s actually still alive/aware). These are quoted several times, and make it clear that the constitution is framed to reduce the possibility of absolute power, with that being seen as the greatest threat against society being able to endure against the Titans:

A clear reference, I’d suggest, to Hobbes’ assertion that the state of nature involves life which is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, and an argument that it is in fact autocratic power, rather than its lack, which most threatens reducing people to such a condition. Instead, the Empire is set up to give all its citizens a role – and a stake – in its functioning. From another Imperial letter:

Not only is collective action seen as a match for the abilities of the departed Übermensch, the Emperor suggests it has the capacity to exceed it.

Very nerdy detectives?

Constitutional theorising is all well and good, but utopia is both impossible and, much more importantly for a novel setting, uninteresting. And Bennett is very clear that the Empire is no utopia. It’s the best some very smart people could come up with in the medium term in response to a genuine existential threat in the titans. But it isn’t presented as perfection, and neither are its citizens. There is corruption, there is laziness, there is self-dealing and acting against the common good (just as Hobbes suggested would happen in any society without an absolute monarch). Continuing the metaphor of the Empire-as-Titan, Ana says:

So who is tending to the Empire? Why, Ana and Din, of course! This point is made rather explicitly several times. Very early on in The Tainted Cup, Ana observes some road workers and notes “...though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.” (The Tainted Cup, Ch 10) She later explicitly equates their job to this maintenance work: “I simply perform maintenance, in my own little way. And you have ably assisted me in that, of course.” (The Tainted Cup, Ch 42).

Ana and Din are part of the Iudex, a branch of government responsible for investigating crimes and puzzles. But they are part of (or solely make up, possibly?) a sub-branch which investigates crimes of specific significance to government. That’s something interesting and different that one doesn’t typically see in cop or private detective-focused fiction.

In most of the anglosphere, at least, government is traditionally divided into three branches: legislature, executive, and judiciary. In crude terms, the legislature makes law, the executive administers its application, and the judiciary authoritatively interprets it. Traditionally the tensions and allocation of functions amongst these branches is supposed to mitigate the potential for abuse of power by any one branch.

But this is in part a Just-So Story, and also doesn’t account for the problem of individual graft or corruption within a branch. And so, especially in recent years, there are institutions of the state set up to deal with the frailties of the structure of the state and the frailties of the humans who hold office within it. Increasingly this is called the fourth branch or integrity branch of government. Things like Ombuds offices, Auditors-General, Information Commissioners, Police complaints bodies and/or Police internal affairs.

With some obvious changes for the fantasy novel context (not too many Ombuds with swords, and lock picking is generally frowned upon), I want to suggest this is the space Ana and Din are operating in. Their job is not to defend the Empire directly, but as Ana says to Din: “I suspect you shall come to realize what many Iudexii eventually learn—that though the Legion defends our Empire, it falls to us to keep an Empire worth defending.” (A Drop of Corruption, Ch 19)

This is, to my mind, a really interesting space to set detective fiction. We have the very fine-grained puzzle box that drives the plot, but the implications of the puzzle are wide-screen and society wide. I tell people this is what is challenging about administrative law as a discipline, and I find it fascinating to find a novelist exploring that same tension.

There’s also another tension in this space in that cynicism must absolutely be rejected: the work of the integrity branch cannot be done without a commitment to genuine principle and an ideal of the public good. But it is also exhausting, imperfect work that will never wholly satisfy: the job is never done and most of it is picking up the pieces after an injustice has already happened. Towards the end of A Drop of Corruption, Ana and Din discuss the inherently frustrating nature of their role:

I find all of this incredibly interesting, and hope to read as many more books in this setting as Bennett cares to write. But where does this go next, to continue exploring these wonderful characters, and interesting ideas? I think there are two metaquestions raised in these first two books that would be fruitful avenues to go down. Firstly, in A Drop of Corruption, we very briefly get our only look at a living Titan. And as Din says “It had a face? And seemed to be trying to speak?” (The Tainted Cup, Ch 41) The original stain on the Empire is surely its foundation extractive capitalism generally, and an analogy to whaling specifically. Bennett is a very good writer, you don’t just chuck a gun like that comment from Din on the mantelpiece and refrain from doing anything with it: the sentience of the Titans & potential for a less mutually destructive relationship will surely be explored at some point in the series. I thought that’d be the next volume when I thought this was a closely connected trilogy, but I understand it is more open-ended than that; if so, I suspect this will be left on the mantel a little longer.

So what’s next then? Well, the mysteries in both The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption have absolutely touched on matters critical to the survival of the Empire. But they both happened on its absolute fringes, geographically and politically. I’d like to see what this odd integrity branch mystery setup does when Ana and Din are literally and metaphorically closer to the halls of power: time for a trip to the Inner Rings.