Bless This Mess: Alchemised by SenLinYu
So, I read Alchemised. I have some thoughts.
In short: it’s too damn long.
At length: …well, you’ll just have to read further.
I read this book partially because it began its life as a fanfic, and I was curious to see how that played out. I’m not going to talk about that in this review, because I want to focus on the book as it stands on its own, but I do have some fanfic-related thoughts, and they are here if you’re interested.
Content warnings: discussion of rape/sexual assault; discussion of gore/body horror
THE MESS
So, okay, I think it’ll be helpful if I give the world-building stuff upfront, because it’s peppered throughout the book and that’s not necessarily bad, but it does make for a somewhat confusing experience at times.
The book is set in what I would describe as kind of alternate-history fantasy Europe in a mid-industrial sort of era (I actually like this part). Magic in this world is done through alchemy, but you have to be born with it. The city-state of Paladia, our setting, has an unusually high occurrence of alchemists.
I don’t really understand how the alchemy works, but that might be on me: if you’re an alchemist, you have “resonance” with certain materials. Mostly this is metal but also there are pyromancers. Also, more importantly, there is necromancy and vivimancy (the ability to impact living tissue), which is an inherited ability. If you can do one you can do the other, but there’s a huge taboo against both in Paladia. I think these are meant to be rare but basically every fucking character in this book is a vivimancer so /shrug/. Also, there’s something called animancy, which I think is the ability to impact the mind itself, which is the Special Special.
At the beginning of Paladia’s history, a big bad Necromancer was defeated by Orion Holdfast, and ever since then his family have been functionally priest-kings of Paladia. They are both political and religious leaders. Helena Marino, our protagonist, is a foreign student on scholarship at the Paladian alchemy school who becomes friends with the Holdfast heir, Luc.
I really would have benefitted from a clear chronology of events, because we’re just kind of given pieces of backstory and meant to fit these in around each other, but I THINK what happened was this: some guy named Morrough manipulated the wealthy and influential families of Paladia to rise up against the Holdfasts using necromancy, promising them immortality and a new world order, and they became known as The Undying. The Undying are immortal (if their physical bodies are destroyed, they can be put into a new body, which the good guys call “liches”) and they raise necrothralls, dead bodies to serve them. A Resistance formed in opposition to them, led by the Order of the Eternal Flame (SAY MY NAME, SUNSHINE THROUGH THE RAIN~).
Okay, also, these important families (the Guilds) move against the Holdfasts essentially in the name of democracy, before they, y’know, started doing lots of necromancy and also sadistically making their enemies do cannibalism and stuff. I talk about this more below but the politics and themes are completely baffling to me. Our “good guys” are on the side of theocratic monarchy, even before we learn about their leadership doing torture.
Our story begins a couple years post-war, where Helena is pulled from the stasis she has been kept in since the war ended. Essentially, some random Undying had a grudge against her, stashed her away against orders so she could torture her later, then got reassigned and forgot. Turns out Helena has some block in her mind, and has locked away some memory that Morrough is really intent on getting from her. She does not remember this and, though she remembers that they lost the war and that all her friends are dead, she gradually realizes she’s missing about a year and a half of specific memories.
Helena is turned over to Morrough’s top lieutenant, some guy called Kaine Ferron, who she went to school with but didn’t really know. Kaine’s job is to slowly try and break through the guard on her memories. She goes to live in his country manor with him and his arranged-marriage wife, Aurelia, who is immediately jealous of Helena and tries to make her life miserable by sending shitty food and forcing her to wear red, which triggers her memories of working as a healer during the war and seeing blood.
We spend approximately 25% of the book (which is about 250 pages, as long as some full books) on Helena having a bad time in the manor. In order to try and protect whatever information she has, she decides she wants to try and kill herself. This — okay, so logically, this does make a certain degree of sense. However, I don’t know Helena, and I don’t know this world, and there isn’t enough done, in my opinion, to make me care about this, to make me bite my nails over “oh no I don’t want her to die but I don’t want Morrough to get the information either!”
Anyway, she’s unsuccessful, partially because she’s been cuffed to block her alchemy, and because Kaine keeps foiling her attempts (and also because then the book would be over). In the meantime, there’s a subplot about how Aurelia is cheating on him with this other guy who seems interested in Helena, too. She thinks he might be a lingering part of the resistance (especially after Undying keep getting assassinated), but turns out he’s just a creep, and Kaine ends up killing him.
Afterwards, Aurelia attempts to torture Helena by taking out her eyes, but Kaine stops her by using the house itself. Helena coaches him through healing her eye, which is a kind of fun bit of body horror/character stuff. Aurelia survives this and then disappears from the narrative for a while. Throughout all of this, Helena has begun to trust Kaine to some extent/to rely on him as her somewhat benevolent captor.
Which of course is when the second part of this novel’s hook comes into place: Morrough wants them to have a child as part of this “repopulation program.” Helena realizes he’s dying, and because they’re both powerful vivimancers/animancers, he plans to, I think, take over the body of their child. So naturally Kaine has to rape her multiple times to impregnate her. It’s okay though, because he goes and vomits afterwards every time because he’s also suffering :( :( :(
Helena gets pregnant after the first cycle of trying, and this puts her body through enough strain that the block in her memories comes down, and after like 300 pages we are finally launched into something halfway interesting: the next approximately 60% of the book, which is all flashbacks of the war.
The war’s not going well for the Eternal Flame/the Resistance/the Good Guys. Helena, one of their best healers, is censured for suggesting using consensual necromancy to combat the bad guys. The leadership tells her to stay away from Luc, the heir apparent, so his image isn’t tarnished. She’s mistrusted for being a vivimancer even though they need her healing.
Kaine Ferron, who killed Luc’s dad and is one of the Undying, reaches out and offers to spy for the Eternal Flame. As payment, he wants Helena, for now and after the war. She agrees to this, and starts meeting with him. He doesn’t pressure her for sex, but he does teach her how to better use her vivimancy and how to fight. This is because he’s actually trying to avenge his mother, who was tortured to death by Morrough to manipulate him.
Okay, I get that this is here so they have something to do while they inevitably fall in love, but dang, I’m so tired of “bonding-via-man-teaching-woman-how-to-fight-and-use-magic” thing. It’s in ACOTAR, it’s in Fourth Wing, it’s so boring. God forbid a woman already know things or learn them on her own. GOD FORBID AN AUTHOR HAVE TO COME UP WITH A DIFFERENT IDEA.
Anyway, Helena becomes gradually more isolated, and bonds more with Kaine. Eventually, after his information leads to a major victory, he gets tortured by Morrough, and an alchemical array is carved into his back. It’s supposed to kill him, but Helena uses this stone she was given that helps her healing and accidentally lets it absorb into him and then he starts to recover. Also, he got to choose the runes that were carved into him and they make him more obsessive, or something.
We find out later that this stone was actually created by the evil big bad Necromancer from history and contains like hundreds of souls. It all feels extremely convenient and now I guess those souls are just…in him? We never return to this, the only lasting impact is that it gives him cool silver hair.
Turns out that the Eternal Flame actually meant for Kaine to die after they made their move, but now that he’s survived, managing him becomes even more of Helena’s job. She also gets kind of replaced at her healing job because of this. The women who step in aren’t as good as she is, because one of the main themes of this book is that everyone is deeply incompetent except Kaine and Helena.
Anyway, Helena and Kaine eventually end up kissing, and then having sex, and she’s got a whole bunch of internalized shame about pleasure and losing her virginity. This is directly contradictory to characterization we’re given earlier, when she states that she doesn’t believe in the gods or the Paladian religion. Admittedly that’s while her memories are gone, but what, did she get religious in the couple of months since being asked to be Kaine’s possession?
Finally something happens: Luc is captured by Morrough. Soren, his best friend, leads a mission to rescue him and brings Helena. Before they go, he gives her permission to use necromancy on him to get them out if necessary. Lo and behold, it is necessary. While escaping with Luc, who’s been experimented on while in captivity, Soren goes down, and Helena necromancies him. She then feels as he gets gradually torn apart and is fucked up about it. I liked this whole sequence, I wish more of the book had been like this.
Except that none of it matters because they’re still overwhelmed and Kaine has to come rescue them, at which point I just about screamed. After the rescue, Luc pulls away on account of the necromancy, and starts asking for heavy drugs, which the other healers give him.
There’s a subplot about how the Undying are making chimeras, which are combined animals, and Kaine is given one that’s like a winged horse thing, which of course he befriends. I actually think this part is fine, it’s maybe his only redeeming quality.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Lila, Soren’s sister and Luc’s secret love, gets pregnant (by Luc). She asks Helena to help her a) carry the baby to term and b) not tell Luc so he doesn’t get distracted. They also have an incredibly annoying conversation where Lila, who, for the record, is the most accomplished warrior of the generation, needles Helena about how one day she’ll for sure want a baby too.
Helena is told to kill Kaine to tie up the loose ends, but they manage to circumvent this by having him prostrate himself before the Eternal Flame leadership. Helena gives him a speech I kind of like about how much she cares about people suffering, and wanting to help, even if she’s just one tiny part of the universe, and he should care too. I wish anything else in the book had anything to do with this.
So, eventually, things break bad, and the Eternal Flame headquarters fall suddenly. Helena runs into Luc and pulls him into a tent for a private meeting, where she learns that he has been slowly being possessed by Morrough since he was captured. There’s also a reveal that Morrough is the old big bad Necromancer from history, but I don’t care about that.
Luc manages to break free, and tricks Helena into stabbing him, saying that he’s functionally been dead since he was captured. Still, they get to make up, and he walks her through healing him enough (and reanimating his guard, who got killed in the shuffle), so she can walk out safely. He also tells her to take care of Lila and the baby, even though technically it was Morrough who impregnated her with Luc’s body (yuck). Mostly, I liked this. If I cared about Luc or their friendship, this might actually have hit, but as it is, it was a fun plot twist.
After this, Helena gets Kaine to save Lila, who had been taken by the Undying. He does so, but blows his cover in the process. In order to protect him, Helena waits until he’s taken Lila to safety, and then she goes and bombs the facility that has the records he removed a prisoner, to preserve his cover. This works, but she gets captured, witnesses the death of the rest of the Eternal Flame members, and gets put in stasis, but not before burying her own memories deep enough she can’t find them.
And then we’re back to present day! Helena’s pretty messed up trying to sort through all of this in her brain, and fair enough. Kaine reveals that he faked Lila’s death and that she’s fine, living with her son in the countryside, and he plans to take Helena there too. They then have several arguments about whether or not he can or should go with her.
In the midst of this, Kaine’s dad (whose original body has been destroyed, so he’s instead in the body of Helena’s main “handler” from the Eternal Flame, a thing that is conceptually cool but means absolutely NOTHING in practice) moves back in while he’s hunting whoever’s been assassinating the Undying (which is Kaine, if you didn’t guess). Also, Aurelia moves back in. This is mostly so she can be bitchy and jealous of Helena again, before Kaine’s dad cuts her throat for being annoying. Joy.
Part of the process of being Undying is that a part of your soul is put into one of the bones in Morrough, from which he can control you to some extent. Helena gets this girl who used to work for the Eternal Flame and then kind of betrayed them to try and save her sister (unsuccessfully) to go grab the bone for them. Then, she goes through the procedure to remove Kaine’s immortality, which needs a willing soul, and his dad agrees to sacrifice himself for that. Again, would probably mean more if I had any emotional attachment to any of this.
The manor burns down, Helena and Kaine take their flying horse to pick up Lila and her son, and then the four of them flee the country and go south, where Helena was born. Helena gives birth to a girl and convinces Kaine to care about her, too. The neighbouring countries decide things have gone far enough and invade Paladia to stabilize it, but don’t manage to kill Morrough, who just goes underground.
Lila decides to head back so that she can kill Morrough, leaving her son behind. She eventually succeeds, and then becomes sort of a defacto leader, at which point she sends for her son and they begin the process of rebuilding, I guess.
We get an epilogue where Helena and Kaine’s daughter (named Enid, after his mom) starts at the rebuilt alchemy school, and reunites with Pol, Lila and Luc’s son. It’s implied that they have romantic feelings for each other, you know, in case you were wondering. They read about the war and reflect on how much was erased and how much the public doesn’t know, and then FINALLY THIS BOOK ENDS.
THE ACTUAL BAD STUFF
This book is too damn long. It’s over 1000 pages, and I think you could easily cut hundreds of pages without actually losing anything. I may live in a glass house here because I love Les Misérables, which is also over 1000 pages (and I’m sure some folks would argue that Victor Hugo’s rants about the Parisian sewer system could be cut), but you know what Hugo doesn’t do? Subject me to the exact same scene over and over again. The pacing is terrible here.
Honestly, a lot of my critiques ultimately come down to this: it’s too repetitive. With some differences between the present day and the past, everything kind of goes the same way: Helena and Kaine meet up. One of them gets injured. The other one heals them. They’re both miserable. Rinse and repeat. This might have been okay once or twice but I could not tell you how many times the cycle repeats and I was SO. DAMN. BORED.
Two related critiques: everyone in this novel sucks, and everyone is miserable. To the latter: obviously it’s war, and this is meant to be, if not tragedy, then something adjacent. This would I think work better if a) it wasn’t jammed down my throat so hard and b) if I cared literally at all about the characters. Helena and Kaine spend SO MUCH TIME talking about how miserable they are.
Which brings me back to the first point: everyone sucks. Helena is mistreated so much for her vivimancy that it’s almost comical. She’s supposed to be close friends with Luc, Lila, and Soren, but I never got a sense for that or a connection to it. The leadership of the Eternal Flame sucks. This book is so long but I don’t care about anyone in it and I don’t feel like the author does either (except for Kaine and Helena, I guess).
Speaking of Helena, though, she has so little interiority, we rarely find out what she’s actually thinking or feeling about anything on the page, for large portions she feels like a non-entity. Her goals do not feel lived in, they feel like they were imposed by the author for the sake of the story.
I was going to complain about the treatment of female characters specifically, though I think this may just be a symptom of the above problem. Like, Ilva Holdfast (Luc’s aunt) seems like she’s supposed to be this morally grey intense leader, but she’s just kind of boringly evil, and then she dies off screen. Kaine’s wife Aurelia gets a tragic backstory that almost feels like it’s there to ward off complaints of this book being misogynistic, but she’s only ever there to be jealous of Helena and complain before she is inevitably murdered (#justiceforAurelia). These don’t feel like fully realized characters, but to be honest, I don’t know that the men make out any better. That’s on top, obviously, of all the sexual violence towards women.
Although, there is this part where the narrative tells the story of the two moons, which are both feminine: one in which the alchemy moon, Lumithia, puts down rebellion by the jealous other moon, Luna, and one in which Luna subdues Lumithia’s rage by standing in her way. I guess this is about different interpretations of myths but all I see is a story about how women can’t relate to each other except through conflict, lol.
There’s no queer people in this book. I think this is also a symptom of none of the other characters feeling like real people, but it also feels like a message: no room for you in this enslavement/forced breeding whumpfic (which is…actually maybe okay).
At one point there’s an off-hand reference to the fact that people in Paladia go on “crusades.” That has a really specific connotation, for me at least, and I have so many questions that will never get answers about WTF that means.
I hate that the Eternal Flame seems to have no plan for how to win the war/defeat Morrough. They’re completely convinced of their moral righteousness and the fact that god is on their side, and therefore they’ll win. Even the ones who are more cunning still don’t have a good plan. I find this absolutely insufferable as its portrayed. I think I’m supposed to, but it also strips the narrative of any interesting moral complexity.
At one point a random character tells Helena that it’s better to die true to what they believe in rather than to live on by betraying themselves. This could be an interesting theme, especially given that the Eternal Flame are also clearly inept/corrupt! “How far do you go to win,” and the accompanying theme of “the winner tells the story” are arguably important thematic questions and I’ve enjoyed other works that have explored them, but they just feel completely kneecapped by poor stakes and bad characterization. Conceptually, yeah, I think it’s important to have standards, and I don’t think we should just throw out the Fantasy Geneva Conventions, but I’m so annoyed by these moralistic assholes that I’m not on their side either! Fucking STAR WARS has more emotional complexity than this. Mostly she and Kaine just have endless conversations about what it means to be a monster.
I also hate that Kaine only cares about Helena. I know that’s like, the appeal of these kind of male leads, but I hate it. “I only care about the world because you’re in it” fuck off. They argue about this multiple times, she gets angry at him because he’s so nihilistic. You know what would have actually been interesting to me? Him learning to care about others, maybe through seeing her care.
The sex is also really boring and repetitive. This isn’t erotica, and the sex isn’t super detailed, but there’s still enough of it that I question why it feels like the exact same scene over and over again, just basic vanilla PIV sex. Like, damn, at least let her be on top for once.
IN CONCLUSION
Listen, if you like whumpfic, if this sounds like your kind of trash thing, go forth. I wish you all the best. For everyone else, I cannot recommend this thing. It’s too dang long and too dang repetitive. Even though there were parts I liked, there were hundreds of pages between them. And even then, I wonder if I actually liked these parts or if they just woke me up a little and I’m taking that as “enjoyment.”
It’s fine to write and read about dark shit. I am not here to pass judgment on that. I like some works that are goofy or problematic - look at the rest of this blog series for that! But I am going to call out the fact that I think this book is poorly constructed and just goddamn boring.
Having said that, it didn’t make me angry in the same way other books have (I’m looking at you, A Court of Frost and Starlight). That would be an emotion, and this book seemed designed to evoke none of those from me.
I give Alchemised 1.5 necrothralls out of 5.