Given that I’ve been reading about magic schools for as long as I’ve been reading fantasy—that is, since I encountered A Wizard of Earthsea at the age of about nine—it’s a bit wild that Emiliy Tesh’s The Incandescent is the first time I’ve read a magic school novel that is about the faculty. There are, to be fair, a few other books with similar interests: Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars takes place among the adults at a magic school, and the protagonist of H.G. Parry’s excellent The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door teaches at her alma mater while getting her PhD.
But The Incandescent is (almost) entirely about Saffy Walden, Director of Magic at the prestigious Chetwood School, where she teaches magic to teenagers and tries to keep them safe from demons. She is extremely good at her job, and she knows it. On a risk assessment form she fills out in the first chapter, she writes one word in the column for risk mitigation in case of demonic incursion: “Me.”
And what a job it is. It seems clear, after this novel and Some Desperate Glory, that Tesh is a masterful writer of characters towards whom a reader might feel genuine warmth and affection—even when you want to shake them. Saffy is excellent at her job, and almost all of its many parts: board meetings, demonic incursions, knowing exactly when to speak sharply to a (privileged and exhausting) student, and when a (struggling and tired) student needs a word of encouragement or a different approach in grading. She’s less great at the parts that require her to be less of an authority figure. Organizing and instructing teens is one thing. Trying to speak to them on a personal level requires a complex calculus of self-awareness and willingness to look like an absolute dork. Sometimes Saffy succeeds, and sometimes she doesn’t. We all make mistakes, but when those mistakes involve demons and overconfidence, they can have spectacularly dire consequences.
The existence of demons is handled here as practically as the existence of magic, which is to say, woven seamlessly into the fabric of English life. (The demons, like the English, have a precise hierarchy.) Chetwood is like any other expensive private school, except that among its subjects are invocation, evocation, and instantiation (divination having long since been discredited). There is also cricket, and rugby, and something called netball, and a great deal of privilege among many of the students, though the school also fosters children who are too potentially powerful to be left to their own magical devices.
Dr. Walden’s primary students are four kids in Year Thirteen, which translates to seniors for us Americans, who may find ourselves a bit perplexed by the British education system terminology. The choice not to explain much of said terminology leaves us at a loss in a small way that echoes the way a person not raised to this system might feel. Those who know this system, who were born to make the most of it, can get away with anything with the right smile and a sharp suit. Everyone else? Maybe not so much.
Walden’s four charges couldn’t be more different, and they never quite cohere as fully fleshed-out characters, much the way teachers rarely have inner lives in a magic school story that’s about kids. One student is of primary interest: Nicola Conway, whose family died in a demonic incursion when she was small, and who has been a foster child at the school ever since. She’s Walden’s star pupil. It only makes sense that Walden wants to help her continue to reach great academic heights. And so she lends Nikki a book that Walden used in her own student years. University, though. Not high school.
Tesh draws a connection between demons and magic, and also between demons and the idea of selfhood; they like to possess anything that might, at any point, have been referred to as having a self, a sense of identity. Like, say, a copy machine frequently referred to as “you bloody bastard thing.” The small demon in the staff room photocopier has some demands. Blood, for instance. But demons also come in much larger sizes.
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The Incandescent
One known as “Old Faithful” has been hanging around on the demonic-plane equivalent of Chetwood for decades, chowing on the “wild magic” generated by a steady stream of teen magicians. Walden, who was once a clever and perhaps overconfident student at Chetwood herself, has a history with that high-level demon. So when Nikki, with the somewhat unwilling help of a classmate, summons it, Walden is certain she’s the person who can stop a(nother) tragedy.
She has help of the school’s Chief Marshal, a woman named Laura with whom Saffy butts heads in the book’s first pages. The Marshals are basically magical cops who have existed for centuries right alongside magicians, for better and sometimes for worse. Laura has a very neat sword. Her kind of pragmatism doesn’t line up with Walden’s pedagogical concerns. But she’s very attractive and very good at her job, which makes her absolute catnip for a woman who really loves expertise.
A different kind of book might have built entirely up to Nikki’s summoning and ended with its dramatic conclusion. Here, the event takes place about 85 pages in, and the rest of the book concerns the fallout from that night—a little bit for Nikki, but mostly for Walden, whose world goes gently and inexorably sideways. She has everything under control until, all of a sudden, she doesn’t. At all.
Most of this book is written in close third-person perspective, staying close to Walden, who is wryly funny in a precisely written, deeply recognizable, late-30s single white female who loves her job kind of way. She feels not just real but familiar to me, a reader who was pretty good at school, liked school (as uncool as that is/was), kind of never wanted to leave school, who would love to just go collect degrees were it not so obscenely expensive—and therefore more than a bit foolhardy—to do so. Affection for what education at its best can be suffuses this novel.
And so does awareness: On the one hand, privileged, comfortable Walden has very little in common with her star pupil, who is a Black orphan from a working-class background. And Walden is hardly the most privileged person at Chetwood. She’s comfortable, but not ski-trips at Christmas and Land Rovers and generational wealth comfortable. Woven throughout the novel is Walden’s awareness of what has changed at the school—the status of women magicians, for one thing—and what has not. Money and power still buy freedom. At least for adults.
What Walden and Nikki do have in common, beyond their area of magical interest, is that they have both made very big, demon-related mistakes. The Incandescent never suggests that Nikki ought to simply learn from Walden’s example; instead, Tesh guides the book, with all its complex relationships, classes and sports fields, spellwork and thaumic engines, to a place where what matters is what a person learns from their own mistakes—and then what they do with that knowledge. Without having made such a drastic youthful mistake, Walden would not be the person who could help Nikki Conway. But Walden, too, is still learning. She never stops learning, and she never stops teaching, even when she encounters something that it might be wiser to leave un-taught.
Part of the joy of a good magic school book is the familiarity. So many readers have been to magic school before, whether on Roke Island, or Brakebills, or Leigh Bardugo’s version of Yale, or the Scholomance. And we keep going back to this rich, expansive territory, where the structure of school rubs up against the unpredictability of magic, where adolescent drama vies for center stage with demonic incursions—or the two things are one and the same. (There’s a little bit of Buffy in some of these stories too, though Sunnydale was not, technically, a magic school on its own. That library, though.) The Incandescent carries all of that forward twenty years, giving us the other side of the school coin. Teachers are adults, but is it possible to fully feel like a grown-up, a fully functional adult human, if you live and work on the grounds of your own greatest traumas? Or extrapolating to our own lives, if you’re still living in the shadows of those mistakes rather than processing them?
The Incandescent is a grown-up school story, a love letter to teaching, a book full of questions (there’s a great digression about demon selfhood) and ideas that primarily takes the form of a character study. I adored Saffy and all her flaws, all her mistakes that don’t seem to feel like mistakes in the moment; there’s a kind of narrative patience at work in the way Tesh weaves in and out of the fabric of Saffy’s life, showing the richness and the blank spots, the detail and the oversights. Magic school sometimes makes it look like the kids are having all the fun (and enduring all the trauma). I love a novel that reminds its readers, cleverly and endearingly, that there is always so much more to learn.
The Incandescent is published by Tor Books.
Read an excerpt.
Every now and then I come across another American cultural blind spot and realise the US is a different place to where I live.
Netball is a 7 a side game where the players have fixed limits on where they can move on the court depending on their nominated position and can only take one step when in possession of the ball. When I was growing up in the 60’s it was also called ‘women’s basketball’. It is a very popular sport in the Commonwealth countries.
Other sites are hinting that Saffy is short for Sapphire, and as this article subtly points out, I bet that’s a partial pun on ‘sapphic’. But I’d also love to know if her full name is a subtle nod to the town of Saffron Walden in Essex. It can’t not be, right? Unless this was unconscious inspiration? Am intrigued. (I lived in England for a bit and more often heard ‘sixth form’ for the last two years of secondary school, but ‘Year 12’ and ‘Year 13’ must also exist since they’re a straightforward extension of the usual labels for earlier years.)
Not criticism of the author here, but yeah, one of my reactions is overlapping with AndrewMcK’s. When I moved to the U.S. I found it striking that people there often didn’t take international differences in stride. (In the opposite direction, growing up in Canada, I only learned the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior labels because I read so many American YA novels that I ended up figuring out what those all meant.) I think it’s an inevitable side-effect of superpower status, though, at least to some extent. (Some interesting related discussion on Tumblr lately: https://enbabe.tumblr.com/post/782807075976839168/if-youre-a-usamerican-and-youve-gotten-this-far)
She gets asked if saffy is short for Saffron in the book. Not being English, what is the significance of Saffron Walden?
I meant it as an observation rather than a criticism. The provinces always know more about the centre of empire than the centre knows about the provinces.
Thanks Molly. This was an amazing book and I have been telling people that we finally have a book with a sapphic, late 30’s McGonagall as the main character. I like your take on it so much more. Always love your work.