A Romance in Twelve Parts is the first Faction Paradox anthology, as well as the first installment in the franchise published by Obverse Books – before anything else of theirs I've reviewed thus far. And as the first anthology, this is the review where I finally admit that, prior to picking up Faction Paradox, I hadn't been much of a reader. It's because of that that while Faction Paradox has been the impetus for me to start working through all manner of books, anthologies remain a blind spot for me. I don't have a reference point for the medium, and though I'd like to write that off as simply making me conveniently impartial, the big downside is that I'm not at all used to the format.
This wasn't a big issue when it came time to review Tales of the City, the first anthology in the City of the Saved spin-off. Tales is short, simple, and centralized to a specific setting, with a remarkably smooth gradual shift in tone and establishment of its theme. Given its doubled length and story count, A Romance in Twelve Parts has to work a lot harder to achieve the same standard of consistency, and the result can be disarming to a relative newcomer to anthologies.
It's not that the stories are totally disparate from each other – there's a good run of stories in the middle that directly deal with members of Faction Paradox, bookended by a few with more tangential relationships to the franchise's eponymous group. The effect is that the transitions between stories start to feel smoother as the anthology goes on, which does a lot to make the later stories jell; nevertheless, it can be hard to see the specific connections between each story, whether thematic or tonal. The first set of stories, for instance, gives the impression that storytelling will be a theme throughout the book, something which fades into the background over time until it's a virtual non-entity.
Luckily, stories don't have to mesh together elegantly to be good content. It's true that some of the early stories lost me with their stylized, rambling narration – let's just say that I really wanted to like Jay Eales's "Mightier than the Sword" – but once the stories start being more Faction-centric, the gears in each turn quite smoothly. Focus on Faction Paradox is something that's surprisingly absent from... well, from Faction Paradox, and its presence here allows many of the stories to get twisty, paradoxical, ethically messy, and all sorts of fun. Lots of them worldbuild about the actual activities of the Faction, and the anthology nears its best when it combines those concepts with genuine emotionality. A particularly strong early example is found in "Nothing Lasts Forever" by David N. Smith and Violet Addison, the tale of a boy who tries to escape the Eleven-Day Empire via a homemade timeship.
Perhaps the deftest example of this balancing act is "Library Pictures" by Stuart Douglas, which threaded its way through wistful vignettes happening simultaneously with an eccentric adventure in a Faction prison feat. Iris Wildthyme, and never lost me through all the tonal table tennis it played with itself. The story even got me close to tearing up near the climax, with the way it handled a character death amidst a horribly twisted situation.
That speaks to the fact that in general, this is a hell of a dark anthology. Dave Hoskin's "Tonton Macoute" is practically a poster-child for this aspect of the book; it forgoes the emotionality and throws you right into the deep-end of the most deliciously harrowing aspects of the Faction universe. Between this and "Bruises" from Tales of the City, I think Hoskin might actually be doing some kind of Michael Brookhaven–style alter-time media magic to cook up stories tailor-made to my tastes. The guy somehow keeps delivering exactly what I personally love to see from this franchise, and it's a shame that these two stories look to be his only contributions to the mythos of the Spiral Politic.
While I'm on the subject of stories I particularly liked, I simply cannot fail to mention the closing piece, "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". Composed of 100 hundred-word vignettes assembled by Philip Purser-Hallard and the anthology's other contributors, it's a brilliantly clever way to depict a Civil War across the near-infinite battleground that is the City of the Saved; as with his dedicated City novel Of the City of the Saved, Purser-Hallard knows that the only way to represent anything in this City is by jumping back and forth between as many perspectives as a single story can reasonably sustain. It's spectacular in both senses of the word, it's chilling to no end, and it hurt me better than a simple linear story could have managed. The ending postures humanity as its own god, a culmination to a tale that all-in-all I'm not sure whether to interpret as a condemnation or celebration of our species. When all's said and done I think I'll go with "both", but the answer "neither" works just as well – that's part of the fun. It's a harrowing and fascinating piece no matter how you view it.
In the paragraphs above, I've gone to lengths to highlight my three favorite stories, putting the good over the bad. But as is inevitably the case for any collection of stories, not everything can be a standout. A good chunk of the anthology is made up of stories that are cute and fun if not my favorite, while others really wore me down. (There's one by the writer of Newtons Sleep in a similar style that, though I tried, I flat-out couldn't compel myself to finish.) Expected though it is, the occasional variation in quality doesn't help the feeling of tonal inconsistency; plenty of the individual installments are solid enough to keep the whole thing afloat, but as the reader progresses from one to the next, the big picture doesn't quite come together.
Granted, it doesn't have to. This is an anthology we're talking about, after all, and part of the goal is highlighting individual writers' styles and strengths, and exploring what different people can bring to the Faction universe. In that sense, A Romance in Twelve Parts succeeds without a doubt; personal likes and dislikes aside, it's a diverse array of stories which each have their own personality while still linking nicely back into the mythos. My only wish is that it was easier to see this as a full-on book rather than a simple series of stories, as it was with Tales of the City. I've no doubt the anthology series finds its groove over time, and the seeds of something great were sown here – when it comes to the æsthetic and tone of the franchise, Obverse gets it, no questions asked – but throughout this particular tome there's a persistent feeling that this publisher's first Faction Paradox outing is still just a little rough around the edges.
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