Bone Shop by Tim Pratt
Novella Chronicles Street Urchin as Sorcerer
By: Ien Nivens - 03/03/2010
Bone Shop by T.A. Pratt.
Foul Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
I'm going to teach you 'chanting. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of precision, and doing a whole lot of steps exactly right, but when it works, you can make some pretty awesome stuff."
"Awesome would be a nice change," Marla said.
--from the novella Bone Shop, by T. A. Pratt
Available at http://www.marlamason.net/boneshop/
If dark urban fantasy is your drug of choice, Tim Pratts Bone Shop is up your alley. This foul-rags-to-dubious-riches prequel to the Marla Mason series, chronicles a street urchins rise through the ranks of sorcerers in the East Coast city of Felsport. Pratts hectic eclecticism is bound together in prose as frank as baling wire, tarnished here, burnished there and spattered everywhere with the solder of broken promises, dire prophecies and talking jawbones. Im going to say this once, maybe twice: Download it. Its as free as a dirty needle, and the odds are better than even that it will infect you, leave you jittery, addicted, and wondering if youre sick. Itll be OK. Theres more where this came from at http://www.marlamason.net
Pratt has peopled Felsport with a cast as intriguing as the magical artifacts they find, finagle and fiddle with in this tale of jiggered hopes and cracked dreams. Jenny Click deserves a novella of her own (but dont give her a copy; shed only set fire to it) while Artie Manns ideas about sorcery deserve at least a spread in a dirty magazine. In the end Bone Shop is, oddly enough, a morality tale. At least, I think so. I cant tell you what the moral is exactly, because that part of my memory has been wiped clean by a tincture of lethe water. But Im pretty sure that it has something to do with cobbling ones ambitions together around a vacant heart.
There are problems with the hodge-podge of narrative fabrics and other magics that Pratt has grabbed off the racks at the thrift shops of myth and imagination. Nothing so threadbare that it cant be mended, but a little backstitching here and there would keep this dream from always threatening to unravel. In a few places, where the seams are turned needlessly inside-out, a little clipping is all thats needed. Let me show you what I mean:
Bone Shop begins with Marla Mason as a sixteen-year-old dropout. Literate and homeless, she spends a lot of time at the public library, reading to keep warm. We never learn why shes on the streets and not in school, but we do come to understand that its a matter of preference. She is mentally tough and determined to improve her circumstances but certainly not by way of a traditonal education. She is not a stickler for rules. Except, apparently, for grammatical ones.
Marla finds Artiethe man who has taken her in, made her his apprentice, given her a semblance of a home and a familydisembowelled. She must go in search of his murderer. Whatever sense of loyalty she may (or may not) feel toward the sorcerer has been augmented in advance by a magically binding oath of vengeance called a geas, which takes the form of Arties voice screaming in her head until his killer is dead. Stalking the perpetrator, Marla [pushes] open a door marked Employee's Only that stupid apostrophe [makes] her grit her teeth
Mind you, apostrophe abuse annoys me, too. But an author poking his fingers through the fabric of a story with his pet grammatical peeve, while his protagonist is breathing down the neck of a serial killer is enough to make me wince. (But I wax as pricklish, surely, as Pratts sanctimonious angels, who stumble about in bums clothing, accusing everyone of well, of something not quite proper.) I reluctantly absolve Pratt of the little crimes he commits and move on to Bone Shops bigger sinsthose of omission.
First is the baffling failure to introduce Somerset (a sorcerer of great historical significance in Felsport, apparently, but who knew?) until Marla needs a brand new nemesis. Somerset is brought back from the dead, before we know that he ever lived, to fill a plot hole in the next to last chapter. We learn that the democratic structure of the sitting sorcerers council is a reaction to Somersets reign of terror while he was alive. Since this is information that a teacher/sorcerer like Artie Mann might have imparted to his apprentices in memorable detail, its absence from Marlas early curriculum is regrettable. It leaves the final levels of the fictional structure top-heavy and out of joint.
While Somersets tardy appearance damages Bone Shops rickety structure, a lack of sufficient character development with regard to Marlas love interest, Daniel, saps vitality from the novellas soul. The peripheral and superficial treatment of Daniels personality prevents two important events from achieving sufficient credibility, or even comprehensibility. The first of these is what Jenny Click, believing that Daniel must be dead, decides that she must do about it. (I wont tell you what that is, because she is one of the most intriguing minor characters Ive met in recent fiction, and you really should get to know her for yourself.) Jennys action stretches the cables of my suspension-of-disbelief bridge to the snapping point, not because it isnt possible, even likely, but because Daniel is presented as little more than a cute butt with a vague Southernness. While he possesses the rare ability to nourish himself on the energies of other people, places and things, he never accumulates enough narrative force of his own. Marla falls in love with him. How do we know? Pratt tells us so. How hard and what for? We dont get to see.
Pratt is not a prudish writer, but he glides over the intimacies of Marlas and Daniels relationship with an almost juvenile shyness. Maybe he assumes that telling us about all the wild sex these two teenagers are having is enough to convince us that they mean something to one another. Its not. A little tenderness in these early scenes, an emotional resonance that the reader can tune into, would go a long way toward making the finale as unendurably poignant as its meant to be.
Hearts are ripped out of their chests in this story; guts get wrenched, mangled and left steaming. But not the readers heart. Not the readers guts. And thats a crying shame. This improbable structure of bone and magical gewgaw that Pratt has somehow rigged together is surely sturdy enough, complex enough, lifelike enough to support the organ of poignancy he tries, too late, to animate. We end up surprised by an ending that might have shocked his story to lifeand shocked us numb with its bitter beauty. But owing to a simple lack of preparation early on, that doesnt happen. Pratt fumbles for the heartstrings of a strong plot and plucks them hard, only to find that they havent been properly tuned. They could be. They ought to be. The independent publishing platform that Pratt employs would allow for it. Bone Shop has all the claws it needs to rip, wrench and mangle its way to an awesome conclusion. All thats missing is the tender vitals.
This review of Bone Shop previously appeared at http://jschancellor.wordpress.com/