Sit back, and enjoy the acid trip: a review of The West Passage
Imagine that The Tombs of Atuan and Titus Groan had a weird love child that got left abandoned in a nuclear apocalypse, where it mutated into the sort of thing that fans of Piranesi or The Spear Cuts through Water might enjoy: something strange, beguiling, surreal, and slippery. That love child would be the The West Passage, and (despite the fact that I just compared it to a bunch of popular fantasy novels) it's unlike anything you will ever read.
On the face of it, The West Passage is about a quest to save a palace from an eldritch monster, but the plot is not at all the appeal. The appeal is the setting, which is basically its own character. The palace in question is the size of a city. To give you a sense of scale, it literally has a train running through it. Characters get lost when they walk a single block away from where they grow up. Lovecraftian horrors rule as petty and destructive gods from various towers. Every time you think you finally understand what this place is like, the author pulls the rug out from under you. One moment, you think a scene involves a bunch of friendly beekeepers. The next moment, you discover that the thing that people are calling a "beehive" turns out to be a deer that pees honey. That sort of thing happens a lot. It's clear that the language we speak doesn't share that many reference points with the one that the characters are using. The words they have don't have analogues in English (or in any real language), so Jared Pechaček chooses a synonym that is close but not quite right.
If that sounds daunting, I can reassure you that Pechaček proves adept at accustoming readers to the world's logic (or lack thereof), until we begin to normalize its horrors. An offhand description of a character's anatomy or an oblique reference to something monstrous may register as little more than minor curiosity at first, easily dismissed as metaphor or affectation, but such details accumulate, until they can no longer be ignored, and you realize just how far you've drifted from familiar ground, though things never tip into total bizarre randomness. The overall aesthetic is actually pretty coherent, resembling something that sits firmly with one foot in fairy tale dreamscape and the other in weird climate fiction. I also promise there's a point to all the strangeness: what the book is really trying to do is reveal the arbitrariness of things like power, language, and society. This civilization is supposed to be understood as alien -- from the way gender works (fluidly and dependent on profession) to how the seasons are determined (by making a political decision to twist a literal wheel). Readers are supposed to wonder "why" at just about every turn, only to learn that nobody really has a satisfying answer, which is actually pretty realistic. We all take things for granted. We all normalize illogical structures. For every challenge we raise about the world of The West Passage, the novel's characters would have a similar question about our society. Many of us wouldn't be able to give an answer that the characters would find satisfying. Sometimes bureaucratic inertia turns temporary policy into seemingly immutable features of the world. The West Passage is a good reminder that it might not be immutable. By giving readers an outsider's perspective of a stable but weird society, we can see that sometimes, what seems immutable from the inside is actually just baffling nonsense
To make matters even more confusing and nonsensical, there are hilarious chapter titles that often don't do a very good job of telling readers what to expect. It's like the author has provided a deliberately misleading map, and readers end up just as lost and surprised as the characters who are forced to navigate a palace and its politics with no guidelines. The stakes are high, a monster is about to rise out of the earth, and everyone is stuck dealing with a convoluted magical bureaucracy. You're meant to be frustrated from start to finish. You're meant to be disoriented and perplexed. You're meant to get distracted by the beautiful illustrations and the surreal songs that appear throughout the narrative. Don't worry if you feel like you can't find solid footing. That feeling is a feature, not a bug. Just sit back, and enjoy the acid trip.