Every few seasons a debut arrives with a map in the front matter and a prophecy in the back, and the trade agrees for a fortnight that this one is different. Most are not. The Gilded Compass is, and the reason is almost perverse: Vashti Oyelaran spends four hundred pages building the most seductive treasure hunt in years, then hands her heroine the treasure with a third of the book still to run.
What follows is the most interesting fantasy novel of the year.
The setup is conventional enough to be disarming. Adaka is a chart-corrector — a functionary who sails with the fleet and quietly amends the official maps when the coastline declines to match them. She is given a compass that points not north but toward the thing you would most regret not finding, and the fleet’s admiralty would very much like it back.
The trick of the middle
Oyelaran writes the sea the way sailors talk about it: mostly boredom, punctuated by terror, described in units of work. The rigging in this book has weight. The food is bad in specific ways. When the storm arrives on page two hundred it is genuinely frightening, because we have spent so long learning exactly how much this ship can take.
The compass does not find things. It finds the shape of the person holding it, and then it points at the hole.
And then Adaka finds it. I will not say what it is. I will say that Oyelaran’s refusal to end the book there is the single bravest structural decision I have read this year, and that the last third — quieter, sadder, occupied almost entirely with the problem of what a person does with a fulfilled desire — is where the novel earns its length.
Where it strains
Not everything holds. The admiralty subplot exists mostly to generate pursuit, and its chief antagonist is a cardboard cut-out in an excellent coat. A late revelation about Adaka’s mother lands with a thud that six hundred earlier pages of restraint had not prepared me for. And the prose, so exact at sea, goes briefly purple whenever the compass is described — as though Oyelaran did not entirely trust the object to be interesting on its own.
These are the complaints of someone who wanted the book to be perfect because it came so close. Read it for the sea. Stay for what happens after.