Review: The Mausoleum's Children

Story title: The Mausoleum's Children
Author: Aliette de Bodard
Link to story: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/ 

(Spoiler-free)

Thuận Lộc was haunted by crushing traumas of childhood memories, memories of slaving away in dark corridors of the Mausoleum for the cold-hearted Architects. She managed to escape, young, but this fortune came with a steep, steep cost: guilt. For her friends, Dao and Nai, never escaped, and while Thuận got to taste the sweet pleasures of freedom, their endless days of toil and struggle carried on, trapped deep within a labyrinth of an inescapable prison, a prison where any hope of leaving would be futile. And when the guilt became unbearable, she made up her mind. She would return to the Mausoleum, and she would not leave the place alone...

This is one of those stories where the reader is thrown into a whirlpool of new invented terms within the first five paragraphs, and that could usually lead to either one of two consequences. Either the reader gets completely blown away by the originality and the intricate details constructed by the author's careful world-building... or the reader gets swallowed into a deep state of confusion and annoyance, only to be amplified by every encounter of a new abstract noun starting with a capitalized letter. And I am sad to say, this piece of work is leaning towards the latter extreme. Not a surprise. Short stories usually do not inherit the amount of flexibility for the writer when it comes to painting a wholly different world from scratch, and treading that fine line, between impressing the readers with novelty, and keeping them engaged and well-versed with the alternate reality is a delicate art. It is my opinion that Aliette did not strike this balance well. I struggled to build mental pictures of various core scenes because I was so bogged down by the hurricane of words these events build upon. Heck, I can not even figure out the exact relationship between the Mausoleum and the ships, and does the motor power the ship or the Mausoleum, and is "the Hunt" like an army or an event? Maybe, I am not paying enough attention, so if you can explain what on earth is going on for the ENTIRE story, come talk to me at room 228.

But if I leave this mess out of the picture, if I just squint my eyes and allow those cracks to fade away, I can still appreciate aspects of the story. Aliette's attack on child labour and the mental state of those suffering from guilt, trauma, and Stockholm's syndrome is well-formed and respectable. The characters she wrote were all broken by the unjust environment they were raised in, and that helplessness and dread that could only be understood by the most damaged of people was palpable in interactions and dialogues between characters. Even from the small child, Công, can we imagine the inhumane torture she had to endure under the rule of the elder Architects. This feat could not be achieved via lazy writing, not even by the luckiest of writers, so I acknowledge the effort that has been put in exploring those themes, even in such a tight story.

A mixed bag overall. This story might not hit the mark, but I believe in Aliette's writing and I look forward to reading her other works.

Rating: 5/10

 

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