#8: Sabriel by Garth Nix
Getting swept up by another fantasy world
Fantasy was probably my primary genre as a kid. Girls with great destinies wielding swords was always a favorite subgenre, but if it had magic and an interesting world, preferably medieval-inspired, then I likely had a passing interest. (Except for Lord Of The Rings, for some reason. Sorry, Dad.) I’m not super picky about fantasy worldbuilding—it is infamously easy to get me on board, belief suspended—but truly great fantasy worldbuilding is precious and awe-inspiring. I dreamed of being a writer, but I couldn’t dream of a world so wholly fresh and original as the ones that exist in Garth Nix’s books.
Of course, worldbuilding doesn’t have to be wholesale original to be successful. Lots of my favorite fantasies are built on preexisting myths or fairytales. I’m a lifelong Harry Potter fan, but you can pretty easily see where J.K. Rowling pulled every element of her worldbuilding, from the linguistic origins of her spells to the real-world allegories behind her plotlines. I’m not by any means suggesting this is a worse way of writing a fantasy (though plenty of ink has been spilled about how the Wizarding World logistics fall apart if you look too closely). It’s just that certain fantasies are so vivid and creative that I find them particularly astonishing, and Sabriel is one of them.
Nix is not an obscure writer; he’s one of the most well-known and enduring young adult sci-fi/fantasy authors working today, and Sabriel, the first from his Old Kingdom series, is a hallmark of YA genre fiction. When I first considered revisiting a Nix book, I actually first thought about the Keys to the Kingdom, a series I remember being strange and mysterious and particularly inventive—but that makes it a little more difficult to write about in one essay, and plus, I only have a copy of the third book, Drowned Wednesday, in my personal collection. (I’d still like to revisit these sometime in the future.) Sabriel, meanwhile, was readily available from the shelf at my parents’ house, and though it’s the first in a series it can be read essentially as a standalone.
So, Sabriel. First, a moment for the gorgeous cover art, that comprised much of my memory of the story. This is a girl with a great destiny wielding a sword! Plus, her magical, mysterious bells, which I remembered she used to fight evil though I couldn’t quite remember what kind of evil it was. Here’s the premise: after the disappearance of her father, Sabriel assumes his role of Abhorsen, whose job is to use those bells to send undead creatures out of the land of the living and back to the Nine Gates of Death. Practiced in the art of “Charter Magic,” Sabriel is essentially a necromancer in reverse.
Having been stuck in a pretty intense reading slump, it took me a while to become re-acclimated to Sabriel. I still found its magical world enchanting and enticing, but this time I was reading it with a much more critical eye than when I read it in middle school. I was contemplating why, for instance, this world includes a magical realm (The Old Kingdom) next to a relatively magic-less world with modern amenities (Ancelstierre). There’s a reason, plot-wise, in the book, but it’s also a way for the reader to identify with Sabriel. Though she’s an accomplished magic user, she doesn’t know much about the Old Kingdom, so when she’s thrown into a plot of intrigue and evil, the reader is on the ride with her.
Some of Nix’s choices were plain and accessible to me. The villain’s moniker, “Kerrigor,” being his birth name backwards is hilariously Tom Marvolo Riddle/I Am Lord Voldemort coded (though I’ll note this book was published before Harry Potter). I just now read that the title Abhorsen was lifted from the name of the executioner from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (“Abhorson"). So some of Nix’s worldbuilding methodology feels familiar. Other aspects, though, I can’t help but marvel at. From the Paperwing plane to the cat Mogget’s true form to the entire system of Free and Charter Magic, the fact that all of this could spring from someone’s brain is entirely fascinating to me. Take, even, the Nine Gates: it’s not a totally original concept for death to have distinct realms (not even to have nine realms, thank you Dante), but I found Nix’s descriptions of his nine precincts of death and their particularities so evocative and specific it really does amaze me that someone could just come up with all of it and give it life and purpose in a story in this way.
Sabriel is quite a dark novel, as you might expect for a story about death. I didn’t remember until re-reading that Sabriel is eighteen when the book begins, but it’s a welcome contrast to all those young adult fantasies where the main character is sixteen but acts twenty-five. Sabriel is an eighteen that really feels eighteen. She’s mature, serious, and verging on adulthood, but still young and unworldly, particularly having spent her youth in a boarding school. There were glimpses of typical teenager-ness that took me by surprise; her memory of trying alcohol with two nameless school friends is a contrast to the intense responsibility she suddenly faces as Abhorsen.
She’s curious about sex, too, and the way this book handled the topic also took me by surprise. It’s not even close to the raunchiness of the “New Adult” romantasies that are popular right now, but Sabriel’s inexperienced perspective is refreshingly frank and straightforward as she contemplates a loud sexual encounter next door at an inn or the anatomy of her companion, Touchstone, when she discovers him frozen like a sculpture. Here Sabriel also really acts her age: long sheltered from the fullness of the world, encountering sex in real life is a little embarrassing, a little tantalizing, a little confusing. It’s funny to think how young I was when I first read this—I definitely kept it quiet from my parents that I was reading a book with sex in it, even something as relatively tame as what goes on in Sabriel. I don’t remember when I first read it, so I can’t even say if I understood it fully, but it’s safe to say that books like these were secretly my first introduction to the subject. (Fanfiction was my real sex education crash course, but that’s a story for a different essay.)
All that said, the romance between Sabriel and Touchstone might be the weakest part of the book, looking at it now. It works on that fantasy level, him being her sworn knight, bound to her by duty but developing sincere loyalty towards her over the course of their quest. Maybe it’s due to the matter-of-fact prose, but I didn’t necessarily feel the relationship blossom in this re-read. Then again, there’s an aspect to Nix’s storytelling that eschews the classic rosy romantic fantasy even as it creates a new world totally in keeping with that tradition. Before their final showdown with Kerrigor, Sabriel recalls the dreams she had when she was at school, “about the Old Kingdom. Proper Charter Magic. Dead to bind. Princes to be… married.” Now she’s experienced nearly all those things, but the stark reality of it is a contrast to any swashbuckling, adventurous dreams she could have conjured. The malevolent dead are gruesome creatures, and innocent lives are sacrificed to combat their evils.
That’s something I like about Sabriel, though. It doesn’t talk down to its young audience. It’s accessible, it’s magical, but it’s dark and serious too. That’s a draw for any young reader who takes themselves quite seriously (like I was), but also for any adult who might pick up the book now (as I am). And it’s part of what makes Nix’s worldbuilding feel so real. Underneath the thrill of magic and the allure of girls with great destinies wielding swords is the ugliness of evil and the stoic optimism it takes to combat that. It may be that—beyond the intricacies of the magic system and the colorful characters and the fantasy map (God, I love a book that starts with a map)—which makes Sabriel and Nix’s Old Kingdom such a rich treat to return to after all this time.