Review: Carnival Row
Jul. 16th, 2023 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurMy most recent semi-binge (a few times a week, since this one requires more attention) has been the show Carnival Row, on Amazon Prime. (Two seasons, 18 episodes total. ETA: not animated - this one is live-action, with well-done SFX.)
tl;dr: solidly good Victorian-ish-era fantasy AU series, with intriguing characters, deep plots, a lot of suspense, and more to say than average.
Let's get into it. I'm going to largely avoid any major spoilers beyond things that come out in the first couple of episodes, and broad tropes and concepts that get addressed.
The high concept is that this takes place in what amounts to early 20th century Europe in an alternate world. All the names have been changed to give them freedom to tell the story they want, but the parallels are not subtle. (Eg, the primary state religion revolves around The Martyr, who clearly was hanged, but it's basically Christianity.)
The story mostly takes place in an (as far as I can tell) unnamed city that is the capital of The Burgue -- basically, London. They have been fighting a large-scale war (roughly WWI) against the forces of The Pact -- who are vaguely a mix of Imperial Germany and Russia. (There are strong echoes of each, in different ways.)
Their primary fight has been over the colonies, particularly Tirnanoc -- which is, of course, where the fae folk come from. There are a bunch of species of fae who show up, but we mainly see the Pix (fairies -- human-size but with fully functional wings) and the Puck (also humanoid but with horns and hooves). The fae species are collectively called "critch" by the humans; this is pretty clearly a universal racist slur, used ubiquitously by everyone including most of the fae themselves.
Seven years ago, the Pact took Tirnanoc, producing a long-term wave of fae refugees to the Burgue; the "Carnival Row" of the title is basically the fae ghetto, seen by the public mainly as a place of brothels and crime. (Although mostly, of course, actually made up of people just trying to get by.)
The plot is largely a story of three relationships.
The leads are Vignette and Philo.
She is a Pix who stayed behind after the fall of Tirnanoc, helping refugees flee the land. Our tale picks up when the Pact are finally taking the last scrap of land, and she herself is forced to flee for the Burgue.
He is a detective for the Burgish Police. He's a good cop, both in that he's smart enough to close more than his fair share of cases, and in that he tries to keep things from getting too bad for the fae. He has quite a number of his own secrets, which come out gradually over the course of the story. (He's not even aware of all of them at the beginning.)
Vignette and Philo were lovers, back when he was a soldier in Tirnanoc seven years ago. As far as she knew, he was killed back then; when she gets to the city and they are reunited, suffice it to say things do not go smoothly.
Their relationship is very, very complicated. They are very much in love with each other, but not only with each other (in particular, Vignette also has a deep relationship with her girlfriend from the homelands, Tourmaline), and there's a lot of frustration and resentment underneath it all. They are both people of passionate opinions and drive, and when they disagree (which is frequently), they wind up on opposing sides as often as the same ones.
Next are Jonah and Sophie. Jonah Breakspear is the son of the Chancellor -- more or less the elected Emperor of the Burgue, whose mandate is somewhat limited but whose power is considerable. Jonah is grown, but spoiled and bored: at the beginning of the story, he is basically a ne'er-do-well with a predilection for the brothels of Carnival Row, but prophesied for greatness someday.
Sophie Longerbane is the daughter of the leader of the opposition in Parliament, Chancellor Breakspear's chief rival. She is a young woman of considerable intelligence and even more ambition in a society that very much considers women to be wives and mothers, and not much else. She is brilliant, dangerous, and probably the least predictable of all the characters.
Suffice it to say, Jonah and Sophie eventually wind up entangled in an incredibly complex, deeply fraught relationship, which really hits its stride in season two. There is absolutely nothing sweet about it (neither of them are exactly nice people), but it is suspenseful, even thrillingly so sometimes, as they find themselves in a chess game of passion, ambition, and power.
Finally, there is the story of Isobel and Agreus.
Isobel Spurnrose is a young aristocrat in her early 20s. She lives with her brother Ezra, who has just managed to lose much of the family fortune on a bad business investment. She is utterly sheltered and spoiled, casually racist in the most upper-crust kind of way. (Critch can be perfectly fine people, so long as they know their place.)
Her life is upended when Agreus Astrayon moves into the empty mansion next door. He is something unheard-of: a wealthy Puck. She is completely scandalized in a "what will my friends think?" kind of way, but then happens upon a plan -- in exchange for him investing some of his vast self-made wealth in her brother's ventures, she will introduce him to polite society. Suffice it to say, sparks eventually fly.
I was rather surprised to find that, by the middle of season two, Isobel actually wound up my favorite character in the show. Since she starts off as such an entitled brat, she has that much more room to grow, and she gets a lot of arc over the course of the story, gradually gaining in strength and self-awareness even as she loses the biases she grew up with. This doesn't come easily (or voluntarily -- she and Agreus go through some serious tribulations), but it's a fascinating examination of someone growing through adversity.
Their relationship is genuinely sweet. It doesn't go by any means simply -- they are breaking some serious societal taboos, and Ezra is much more seriously racist than she is -- but this just keeps drawing them closer together as each other's rocks in the storm.
As mentioned above, the story has a lot to say.
Sexism is a consistent through-line. About half the cast are women, and Burgish society has a decidedly old-fashioned view there. Isobel and Sophie both start the story very much trapped in their societal roles, and much of their arcs are about breaking out of that. (While it isn't called out, Pix society doesn't appear to have such an issue -- while Vignette has her own problems, agency mostly isn't one of them once she finds her feet in the Burgue.)
Classism is subtler, but deeply woven into the story. The Burgue is capitalist in the finest red-in-tooth-and-claw tradition, and the lower classes of society (especially the fae) are treated like dirt. But while the story doesn't have any fondness there, suffice it to say we eventually get to see another society that is very much early 20th century communist, and it is horribly realistic about just how totalitarian that can get. So by and large, this story is perfectly happy to indict the monstrousness of both extremes, especially as pursued in the early 20th century.
But of course, racism is the heart and soul of this story. The use of the fae as a metaphor allows the show to be unsparing to a degree that many shows aren't willing to go. Burgish society at its best is casually racist; at its worst, cruelly so. Yes, they're been fighting to "save" Tirnanoc, but in the most colonialist sense. The story is rich in parallels with the real world, from the way that the fae races are used as cheap labor to the plundering of their cultural artifacts to show in Burgish museums.
On the content warning front, obviously all of the above: in particular, the racism is metaphorical but unsubtle, and central to the story.
Both seasons involve rather grisly serial murders. The serious on-screen violence is infrequent but sometimes fairly gory when it happens. There is necromantic magic, and pretty horrifying monsters involved with the story; they are mainly Macguffins and plot hooks (the story itself is mostly interpersonal), but when the guignol hits, it's fairly grand. And there is a non-trivial amount of realistic petty violence throughout the story, particularly from the Burgish police.
(There's also a moderate amount of sex and nudity, but not tons: roughly the same level as Bridgerton.)
I will caveat that I'm not quite done with the series yet -- I have two episodes to go, but I'm getting this written while I have a free hour. So I don't know with confidence whether they stick the landing. But the pacing is right for a reasonably good finish. It feels to me like the series was originally planned to run slightly longer -- the back half of the second season moves pretty fast -- but they took the time they had and used it well.
So overall, a solid novel crossing a bunch of genres and tropes. Not high art, but rather better than I had expected -- this one's flown a bit too much under the radar. It's confident in both its fantasy world and its alternate history, while being extremely conscious of real-world history and the parallels being drawn. If the above sounds intriguing to you, I suspect you'll like it.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-17 01:28 pm (UTC)*it's been a while since I watched S1, the details are a smidge fuzzy.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-17 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-17 09:29 pm (UTC)Interesting! I had based that comment on the current situation in Ragosa when the plot moves to there in s2; I hadn't noticed the language detail (my days of studying Russian are many years in the past), but it fits.
(I will admit that I had pegged the Pact as basically Prussia until that point.)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-17 10:19 pm (UTC)