The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean
Devon Fairweather is a Book Eater. Her people are very like humans, but with one fundamental difference: they eat only books. Just six of the ancient Book Eater families remain, and they are tucked in the remotest pockets of England and Scotland, in hiding. Devon is in London, because she is on the run. Her son, Cai, was born a Mind Eater, a dreaded variety who subsists not on books but on human souls. He's considered a monster, but Devon loves him with a maternal ferocity that won't be shaken. 'The Book Eaters' is the story of what Devon undertakes - and risks - to save him.
'The Book Eaters' is a dystopian gothic fantasy. It reminded me a bit of the stories my friends and I used to make up when we were teenagers: it had a rebellious, sassy heroine, the classic fantasy trope of feuding tribes, a bit of juicy gore (including the sucking out of brains), and a shamelessly feminist perspective. Macabre, escapist, and girl-powered, it felt like the brainchild of a schoolgirl - and I do not mean this as an insult. The concept was cool, it was youthful, and it invited you to suspend your disbelief and relish it in all its gutsy glory. It's a book to devour.
Crucially, too, Sunyi Dean's fanciful world is very convincingly built. She has clearly thought through every detail and permutation of her central premise, and she does a good job of fleshing it all out, working it through, and answering our imaginative wonderings as we read. What actually happens to a Book Eater when they eat a book? What about when a Mind Eater eats a person? How is mind-eating viewed by Book Eaters? What about by Mind Eaters? What would happen if a Mind Eater ate a Book Eater?
All these questions are answered on the way through the story, and they constituted my favourite bits of the book. Dean's ideas, and her workings-out of the details of her creation, were to me her strongest merits. I particularly liked how she realised the concept of mind-eating: to eat a person was to absorb their very essence. Mind Eaters take on the personalities, mannerisms and even morals of all the people they consume; they immortalise their victims. To the outsider, mind-eating is a monstrosity, repulsive and wrong. To a Mind Eater, it's almost eucharistic. A fascinating idea!
Book Eaters similarly acquire the essence of the books they consume: eating a book in Polish would give them an understanding of the Polish language, eating a map would be useful preparation for visiting an unknown place. Dean describes each book-meal with very entertaining details of texture and flavour - magazines taste metallic and glossy, romance is strong and spicy, dictionaries are dry and claggy and served as a childhood punishment. Much to my approval, old books taste the best: musty, nutty and melt-in-the-mouth. I can well imagine that that would be the case. Given that they eat multiple books a day every day, each Book Eater becomes an encyclopaedic repository of knowledge and language.
Now it hasn't escaped my notice that the concept of acquiring knowledge from books is not entirely fantastical. We may not eat books in real life, but we do talk about the consumption of texts metaphorically all the time - I call myself the word wolf because I'm hungry for words! The idea of absorbing a book's contents into one's body is entrenched in our understanding of reading; all Dean has done is make that consumption literal. But Dean is aware that she has done this, and the real-world stakes of her concept are not lost on her. She actually uses the idea of book-eating to explore the politics of reading in a really interesting and clever way.
Reading is power, and the patriarchs of the Book Eater families know it. Book Eater girls like Devon are brought up on a restricted diet of fairytales - stories in which the woman's happy ending is to marry a prince, every time. These stories become the girls' only frame of reference in their self-understanding, so that when they're married off to a Book Eater man as a reproductive commodity, they accept it as the only right path. This is exaggerated dystopian fantasy, of course, but it has overtones of truth. Literature helps us understand ourselves; reading widely broadens our minds and teaches us different ways of being, of seeing, of thinking. When Devon eats lesbian fanfic she understands her sexuality for the first time - literary representation is powerfully liberating. Ultimately, eating a wide range of books helps Devon to overcome oppression, because the insight they give her is so equipping. Maybe Dean is inviting us to consider: what if that idea is not fantasy?
Alongside its thought-provoking politics, 'The Book Eaters' was a rollicking ride, packed with action, romance, gore, humour, betrayals, fights and espionage. It was pacy, twisty and highly entertaining - not too serious, but eminently enjoyable.
You can buy 'The Book Eaters' from Waterstones by following this link (I'll receive a small commission if you do):
The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean - Waterstones
