their sworn enemies, the warriors of the Eternal Flame, Alchemised is a book of biblical length and quite unlike anything I have read before. The narrative is divided into three parts – a “literary triptych”. Sen explains: “The middle panel is the context and then there are two panels on the side that you don’t fully understand what they mean or what they represent, until you have the centre panel context.” When the novel opens in the first panel, the necromancers have won the war and we meet gifted healer Helena, a member of the vanquished Eternal Flame, who has been captured and imprisoned by the enemy. She is held in the home of Kaine Ferron, who is tasked with uncovering the memories that are hidden in the recesses of Helena’s mind. The second panel journeys into Helena’s past, giving clarity and renewed horror to the opening events. Alchemised comes armed with an author’s


note and content notes at the beginning and end of the text as Sen refuses to shy away from some of the terrifying outcomes of armed conflict. The story includes descriptions and references to torture, human experimentation and sexual assault, among others. This component was also a tenet of Manacled’s narrative: “With Manacled, people at different points would call it something like torture porn and I would be like: ‘Well, I actually took real things that people have done to other humans and then I dialled it back.’ [I was] barely even brushing on the types of things that have actually happened in history.” For Alchemised, Sen was informed by their research into the events on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, “horrifying” Victorian medi- cal procedures, Nazi concentration camps and Unit 731, a section of the Japanese army in the Second World War that engaged in medical experimentation. “To me [the reaction to Manacled] was interesting because I thought: ‘That really speaks to how sanitised your percep- tion of what war really is.’”


No spoilers here about Helena and Kaine, but


Sen focalises the narrative tension between judgement and redemption through their rela- tionship. In the first few hundred pages Helena is told she must participate in a “repopulation programme” and Kaine is elected as the person who must forcibly impregnate her. “I wanted to write a story that was deeply intimate in its ideas of redemption… It had to be a really intimate crime, an intimate tragedy, that was at the core of their relationship to each other. [I wanted to make] the reader uncomfortable with it because I didn’t want it to be something that they could brush off – that was part of the reason it happens on the page because I didn’t want the reader to brush off the trauma.” Helena is a talented vivimancer, meaning she


can manipulate and heal biological tissue. This is invaluable to her work as a healer when she is relied upon to mend thousands of Eternal Flame combatants, and her occupation was a “very conscious choice”. Sen wanted to depict a character who is not a soldier or a healer by virtue of their gender but rather a character who becomes a healer as a meaningful way to contrib- ute to the war effort, even while knowing “she’s not going to get accolades, no one is going to recognise her sacrifice”. Sen tells me a member of their family died


There’s all these barriers and resistance that people put up if it’s non-fiction… in fiction, you can be so much more confronted with ideas because it really gets into the messiness of human experience


Even though it is set in a fantastical world,


Alchemised is an intentionally unflinching portrayal of what humans can do to each other. For Sen, fiction was the only way they could explore these ideas: “There’s all these barriers and resistance that people put up if it’s non- fiction… in fiction, you can be so much more confronted with ideas because it really gets into the messiness of human experience.” Parts of the novel are designed to be “really horrifying” and they hope it will “push people to re-evaluate what they see depicted in history”. This is not a “story where you can make an easy judgement” or one that avows clear lines of morality.


during surgery and “it was deeply traumatising to the surgeons and nurses”. They continued: “It always stayed with me. The idea of trying to save somebody and watching them die anyway… that concept of trauma felt so much more real and heroic than the idea that the greatest heroism you can perform is going and killing people.” At one point in the novel, an exhausted Helena is told: “In the hospital, every battle looks like losing. I can’t imagine what it’s like, for it to be like that all the time… All you see in there is the worst of it.” Helena was partly influenced by Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War, a written oral history of the Soviet women who served during the Second World War. Sen remem- bers one of the women recounting how “war is just all of the same work that we’ve always been doing”. Sen continues: “Women were still doing the laundry, the nursing, the cooking, but then they’re also fighting in this conflict”. Having grown up in a “very conservative, religious” family, Sen was surrounded by a “constant fasci- nation with the Second World War, but very much from the perspective that the US came in and saved the day”. It was later, when reading about the treatment of people who did not go into combat or those who elected to serve as medical staff, that Sen questioned: “Why is killing somebody considered so much more heroic and difficult than trying to keep somebody alive?” This is one of the questions the reader is left


with as the fate of Helena and Kaine unravels over a nearly 1,000-page epic. Offering no easy answers, Alchemised is an incisive examination of the interplay between gender, war and heroism that shows the horrifying lengths we will go to to protect the ones we love.


11


Extract


Helena wondered sometimes if she still had eyes. The darkness surrounding her never ended. She thought at first if she waited long enough, some glimmer of light would appear, or someone would come. Yet no matter how long she waited, there was nothing. Just endless dark. She had a body; she could feel it wrapped around her like a cage, but no amount of effort or determination could make it move. It floated inert and unresponsive except when jerking violently as the surges hit – jolts of electricity tearing through her, beginning at the base of her neck and making every muscle in her body seize violently. As suddenly as they came, they’d be gone. They were her only sense of time.


KATY WEAVER


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