Dark Waters
The Tide Child Trilogy by RJ Barker
What spurred me to pick up RJ Barker’s novel The Bone Ships was nothing more than a pirate aesthetic. The pure camp of pirates on ships made of giant skeletons struck me as cute. Little did I know, I was about to embark into one of the darker worlds and enjoyable trilogies I’ve read in a while. Past the cartoonish conceit of giant ships made of bone, The Tide Child Trilogy packs depth, complicated characters, and philosophy into a page turning story.
The story opens with a man named Joron who is little more than a drunk, sleeping off a hangover in a hovel of a room that smells like rotting fish. He is a “captain” of a black ship of condemned criminals and I put that in scare quotes because the crew made him captain just to deny authority to anyone else. When we meet him he is just an alcoholic, too self-pitying to do anything, too disassociated to even remember the names of the crew. Joron would have stayed that way too until he drank himself to death if a woman didn’t show up that morning and demand his hat from him, symbol of the role of captain. She does indeed take his hat, makes Joron the first mate and then starts whipping the crew into fighting shape.
As a clueless drunk, Joron is somehow the perfect driver of the story. He is this dark world’s twisted answer to the fantasy cliche of the innocent farm boy. Joron is on the black boat for a reason. He killed a man. But as his drunken stupor lifts under the new captain, we discover the world of these bone ships with him. Instead of being naive, he is ignorant. Instead of young, he is a washed out broken man returning to his senses. As the new captain we come to love as Lucky Meas captains the ship into new water, we discover a richly imagined world as hellish as it is salty. These books are so damn salty they sting.
The world building here is detailed, twisted and dark. There is a caste system based on able-bodiedness. Lots of people are missing fingers, arms or legs and they are Berncast and allowed only menial work. There is an enslaved race of bird people called Gullaime that can call the wind, useful on the deck of a ship. The giant bones of the ship are from gargantuan sea worms called keyshan that have been missing for centuries but are now back. The book begins with the threat of a new arms race to kill keyshans and make more boats. Keyshan will also become a clue to a great mystery about the nature of this world.
The book is not a Romantasy, but the sex is nevertheless twisted in a richly imagined knot. Women are considered better captains than men and generally the leaders are those with the most children who aren’t berncast. But all women must sacrifice their firstborn perfect child to the chips to make a corpselight that glows in the rigging. When you crew a boneship, heterosexual pairings are forbidden on penalty of death. A man can lie with a man and a woman with a woman as shipfriends. Yes, the pirates are all gay by force of law.
In religion they worship women, the Hag and the Mother. The hag is the god of death and welcomes the dead to her fire at the bottom of the ocean if they don’t commit too many heinous acts. From the pages of this book, there won’t be many people at her fire. Slaughter, child abduction of enemies for corpselights, murder and more are rampant institutions in this world.
On these dark seas, RJ Barker works a kind of miracle on the deck of the condemned ship. The crew finds their pride and they become excellent. Then they become friends. Joron, our main character, stops drinking and comes to admire the captain who stole his hat. In vibes alone, this felt like the furthest thing from the cliche tropes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the closest to its spirit. The boat forms a fellowship, the deepest kind of friends inspired by a vision of changing this broken world and looking out for each other. The beating gushy heart of this book is a meditation on friendship, its power and its solace. Friendship becomes the glowing aura that makes hanging out in this dark world not only bearable but fun. You want to be with these people. The characters are fantastic and you want them by your side.
The big question the Tide Child Trilogy asks is what do you do in a hopelessly unjust society. Time and again, it feels like there is no answer. The institutions of the powerful and avaricious win upon these seas. It’s a theme I wish I didn’t recognize so well. And yet, banding together in friendship and vision, this crew does the impossible. They create a spirit that holds the hopelessness of this imagined world at bay and then they change that world in a climactic ending I won’t say much about except that it is ecstatic and deeply satisfying.