The Candle and the Flame
By Nafiza Azad
Nafiza Azad was born in the mid-1980s in the city of Lautoka, the Republic of Fiji. When she was 17, in 2001, her family moved to British Columbia. In 2007, she entered the University of British Columbia. At first, she majored in biology in order to become a doctor but she changed her major to English and decided to pursue a career in writing. She has stated that this was influenced in part by the career of Willow Wilson, an American-born Muslim writer, and by S.A Chakraborty, who I am sure regular readers will remember as the author of The City of Brass, which we've reviewed earlier. She earned a BA in English Literature and a Master's degree in Children's Literature, writing a novel as her thesis despite the advice of a professor telling her not to.
The Candle and the Flame is her first novel, it was published in 2019 by Scholastic. The book did rather well being nominated for the Morris award for time writers. Ms. Azad has said that lot of the book was her pushing back against negative pressures that she felt in society. Be it the bigotry being aimed at Muslims in western society or the fact that multiculturalism as a way of life was and is coming under increasing skepticism(By reactionary nationalists and racists. The idea that a society needs cultural and ethnic uniformity in order to function is and always has been bullshit,). Through the setting and the characters, Ms. Azad makes her own stance and argument rather clearly but without straying into preaching from a soapbox or detracting from the plot or characters. Which honestly makes her argument in a much stronger manner than any speech could. But let's take a look at that setting and those characters shall we?
The story is set in the city of Noor, the capital of the kingdom of Qirat. The city and the kingdom are split in two, divided into one half ruled by a human rajah and the other half ruled by Ifrit Emirs. The division and the reason for it are quite recent. Not even a decade ago, the kingdom came under attack from the Shayateen, a tribe of Djinn who thrive on causing death and chaos. Although in my opinion, they don't really cause chaos so much as mass death. Maybe I'm just being fussy but life is much more chaotic than death. After all, life changes, moves, grows and makes all sorts of noise and ruckus. Death... Not so much (You are thinking from an individual perspective. For a society, mass death disrupts everything from normal commerce to family life; taking the web of relationships that form the basis of all society and casting them to ruin. That’s going to be pretty damned chaotic. {For a very short period at best and their goal was to wipe out society entirely. Frankly teaching the humans new technology and whispering new ideologies to them would have caused more chaos and on a longer scale}). Given the statements of the Shayateen within the story, the whole invocation of chaos seems to be just an excuse to be bloodthirsty monsters. If I was a creature of chaos, for example, I would be striving to create life and tear down boundaries, not create mass graves where nothing grows. But, back to the story.
Because the Maharajah of Qirat had aided an old Ifrit searching for lost kin, he was able to call them forth to save his kingdom before marching to war. While the Maharajah himself and his oldest son both perished in the war, throwing themselves at an army of creatures they could barely hope to hurt. They did successfully save their kingdom and people. The Ifrit came, and because they are organized, disciplined, capable of forethought and tactics... And the little fact that their very blood is lethal to the Shayateen, they were able to save Qirat. Well, most of it. The army of Qirat was practically destroyed and the city of Noor? Every inhabitant was butchered mercilessly except for two small girls and an old woman (Case in point, a Kingdom that has lost almost every inhabitant of a capital city loses what centralized bureaucracy it might have had. It serves as a center of commerce no matter what economic system you’re running, and that gets disrupted. There’s also a power vacuum with the loss of the monarchy - without having some other system in the wings to replace it after they unalive the Romanovs anyway - which will lead to a power struggle one way or the other. Or if it doesn’t because the second son or whatever escaped, that monarchy is still weakened.{their goal was to kill everyone in the kingdom and then just keep on killing. That’s all, they don’t seem to have any other goal than to kill things! This is a crude and efficient way to spread or create chaos at best.}I’m starting to think I’d just be a better class of Chaos Lord. Because I’d do some killing, then keep it going, slowly, so the system could never re-stabilize.).
The new Maharajah, the second son of the slain one was heartbroken but grateful. Plus aware of the fragile state of his nation. He granted the dry, desert half of his kingdom to the Ifrit as long as they agreed to defend the whole nation against attacks supernatural or otherwise. The Ifrit for their own reasons agreed. In the years since, the kingdom and its capital, have rebuilt once again. It is prosperous, full of citizens from across the world due to its location on the Silk Road. Once again the city of Noor is full, with goods from across the world bursting forth from its market and languages and people from across the world teaming and echoing within its walls. Once again, the specter of danger threatens the peace and prosperity of the city of Noor however, as rumors of Shayateen and Ghul sightings disturb and frighten the good citizens and their rulers.
Among them are the three survivors of the last massacre, an old woman named Laali and two young women. One is a creator of cosmetics named Sunaina and another is our main character Fatima. The characters work as a microcosm of the city of Noor in a way. None of them are related by blood but they all consider each other family. Fatima is a Muslim, Sunaina a Hindu but they not only call each other sisters but live together and clearly care for one another. That said their relationship isn't free of friction and there is a bit of petty and not so petty arguing and fighting between them. Which if you've ever had a sibling, you know is perfectly normal. It's when you have a pair of siblings that are utterly formal and clearly avoiding such behavior that you know something is wrong in my experience (Oh, definitely. My sister and I have a great relationship; and every time I see her I basically flip a coin to determine if I lick the side of her face and say “This Child is Clean”.).
Fatima's life, much like her city, is one ringed in by loss. She lost her birth family when she was very young, only to be adopted by Sunaina's family and then lost them in turn when the city fell. However, much like Noor itself, Fatima works not to be defined by her loss. She works as a messenger and sort of postal woman, delivering small packages and letters through the bustling streets of Noor. Because of this and the fact that she and her sister spent time after the attack homeless, Fatima knows the dense back alley's like the back of her hand. She also has friends among her neighbors and a pair of mentors in her boss and the owner of a strange little book store that never seems to actually sell any books. A man who also is willing to spend hours teaching her how to read, write and speak half a dozen languages. Despite her struggle with lingering PTSD attacks, Fatima's life seems to be moving along quite nicely, so you know that's not going to last.
Meanwhile, Emir Zulfikar is a Djinn with a rising tide of problems. He only rules half a city but he has to deal with the human Maharajah and human nobility. In all honesty, the Maharajah is the least of his problems, if for no other reason than the man in question not wanting to be a problem. Both of them have to deal with a conspiracy in human society as powerful nobles and landowners seek to eject the Djinn from Qirat so they can get at the lands and wealth that are under their control (That’s just downright ungrateful. But that’s nobility for you. They’re all greedy short-sighted man-children.). Add on top of that that there are increasing attacks by Ghuls - a type of supernatural monsters - on travelers, and increasingly, inside the cities. And the Ifrit can't find out where they're coming from. Layer on the rumors that the Shayateen are hanging around and you have a stressful situation that could boil over at any moment.
This isn't helped by the fact there are also a lot of boiling tensions within Ifrit society that could spill over. There's the conflict between Zulfikar and his Wazir, who seems to delight in pushing at the young Emir and trying to undermine his authority. This is complicated by the fact that the Wazir is the son of the Raees, the leader of Ifrit society. So when a high-ranking and magically powerful Ifrit dies under extremely suspicious circumstances and his power doesn't pass on to his heir like it's supposed to, it’s trouble that Zulfikar doesn't need. It's made worse when the only witness to the death and the only person who can give him any leads is our protagonist, Fatima.
Zulfikar and Fatima are now having to learn to work together while dealing with unseen dangers and hidden enemies on all sides. They have to figure out what killed the Ifrit in question, why he was living hidden away in human society, what happened to his power and what they must do when they find it. Ms. Azad does a good job in making sure that answering these questions only leads to more questions and even greater dangers. Which helps keep the tension going without making the plot feel like it's dragging forward.
The Ifrits are honestly pretty interesting to me, they're a matriarchal society but clearly, men are allowed to rise pretty high if they're allowed to rule entire cities. While they talk a lot about being devoted to reason and order, they're also pretty emotional people. That said, they're also a lot blunter and plain-spoken about those emotions than most human beings. Where we have a tendency to sit on our grievances and avoid expressing ourselves if it might lead to conflict; the Ifrit see no problem in just laying everything out in public and if the listener has a problem with that, so much the worse for them. There are certainly a lot of pros for such an approach, but I would think doing that too often in a human context would leave a person a bit isolated.
The pacing and the characterizations are also rather well done, as are the relationships and most of the conflicts between the characters. For example, the relationship between the Maharajah and his wife is rather sweet and endearing. The characters all have rather decent arcs and grow in how they understand each other and themselves, which is nice to see. Even loss and grieving are tackled rather well in this book as we're shown the characters grappling with grief in mostly if not always healthy ways. To be honest, it's just nice to read a book where the characters don't burn every bridge in the pursuit of madness and power every now and again. There is also a restrained but somewhat interesting romance plot in the book. I'm not sure I can call it a slow burn but it does simmer nicely for most of the book.
That said, I felt that this book had an awful lot of telling instead of showing. For example, we are told rather quickly and somewhat awkwardly about the history of the attack on the City of Noor at the beginning of the book. A number of the villains also come across as a bit one-dimensional. One of them, for example, is supposed to be a charismatic and popular person, but at no time did we see any charisma from him. Frankly, the character was an unlikeable and petty bully on top of a sex harasser and pest from his first appearance to the end. There are plenty of people like this in the real world but if you're going to claim someone is charismatic, show him being charismatic. I also regard the ending as a bit too pat and neat honestly. Once the good guys figure out what is going on and get their feet under them, they can roll up the bad guys rather quickly and easily. The Shayateen specifically were rather disappointing given how much the story had built them up. So if you're looking for an explosive and brutal fight, be aware you won't get it here.
All in all, The Candle and the Flame is a pretty good book. Especially for someone's first novel. To be honest, given that it was meant to be aimed at teens, which I am emphatically not, my issues may be just an audience mismatch. So I would encourage my readers to keep that in mind when reading this book or if you're more worried about gray hairs than pimples maybe hand this book to a younger friend or relation. That said in my opinion this book is better than average but not great. I'm giving The Candle and the Flame by Nafiza Azad a C+ but I think if I had read this book when I was 15, I would have rated it higher. So keep that in mind.
I hope you enjoyed this review, which was chosen by our ever wise patrons. If you would like a vote on upcoming reviews join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads The april poll is up and there are discussions about upcoming events! Next week, by special request we review Harleen by Stjepan Sejic. Until then, stay safe and keep reading!
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