Snake Agent by Liz Williams

Snake Agent

by Liz Williams 

Elizabeth “Liz” Williams was born in Gloucester in the UK on February 26th, 1965. Her father was a stage magician, but due to World War II and other events had to turn to working in a bank to keep the family fed. He kept practicing stage magic however and also kept a bookshelf full of John Dee and other occultist works (I officially like this dude). Meanwhile, Dr. Williams' mother was the Gothic author Veronica Williams, who wrote nearly a dozen novels herself.  This created a unique environment for Dr. Williams to grow up in (An occultist stage magician and a gothic novelist?  Naaaah, that’s perfectly conventional, seen it a million times). She attended the universities of Manchester and Sussex graduating with degrees in philosophy and artificial intelligence and then headed to Cambridge to graduate in 1993 with a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science (Well alright then!). 

During her college career, she worked a number of part-time jobs, including a stint as a pier-side Tarot reader (Yeah, but with her dad’s library she’s probably not bullshitting but doing it right.). After graduating with her Ph.D. she worked in and out of Kyrgyzstan from the mid-90s to the 2000s as an administrator for an education program. This involved moving back and forth from the UK to Kyrgyzstan as the demands of the job required until in 2000 the program finally folded. She then spent a year running an IT program at Brighton Women's Centre. It was in 2001 that her first novel Ghost Sister was released, with Empire of Bones released in 2002, the Poison Master in 2003, and then Nine Layers of the Sky in 2004. Dr. Williams lost her long-time partner Charles in 2002 to complications surrounding a brain tumor, the fact that she could write at such a pace while dealing with a loss is something to respect in my opinion (Honestly, it probably fueled her.  I rewrote two entire Harry Potter books as queer communist propaganda to cope with a breakup.  And now I am rewriting another one.). 

After this, her attention switched to writing novel series, such as the Banner of Souls Sequence and the subject of today's review The Detective Inspector Chen Sequence. She also wrote for the Guardian throughout the last decade and runs a witchcraft shop (Hell yes!), The Cat and Cauldron in Glastonbury with her current partner, Trevor. As you might guess, Dr. Williams is a pagan and has written several nonfiction works on paganism. She is also a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, a Neo-Druidic group that started in England but now has members across the world. Now let's talk about the novel we're here to review, shall we? 

Snake Agent was published in 2005 by Night Shade books but distributed by Simon & Schuster, which means that Night Shade provided the editing and text setting services but Simon & Schuster actually got the book to the markets. Set in the near future, mostly in the city of Singapore 3, a franchise of the original city of Singapore (What? {I got no idea, that’s all the novel says}), the world of Snake Agent is one where the barrier between the afterlife and the physical world has been breached. Humanity has definite, physical, undeniable proof of the hereafter and it's the afterword of Chinese mythology (Oh God No.). This means Heaven and Hell are both run by dense and nearly impenetrable bureaucracies staffed by supernatural entities meant to keep the universe running and human souls moving smoothly through the wheel of reincarnation (Imagine the Flughafen-Verspätung Traurigkeit {This translate to Flughafen-Verspätung Traurigkeit}). So not even death is permanent and any punishment or reward is temporary before you're stripped of your memories and personality and sent forth to do it all over again. 

Detective Inspector Chen tries not to worry too much about bigger picture stuff like that, he's got enough on his plate. Because Chen's job is to investigate supernatural crime and try his level best to keep the people who cut deals with hell from getting away with too much. This is a tall order, as cutting a deal with hell does tend to lead to a bit of material wealth and temporal power even if the demons of hell will always betray you eventually (Why do people do this?  Aren’t there books titled “Faustian Bargains and You!” with the first sentence being “You do not want to do a Faustian Bargain.”?{You’re asking the Christian like he knows? Like half of my religion is don’t make deals with the devil and what do people do?  Make deals with the devil!}). Now Chen isn't on his own here, the powers of Heaven are also operating openly on Earth to maintain the balance, which in this case means that officers and demon hunters like Chen and others have patron goddesses' and gods who provide divine juice to their clients to confront demons, evil spirits, and other malefactors on more even terms. Humanity has also rediscovered old arts to exorcise spirits and things that go bump in the night. So instead of using court orders and a pistol, Chen operates with seals and a Buddhist rosary. Of course, hell and heaven are both bureaucracies so Chen still has to maintain his paperwork and make sure he has the proper visas filed if an investigation requires him to visit the afterlife (But at least it’s a smooth bureaucracy that works, unlike Franz Kafka International Airport? {AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA}). 

Of course, life ain't easy for Chen. For one thing, he married a demon, who is actually a very understanding and gentle lady but that's still enough to get him in really bad odor with his patron goddesses. The demon lady in question also fled Hell after putting herself in a bad odor with the authorities so Chen ain't popular with them either but I'll get back to this. On top of this, he isn't Mr. Popular with the rest of his department (So he’s pissed off literally everyone.  He needs a seminary in People Skills.  Christ, even I have managed to pull that off and I’m an outspokenly queer communist, even at work.{I don’t think it’s anything he did that pissed the humans off, just what he represents}), because humanity's collective reaction to finding out the afterlife is a real place with its own paperwork requirements? Plug our ears, stomp our feet, and whistle real loud in the hopes that Heaven and Hell go away (This is a perfectly understandable reaction, really.). Now don't get me wrong, some people are being practical about the whole business but the majority of humanity is screwing its eyes tightly closed. So when you turn the hall and there's a guy like Chen, who absolutely reeks of this supernatural stuff? You find somewhere else to be. Now his fellow officers aren't actively bullying Chen or anything, they're just doing their level best to avoid him but even that's gonna eat at you a little. 

Still, Chen figures he can still do his job, after all, he has a wife to support and given how both Heaven and Hell would love to scalp her, she isn't gonna be getting any part-time jobs to help out anytime soon (Poor thing.  What did she do, anyway? {Refuse to marry a demon that was a hive of festering diseases}Well that is definitely a reason to run...). Plus Chen seems rather driven to do his job, although the book doesn't really give us any insight into why. We find that Chen is a good, stand-up person with a moral code that the vast majority of us can respect but what motivates him? Where does he come from? Does he want anything but to go home to his wife at the end of the day? What drew him into policing the supernatural as opposed to just mundane human crime? None of these questions are really answered. I wouldn't call him a cipher but when I finished the book I realized I knew just as much about Chen as I knew at the end of the 4th chapter or so. What I know is that he is a decent person who, despite being a bit cynical about the world around him, honestly believes that he can work to make it better even if it's only marginally. Because of that, he is willing to pay the cost of doing a good deed and the right thing, no matter how steep it is (No real person is that driven without external pressures of some kind…)

This is a good thing for just about everyone in Singapore 3. Because his willingness to pay the price of a good deed is what drives him to take the case of a rich girl's ghost being kidnapped to hell. When Pearl, age 14, died officially of anorexia she was slated to head off to heaven. So imagine how her mother feels when she finds a photo of her girl's ghost in hell (Someone misfiled her paperwork!). Chen's the only one who can help her but that means going up against wealthy men and demons with minimum support from his goddess. To make up for it he is going to get some help, of dubious nature. Whether it's Zhu Irzh the slightly dodgy but almost good-hearted demon enforcer working for the ministry of Vice or the fanatical No Ro Shi, Beijing's greatest demon hunter (Okay, these people sound interesting…). 

Zhu Irzh is a pleasure to read because he's a snarky, swashbuckling type of guy. Yes, he's corrupt and untrustworthy by human standards but he's got something of a conscience underneath it all. It's just a spark of empathy and compassion but when balanced with wry humor about the ineptness of the government of hell and his concerns about what is going on around him...  Well, that spark of empathy he's hiding is going to get him killed if he's not careful. Meanwhile, No Ro Shi is as human as any of us but is a cold, relentless maniac. Driven by a black and white view of the world fueled by a suppressed outrage that Heaven and Hell not only proved the Party wrong by existing but don't comply with Party doctrine (Which Party?  The CCP or some other Party? {Yes, the CCP, he’s from Beijing and is a leading cause of demon death in Northern China}). We don't get a lot of No Ro Shi but a little of him goes a long way and despite that, I feel I understand what makes No Ro Shi tick better than I do the title character of the series, weirdly enough. 

The world-building is interesting and revealed through character action and thoughts in marvelously subtle ways. For example, there is no public or charitable medicine in Hell but there is an endless list of things that can hurt you. So even the demons have to spend large amounts of their wealth on health insurance (Let that be a lesson for you all.  Hell is fully privatized.{Oh you wish.  It’s public-private partnerships all the way down. Private Insurance paying kickbacks to government agencies etc} Kill me.). This comes up when Zhu Irzh is injured and despite being a uniformed officer of what passes for Law in Hell, the first words out of anyone's mouth is “Do you have Health Insurance?” This is also carried by Zhu Irzh amazement that Detective Chen is willing to heal him, even if that means making his goddess even more upset with him. Inari provides a lot of world-building in her own plotline which gives us a bit of a tour of Hell. A hell that is the worst combination of capitalism, autocratic rule, and corporate/aristocratic intrigue. 

I enjoyed reading the book but I did feel that Chen himself needed more characterization. For that matter the human world could have used more work as most of the book seems very focused on Hell.  This left Singapore 3 feeling pretty generic honestly.  That said Dr. Williams did a great job creating a Hell that is very different from the standard Christian or western visualization and giving us an alternate look at how you can view the afterlife. Because of that, I'm giving Snake Agent a B+ and I recommend it to anyone who would like to see a cyberpunk world with a fantasy twist that isn't Tolkienish in nature. 

I hope you enjoyed this review, which was voted for and recommended by our ever-wise patrons.  If you enjoyed it and would like to support this review series or would like a vote on future reviews, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a vote is only a dollar a month!  Next week we look at a nonfiction work, The Boxer Rebellion by Diana Preston.  Until then stay safe and keep reading!