The Steam Magnate by Dana Copithorne

The city of broken glass is the central character of Dana Copithorne’s novel The Steam Magnate. Protagonists Kyra and Eson, and later Jado the inventor, play out their parts in the arms of a dreamlike world of lost knowledge and serene days filled with filtered light and settings presented one by one like paintings in a gallery. The reader determined to have a love story or a tale of intrigue surrounding power will be tantalized but might be ultimately disappointed by the way conflicts wash away before the greater significance of mood and setting, but the eerie feeling of having visited a unique place with deep secrets will stay with the reader when the book is finished.

The Steam Magnate’s strengths lie in the pictures it creates in the reader’s head filled with brooding undertows and the haunting impression of lives trapped in amber. The featured line drawings enhance the effect. I sometimes paused to study an illustration until I felt satisfied and then reread the scene it described before continuing with the next chapter. It would be a mistake to read The Steam Magnate with too much urgency.

Drama, in the book, is vested in marvellous details rather than events in the lives of the characters. It is ultimately not very important, for example, why Kyra comes to the Glass City to meet Eson or that he originally mistook her for another woman named Sarah. It is not clear whether Eson’s entrepreneurial endeavours, with Jado, is ultimately successful or desirable. And although the characters intertwine, each is profoundly alone to the very end where Eson and Kyra are parted. Important questions are resolved in introspective solitude. I was fond of the use of letters as bridging instruments in this internal dialogue, sometimes answering questions left unanswered from the earlier part of the novel. The letters span time and place like artefacts of communication that create a false sense of certainty about slippery relationships.

Science is a shadowy spectre in the world of The Steam Magnate. Its power is nodded at occasionally in items like the fantastical vision bird explained as a product of lost craft from an earlier era, but the feel of Copithorne’s realm is magical although the magic might be understood as a metaphorical cipher for real phenomenon. Eson’s power over his debtors, for example, is bound up in potent documents it is easy to interpret as legal ones that drain their victims of vitality. His attempts to profit from nature, first through steam power and later through attempts to harness the might of the ocean in the city of Rising Waters, parallels the exploitation of natural resources to create wealth in the mundane world. But whatever the deeper significance of the magical functions and objects in The Steam Magnate, they wind through the book’s gently flowing plot like bright ribbons.

In one sense, The Steam Magnate is a book about how we succeed and fail to connect with each other as spiritual beings with hopes, secrets and aspirations, but its unique charm is in the interplay between these and the settings in which they take place. Place and personality interact in the search for identity. Jado the inventor sums it up well in the following passage:

The places Jado knew had been the settings of stories he had heard all his life. When he was a child, the stories were of heroes and thieves, ghosts and angels. As he got older he was told other stories that changed his view of each spatial reference point. Sunlight Appears Only at Dusk was at first a ghost tale, a place where one must be fearful for his soul when walking past. Later, Jado learned it was also a place where some of his past relatives had been arrested and taken away on false grounds a hundred years earlier. So the place took on a different meaning, and his sense of identity sharpened.

Anyone nimble-minded enough to appreciate the bleed of spirit between character and setting, history and present, will find The Steam Magnate an interesting meditation.