Liz Bourke Reviews A Multitude of Dreams by Mara Rutherford

A Multitude of Dreams, Mara Rutherford (Inkyard Press 978-1335457967, $19.99, 394pp, hc.) August 2023.

If you don’t think too deeply about Mara Ruther­ford’s A Multitude of Dreams, it’s a smooth and readable young-adult novel borrowing strongly from the gothic and romantic traditions: a sealed castle, a masquerading princess-who-is-not-a-princess, a mad king, a plucky young gentleman, a terrible disease, a monster wearing the face of a benevolent master, secret passages and desperate struggles. Look for the wider world of the novel to make sense, however, and things begin to peel apart at the seams.

A terrible plague has ravaged the country of Goslind, rendering it scarcely habited. The mori roja, the red death, has no cure and few survi­vors. ‘‘Mad’’ King Stuart shut up his castle with his entire court inside it, and there they have remained for the last three years, all windows boarded up, no one permitted to mention the plague, or to leave.

Seraphina is also sealed within the castle. Taken from her family before the plague began as part of a plot by the king’s living daughters to maintain what’s left of their father’s sanity, she’s been forced to take the place of the youngest princess, knowledge of whose death, the king’s daughters fear, would overturn their father’s mind entirely. Her masquerade as Princess Imogen is a precarious one: if she slips and is discovered, the king will have her killed. And so far, the plague and the castle’s own quarantine has meant she’s been unable to flee, regardless of how badly she wants to. Food is running low, and the discontent of King Stuart’s court is growing. Seraphina needs to find a way out.

Nico Mott is the son of a butcher and a gentle­woman. Once he had ambitions of becoming a doctor, but the plague took that from him, along with everything else. One of the few to have caught the plague and survived, he was taken on as a labourer by Lord Crane, a man who’s kept the trappings of a country gentleman even as the world around him fell to the plague. After the disappearance of a guest – a woman travelling home to see if any of her family survived – Nico begins to suspect that Crane isn’t quite as benevo­lent as he first appeared. When Crane sends him and a pair of companions to see if any survivors might remain in the sealed castle, he realises a Terrible Truth (in fantasy novels, are there any other kind?) about Crane and his motivations. And ends up running headlong into Seraphina, who’s still looking for a way out.

The red plague kills most people. Some few survive it. Some few don’t survive it, but return from death. These ‘‘returned’’ crave the blood of those not touched by the plague, and are very hard to kill. Crane is one of these. The inhabit­ants of the castle will prove a feast for him and those like him.

Nico joins Seraphina in a masquerade, pre­tending to be a visiting prince that King Stuart had somehow been in contact with and expected to visit. Together they try to figure out how to adequately warn the castle’s inhabitants about so unbelievable a danger as the one posed by Crane. Their problems are made worse when, with the king’s sudden death, the most unpleas­ant of Seraphina’s quondam sisters makes a play for the throne and orders Seraphina’s arrest as an imposter. Seraphina and Nico escape, with assistance, but Crane and his fellow ‘‘returned’’ attack, leading to a desperate and bloody struggle for the castle, the throne, and Seraphina’s very survival.

As the epigraph makes clear, Rutherford takes much inspiration (and her title) from Edgar Al­lan Poe’s ‘‘The Masque of the Red Death.’’ Had Rutherford leaned more heavily into an atmo­sphere of gothic horror, this novel might have worked a little better. Instead, it mixes gothic furniture with the mood of adventure, resulting in an unevenly paced novel with unexpected changes in tone and the sense that the author didn’t quite know what sort of story she really wanted to tell. A Multitude of Dreams could have been a very interesting novel, but even aside from the pacing and the mood, there are gaps in the novel that make for great difficulties in the suspension of my disbelief.

The first and greatest of these is Seraphina’s po­sition as a member of a Jewish community. This is a secondary world, or at least a set of invented kingdoms with no relationship to the pre-mod­ern European kingdoms of our own. The flavour of Goslind is ‘‘vaguely early-modern European without gunpowder,’’ medieval in its weaponry and little more. In Goslind, Jewish communi­ties are confined to ghettoes and blamed for the wider community’s misfortunes, reproducing the social role of Jewish communities in much of medieval Europe. The relationship between Jewish communities and their wider society in Europe prior to the latter half of the 20th century was mediated through the dominant social role of Christianity. Jewish communities in other times and places – in the Ottoman empire, for example, or in Rome before the conversion of the emperor Constantine – navigated a decidedly different set of constraints and suffered different legal and social disabilities. Goslind does not ap­pear to have a dominant religion, or not, at least, one to which anyone has had recourse to in times of plague. No one prays, the king’s court contains no priests, no churches or chapels, temples or shrines; no one has even become aggressively blasphemous and turned to cursing heaven for its failure to intervene. Rutherford doesn’t give much definition to Goslind or its culture, and I found this absence of definition, of a sense of the social and cultural world of the novel’s characters as a real one, to be one of A Multitude of Dream’s more disappointing lacks.

It also doesn’t make much sense that the servants appear to be able to come and go from King Stuart’s castle, but they’ve never brought the plague inside, nor that they have fresh ber­ries without greenhouses, nor that in a castle (which, housing as it does something over a hundred nobles and all their servants with no complaints of overcrowding, must be something of a palace) devoid of natural light, there appears to be no shortage of candles, and lamp oil for lighting, nor firewood for heating. And Ruth­erford does not mention how the ‘‘mad’’ king keeps order amongst his court, when the plague has fundamentally disrupted the usual drivers of premodern politics. (Power is a question of resources, and resources in the premodern world usually come down to agriculture and control of agricultural land and surpluses. You can’t field troops unless you can feed them, but unless you can field them someone who can might come and take all the fruit of your fields.)

After a while I started looking for holes to poke in corners of Rutherford’s world. I like things to make sense in context, or at least to be whisked past the gaps quickly, with more compelling mat­ter to redirect my attention. If you’re less inclined to quibble, this is a perfectly decent entertaining adventure. For me, while Rutherford’s characters are interesting, and her plague-vampires divert­ing, I keep getting hung up on how much better this novel could have been had the world been richer in detail and the author willing to lean in to a darker, weirder atmosphere.

This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.

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