Radiant State by Peter Higgins review – an exceptional fantasy

This triumphant conclusion to the Wolfhound Century trilogy channels the violence, mythology and poetry of Russian history

To those of us who stay intoxicated with the clutch of genres labelled “fantastica” or “speculative fiction”, where the author gets to mix at will what is, what was, what wasn’t and what may yet be, one of the particular joys is never knowing in advance what is possible. New books announce themselves not as recombinations of the familiar, but as revelations of what imagination is capable of. For instance, take this: “The wolfhound age springs at my shoulders / Though I’m no wolf by blood.” It’s the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, writing in March 1931, a man of incandescent lyrical gifts treated by Stalin with a kind of threadbare indulgence for a time, and then casually destroyed. Does it seem likely that Mandelstam’s rare, private, strange eye on his age could be adapted for a fantasy novel? Does it seem likely that you could form a stable mixture of his lyrical intensity with kinetic, fast-plotted, thrillerish violence? No. Really not.

But that is exactly what Peter Higgins has done in the astonishing trio of fantasies that began in 2013 with Wolfhound Century and now ends with Radiant State. They are set in a version of Russia where mythology and poetry have been prised apart from the history of power and force through which, in our world, they were inextricably threaded, and given a separate existence. This is not the Soviet Union or its imperial predecessor, but the Vlast, whose synonyms in a dictionary “filled almost half a column. Ascendancy. Domination. Rule. Lordship. Mastery. Grasp. Rod. Control. Command ... ”

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