Gifted and Talented, New York Times bestselling writer of The Atlas Six Olivie Blake’s latest novel, is about three siblings who gather at their childhood home when their father Thayer Wren, the man known for having catapulted technology into the modern age, suddenly dies. Meredith, Arthur and Eilidh are all the children of Thayer and his beautiful, intelligent and unwell wife who died an early death related to an eating disorder. Though the siblings were all raised by the same father, they each carry their own very unique set of childhood traumas and memories. They also have some strange abilities. As the three wait for the contents of their father’s will to be revealed, they must contend with their own demons, and each other’s.
The story is told by an omniscient narrator who breaks the fourth wall often, and tells us that the “the first thing to know about the Almighty House of Wren is that it’s a crumbing mess of conflict and lies, with the general obfuscation of reality as a treat,” and that “aside from being assholes, [the Wrens are] also fucking frauds.” Though the narrator claims to be a “voice of God narration” who is mostly “‘”here to observe and make the occasional comment as related to your understanding of the plot,” their lens is an angry, fairly bitter and often unreliable one. We do find out later who the narrator is; many will guess it fairly early on, only to doubt their guess not just because the narrator denies it, but also because it doesn’t quite make sense for this person to be giving us all this information about the Wrens’ internal emotional landscapes as fact, logically.
But logic isn’t at all necessary in a story about magic and technology mixing, is it? Again, the self-proclaimed God tells us that “the things you should know about the world […] mostly have to do with the magitech industry, the basis of which is Magic—the elegant architectural system of transporting electromagnetic waves […] Magic (TM) is essentially the channeling of unusually potent electromagnetic waves en masse—a primitive form of supercomputing, essentially.” Much like most of Blake’s prose, this appears to make surface level sense. The narrator takes it further: “Does [magic] exist, you ask? Of course it does, or how else to explain Wrenfare’s operational system, which is otherwise unfathomable at this scale?” and “just because the majority of the world doesn’t produce magic doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” Insert a bunch of blurry history about Nikola Tesla, generational wealth, parallel internets, ambition and greed, and we are told that “‘”magic has existed in various shades throughout history, alternately called by names like technology or witchcraft or shamanism, depending on who authors the story,” but in this case our narrative God has chosen to “call it what it is.”
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What is it, though? What is it that makes the Wren siblings so different from anyone else born with money and privilege and power? Or is it the combination of these things, along with an emotional distant father and a dead mother that means that “by the time their father’s death irreversibly changes the trajectory of all three lives, its pretty clear they’ve all equally fucked themselves?”
Meredith and her million dollar mental health tech start up are about to be exposed for fraud by her ex Jamie, a man she is still obsessed by. Arthur is about to lose an election as the second youngest congressman ever because of his highly liberal, progressive agenda, and the dynamics of his happy polyamourous relationships are shifting. Eilidh has no idea who she is after a car accident destroyed her career as a genius ballerina, and is floundering at a random executive role at Wrenfare while awkwardly flirting with her father’s pretty assistant.
Each of the Wrens are tussling with either their strange abilities, or the repercussions of them.
Meredith, as the oldest child, took on the burden of trying to keep her parents happy constantly: “I really thought that if I was good enough, if I did everything perfectly […] my dad could be proud of me […] And everything would be okay, if I could just fix everything that was wrong with me,” she says. As an adult, Meredith discovers she has the ability to telepathically push people into being different or “better,” into changing their minds about how they feel, into ‘fixing’ them.
Arthur, always magnetic and charming now seems to be some kind of “arguably half-alive poltergeist, haunting every highbrow political venue with the occult situationship between himself and every electrical current.” Sparks, sudden shortages of power, light bulbs fizzing out are all common around Arthur especially when he is emotional.
And Eilidh, who feels like the world is constantly ending ever since her career did, thinks she is ‘”cursed with an inner rottenness, a personal demon she couldn’t control. A creature, a wee little ghost that seemed to be somehow both benign and a raw, molten, earth-destroying power that she could only use when she got ugly, when she let her own darkness run free. But that wasn’t it, was it? Because sometimes it gave her something too, sometimes it kept her safe.” When she feels like everything is truly spinning out of control, Eilidh causes a mini-apocalypse, albeit one that doesn’t seem to have any serious long term repercussions. That a plague of locusts, or total sudden darkness in the day time can come and go without global concern, without talk of so much as a stock market crash, makes it clear that the book’s gaze is turned entirely inwards, looking at only the siblings and the few others immediately around them, with just an impressionistic image of the larger world the story is set in.
The defining feature of this character-driven narrative is the dialogue. It tends to be in that sharp rapid fire style, between the characters and even from the narrator. Every other sentence is a clever quip. There is little breathing room between conversations, which can get a little tiresome, given that that’s what the majority of the book consists of. Not all these conversations are providing valuable information (often, they are repeating information until it loses its worth), and most are not moving the plot along, whatever semblance of plot there may be. There is a premise, an intriguing elevator pitch—three rich young siblings with vague magical abilities gather to hear the contents of their rich powerful tech magnate father’s will—but there is not much of a plot, though there are suggestions on what it may have been (mentions of the Count of Monte Cristo may lead some readers to think there was a very long game being played with Meredith, for example), and what will be, after the book ends. It is a book concerned with sibling dynamics, parenting and what it means to never quite live up to the expectations that you assume have been set up for you.
It’s a lot of book. It’s a lot of dialogue. So much so that plenty of it comes across frustratingly as junk prose: wordy and unnecessary. It is one thing to have self-indulgent, privileged and deeply flawed characters, quite another to spend so much time explaining why and how they are the way they are. They are also, unfortunately, very much stuck in their grooves: Meredith spends most of the book trying to prove she’s not a failure. Arthur spends most of the book on drugs. Eilidh spends most of the book feeling sorry for herself, so it can start to feel like a cliché: a book about sad rich people with daddy issues’ anxieties around fame and fortune. It is a credit, then, to the rapid fire prose that attention is mostly retained through the flashbacks and extensive introspection that each character heavily indulges in, though it does at times start to feel like a good shake out of it would reveal a much leaner story hidden inside the chaotic “vibey” narrative of Gifted and Talented.
Gifted & Talented is published by Tor Books.