WRITINGS

REVIEW: The House in the Cerulean Sea(2020) by TJ Klune

This is the most American fantasy book I have ever read. If Tolkien and Rowling represent the platonic ideals of fantasy from England, then Klune just might represent the same for the United States of America. Just like America itself, The House in the Cerulean Sea steals complex global and local histories and traumas, whitewashes them until they're almost unrecognizable, and spits them back out as pure escapism for an audience of the world's most ignorant and privileged, all in a narrative voice so stilted as to give anyone who actually cares about the art of words a pounding headache.

Let's get into it.

To quote TJ Klune on the inspiration behind his novel:

"It remained fuzzy until I stumbled across the Sixties Scoop, something I'd never heard of before, something I'd never been taught in school (I'm American, by the way). In Canada, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, indigenous children were taken from their homes and families and placed into government-sanctioned facilities, such as residential schools. The goal was for primarily white, middle-class families across Canada, the US, and even Europe—to adopt these children. It's estimated that over 20,000 indigenous children were taken, and it wasn't until 2017 that the families of those affected reached a financial settlement with the Canadian government totaling over eight hundred million dollars.

I researched more, and discovered instances the world over, in my own country and abroad, of the same thing happening: families being separated because they were different, because of the color of their skin, because of their faith, because those in power were scared of them. I wrote The House in the Cerulean Sea in the spring of 2018, months later, in the summer, news exploded from our southern border about families searching for a better life being separated and put into government-sanctioned facilities."

Unlike the American who wrote this garbage, I'm Canadian. Like the American who wrote this garbage, I went through a school system that never taught me about the Sixties Scoop or residential schools in any level of detail. Genocidal institutions don't usually like to admit to genocide. Pointing at the American school system is a terrible excuse for Klune to claim total ignorance to the colonial history of educational institutions, because, like, obviously the school system is not going to tell on itself like that. Klune is 40 years old; he shouldn't be considering his dozen mandatory years in the American school system the foundation of his worldly knowledge still, especially as a professional writer, but whatever. What really happened here is Klune never learned about residential schools as a kid, never bothered seeking out knowledge about them as an adult, and only chose to look deeper once he wanted to appropriate them as the allegorical basis for his fantasy romance novel. Coming from a place of such ignorance, Klune never should have touched this subject matter with a ten-foot pole. He especially shouldn't have touched it in a story where the main theme is "kindness". America doesn't show Indigenous people any kindness, and neither does this book.

Klune cites colonial violence in Canada as his primary inspiration, never pausing to wash his bloody American hands before sitting down to sculpt a story out of our shared history. What the incredibly understated quote above leaves out is that the United States founded the North American residential schooling system. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania operated between 1879 and 1918 and became the model for a further 26 such institutions across the States. Its founder, Col. Richard Pratt, laid out the mandate of residential schooling as such: "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." When the Canadian government set out to create its own residential school system, they modeled it on the one already taking shape in the States. Just like Canada, the US continues to take Indigenous children out of their communities and force them through fostering and adoption, vanishing them into non-Indigenous nuclear families in order to kill their culture. That's just a little taste of the history Klune is invoking here. The only difference between Canada and the US when it comes to the treatment of Indigenous peoples is that America has yet to acknowledge its past and present genocidal policies even to the pathetic, performative extent Canada has.

I can only assume Klune found it easier to write a whimsical fantasy about residential schools than he would have found doing the same for genocidal policies he might actually have learned about in school, like the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. But that's assuming he even made the connection between settler-colonialism, Indigenous massacres and displacement, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the separation of migrant families at the US border in the first place. Based on this book and its promo materials, I really, truly doubt he thought about it that hard, beyond 'thing bad'. To be fair to Klune, neither did his American beta readers, his American literary agent, his American editor, his American publishing house, or the American media outlets and American authors who gave this book glowing reviews. This book should never have been conceived, written, published, marketed, or praised the way it has been, but because white Americans had their hands on the controls at every step of the process, here we are. In an uwu softboi fantasy novel about how the trauma of genocidal family separation can be soothed by the power of 'the friends we made along the way'.

Our protagonist and sole POV character is Linus Baker, a 40-year-old caseworker with a 17-year career under his belt at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). If we're running with Klune's inspirational analogies, Linus either works for the Roman Catholic Church, a government-run foster care/adoption agency, or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). If I can draw a parallel to a much more capable piece of fairytale-oppression media, Linus has been working for Lord Farquaad for 17 years. None of these are particularly sympathetic positions for a protagonist to start out in, but the book insists we must have sympathy for Linus. His job is hard. He's in constant danger of getting fired. His boss is mean. His coworker makes fun of his appearance. His neighbour harasses him about his sexuality. He's lonely. Even his cat is "a thing of evil". And on, and on. Anything to distract from the fact he’s the keenest, highest-performing, most by-the-book worker at the genocide agency, whose biggest fear is "getting sacked" (Oh yeah, Klune leans hard on the pseudo-British English as yet another way of removing his work from its American context. The book is littered with quaint Britishisms like "Toodle-oo", "trousers", and "Bugger", though Americanized spellings like "pajamas", "color", and "center" remain untouched. On the whole, Klune's prose is startlingly contrived. Check this out:

"There was another table set at the other end of the kitchen. This one looked more used than the one in the formal dining room. There was a slightly worn tablecloth spread out, weighted down by place settings. Three plates and sets of silverware were on one side. There were four place settings on the other side, though one didn't have a spoon or fork. And there were settings at either end of the table. Candles were lit and flickering. In the center, there was food stacked high."

I mean, whooooooof, buddy, can we try anything spicier than the passive voice? I guess that would involve acknowledging who actually performed the labour to prepare the meal and set the table for Linus. Foster children and their unpaid housekeeper of colour, by the way).

The novel opens with DICOMY's Extremely Upper Management noting Linus' exceptional work and sending him to observe a particularly "problematic" orphanage housing some of the agency's most dangerous charges. In Klune's analogy, foster kids are magical creatures. It is inevitably and totally dehumanizing. Most of the children have animalistic features (feathers, wings, tails). One is straight-up a wyvern. One child is introduced as "an amorphous green blob" as easily as another is introduced as "a large black boy" (a werewolf; later on, he emphatically exclaims, "I'm a dog!"). One is literally the Antichrist, "a weapon of mass destruction in the body of a six-year-old", an especially charming authorial choice given that real residential schools were run by Christians and Catholics who more or less thought of Indigenous kids as godless demons. At one point Linus wishes for a cross or a Bible to ward off this kid's evil aura. The foul idea that foster children need careful control because they're dangerous and embarrassing to themselves, each other, and their adult caretakers never leaves this book, and how could it when those children are literal demons, animals, and monsters? Imagine writing a book inspired by residential schools where your main character is outwardly sympathetic to the children and then goes behind their backs to write stuff in his reports like "I believe—under proper guidance—that he will be capable of becoming a productive member of society. So long, that is, as he doesn’t give in to his true nature. It does beg the question of nature versus nurture, if there is inherent evil in the world that can be overcome by a normalized upbringing. Can he be rehabilitated? Assimilated? That remains to be seen." Nope. No. Do not pass Go. Crawl on back into your musty grave, Col. Richard Pratt.

Rather than the children's cultures, traditions, languages, and family relations, the "true nature" and "inherent evil" DICOMY residential schooling seeks to suppress is the children's supernatural power. In real residential schools, the process of cultural assimilation involved rampant verbal, sexual, and physical abuse, including murder. The novel seems to know this on some level, but certainly doesn't consider it all that important. While reflecting on his job history, Linus glibly recalls a DICOMY orphanage worker planning to ritually sacrifice all the children under his care. He recalls witnessing an orphanage worker slapping a child across the face. He admits he doesn't think about what happens to children after he files a behaviour report or shuts down an orphanage. He stops just short of wondering out loud how the more 'monstrous' children masturbate. Scant mention is made of how the children came to be separated from their birth communities and put into DICOMY's institutional care, and what little we get is extremely traumatic. Phee watched her own mother starve to death and DICOMY workers dragged her away from the corpse. Sal has been through 12 previous foster homes and was once beaten by an orphanage worker for taking food; because him defending himself against this abuse turned his abuser into a werewolf, he now has to reassure the adults in his life he "won't do it again". Best not to think what the unspoken alternative might be. Shelter dogs who come in with a bite history, especially those with human-infectious diseases, usually get put down (and for good reason, which is why we shouldn't carelessly mix animal and human rights metaphors like this book does). The brutal, lethal violence inherent to residential schools and foster care occurs entirely off-page so the quaint little orphanage of this book can be a safe, controlled, sanitized environment.

The "proper guidance" and "normalized upbringing" we get on-page is Mr. Parnassus, the orphanage master, teaching the kids European science, European mathematics, European philosophy, and European literature. He takes them on a treasure hunting "expedition" where they all dress up in safari clothes and pith helmets like little European explorers (they spend most of it worrying about getting eaten by imaginary wild cannibals, one of the most worn-out colonial tropes ever). He encourages one of the children, Chauncey, to pursue becoming a servant as an adult and allows Linus to treat him as one in his own home (imagine, for a moment, what Chauncey's fawning enthusiasm for carrying privileged people's luggage would look like if he were the "large black boy" and not the "amorphous green blob"). Mr. Parnassus keeps the children on a strict routine where "Day in and day out, they have structure. Breakfast at eight on the dot, then classes. Lunch at noon. More classes. Individual pursuits in the afternoon. Dinner at half past seven. Bed by nine." The kids are obsessed with American pop culture. They celebrate Christmas. Mr. Parnassus eventually turning out to be a magical creature and a victim of DICOMY himself has little bearing on the colonial nature of his orphanage management.

Ultimately, the festering problem at the heart of this book is the festering problem at the heart of institutional foster care itself: it does not care whether children can or should be reunited with the communities they were taken from. The Indigenous kids forced into residential schools and the kids in immigration detention at the US-Mexico border were taken from living families and cultural traditions, but conveniently neither Mr. Parnassus nor any of his children can say the same. If their birth communities aren't dead or totally unknown to DICOMY, they're written off as inherently abusive. Why would you reunite a kid with his family when his dad is Satan and his relatives all live in Hell? Why would a book about 'found family' care about giving stolen children back? Mr. Parnassus and his kids are terra nullius, a brand new blank slate of a family waiting for Linus to discover them and build his new life upon them. The first adult magical creature Linus meets says of one of the children, "It doesn't matter where he came from. Or what he is. He's a child". He can be shaped any way the adult characters want. Whatever he was before, whatever culture or family he was born into, doesn't matter, because "A person is more than where they came from". DICOMY sucks, but Mr. Parnassus' orphanage is better than whatever unspeakable suffering the kids lived with before they were registered. DICOMY's treatment of the children is wrong, but DICOMY's understanding of who the children are and where they came from goes unquestioned. The children really are special, dangerous, exotic magical creatures with nowhere else to go. The Black kid really is a dog. The Indigenous-coded kid really is the spawn of Satan. 40-year-old Linus really is more mature and knowledgeable about the world than a 263-year-old gnome, who obviously ought to be kept in an institution and treated like a human child. It really is true that absolutely nobody alive knows where Chauncey came from or what kind of being he is. His obsession with being a bellhop isn't a trauma response due to having no other framework for his identity, it's just a fact. His utter lack of records isn't DICOMY's fault, it's just a fact. The institutionalization of these children and the obliteration of their birth communities isn't anyone's fault, just a neat fact Klune and Linus stumbled across.

The end of the book finds Linus considering it a revolutionary win that he has convinced DICOMY to keep one of its institutions open. He also steals a bunch of children's records from DICOMY with no consideration for how this might interrupt any future process of attempting to figure out where the children came from. In the real world, the destruction and 'misplacement' of residential school records continues to be a major barrier to reckoning with the truth of Indigenous genocide to this day. Linus and Mr. Parnassus adopt the children from Mr. Parnassus' orphanage, completing the genocidal cycle. The children were removed from their cultural communities, institutionally scrubbed of their origins, given a strict European education, and adopted out to a middle-class white nuclear family. Happy ending, credits roll.

At the end of the blog post quoted at the top of this review, Klune gets on his soapbox to say, "We, like Linus discovers, need to use our voices for those who can't speak for themselves, those who should be allowed to be small in this great, wide world. But sometimes we also need to shut up and listen to those small voices, because if we don't, we run the risk of drowning them out." Well, Indigenous people can and do speak for themselves about family separation. Yes, even in fiction. Even speculative fiction. Klune does not need to speak for them; he's drowning them out. Nobody needs a fluffy fantasy book about residential schools written from the point of view of a clueless white American man aesthetically pretending to be British. Nobody needs reassurance that the traumatic system of governmental foster care and adoption can produce happy queer nuclear families. Nobody except white Americans who had a really hard time watching Trump get elected you guys :( and would rather ignore and escape reality than attempt understanding how it got to this point, which seems to be exactly the toilet bowl this polished turd of a novel has made a splash in.

To TJ Klune I say: shut up. White America is a small-hearted, narrow-minded, blood-soaked little corner of our world, not a pulpit from which you can preach universal kindness. Look hard at the bones you're standing on before you start trampling all over the rest of us. Next time I hope you can own your ideas enough to at least write them in your own American English. I won't be reading any more of your work, though (nor will I ever revisit Seanan McGuire's magical orphanage books now that I know she thinks this one is "very close to perfect").

What happens to an institutionalized kid after you file your report about them? Well, unless you kill them, they grow up into an adult who can speak for themselves about how badly your institution treated them. Those voices are entirely missing from this book.