[Book Review] Non-Serviam (The Hypostasis of Dissent 1) — Sfarda L. Gul
The hyperstylized GrimDark debut by author Sfarda Gul, Non Serviam positions itself as literary political GrimDark. It is equal parts a visceral and cerebral experience. Their approach to telling a familiar dark fantasy tale of revolution under the crushing fist of tyranny both serves as the greatest strength and biggest weakness of the first part of The Hypostasis of Dissent duology.
Non Serviam (Latin for “I Will Not Serve”) is a tale not entirely unheard of in the GrimDark ecosystem. Set in the city of Vencenza, a fantasy version of Venice (among other related locales), the story revolves around the budding revolution of the common folk long oppressed under a tyrannical ruler. In this iteration of the Dark Overlord tale, the tyrant has outlawed all forms of emotional expression. As a counterfoil, our protagonists are artists of various forms — playwright, musician, thespian, all of which are banned by the powers that be, with extreme and violent prejudice.
Central to the narrative are the three POV characters, Georgianna, a budding actor who has her quiet life thrown into turmoil as she is thrown into the misery vortex as a stand-in for the obscene governance till she becomes the pinnacle of rage, channeled outwards and within her own self. Following which we have Cesare, the cunning Machiavellian insert who is the brains behind the revolution orchestrated to erupt forming the central motif of the Non Serviam. Lastly we have Lucrezia, who, well, I kinda forget what her whole schtick was, because she paled compared to the other two archetypes.
What Sfarda Gul (pseudonym) gets right, to an extent, is the effort put into worldbuilding. They have created expansive mythos borrowing from medieval Latin and Middle-Eastern cultures, as well as drawing influences from African subcultures as well as Indian and East-Asian flavors. There is a clear sense of effort being put into creating an in-universe language for the narrative as well as creating extensive ancillary documentation for all the terminology including detailed appendices, pronunciation guides, and even some nifty pictorial guides to the masks (which form a central motif in the story further into the Venetian Theater vibe).
Unfortunately, there is something vaguely vacuous about both her characters and worldbuilding. The author sets out to create archetypes that we have seen before, and better versions of in other works of GrimDark fantasy. Georgianna comes across as a petulant rage-first-think-later version of the much more maniacally savant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson), Cesare feels like a downgraded version of Locke Lamora (The Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch) which also explores the Mediterranean Theater aesthetic, in a more sunny approach.
The tyrannical lord is a tired trope by this point, and the author’s motif of the outlawing of expression, while an intriguing premise, is not really dug into in a way which feels expansive. One of the keystone aspects of GrimDark is that it is a bleak world, and while there is plenty of violence and oppression in Non Serviam the sense of general misery is not really well painted, best done through the eyes of the non-protagonist characters.
But by far, the biggest aspect which will divide the readers of this series, and will decide whether this series will succeed or not, is Gul’s stylistic choice of prose.
<Deep Breath>
GrimDark has always been a genre that has given authors a wider leeway of flexing their stylistic prose, from the brutalist Sanderson approach to the black-comedy of Abercrombie, the bloodthirsty mania of Fletcher, the poetic repetition of Anna Smith Spark, or the academic leanings of Mark Lawrence and Tchaikovsky. There is even the tumblr-esque edgelord purple prose of Jay Kristoff, which has also been divisive among fantasy readers as being overly edgy. You can read a review of Kristoff’s latest offering here.
Then there’s whatever the hell Sfarda S. Gul decided to throw at us in Non Serviam.
Their prose is hyperstylized purple (reaching for a more extreme color here) to the point of tedium. With incredibly long run-on sentences, convoluted structure, and purposefully obtuse vocabulary, their writing style hits you like a sledgehammer and exhausts you before you get to the end of the first chapter. I would like to think of myself that likes elevated approach and even likes getting stumped by words that I have not read before, and looking up its meaning.
I cannot comment on the realistic control over the English language that the author possesses
The overall appearance of the prose feels so hamfisted, so contrived, so dragged out with broken teeth out of the cavernous darkness into the blinding and bloodsoaked sunlight of a dying world (now they have ME doing it too!) that it feels as if they took their first draft and pushed it through the thesaurus meatgrinder.
For those who watched the entirety of the Spartcaus TV show, you will know exactly just how exaggerated prose can lead to comedic tedium.
To further complicate matters, Non Serviam is told in both First, Second, AND Third person voices. Georgianna’s POV is told in the first person, the Second person voice is thankfully sparse and is only reserved for her flashbacks, and Cesare and Lucrecia’s POVs are narrated in the standard third person. Phew! Furthermore, even the chapter titles come across less as well-thought-out and impressive, and more as a “look how smart I am” self-congratulation. The titles are either drawn from medical or psychological terminology, or genuinely feel like regular sentences pushed through an English-to-Latin translator. This is NOT commentary on the author’s command over Latin (which is seemingly considerable along with several other languages as per the footnotes), but when piled on the rest of their prose’s critique veers deeply into “Im14AndThisIsDeep” territory.
Non Serviam is a textbook example of “style over substance”. What lies beneath all the claustrophobically complex prose and elaborate yet vacuous worldbuilding is a sadly anemic plot carried forward by characters that feel like caricatures of exaggeration, and vehicles of poorly concealed messaging rather than fleshed-out characters with distinct voices. The amateur nature of the prose is stark in that for all the effort the author put into their prose, all the characters spoke with exactly the same voice, leading the reader to be extremely confused and unable to form mental anchors via speech mannerisms or delivery. This problem is further exacerbated when both the narration and dialog suffer from nearly identical bloat, making even the most ardent of readers unable to distinguish between the two. The total of which is a dense mess of overly compressed yet overly fatty slab covering very little meat over a weak skeleton of a memorable tale.
Non Serviam also highlights the aspects of GrimDark that makes the genre the most inaccessible to newcomers. This story lacked the blase meta commentary towards its own bleak universe or the nuanced morally grey diverse characters that fill out the world. For as much as the author has written essays about the pitfalls of GrimDark on other forums …
Non Serviam is misery-porn, the weakest form of GrimDark
Every character is so broken down by past mental, physical, and sexual abuse that they become paragons of self-loathing. While this is a staple within many GrimDark characters, Gul treats her characters with the subtlety of a bulldozer. Both Georgianna and Cesare get more and more unbelievable as they are both subjected to the maligned trope known as the Conga Line of Trauma, to the point of reader nausea.
Feminine Rage is also a central motif in Non Serviam, and Georgianna feels channels it to a hyperbolic degree. I will fully admit that I am no expert in trauma representation and I can empathize with their author’s effort to shed light on real-world issues through their chosen artform, but they do so without intelligent restraint.
There IS a good story within Non Serviam but it is held back by the author’s own stylistic choices, which I feel will drive more readers away than towards their future efforts.
