Review: The Navigating Fox

The Navigating Fox by Christopher Rowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting, unusual, enjoyable and well executed.

In an alternate version of our world, a form of the Roman Empire has colonized part of North America (it did take me a while to figure out that the action was taking place on that continent and not in Europe), but the rest of the continent is still in the hands of its indigenous people. That's not the original bit. The original bit is that someone (possibly not the person credited by legend) has figured out an alchemical process which makes non-human animals "knowledgeable" - sentient, in other words.

The Navigating Fox is such a person. The adjective used for a knowledgeable creature differs depending on the species; for a fox, apparently it's "navigating," though since he is the only knowledgeable fox perhaps it isn't. He can guide people on a system of mysterious paths that take them between places more quickly than would otherwise be the case - nobody knows how.

A lot of things are not clear-cut, in a good way, and most of the major characters believe at least one thing that turns out to be significantly untrue about the way the world works and the intentions, motivations, knowledge and actions of other characters. The story opens with the fox, in a Tom and Huck's funeral moment, secretly attending a procedure to throw him out of the Explorers' Sodality on the basis that he is lying about the existence of the paths (but really because his accuser's sister was on his last expedition, the one from which only he returned). From there, we get two narrative threads. The main thread is a second expedition, commissioned by a senior priest, ostensibly to close the gates of hell and end death; the secondary thread consists of several chapters detailing how the first expedition unfolded.

While short, it packs in plenty of worldbuilding without any infodumping, plenty of character development without long passages of introspection, and a surprising amount of twisty plot. It takes a very capable author to pull off that kind of concise writing; the pre-release version I got via Netgalley is also very clean from a copy editing point of view, barring a few minor typing errors. It's a solid piece of writing, and gets an unhesitating recommendation from me.

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