I sort of fell into these books by accident and then spent several nights in a row staying up late to read them all, which I figure is usually a good sign. There’s a good backlog of books at this point as well as more to come, giving readers something to sink their teeth into, should they feel so inclined. And I think there’s a lot to like about this series, because it really pushes at the boundaries of good and evil and who gets to define people and how people should live with respect to them, and it does so in some interesting ways.
Our lead character is apprenticed to a Spook, a man charged with handling various spirits, devils, and other unsavoury things in the County, a fantasy version of England. The Spook teaches him how to do his job, mentors him, educates him, and supervises him as he starts working on his own. This might seem like a relatively simple premise, but things start to get complicated almost immediately.
Witches are wound throughout the story, and they’re originally presented as purely evil and not quite human. But, these boundaries start to fall away as we learn about the Spook’s past and Tom’s present, and it’s simply not possible to be so simplistic. The stories absolutely have stereotypical evil witches, but there’s also something sad and dark about them, and the relationships they cultivate and develop with the characters. The Spook tells Tom to avoid and fear witches, but even he can’t seem to follow his own advice, and it has intense consequences for both characters as they struggle to navigate the growing darkness of their world.
The Spook has some profoundly misogynistic attitudes, and it intrigues me as a reader to see them framed somewhat neutrally, but to watch Tom grow to understand that they are both puzzling and wrong. As the character grows and deepens his own relationship with the women around them, he starts to recognise that his icon, his mentor, his master, is not actually always right, and can in fact be very wrong. Instead of having this forced on them, readers come into it naturally and grow with it as Tom does, and as he’s exposed to other ways of doing thing.
This is not to say that the books are shining models of anti-misogyny and positive messaging. There’s a lot of complex storylining bound up in the historic treatment of witches, and there’s no exception here, where women who are wise and clever are often depicted as witches, and thus as evil. They also come with a sinister side, consuming blood and bone and using them in rituals, which reiterates loaded historical ideas about witches and their ‘black sabbaths’ and eating Christian children.
At the same time, though, The Last Apprentice interweaves very real history and mythology. The Spook points out that the classic floating test used to catch a witch is a load of bunk, as witches of course weather it just fine while women sink to the bottom and die to prove their innocence. Delaney seems to drift a bit over the course of the series as he handles the witches, their familiars, and their assistants; sometimes he’s modeling a powerful female society of connected and interdependent women who work together to accomplish tasks and are intriguing and fun and interesting, and sometimes he’s falling short of the mark.
Which is understandable in a series that specifically isn’t designed to send any particular messages about life and society, and includes a large number of books. What The Last Apprentice does well is turn ideas about adult reliability and authority on their head, and ask people if they are so certain that the difference between good and evil is crisp, clear, and easy to read. This is not a happy, light fantasy with mentors who cheerfully guide the characters through the darkness; murkiness and abuse and confusion are part of the world as Tom tries to come into his own while balancing what he’s been taught.
The Spook is not a reliable mentor, even as he claims to be, and the deconstruction of his values over the course of the book is particularly interesting to watch. He wants to be the kind of man who does not compromise and absolutely refuses to enter grey areas, but he finds this impossible in actual practice because there are so many grey areas, and because limiting yourself can make it impossible to perform the tasks you need to do. Tom is forced to learn this by watching his mentor compromise and stumble, and seeing that adulthood is not as easy as it sometimes looks; taking a stand is not always possible, and it sometimes involves working with people you don’t like or agree with to accomplish that goal.
Tom also finds that the rules about good and bad, evil and pure, are not as set as he thought they were. An uncomfortable realisation for people of any age, it takes on particular resonance for him because he is in training to become the arbiter of these things, the reliable source, the person who can be trusted to identify and eradicate badness. Tom can hear things others cannot and see things that are not visible, and he comes to understand that this doesn’t necessarily make those things evil or wrong. In a way, The Last Apprentice leaves readers with lingering questions that cannot be easily answered, whether they are young adults or allegedly fully grown ones.
