Empire City suffers under circumstance unprecedented in history.

Or does it?

Depending on how one takes one’s metaphors, it may be that the pair of dragons, which rose one day out of the sea to take up a circling position above the metropolis, occasionally spitting fire down at random targets, is just another form of an old problem, one going back to Ur or Sodom and Gomorrah or Rome or London or Sarajevo, each in their own way suffering calamity that subsequently defined them.  Dragons come in many forms—earthquakes, vulcanism, sacking, a blitz, snipers. As buildings burn, collapse, streets are torn up, and safety becomes a once-long-ago idea, what the people in those cities do determines whether the city survives or fades into myth.

Individuals are often remembered. Gilgamesh, Lot, Nero, Churchill—

Duncan Ripple, Swanny Dahlberg, Abby.

Who?

One day in the future, they will be remembered as the heroes of Empire City. They, the last of Late Capitalism’s Royalty, who forged an alliance that saw the end of the terrible reign of the dragons. Two of them scions of great families who did not flee their tormented city even after fifty years of fire and death, one a girl out of Nowhere who found and met her destiny as a dragonslayer. Because of their selfless efforts, Empire City could be reborn.

If this sounds unlikely, hagiographic hype, well, it is.  And yet, reading Chandler Klang Smith’s novel, The Sky Is Yours, one wonders at all those other epic personalities to whom we attribute greatness. Some we know well whether or not they deserved their reputations (and even how mixed said reputation may be) while others are sketches, idolons of the past, forms into which we pour the substance of our own aspirations toward greatness. The realities may have been just as epically different.

Duncan Ripple, a former reality tv star (his childhood up through adolescence), as a consequence of which carrying a bloated sense of his own greatness, has reached majority and is on his way to meet his future bride, Swanny. Swanny has spent most of her life being groomed by her mother, whose shark’s instincts, business savvy, and stainless steel sense of purpose focus all her considerable powers for just this event, which will bind two of the largest family concerns together. Swanny, however, is a devoted Romantic, her ideas about marriage drawn from countless over-the-top and somewhat purplish novels. She is also dying from a genetic disorder, one symptom of which is teeth that never stop coming in (hence the need for an on-staff dentist).

Dunk, as he styles himself, is flying to the Dahlberg Estate to commence the process, paying no attention to anything but himself (as usual), and runs into the sweeping tail of one of the dragons.  His HowFly tries with programmed valor to save itself (and him) but ends up crashing into the island of refuse outside Empire City where lives Abby, the Girl, brought there by The Lady years before to escape what the Lady called People Machines, to raise Abby (who does not actually know her real name) apart from all the artifice and decay of the ancient metropolis. Abby is an Innocent when Dunk slams into her island. She rescues him, nurses him back to life, and then provides him with the first real sexual experience of his to-date superficial, televised, and facile existence. She becomes a surreal Enkidu to his decidedly problematic Gilgamesh.

When Dunk is rescued by his uncle, a wheel-chair-bound sybarite who almost made history by attempting to kill the dragons (who nearly killed him), he drags Abby back with him where ensues the opening rounds of disruption about his Destiny, Fate, personal ambition, desire, and all the miscalculations endemic to Planned Futures. The meeting with his intended goes badly, the families end up in stressed relations, and the marriage may (or may not) be off.

Except Swanny does marry Dunk, although Dunk has no intention of actually giving up Abby, who the rest of the family intends to send off to an asylum.

Then things go very strange.

There is ample plot to satisfy any desire for the delight of improbable twists, and the situations evolve into life lessons, the world (the city, at least) is brought closer to the brink. This is a detailed portrait of how things simply will not hold without a center, especially after a point of no return is reached, and the pathos of those who still hope that things can be turned around. The landscape is entropic in the extreme, locked in a moment of tumble, and the characters flail about for anchors that will not remain in place.

Klang Smith shows herself to be a masterful juggler.  There should be no way for all the components at play here to cohere, and yet they do.  They do with a surprising and pleasurable grace and at times the writing is nearing transcendence.  This is allegory, metaphor, and potboiler mingled artfully to make an elegant mockery of expectation and resolution. Who these people are and who they become as they spin around each other just as the dragons circle overhead suggests, finally, that superficiality requires substance to survive, and that try as some might to remain shallow, depths are there to fall into whether we like it or not.

Dunk’s reality show was called Late Capitalism’s Royalty and there is much here that does not even attempt to be subtle about the economics of greed, the consequences of avarice, and the futility of treating systems like religion. Empire City is a place in constant economic collapse.  The dragons can be seen to represent the inevitability of forces beyond the Market to disrupt, depress, or destroy any attempt to enforce the conformity of Success.

It is Abby finally who brings the whole into focus and elevates the entire thing above the level of mere dystopic indulgence.  Abby, trash-heap naif, loyal, speaker to animals, honest sensualist, who only wants to know where she came from and what her name really is, who represents the human spirit unafraid to go where love takes it.  Others try, begin to overcome the expectations of their upbringing, make the attempt at enlightenment, heroism, freedom.  Abby simply is.

Klang Smith has taken the trappings of what has become the standard æsthetic of dystopian novels and added enough satire, insight, and possibility to the mix to make the book less about starting over and more about genuine rebirth.  Weird, funny, gruesome, a collapsing wavefront of chaos harnessed finally by an inevitability that leaves us options.  The Sky May Well Be Ours.