Why lie? Magic For Liars, by Sarah Gailey

 Yes, George Santos is somewhat mesmerizing.  He does not have mesmeric powers, although some of his con victims might beg to differ.  Rather, the dumpster fire that is George Santos, and the spectacle of a party indifferent to lying while trying to manage a House majority of only 222 seats has all the hypnotic effect of a campfire on a balmy, summer night.  I still have no great insight into Brigadier General Santos, and the challenge for commentary on the topic is that at the end of the day, he's just a damned liar in a party of moral cowards who are afraid to confront lies in any circumstance, much less when facing the possibility of seeing a House margin go from 222 to 221.  There's just no insight there.  So we turn to a novel.  I have been meaning to read Sarah Gailey's Magic For Liars for quite some time, but we all have overflowing "to read" stacks.  The main reason this one did not really rise to the top for me is that while it received very favorable coverage in the science fiction & fantasy community, it is a "magic school" book, and a murder mystery.  I care for neither of these.  I do intend to read the Lev Grossman books at some point, but I never read the popular kids' books, I haven't read the genre, and I just don't give a rat's ass about any of this.  I also never bothered with the mystery genre.  Put that together, and yes, Gailey may have received a lot of favorable reviews, but it was not going to rise to the top of my reading list.

And then George Santos, so I figured, fuck it.  Let's give this one a shot.

Here's the schtick.  It is the modern world, except that magic is secretly real.  Some people can do magic ("are magic").  When discovered, they are sent to magic schools, which are basically just regular schools, with all of the regular travails of high school bullshit, and just some other classes.  The ones that teach magic.  The schools themselves are remarkably normal, except for the magic.

The POV character is Ivy.  She has a twin sister, Tabitha.  (Yes, really.  Oy.)  Tabitha is a mage, and a very powerful one at that.  Ivy has no ability to do magic.  Tabitha gets sent off to learn magic as a kid, and they go their separate ways.  Ivy becomes a private detective, and Tabitha teaches magic.  They don't communicate at all.

At Tabitha's school, her girlfriend, Sylvia's body is found in the library sliced in half, down the middle, vertically.  Obviously, magic.  The school calls in the investigators, who conclude that it was an accident, and that Sylvia was messing around with very dangerous magic, and lost control of it.  The head master of the school doesn't believe it, but doesn't have an option to reject their call.  She can't exactly call the regular cops.  She needs a PI, and one who knows about magic.  Tabitha's sister.

She offers Ivy a fuckload of money to investigate, because the head master is convinced that this was a murder.  Find the murderer.

Here's the gimmick.  Nobody at the school would expect an investigator who can't do magic, and Ivy just lets everyone believe it.

So let's grumble first.  I shall skip the part in which I comment on the pointlessly excessive wokeism, which is less than I expected, but still there.  It is mandatory for the genre.  You cannot publish in sci-fi/fantasy without wokeism anymore.  Let's instead grumble about mysteries.

I do not read mysteries.  I have sympathy for the challenge of writing them, because there is a balance between ensuring the information is there to avoid the ending just coming out of the author's ass, and ensuring that you aren't just screaming at the main character because it is too obvious.

Here's the thing.  Gailey throws out a lot of red herrings that are very obviously red herrings.  The students and their bullshit.  There's a stupid "Chosen One" sub-plot, and I fucking hate that gimmick.  It is the most over-used plot ever.  It also has fuckall to do with the mystery, but it was also obvious all along that it had fuckall to do with the mystery.  As you read, you can immediately identify the red herrings as red herrings.  So why bother?

The actual answer is that the magic investigators had it right.  It was an accident.  What they had wrong was who accidentally butterflied Sylvia.  She was dying of cancer.  Tabitha was experimenting with magic to try to cure her.  She fucked up.  So yes, accident.  But Tabitha's accident, not Sylvia's.

There was one word, in the middle of the book, noting that Sylvia was "dying," rather than, "dead."  And Gailey didn't return to it until the end.  There were also a lot of references to what is and is not possible for cures.  So... clues, right?

The problem is that you have a character named Mrs. Webb, who is ostensibly the greatest healer ever, explaining what is and is not possible, even with magic, so arriving at the correct answer requires concluding that Tabitha surpassed the character you are told is, like, the best ever at this.

Of course, she kinda didn't, since she killed Sylvia in the process, but still.  All of which leads to the observation that the magic investigators basically just had it right from the beginning.  It wasn't murder, it was an accident, and the head master had her head up her ass, with no real reason to distrust that investigation, she hired someone unqualified to investigate, and this is all ludicrous.

With that out of the way, let's think about lying.  Ivy is a liar.  The novel is set up such that your expectation is that she'll lie about her ability to do magic in order to facilitate an investigation, but actually, she is not that sophisticated.  Instead, she imagines the life she would have had if she could do magic, the way Tabitha could.  She fantasizes about another life, and tries to live it, if only briefly, during the course of the investigation.  Her actual life is the life of a cliched PI.  She is an alcoholic loser.  But what if?

Marcus Aurelius wrote, waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be.  Be one.  Ivy cannot be magic.  But she can be different.  She wishes herself to be the kind of person who can be with Rahul, and acts at it.

Don't pretend.  Be that.

The lies that Ivy tells-- the important lies-- are the lies she tells for the sake of her own sense of self.  She wants a different life, but rather than build it within the constraints of what she can, she tells herself that she cannot, lives an embittered life, drinks to excess, and creates her own problems.

Yet the lies are comprehensible.  They serve a purpose.  Most lies do, and most people lie.  They lie to the world, they lie to themselves, and they do so for some combination of tangible gain or egoistic gain.  Or perhaps prevention of loss, which is economically the flip side of that coin.  When you start peeling back the layers of lies, you can have several different reactions, based on the kinds of lies you encounter.

Ivy is, in most ways, a conventional liar, magic aside.  She is rather pathetic, yet in a way that most people can comprehend.  Her mother died of cancer when she was a teenager, her sister is a powerful mage, off being spectacular, and Ivy is... what?  This is not to say that she has no moral obligation, but one can understand the psychological burden her early life put on her.  She wants a different life, but she does not understand how to create it, so she lies.  The reader can understand.

Comprehensible lies.

Then there are the incomprehensible liars.  George Santos is not Ivy Gamble.  He is not someone who has faced challenges and understandably failed to meet them.  He is not responding to difficult circumstances in poor but comprehensible ways.  There is just something wrong with the wiring of his brain.  Occasionally, you may meet someone like George Santos.  I have, unfortunately, had the displeasure to have to deal with such people.  Yes, they go far.  They can become president, members of the House of Representatives, they can reach high positions in academia, and why?

At Tabitha's magic school, everyone just assumes that Ivy can do magic, and it would never occur to them that Ivy would not be able to do magic.  It would never occur to them to check.  It's a lie that would never occur to them.  When you speak to people, your default assumption is that the other person is speaking the truth, or at least in good faith.  Civilization does not work without a presumption of truth.  It can work with the occasional lie, or incorrect belief, or misunderstanding, but people are neurologically predisposed to trust each other in most circumstances.

Liars exploit that neurological predisposition.  They exploit the fact that when you hear a statement, your initial reaction is to presume the speaker is telling the truth.  And the worst of the worst exploit civilization.

How?  

Quick, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

As soon as I ask that question, your mind immediately goes to what you had.  If we were speaking, you might stumble for a moment, particularly if your breakfasts vary, but it would just never occur to you to lie.

There is a type of person-- rare, but they exist-- who has a different thought process.  There is a type of person who will lie, even in response to that.  Whose brain is so fucked up that instead of going to--omelette and coffee, for me this morning-- this person will come up with some lie for any number of reasons.  And it would never occur to you to check.  And this person will lie so much that you cannot check everything.

Such people cannot be understood by those whose brains are wired for truth.  All you can do is disregard and avoid, to the degree that you can.

Oy, please get these fucking people away from me.

I have written, on many occasions, that few are as dangerous as liars because liars undercut civilization itself.  We have two ways to resolve disputes.  Words, or violence.  I prefer words, but words only work when people speak the truth.  Ivy-style liars are difficult, but resolvable when we can understand the source of their lies.

Santos-style liars?  The kind with whom I must deal more frequently than anyone should?  Excise them, exile them, excommunicate them.

Because we have two methods.  Words, or violence.  If you want to use words, we need truth.

The Meters, "Liar," from Fire On The Bayou.