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The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

By: Abigail Nussbaum Issue: 14 July 2025

“School as a teacher is pretty different from school as a student,” said Walden. “Better, honestly, in the way that being an adult is generally a lot better than being a child.”

In her Hugo-winning novel Some Desperate Glory (2023), Emily Tesh tore through many of the conventions that govern modern, popular SF. Barrelling through a trilogy’s worth of plot in a single novel, playing merry hell with time and space, nodding at the familiar structure of the YA novel of self-discovery and self-actualization before thoroughly upending it, the novel seemed determined to confound the reader’s expectations at every turn. In one respect, however, Some Desperate Glory hewed closely to the familiar form of a YA adventure. As its heroine, Kyr, uncovered the lies she had been raised on and rebelled against them, the teachers who promulgated those lies inevitably took a background role: sometimes villainous, sometimes supportive, but always a backdrop to Kyr’s starring turn.

In her new novel, The Incandescent, Tesh overturns this last, and perhaps most cherished, of conventions. What if you told a magical school story, she asks, from the point of view of the teacher? Like the best ideas, this one feels at once revolutionary and obvious. Even if you’re not a teacher, even if you left school decades ago and never looked back, it must at some point have occurred to you how different the story of that period in your life would have looked from behind the desk at the front of the class; how experiences that felt earth-shattering to a person going through them for the first time would have seemed like yet another repetition of a familiar tale to someone with a bit more life behind them; how what you were sure were cherished secrets and private dramas were in fact fully visible from a different vantage point. To take that change in perspective and apply it to a familiar fantasy tale is an enormously fruitful idea, and this is at once The Incandescent’s strength and weakness. This is a novel with a great deal to say: about fantasy and the magical school story, but also about teaching, about class, and about how they intersect with each other. It can lose itself a little in trying to say all of it.

Saffy Walden is Director of Magic at Chetwood School, “founded as a school of pure magic, turning out fully trained magicians who were masters of all the arcane disciplines [...] and, as a bonus, could usually add, subtract, and write their own names.” But that was in the past, she immediately tells us, “before the advent of the National Curriculum and OFSTED’s private-sector shadow, the Independent Schools Inspectorate. These days Chetwood School was a specialist foundation, like a technical or musical college, with a full complement of academic teaching staff alongside the magicians.”

Right away, then, Tesh sets up the duality that the rest of the novel will play with. There is magic, the arcane discipline that promises immense power but carries tremendous risk—indeed, Saffy is introduced filling out a risk assessment form for an upcoming practical lesson that includes boxes for demonic possession and the incursion of another plane of reality onto our own. But there is also magic, the specialization that can set you apart in an Oxbridge interview; that, like Classics, is perhaps more useful as a marker of class and privilege than an actual discipline. As Director of Magic, Saffy is in charge of monitoring the defenses that hold back creatures from the demonic plane, for whom a gathering of hundreds of magically gifted youngsters represents an irresistible snack (this conceit echoes Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy [2020-2022], a setting in which teachers were pointedly and deliberately absent). But she also spends her time in budget meetings, or advising her A-level students as they prepare to apply to university.

A teacher herself, Tesh fills the novel with granular, lived-in details of the teaching experience that stress not just its challenges, but the scope it offers for creativity and self-expression. A standout scene sees Saffy auditing a GCSE seminar, highlighting the delicate, skilled way in which the teacher leading the discussion manages to direct it in certain avenues while leaving students the freedom to develop their own ideas. Much of Saffy’s work involves negotiating her students’ fluid, in-between states: recognizing when they need to be treated like children, and when to be respected like adults. There is a tremendous fondness towards young people running through this book which feels like both an extension of, and a response to, the way that much of YA fantasy treats one’s sixteenth and seventeenth years as the sole defining moments of a life. Yes, these are near-adults making impactful decisions, Tesh and Saffy seem to be saying. But they are also young, inexperienced people, who deserve a space in which they can experiment, make mistakes, and change their minds.

It’s with this attitude in mind that the novel sets up what initially seems like its main plot, when the students of Saffy’s A-level Invocation class accidentally summon a demon much larger than they can handle. The incident gives Saffy—a Doctor of Thaumaturgy who turned down offers from defense contractors and intelligence agencies to go into teaching—an opportunity to strut her stuff. It also puts her in conflict with Laura Kenning, the school’s Chief Marshal, a magical cop allegedly in place for the students’ protection, but whom both they and Saffy distrust. [1] As Saffy and Laura clash, it becomes clear that the demon the students called has not slunk away after being dismissed by Saffy. And also that it and she have a connection—when a student at Chetwood herself, Saffy and another student called this same demon; only she lived to tell the tale.

Here, again, we see Tesh’s fondness for playing with the conventional storytelling forms of the fantastic genres. In another writer’s hands, this premise—a teacher haunted by a youthful failure, stepping up to protect a new generation of young people—would be the substance of the whole novel. In The Incandescent, it takes up only its first half. What follows initially feels like housekeeping: Saffy must steer the school board to prevent them from pinning all the blame on a talented scholarship student; she and Laura, having shared a near-death experience, realize that there might be a spark between them; Chetwood is assigned a posh new security consultant, whom Saffy is alternately charmed and repelled by. There’s so much running to and fro in these chapters that it’s easy, at first, not to notice that they are subtly poking at many of the truisms that the book, and Saffy, presented to us in its first half. “[Walden] wore her adulthood like armour,” we’re told as she prepares to face off against the demon menacing her students. If you’ve amassed some distance from your own teenage years, there’s something incredibly attractive about this image. The idea that the things we’ve done, learned, and accumulated since childhood give us strength is something that popular fiction often seems ignorant or skeptical of, and it’s hard not to be won over by the image of the badass teacher whose maturity and life experience are an asset rather than an impediment. But what works as armor can also function as a mask, and by the time we learn that Saffy has bound a powerful demon to her service—something she keeps telling her students they should absolutely never attempt, while repeatedly assuring Laura that she is fully in control—it’s hard not to wonder how much of what Saffy tells us about herself is a self-serving narrative.

Already in the first half of the novel there are hints that Saffy is a bit of a bullshitter. “When you spend your days with teenagers, you age fast,” she tells Laura in one encounter. “Spiritually, if not physically, I really am an ancient crone.” Not long after, however, she observes that the school environment “brings out everyone’s inner teenager.” This isn’t a lie, of course—both of these things can be true at once. But it speaks to the sort of person who likes to spin narratives, to present their interlocutors with a coherent system of the world while obscuring the places where they have fudged or simplified the details—to lecture, in other words.

What The Incandescent does in its second half is poke at the foundations of those lectures, and thus at the image that Saffy has woven around herself. Having spent the first half of the novel in her head, we have gotten used to thinking of Chetwood as she does, as a lumbering edifice kept going mainly by inertia, with an enormous endowment that is nevertheless just barely keeping ahead of its expenditures, ancient facilities that are impossible to heat and illegal to tear down or remodel, students housed in a brutalist ’60s monstrosity, and a boiler constantly threatening to either die or explode. It takes a moment of frankness from Laura to remind us that there is, of course, another side to all this.

Laura snorted. “That’s just Chetwood all over, isn’t it?” she said as they struck out for the country lane that led back from the village towards the school gates. “Like living in a theme park. Acres of countryside—weird little chapel—teachers in fancy dress for assembly—tennis courts, rowing lake, a school golf course for crissakes […] you walk in somewhere like this and you think, ‘Fucking hell, this exists? This is real? All these kids, do they think it’s normal, living in a picture postcard?’ Little bit of bitterness, maybe. ‘Why didn’t I have this?’ And the answer is I didn’t have the sense to be born to parents with more money than God.”

There are counters to this argument, of course: Chetwood has a generous scholarship program; the kids who attend it are real people whose difficulties in making the journey to adulthood are not alleviated by having access to a golf course; most importantly, this system is not of Saffy’s making, nor is it possible for her to change it. Nevertheless, as she goes on to acknowledge, for all the challenges of her job, she is doing teaching on easy mode, with lavish facilities, small class sizes, and a student population drawn from mostly stable backgrounds.

Early in the novel Saffy bristles at the memory of a former girlfriend who dismissed her plans for a career in education as “babysitting.” Much of the first half of The Incandescent, with its in-depth look at the intellectual and emotional challenges of teaching, seems designed to counter this simplistic, misguided view of the profession. But this still leaves the thornier question of why Saffy has chosen to be a teacher, especially with so many other more lucrative, more respected alternatives on offer. She and Laura bond over being overqualified for their positions while still recognizing that people with their skills and dedication are necessary for those jobs to be done well. But as Mark, the security consultant who joins Chetwood in the second half of the book, points out: “If you really thought the best use of your time was, what was it, making a nasty world a little bit fairer for all the poor innocent children, then you could be teaching GCSE Maths in some sad inner-city comp, couldn’t you?”

It’s a question that also occurs when Saffy tries to prevent Nikki, the student who nearly caused the school to be overrun by a demon, from throwing her life away (read: giving up a place at Oxford). This effort is complicated by the fact that it fundamentally boils down to a choice of selfishness. As Saffy admits, she made a similar error as a girl—that is, she summoned a demon—and then chose to keep having a life—that is, she went to Oxford—despite it. There’s a way of casting that choice in a noble light—“because I had a terrible experience which was my own fault, and learned from it, and kept learning […] I was in a position to help you that night. For that reason alone, Nikki, I don’t regret any of it.” But there is also, as Saffy admits to herself, another way of telling the story—one in which she was a privileged girl with a path laid before her, who would not allow herself to be swayed from that path, even by guilt over another child’s death.

It’s while she’s contemplating this question—including in debates with the demon she’s bound—that Saffy runs afoul of yet another supernatural menace. Again we see Tesh’s tendency to burn through story, but this time the results feel a bit unfocused. If the demon Saffy faced in the first half of the novel helped to clarify her personality and issues, the one she grapples with in its second half feels like a distraction from them. Much of the second half of The Incandescent has been spent in conversations about the ways in which Chetwood is emblematic of so many failings in the education system, and perhaps the capitalist system as a whole (if the novel is calling out Saffy’s tendency to lecture, it does so by letting her, and everyone around her, lecture even more). It’s hard, by this point, not to feel that demons are the least of everyone’s problems.

“[An] elite education was an investment in power,” Saffy muses near the end of the novel. “Magic was the least of what you gained at Chetwood. What mattered was the power to walk the walk and talk the talk, to have your résumé picked out of the pile and the interviewer already speaking your language. […] You could never completely future-proof your children. But power would keep them safe from the bitter grind of survival in a way that nothing else could.” There’s an echo here of the way in which, earlier in the novel, Saffy speaks about demons, and about Chetwood as a safe haven where magical children could be protected from them. But if the real danger that Chetwood protects its students from is the grind of poverty and the uncertainty of even a middle-class lifestyle, then why are we even still talking about demons?

Perhaps another way of putting it is that there is so much to say on this topic—on the realities of an education system that is still fundamentally class-based, and the way those realities are filtered through the fantasy genre without ever seeming to touch the sides—that a single novel is not quite equal to the task. By its end, The Incandescent is doing many things: talking at length about the fundamental flaws in the British educational system; tearing down Saffy’s self-delusions as it hones in on the things she has never admitted to herself; and yes, fighting off yet another demon. This is hardly a surprise coming from an author of Tesh’s skill, verve, and well-established proclivity for powering through story. But in this case one can feel the result straining at its seams.

Which, in a way, is a kind of compliment. I would have liked more time to spend with the flawed, complicated, amazing woman and teacher who is Saffy Walden, and with her conflicted ideas about class and education. And I would like more authors to pick up the gauntlet Tesh has thrown down, and think seriously about the magical school story as a story about education, and through it, class and power. For now, we have The Incandescent, a novel that is remarkable both in itself, and as a call to action.

Endnotes

[1] The Marshals’ presence in the school is a detail that feels as if it was taken less from English private schools than from American public ones, where school resource officers are often accused of criminalizing non-white students and feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Perhaps for this reason, Tesh touches on this issue only glancingly, giving Saffy the occasional zinger against the Marshals—“Let’s face it, Laura. If a person is any good at demon hunting, then they don’t apply for the job where the most difficult thing they have to do on a daily basis is intimidate children”—but eventually coming to treat them, and especially Laura, as allies. [return]

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