The Tinder Box by MR Carey

Prolific and diverse speculative fiction author MR Carey reimagines a Hans Christian Andersen tale in his latest book The Tinder Box. That original story followed a soldier who finds a magic tinderbox that allows him to summon forth vicious dogs who help him get what he wants. Being a Hans Christian Andersen story it is fairly bloody and the moral of the story seems to be: if you have power use it to get what you want. MR Carey takes the basic premise and some of the beats of the original story to craft something that is still fairly dark but more interesting and more palatable.

The Tinder Box is set in a fictious (or perhaps, as the forward suggests, forgotten?) medieval middle European country. The protagonist, Mag Tresti, is an ex-soldier cashiered due to injury and finding it hard to make a living in a country decimated by war. He ends up getting work with a widow called Jannae Mirchella. He slowly comes to understand that Jannae is a witch and it is those powers that prevent her from looting the body of a demon that crashes dead onto her land. Instead, Mag searches the body and brings everything to Jannae except for a battered tinderbox which he escapes with. He soon finds that the tinder box has the power to summon three very different demons who are bound to follow his commands. Mag also soon realises that Jannae is on his tail, keen to take the tinderbox and its power for herself.

This is the set up for a story that becomes much more complex as it goes. Carey goes into detail on Jannae’s somewhat tragic backstory, Mag learns of an ongoing war between angels and demons and both of them are being pursued by the King’s powerful adviser who has been collecting magic artefacts and wants the tinderbox for himself. Adding all of this complexity allows Carey to twist the original story into interesting new shapes while still somewhat maintaining a fairytale feel.

The Tinderbox is above all a great reinvention of what seems to be a minor and mostly forgotten Andersen tale. Carey has taken most of the basic elements and given them much more depth and interest. But he also anchors the story around Mag and Jannae, two characters who are more complex than their fairytale originals. After his most recent foray into post-apocalyptic tales (The Book of Koli), multiverses (The Pandominion series) and another more medieval fantasy (Once Was Willem), fairy tale reinvention in The Tinder Box is yet another successful string to Carey’s bow.

The Tinder Box by MR Carey

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8.0/10