When it comes to a story about immortals, it’s only natural that the setting will jump around and this time we go the farthest back in the Baccano! novels so far, 18th century Italy. There is a small enclave of alchemists in the town of Lotto Valentino, a town that’s unusual for being relatively free of Spanish rule, churches, and over-bearing nobles. Young Huey Laforet doesn’t care very much about any of those details however — still grieving the loss of his mother to a witch trial years earlier, Huey studies intensely at the alchemist’s school but the only future he can see for himself is destruction. But no one else in Huey’s life is quite so nihilistic and perhaps he can be convinced to care at least about some of the strange murders going on in town.
A decent chunk of the Baccano! cast is centuries old in the “present-day” volumes and one thing I’ve been looking forward to is getting to know more of their pasts. 1705 The Ironic Light Orchestra only covers the backgrounds of two characters, Huey and Elmer (well, except for one additional, surprising reveal towards the end of the volume, which left me quite literally swearing out loud at Narita in a guest bedroom), who’s close relationship with each other seems to baffle everyone in-universe at least. Elmer has barely gotten any time in the novels up to this point: he was one of the main characters in 2001: The Children of Bottle but I believe he had been “missing” for several decades by that point and can’t remember him coming up in the 1930s light novels. Huey however has gotten more time, both as a vague antagonistic force in the 1930s and as a more concrete, actual person that time some of the cast took a trip to Alcatraz and then Huey tried to blow up Chicago (Volume 8, 1935 Alice in Jails: Prison, Volume 9, 1934 Alice in Jails: Streets, Volume 10, 1934 Peter Pan in Chains: Finale). However, 1705 gives us a much clearer view of both characters and one that shows that time doesn’t heal all wounds.
Even by this point in their lives, Huey and Elmer have been quite a lot and these tragedies are still shaping them in the 20th and 21st centuries. They’re both orphans in the world and if Huey didn’t have to leave his living quarters to get books from the alchemist’s library I suspect he would be a total recluse. He’s not actively seeking out the destruction of the world but he’s also not seeking out any reason to engage with anything, it’s only a combination of Elmer’s relentless yet force optimism that gets Huey to consider doing or viewing anything different although really, it’s Elmer’s shared dark past that seems to intrigue Huey more than anything else. Elmer was straight-up rescued from a cult and, as many other characters have said, his determination to have give people genuine smiles at any cost or reason makes him possibly the most unsettling character in all of Baccano! (a group of characters which also includes a literal demon and multiple torturers I might add).
While these two characters, especially Huey, are the main “focus” of the volume, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that their a part of the main “plot,” if anything they’re just passersby to a plot about mysterious murders and drugs. Given how detached both of them are from the world (Elmer possibly even more so than Huey) that makes sense, but it’s still funny on a meta-level to see Narita introducing a whole side-cast of weird nobles, samurai (?), and other alchemists without much weight given to them. Speaking of which, it’s also funny that it’s in this volume, practically a side-story, that Narita finally answers a question I’ve long been wondering: if all it takes to create an elixir of immortality is to summon a demon, has anyone else pulled that off at some point? (Not that I have any idea how difficult it is to summon a demon.) We’ve seen other characters spend literally centuries on trying to create the elixir without demonic intervention (and Slizard was the only one who succeeded in creating a “full” immortality potion) but it appears that we now have proof that either someone beat Slizard to the punch by who knows how many centuries or that Maiza isn’t the only one who knows how to summon a demon. We’ve seen a few different variations on immortality in Baccano! so far and I’m not sure precisely which type we’re dealing with but it appears that yes, there are other immortals, unconnected to the main cast. That opens up a lot of new avenues for shenanigans for Narita, provided that any of them are still alive by the 2000s (though it appears that at least one of them is still around by the 1930s).
While this volume had less “action” than previous volumes, the introduction of new characters, a new setting, and possible new wrinkles in the world made it a read that was just as enjoyable as all of the previous volumes. Fans certainly shouldn’t look at this volume as one to skip, especially as we’ll return in volumes 15 and 17, inching ever closer to that fateful night on the Advena Avis.