Tag: Fantasy

I Have Been Obliterated By 1 Million Words of Power

In September I set off on an epic journey which I only barely survived. This journey was a walk from beginning to end through the three (sometimes four) volumes of Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn series. I chose to confront this series in the form of three audiobooks, because 1) my family had three Audible audiobook credits hanging around and I’m always trying to get my father to cancel his various Amazon subscriptions, but he wouldn’t do it until I spent his extra credits; 2) the books are so long I felt they would be annoying to read in heavy corporeal format; 3) the audiobooks are narrated by one Andrew Wincott, whom you may know from a recent tour de force voice role; and 4) I like audiobooks. When I listen to audiobooks, do I catch every single word the way I do when I read on paper? No, but the claim that I catch every word while reading on paper is also a delusion, especially when I’m sleepy.

Why did I choose to confront Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn at all? A review at Christian Century magazine, of all things. And by far this series is the finest book recommendation I’ve gleaned from that publication.

Though it demanded an enormous amount of time to complete (33 hours + 32 hours + 63 hours), Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn rewarded my investment a hundred times over. Though I have complained in these very pages about my intolerance of slow burn romance, I am prepared to suffer an enormous number of pages for a good slow burn plot. Here Williams accomplishes that with aplomb.

To condense violently a sprawling and exceedingly intricate cast of characters and circumstances, this trilogy concerns the development of Simon/Seoman, a bumbling and naive scullion who grows up among the many servants of the Hayholt, royal castle of the land of Osten Ard. Within the castle lives King Prester John, beloved uniter of the many diverse principalities of Osten Ard, and his two sons, Elias and Josua. When Prester John dies and Elias ascends to the throne, things in the Hayholt begin to change, and soon things all over Osten Ard change as well–most notably the weather. Simon and his mentor, the wizard Doctor Morgenes, investigate, and soon Simon finds himself at the center of a centuries-long conflict fueled by the boundless hate of an ancient elvish revenant called the Storm King, a monster who can only be defeated with the power of a prophecy concerning three magical swords: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.

So far I expect this sounds quite standard fantasy to you, and if I told you that during his travels Simon meets a rebellious princess, a wise old witch, and a funny little Arctic gnome-type dude, that would not dissuade you from presuming Williams’ work is derivative.

But for Tad’s sake I will object. Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn mobilizes familiar fantasy tropes for structural purposes, settling the reader on familiar ground, but Williams probes these tropes with a weather eye and a deep interest in his characters’ emotional landscapes, and in doing so produces an epic fantasy which is shockingly, piercingly relevant as a guide and a comfort for how to live in terrifying times.

On the throne, Elias fails to rise to his sainted father’s example. He surrounds himself with greedy, vain, and self-interested nobles who plunder Osten Ard’s provinces. He takes up the cursed blade Sorrow and descends into madness, turning on his own daughter, Princess Miriamele, as well as his brother Prince Josua. At the same time, the Storm King’s influence breaks the reliable wheel of the seasons, bringing on an endless winter. One thing which sets this trilogy apart from other famous fantasy series (which I have also enjoyed) is Williams’ thoroughness in depicting the real, material cost of evil. Wherever our heroes go, they see peasants displaced, fields lying fallow, children abandoned. Elias’ selfishness and cruelty allow the Storm King to sweep his influence across the land, sowing starvation and mass death, the tools to complete his genocidal ends.

Though the story of the trilogy is Simon’s at heart, Williams adopts many eyes with which to observe it. The reader watches the struggle against the Storm King and Elias at the shoulders of Josua, Miriamele, the Duke Isgrimnur, the scholar Tiamak, the Hayholt cook Rachel, and even Elias’ corrupt allies Guthwulf and Fengbold. Williams captures the continent-spanning conflict through its immediate material and emotional impacts on the characters. Each character is marked not only by the role they play in the struggle, but by the manner in which their natures constrains their ability to play that role well. Josua is a towering achievement in character writing, a figure whose torments and triumphs will linger with me. Here Williams deconstructs the heroic hidden king figure a la Aragorn by creating a man who strives to be good and to lead, and yet is hobbled by his own nature. Josua is melancholic and critical, unable to sit comfortably in his relationships and dogged by his own inadequacies. He does lead our heroes bravely, but the question of whether he ought be king if his brother falls hangs uncertainly over him. He is not a perfect man, a perfect husband, or a perfect leader, and to sit with him as he faces near-certain destruction again and again is to be reminded of one’s own fallibility. Facing down his weakness and failure is what allows Josua to outdo the evils arrayed against him.

Despair is the real villain of Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn. Despair rises on the cold winds commanded by the Storm King to chill our heroes’ will to fight back, threatening to atomize them into a disparate collection of mourners. Sorrow is the great weapon of the Storm King and Elias, LITERALLY. Whom the sword touches, it drives mad, making them an addict to its presence. Multiple characters slide into depression, usually well-justified, and Williams’ exploration of self-hate and self-immiseration finds its grandest expression in the fallen priest Cadrach, whose bitterness nearly collapses the whole fight against the Storm King.

This is why Simon must be the central figure of the trilogy. When the story begins, Simon is the bane of his foster mother, Rachel the cook, who wishes he would stop daydreaming and start doing his chores. Simon’s detractors call him “mooncalf”, a reference to his overweening flights of fancy. As he journeys through more and more terrifying situations, Simon grows up, but he does not lose his wild imagination. This inability to close his mind to the world allows him to connect with the elven Sitha unlike any other mortal, and it also gives him a great horror of the evils of war when he finally witnesses them. It is this power, not fighting skill, which puts Simon in place to defeat the Storm King as no one else can. This climactic moment echoes the finale of The Lord of the Rings, in that the unassuming hero brings down the unfathomably powerful villain by finding their one weakness, but a critical difference lies in those means. Simon is closer to the martial hero archetype associated with fantasy than Frodo is, as in the course of his adventures he slays giants and duels dragons and falls in love with a princess. But Simon does not slay the Storm King by force of arms. He defeats the Storm King by his willingness to see the Storm King, an incorporeal monstrosity fueled by ancient hate, as a being undeserving of suffering. He interrupts the hate which has enchanted him and his companions into serving their nemesis. I suspect this might be why Christian Century liked the series, but I believe the core sentiment is of value to those of us outside the faith as well.

Simon can imagine what it is to be his enemies, what has driven them to destroy his home, and so he can deny them. He can prevent them from making him like them. He endures profound suffering at the hands of the Storm King, and still does not consider the Storm King unworthy of compassion. While I don’t necessarily agree with the all-encompassing forgiveness doctrine of Christianity, I do agree with Williams’ proposition that turning towards the humanity of your enemies allows you to interrupt the destructive kind of hate which blinds you to actual solutions. The mad rush towards defeating the Storm King prevents our heroes from examining their means and almost prevents them from achieving their goal. Simon, burdened by an inability to stop wondering and dreaming, is the only one who can stop at a critical moment to consider the way out.

When we leave the heroes of Osten Ard, they have rescued their lands from the mad king and his ghostly puppetmaster. They have undone the evil magic which derailed their climate. They have lost a great deal. The conclusion of the series is not nearly as protracted or furiously appendicized as The Lord of the Rings. Every surviving character is addressed, but what is most thoroughly illustrated is the terrible aftermath and the long walk to recovery still ahead. Simon led the way out of the conflict with the Storm King, but the wreckage of the land endures. The work is not done. However, our heroes have much experience in rejecting despair; they will endure this as they have endured the quest against the Storm King, the deprecations of cruel King Elias. Despite their failings, they will rebuild.

At least until I pick up Williams’ sequel series and see what’s risen to torment them anew 😛

One thing long-time readers of the blog will know about me is that I’m incapable of starting a book series at the beginning. Another thing about me is that I am really good at avoiding touchstone pieces of media. The films of Martin Scorsese? Never seen’em. Super Mario? Don’t know him. Discworld? Never read any. Until now.

For a long time, I low-key avoided Discworld, despite its popularity and the many charming accounts of it I heard, because I don’t generally care for overtly comedic novels and I didn’t want to be That Guy who hates something everybody else loves, especially not when Terry Pratchett genuinely seems to have been a lovely person. I’ve read and enjoyed other Pratchett books, like Nation and The Long Earth, but I was never strong enough to confront his opus series.

Well, no man can run forever. Trundling over to the P shelf of the library’s SFF section, I examined the many Discworld titles available. I sought a Death story, as they’re such prolific furnishers of touching quotes posted out of context on TVTropes, but instead I found Night Watch. I knew the name “Sam Vimes” and I knew that he was a city guard who had vaguely noir-inflected adventures. Surely that’s more than enough information to steer one through a light fantasy adventure!

Somewhere a Discworld fan is crying. Because what I didn’t know is that Night Watch is apparently considered 1) the climactic entry in the Sam Vimes saga; 2) the darkest and most serious Discworld story; and 3) perhaps the best Discworld story of all. I am literally addicted to causing myself problems.

Night Watch begins with Sam Vimes, head of the Ankh-Morpork City Guard, in a bit of a tizzy: his wife is about to give birth to their first child, his men are marking the anniversary of a tragic day in city history, and an evil murderer is loose on the streets. When Sam pursues that killer, Carcer, on a rooftop chase at the magic college, he and Carcer are struck by an unusual bolt of lightning which launches them decades into the past. Sam realizes he’s returned to a pivotal period in Ankh-Morpork’s history and in his life: the early days of his career as a guardsman, when Ankh-Morpork’s citizens came together in widespread revolt against the city’s loathsome leader and his secret police. Worse still, Sam’s dropped into the role of his old mentor, John Keel, who died/will die in the revolt along with a number of Sam’s compatriots. All Sam has to guide him is his foreknowledge of the revolt’s events, and as Keel he has a flock of bumbling young guardsmen, including his own teenage self, to protect.

So we begin with exciting tensions already at play: Sam needs to get home to his nascent family in the present, but he also needs to ensure his younger self’s survival, but if he allows events to play out as they once did, he and his friends/charges will die. So Sam-as-Keel tries his best to change the path of the revolt, protecting everyone.

Pratchett makes this book, despite all its fantastical and ironic trappings, a studied, thoughtful meditation on the relationship between politics and people. The revolt in Ankh-Morpork comes out of deprivation and frustration, years of unhappiness and struggle for the everyday people. These people become fearsome because they have been beat down, abused, and exploited, and they turn on their oppressors with whatever tools are at hand. But who are those oppressors? Does ACAB extend to Sam Vimes?

I’m still pondering this question. Night Watch came out in the early 2000s, and it was written by a white British guy, so I did not expect it to reflect contemporary American policing discourse or to possess a particularly edgy bent. Pratchett does not explicitly question the existence of police or public safety officers. Instead, he explores via Sam the nature of public safety itself and the purpose of “our protectors”. While incompetent or cruel officers order constant escalations of force, Sam pulls back whenever the people of Ankh-Morpork push, establishes points of solidarity between the inhabitants of his neighborhood and the members of his watch, and always deescalates. He works the crowd and he staunchly and publicly rejects the secret police’s violence. His watch house is the only one not burnt down by angry citizens. I don’t know that this absolves him of being a cop, but it models a different kind of officer, one who serves the people, not the state, as Vimes states explicitly when he explains the Ankh-Morpork watchmen’s oath to his guardsmen. Vimes and his watchmen are not so much in charge as they are attentive and responsive to the needs of the city. 

Though Discworld is an intentionally campy and tropey sort of fantasy world, the view Night Watch provides on what politics, police, and people can accomplish is ruthlessly honest. Very few books I’ve read recently have said anything as true and as smart as when Pratchett observes “One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed with people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking” (I don’t remember what page that was on, and this isn’t academic writing, so I don’t have to; you will have to read the book to discover it).

In the end, Sam is able to soften the body count of the revolt, saving many civilians, and he apprehends the villainous Carcer, dragging him back to the present to face justice. He preserves his own moral standing, rejecting Carcer’s attempts to bait him into extrajudicial violence. But Sam isn’t able to save any of the boys from his watch. Though he averts the riot which originally killed them, still the men who died before die again at the hands of Carcer’s accomplices. He can’t change the murderous course of history, but he ends the book with an unexpected sense of joy for the memory of his friends and the people they saved.

Is Night Watch a good book? Yes. Is it a *copaganda*? I dunno. Though the action occurs on Discworld’s flamboyantly fantastical stage, the struggle itself springs out of thoroughly-realized and realistic systems, the same ones which harry us through our real lives. Pratchett gazes on the denizens of his world with a clear-eyed maturity which allows for gentle ribbing at times, but also a deep respect. Following that mode, I find it more productive to see Sam not as a single good apple cop, but as a character who demonstrates the power each of us possess to avert the worst in times of crisis. Maintaining our composure, managing our immediate circumstances, and connecting with those around us isn’t enough to prevent every disaster and save every life. But we can alleviate the suffering and soften the extremity of the crisis. Sam can rest easy when he arrives home to the present because he did everything worth doing, as well as he was able. That’s the sort of hero we can and should all aspire to be, and that Pratchett left me with some unanswered questions at the end of the book is not a mark of any failing as a writer, but rather his willingness to engage with complex ideas and his faith in me to work my way through them. I’m holding that trust, and I’m offering it to you.

Last week, I reported on P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout and The Haunting of Tram 015, as well as (sigh) Catherynne M. Valente’s Speak Easy. But they are not my only recent fantasy checkouts.

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia McKillip

Another barrier between me and Speak Easy may be that I don’t particularly care for fairy tale rewrites. Call me a fake feminist, call me a hater of fun, or call me a person who just isn’t super-interested in fairy tales – it’s up to you. Either way I was a little wary when I picked up this Patricia McKillip collection and saw a lot of familiar fairy tale titles in the contents.

I needn’t have worried. This is my first encounter with McKillip’s work, and I’m going to make sure it is not the last. Each of her stories in Wonders of the Invisible World is an artful, subtly engineered piece, her prose unshowy but perfectly calibrated, and her endings always perfectly timed. The stories leave me wanting more, and since it’s a collection I can turn the page and get another hit.

McKillip captures a glorious wonder at the possibilities and mysteries of magic, and her attention to the experiences of women in these fantasy settings is particularly compelling. While princesses and witches are familiar fairy tale heroines, McKillip investigates the everyday predicaments and dissatisfactions of women with a clear-eyed kind of feminism that inspires reflection. Jack O’Lantern and Naming Day root themselves in the very mundane humiliations endured by women since time immemorial, and then deploy their fantastical elements to produce a brief but wondrous liberation for their female characters. They have a truly mature loveliness that sees the humanity and complexity of everyday life, not just the badassery of grand defiant heroes.

A few of her stories are a little too gentle for my taste, using their fantastic elements to shy away from the harshness of real life, but perhaps that’s the value of fantasy: we can struggle and suffer and in the end all come home safe. And other stories in the collection are chillingly clear-eyed about their subjects: the best of these, Xmas Cruise, is a heart-wrenching comment on climate change and environmental degradation, and shockingly prescient for a story from 1993. As with her feminist stories, McKillip uses her unerring gaze to lay bare the weaknesses which keep us from saving either ourselves or the other beings which inhabit the Earth.

All of her particular talents come together in the collection’s final story: The Doorkeeper of Khaat. This piece conjures up a fully realized science fiction world, inhabited by familiar yet alien cultures, and sets them spinning around a young poet, whose idealism and romanticism are obviously fated to be his doom. The story darts around all expected resolutions to settle into a meditation on the mysteries of love and loyalty across generations and cultures. How far would you go for someone you loved? And what kind of person do you become when you stand between worlds?

All of the stories in Wonders of the Invisible World are good, and besides those already mentioned I also enjoyed Knight of the Well, an eminently satisfying fantasy mystery. Each of the stories I’ve mentioned in this review could have been dragged out to a novel’s length, but McKillip deploys a deft hand in keeping them at exactly the right length to intrigue, amuse, and ultimately leave one wondering. I will be returning to her work posthaste.

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

I don’t remember where I first heard about this book – probably on one of the millions of other SFF blogs I follow. I have not read any of Nghi Vo’s other books, and I’ve been afraid to buy them because they’re so short. I can’t afford $8 for an afternoon. Well, okay, now that I write it out, that is less than I’d pay for a movie ticket, but the movie also doesn’t come live on my already-overstuffed shelf after I watch it.

All this to say, I didn’t know what awaited me within the pages of The City in Glass, but luckily it proved to be pretty sick. The setting, themed around a vague Classical Era Mediterranean vibe, drew me in, as I have been a Hellenic wonk since childhood. I’m also continually interested in the lives and minds of long-lived spiritual beings like angels and demons, and this fed my fascination with the psychology of things which can’t die and (pretend that they) can’t change.

The book is a short, speedy account of the aftermath of a city’s smiting and the grieving process of an immortal demon who has lived in the city since its early days. The demon, Vitrine, has spent her endless days cultivating the city like a garden, nurturing it into a wild and wealthy trading hub full of brilliant and debauched citizens. So of course a group of angels show up to spoil the fun. They destroy the city utterly, obliterating all life in a chillingly nuke-like spectacle, except for Vitrine, who cannot die. In her anger, she pierces one of the angels with a powerful curse: love for her. The angel, experiencing debased emotions like guilt and shame for the first time, is barred from his celestial home, and comes to reside with Vitrine in the ruins of the city, despite her hatred.

Vitrine and the angel proceed to have a world-historically toxic relationship (slay!) while slowly the city reestablishes itself around them. There’s fascinating ambiguity around the power and influence of the immortals, the question of whether the city would have risen again without their interference. Throughout its restoration, Vitrine and the angel push and pull at each other, driving at each other with searing philosophical questions and plucking favorites from among the mortals inhabiting their domain. In the end, their relationship hits its climax in tandem with the climax of the city’s resurrection, and all come together (lol) in a bloody and delirious whirlwind.

Fundamentally, this is a book that is mostly about very literally unrelatable characters discussing ethics and philosophy while toying with very briefly alive human beings. I can see how this is all a tremendous turn-off for some people (the weak…), but for me it’s a rare delectation. It’s a short piece which does not overstay its heady concept, it moves quickly and skillfully across thousands of years, and it offers, as its culmination, perhaps the most gloriously improbable sex act I can imagine. What higher praise can one offer?

In conclusion, my return to library usership has been a smashing success. I still managed to mostly select books that I really enjoyed, but at least they were different from my usual fare. I guess my taste is just too good… I must continue to dare, and trust that in my eventual fall we will discover some truly exciting reviews.

With a newly minted library card in hand, I’m excitedly exploring the stacks of my local with a mind to dare. For the last year or so, I’ve been in a between-residences limbo which denied me the comfort of a local library to call my own. This has increased the general cowardice of my reading, in that I don’t want to spend money on books I don’t know I’ll like. Thus, my book purchases have all been the glowingly reviewed work of authors I’m already convinced are lit. Honestly, I’m getting bored of the book reviews I’ve been posting here because they’re all so relentlessly positive. 

But no longer! I came home from my first trip to the library with a varied collection of short fantasy works to peruse, which I will describe for you here, and in a second post next week.

Ring Shout and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

I’m already cheating the requirements I set out above, because I did pick these due to a prior appreciation of Clark’s work. I heard many positive endorsements of Ring Shout when it came out, and I enjoyed the first Dead Djinn in Cairo novella. And both novellas met those standards.

Ring Shout tells the story of Maryse, a Black woman who hunts KKK demons in the 1920s American South. A Buffy-esque monster-slayer, Maryse deals with her tragic past and romantic troubles alongside the fiendishly literal monstrosities of American racism.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 follows two paranormal investigators in the steampunk Cairo of Clark’s earlier Dead Djinn stories as they attempt to exorcise a mysterious spirit from the public transit system.

Ring Shout is the showier and more ambitious of the two novellas, pulling together magic, history, and a spiky metaphor to make a short adventure that strains a bit in its truncated length. There’s certainly enough material within the novella to populate multiple books or an entire TV season. Though many alluring elaborations lurk in the story’s corners, Clark ignores the siren call of excess world-building because he has something he genuinely wants to say about the nature of hate and its close sibling violence. I’m not sure I entirely agree with what he proposes at the end of the story, but I continue to think on it. This is a better outcome than the story concluding with total author-reader alignment, because that’s a sign that what I’m reading isn’t going anywhere interesting, it’s just sucking up to me. Thankfully, Clark has actual ideas which can’t just be slurped up like slop.

In comparison to Ring Shout, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is Not That Deep. It’s a detective adventure story in one of Clark’s most fascinating alternate worlds. Honestly, as an enthusiastic dilettante historian of Southwest Asia, I would love for Clark to drop a world-building book about the Dead Djinn timeline, rather than keep piecing details together from the stories. However, as an advocate of art as a real thing worth doing, I must support Clark’s use of his worlds as backdrops for actual stories and not merely mental masturbation tools for nerds who love treating imaginary places as incontrovertible realities.

Anyway, Tram Car 015 is super-concise and super-enjoyable, using the very familiar detective story structure to have some fun with a spooky type of Central Asian spirit which was new to me. In the background, suffrage activists organize to pass a bill granting Egyptian women the vote. But this detail never fully connected with the main plot, at least in my reading, even though the spirit haunting the tram car preys specifically on women. The gory and fearsome legends surrounding the spirit also never quite paid off for me because the monster is ultimately defeated in a very clean fashion (though the resolution is clever and broadly satisfying). Tram Car 015 offers the pleasures of another episode of a favorite TV show – a good episode that isn’t the show’s finest – and that’s perfectly reasonable. I’d much rather live in a world overflowing with interesting projects from Clark, a wonderfully imaginative writer, than a world where I’m waiting eternally for him to produce one conclusive masterpiece. His popcorn stories are as tasty as his truffle risotto ones, if less filling.

Let the man cook!

Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente

In the introduction above, I complained about my overly positive reviews and hoped the library would allow me to explore a wider range of reactions. Well, the gods made good on my accursed wish. I picked up Speak Easy with curiosity, having enjoyed many of Valente’s short stories, but having also heard from folks who strongly dislike her writing. I never understood what irritated them so, until now.

Speak Easy is a fairy tale rewrite of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” which is also a Roaring ‘20s pastiche which is also an exploration of the toxic dynamic of a real life famous literary couple which also includes heavy allusion to the fairy characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Does this sound like too much? Even to me, a person who loved Riverdale?

It is. And it all strains beneath the ACME 1000-lb weight of Valente’s overdone ‘20s slang narration. The story is buried beneath an incomprehensible quantity of period-appropriate slang, the writerly equivalent of a living room with crazy print wallpaper and crazy print upholstery and crazy print lampshades and a big old crazy print rug, in that I felt vaguely nauseous the whole time and wanted to go home.

One might say this is an appropriate reaction to the debauched Jazz Age, to which I would say, “It also repeatedly made me want to stop reading the book, and the book is only 150 pages long.” I have read French postmodernist cultural critique that was easier to decrypt and more coherent than Speak Easy. So I now see the Valente-haters’ point. I’ll continue to read her short stories where I encounter them, but it may be a while before I pick up one of her longer works again.

So that’s a W and an L, but since I learned more about my own reading tastes, it’s really two Ws. Next week, I’ll report on the other two books I pulled on my first adventure as a licensed library user. Sadly, neither was disappointing.