Reading and watching roundup: Pulley, Walton, LeGuin (and Tesh)
21. Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow -- this is the sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and, hm. Pulley has a special trick of writing books that first sound like they won't appeal to me, then I start reading them and am really enjoying myself -- not on a popcorn level, I find them both enjoyable to read and good, and then something happens towards the end that leaves me going, "wait, what?" and then trying to figure out how I feel about it and whether I'm MEANT to feel conflicted, and thinking about that for a long time. Which is actually kind of impressive, especially if it's on purpose, and not just the artefact of some weird interaction between the way I feel about Pulley's characters and the way she feels about them, which, I confess, I still haven't figured out.
In 'Watchmaker' the "wait, what?" moment was Grace becoming the antagonist, and I was left feeling conflicted over whether I should thing she was completely in the wrong and Mori is a gentle soul who was doing everything for the greater good and occasionally acting in self defense, or whether Grace had a point and Mori *was* dangerous and not above acting selfishly. 'Pepperharrow'-- well. Spoilers! At first this book seemed to be willing to engage with the latter interpretation much more than the first book: Takiko seemed to believe Mori was dangerous (and seemed like someone who would know), as well as the head of his family, and Thaniel had that moment, after he learned that Takiko holds Mori responsible for the death of Kuroda's wife (and Mori seems to agree with that interpretation), where he thinks that "The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemteries of tery full of dead wives" -- and, like, that was great! I really like Thaniel's POV, but some acknowledgement that he is an unreliable narrator when it comes to Mori was very welcome, because I spent the ending of book 1 finding Mori's use of his powers a lot creepier than Thaniel seemed to, and this felt like acknowledgement that Thaniel was probably not objective on that score. But then... it turns out that Kuroda's wife volunteered, approached Mori herself and "gifted" her death to him to make use of, and really he was just carrying out her wishes because otherwise she would've had a horrible lingering death from illness -- it was, basically, assisted suicide for the greater good. Which, OK -- I didn't like that this uncomplicated Mori to a great degree, but it's OK if Pulley wants to make him less dark than I inherently see him as (more on which below), and it's actually kind of a neat use of his powers, and a neat bit of interaction between him and 'mundanes'. (I also kept trying to figure out if he was also trying to prevent WWII -- he clearly lived long enough to remember the atomic bomb, given his reaction to stopping in Nagasaki -- and not wanting to be at war with the Americans is the explanation he gives Pyotr. But I'm not sure I believe that Mori can change things on that scale, though I do believe he would try.) But apparently he did not tell Takiko the truth because he was afraid of her (or at least that's what he says; I'm assuming it's more likely that it was actually part of manipulating Takiko to have just the right attitude towards him to play her role in the gambit that plays out in this book, but I dunno, like I said, I tend to interpret him darker than I think I'm meant to...) The thing that got me was Takiko, once she learns the truth, choosing to sacrifice herself, basically -- which feels like the narrative validating that she was wrong to mistrust Mori and he is actually Good and Right.
Which, I dunno, man. Thaniel is quick to point out that just hastening the invention of the electron microscope, if it leads to a cure for TB faster, would save more lives than were lost in the events that brought it about; let's assume that's true. Let's even assume that in staging this Mori landed on a maximum of net lives saved; that there wasn't a more bloodless way to hasten the electron invention but have it arrive later, too late to save Thaniel (which I'm not at all sure I believe). That's still Mori making a specific choice of "these random strangers will die so that Thaniel and some other random strangers will live", and it's a choice I'm really uncomfortable with. Like, I would hate having Mori's abilities, because I would not want the responsibility for deciding those things, and I do think -- as he does too, I believe -- that exercising the making of such choices puts the person beyond Good and Moral status, even if they start doing it with the best and most selfless intentions (and I don't believe that Mori is selfless in his exercise of his powers). Because, like, I hate having to think about trolley problems in any event (I would be about as terrible as Chidi at it in any practical circumstances), but this is not just pulling a lever to decide whether to save five people and kill one or to do nothing -- this book shows that Mori goes off and builds a fucking railroad for the purposes of bringing about the trolley problem he wants, and that, to me, is a degree of premeditation that's really scary. Thaniel clearly does not agree with me, which is fine; Grace and Takiko seem to come around to at least the view of Mori being the lesser of other available evils, which I suppose is also fine, although it would be nice if there was some sympathetic character who was like, "cool motive, still murder" about it. More concerning to me is that I feel like Pulley thinks Mori is clearly in the right, and that bothers me more, because it makes me feel like I can't trust her? Me, I tend to be much more along the lines of the Duke of Choshi ("Now tell me,what manner of creature is it that waits for a person's darkest moment, and then appears from the shadows an says, I will save you; come with me?") and what seems to be Mori's own opinion: "'Evil. You're evil.' 'Yes.'[...] but he looked haunted, and sad, as though evil was a border he had crossed a long time ago and he was so deep into the country beyond that he could hardly remember anywhere else."
So that was my biggest problem with the book, which in fact is just the continuation of my problem with the first book. I also got kind of excited when the book opened with Grace's POV, but then she got shuttled off screen, and while I did enjoy Thaniel meeting up with her later and her contribution to the plot, it really drove home to me that Pulley isn't really interested in Grace as a character, only as a plot device -- she has a harrowing adventure and solves a scientific mystery and has some personal growth about Mori, but we don't get to see any of it except what she reports to Thaniel as necessary moments -- and that's frustrating to me. I was also puzzled by Thaniel thinking that Grace's animosity to Mori was because she wanted Mori to be interested in her and not in Thaniel. Grace's own thoughts -- "He was a quiet man, but she knew what it was like to be extremely clever in a very small space. You got bored." -- made more sense to me, though I definitely don't think that's all that drives Mori (but I'm willing to believe that Grace does, at least at that point.) (When I was complaining non-spoiler-ly to Best Chat about this book, ikel89 suggested I should read Bedlam Stacks because "it can't hurt you with Grace", and this is probably wise advice... XD)
I should mention somewhere, and it might as well be here, that I don't consider Mori failing to save someone, like Kuroda's wife, making him culpable of murder -- it's still Kuroda that killed her, even if Mori tells Thaniel it was him (and, well, I guess it was him physically that put her out of her misery, after Kuroda broke her skull). Takiko does hit him (and hurt him) after Kuroda's wife's death, but I don't see anything in the text that suggests she's done it before (other than Midori asking Mori if Takiko hurts him, and, well, I'm not sure her intent to hit him with a bottle counts even if it was serious enough that he reacted to it psychosomatically), and while I don't think there's an excuse for hitting one's spouse under normal circumstances, in this case even if Mori had not enabled/failed to prevent Midori's death, he absolutely helped Kuroda cover it up, and, like, accessory to murder of one's best friend is not a normal circumstance, I feel like. Not to mention that Mori could've stopped her easily if he'd chosen to. I do think it's an interesting parallel being set up between Takiko and Kuroda, but I don't think it's fair to her.
I do appreciate that at least Mori is allowed some genuine flaws, like being a misogynist apparently (not thinking women should vote, etc.) But also, hm, it does make me wonder that both books feature a woman antagonist or at least a woman who is in the wrong (and expiates her wrongness).
I did have another wait, what? moment in this one, though, shortly after Mori's return, which was the reveal that he had not anticipated Thaniel looking for him and worrying about him. Which is just... kind of ridiculous? He had apparently assumed Thaniel was just putting up with him for free rent, but... first of all he laid his plans at a time when he could still foresee the future, and even if he couldn't see clearly the outcomes of his plans of this gambit, surely there were various earlier "forks" that involved Thaniel where he would've been able to tell that Thaniel worries about him? It seems very unlikely that it wouldn't have come up at all. Second, even if he didn't KNOW with future-seeing powers, doing what he does means he has to be very good at understanding how people's actions and feelings are related, to understand people very well, and so not being able to interpret correctly how Thaniel feels about him, after 4 years together in linear time and a lot more than that counting the various futures and dead-ends he also has a memory of-- well, it just seems out of character for Mori?? Well, really, it seems like a bad writing choice, because I actually don't think it's necessary at all for Mori to have been clueless -- I would have bought any other number of explanations for his reserve, from thinking Thaniel and his English prudishness weren't up for anything more yet to the pre-emptive grieving that makes things difficult for him later on, or... just leave it alone? there are enough complications in Mori and Thaniel's individual and shared lives that "but does he looooove me" doesn't really need to be part of it. I just thought it was a weird choice.
Well, that's all the serious complaints out of the way. I have one more quibble, which is more of a puzzled feeling than a complaint, but I'll save it for the section where it belongs thematically. Now for the things I enjoyed, which is pretty much everything else.
When I first heard that the sequel was set in Japan, I was kind of disappointed because I have no particular interest in Japan as a setting, the flashbacks in Japan were the least interesting part of 'Watchmaker' for me, and I was not looking forward to a book full of stilted formal dialogue. But! I ended up LOVING the choice Pulley made with the Japanese dialogue, which she explains in her afterword; the result is not stilted at all but vibrant and hilarious, because in an effort to transmit the different levels of formality, she has a lot of characters talk in heavily colloquial terms, and it's really fun. I mean, I have no idea how it comes across to someone who speaks Japanese, but I personally was delighted by phrases like Tanaka's ""Yeah, mate, no offense, but will you fuck off?" But I do have a quibble on this score: the way people kept thinking of translations of the Japanese names struck me as really weird. I don't know if part of Pulley's Japanese scholarship opportunity thing was that the resulting project had to teach a certain number of Japanese words explicitly or somthing, but that's what it ended up feeling like. Like, OK, I don't speak Japanese, so maybe it's different, but it seems so weird to me that a native speaker, like Takiko, would flash to the literal meaning of common names (even if prompted by someone's purple scarf). Name translation games I believe in more, but that was a bit weird. And even Thaniel, who is clearly fluent at this point and presumably used to Japanese names, thinking of the literal meaning of Hikaru also felt odd, at least given what was going on at the time. On the other hand, I did learn a handful of Japanese words out of it, which is neat, I guess?
I was delighted to have Katsu back and to know that he survived the climax of 'Watchmaker'; I'd known *a* clockwork octopus was in this book but was thinking it was a diffrent one, Katsu 2.0, so knowing that he didn't perish in the explosion and only lost one tentacle was a very pleasant surprise. And he continued to steal the show as he'd done in the first book, cheering me up each time he appeared on page, accepting Pyotr's spoon and competing with the neighbors' cat and playing kraken with origami boats on a pool. ♥ Katsu! ♥
The other wonderful thing about this book for me was Six. I'd liked her as a little kid in the first book, but I REALLY liked her here. I can't say whether Pulley got everything exactly right, but I thought it was a really interesting portrayal of a child who was on the spectrum (though they don't have the words for that of course, and Thaniel just calls it being different), and gifted, and has survived some unspecified trauma in her workhouse years (""she tipped forward over her knees when somebody had told her she was in the wrong [...] It was appalling and animal. Thaniel hoped she didn't remember why she did it anymore.") I loved the interaction between her and Thaniel (and the way him being a father makes him feel kind of paternal towards the fresh-out-of-school juniors at the legation and the other young people he deals with), and the different relationship she has with Mori, who reassures her that he won't give her back to the workhouse if Thaniel were to die not by telling her he loves her but by telling her that Katsu lost the receipt he'd need to present (I really loved that moment), and lets her steal his watch so they can be linked by its golden chain. Six's unpredictability, possibly even for Mori, her peculiar manners but ability to make friends with both children and grown-ups, Thaniel's loving, deeply understanding-even-while-baffled frustration with her being able to handle the legation being on fire but not taking the "wrong" stairs to breakfast and "She wouldn't sulk if she was unhappy or angry. She would behave normally but then she would change all the door handles" -- I thought all of it painted a really cool portrait of an interesting character. Oh, and I loved that Six's choice of bedtime reading is a generator instead of a princess story because "I already know how princesses work" :D
I had not expected Mori to lose his ability to foresee the future as a result of this stuff, even though I suppose he must've known there was a very good chance it was coming, given the promise he gave Takiko. I liked the effects of it, though, like the revelation that he is terrible at directions (relatable!) and presumably only got around that before by remembering-from-the-future where he needed to go to find his way. That was a really charming detail! As always, thinking too much about parallel-futures powers makes my head hurt if I do it too much, but this had some neat applications of it, of course, like when I started to figure out that the guards dying off at the prison and the disasters befalling the other prisons was all Mori's clockmaker hand at work. Like Kuroda, I had assumed that Thaniel had been placed at the legation to save Akinori's life (I looked up him and Kuroda after encountering them, since they sounded like real people, and learned about the assassination), so was very surprised when that turned out not to be the case. Also, I'm now guessing that Mori showing Grace the carriage bolt at the end of the first book was less a threat and more of a nudge to get her to leave England and go to Japan and be in a position to do her part in accelerating the invention of the electron microscope. And the moment early on in the book, where he loses all his Russian -- that's the door closing on a future where he DID defect to Russia, right? That was cool!
The ghosts were neat, and genuinely creepy as well, before Thaniel and I figured out what they were. I actually did so a little ahead of him, in the monk's hut, as soon as we saw that thre could be ghosts of still living creatures (illustrated by the cat). I did NOT figure out that the reason certain people were seeing the ghosts was that fine particles in air revealed them, so that was cool. Also, there was a ghost T-Rex! (I don't think I needed to know about Mori's powers being legendary rather than randomly unique, or to have an explanation for why owls kept showing up ahead of him, but I also don't actively mind either of those things, so OK, I guess?) Oh, and the system for keeping Mori unbalanced using random numbers written down via the electrograph was very interesting, and the snatches of experimentation on Subject A suitably horrifying.
I had NOT expected the intensely gothic feel of the early part of this book, and I'm not really into gothics, but it worked really well, with Thaniel the outsider and rooms that can shift and translucent walls and nightingale floors -- the whole thing lended itself to a gothic treatment surprisingly well! And the moths, man! Ghost made of clairvoyantly delivered moths -- that was something!
I continued to like Thaniel's synesthesia and the elegant way it was integrated into his POV -- "the mist, most of it, was the noise of the birds. The world looked clearer when he covered his ears." , "Someone was walking over the nightingale floor, which made a constellation of white squeaks", "The safety catch snicked white", "Deep under the floor somewhere was that earthquake-purple thrum", etc. It's a really nice, distinctive POV trick that works very naturally. And also that he writes a symphony for Mori which is so vivid that Sullivan can recognize him from the music. In general the writing is really lovely, and I find Thaniel's POV pleasantly soothing until it turns quietly poignant -- he is a great POV character, as in the first book. I also really enjoyed Thaniel's first impressions of Japan, the first really unfamiliar thing being the telegraph poles being a different configuration than in England, being surprised by the familiarity of the clear cold mist that reminds him of Lincolnshire, feeling stupid by being blindsided by not everything being "cherry trees and temples".
Also, like, it's totally not the point, but I kind of liked Kuroda as a character, in his cheerful bully way, and would absolutely read Kuroda/Mori fic, because I feel like that's barely even subtext, what with Kuroda having him dressed up to have a flower on either side and anticipating his return to Japan with the excitement of his wedding night. Also this: "'Fuck you,' Kuroda wheezed, and kissed his cheek." XD And Kuroda's wife appears to be of the same opinion. (I mean, Kuroda is a terrible person who murdered his wife in a drunken rage, but he is interesting to have around and Mori acts interestingly with him.) And Takiko/Kuroda's wife, too, of course.
Quotes:
The Emperor: "It's Nagasaki. People will have sold them [the Russian fleet] fourteen different kinds of chicken and then stolen their lifeboats before they can even say privet"
"Like a banner, the old familiar joy of the fight unrolled in Kuroda's heart, dusty for having been packed away for so long, but no less bright."
"The light upset a heron, somewhere among the reeds. It made a prehistoric noise and clattered away."
Thaniel on his father's penny-pinching: "Really it had been a healthy experience, because now he knew that if anyone said 'it's the principle of the thing' then the correct response was to punch that person in the throat"
"Luggage had disappeared into the meticulous accounting of the ship's staff; it would appear at some point, though all the stewards seemed to think it was vulgar to ask."
"He wondered if he was hallucinating telegraphy. He hoped not. If you were going to hallucinate something, Morse was very dull."
Thaniel talking to the cook: "'I think I'm normally mannered, but Mr Vaulker seems like a...' You couldn't really say 'unreserved cock' in Japanese. It didn't translate. 'Difficult person.''
The cook about Vaulkner: "'I never know what he's saying' the old lady said, devastatingly unworried."
Kuroda thinking: "If Mori ever came across a rat, it wouldn't give him the plague; it would make friends, give him an enchanted present, and arrange for him to marry a moon princess before the end of the fortnight. Mori always ended up with princesses where everyone else got plague."
Kuroda on his wife: "She wasn't stupid. She wrote poetry, beautiful poetry. But she always pretended to be brainless, and he hated it, hated it like everyone hated concealed weaponry."
Takiko: "All the anger misted into the awful bleak frustration of being the strongest person in the room."
Takiko to Kuroda: "Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups."
"Arinori made friends with the lower orders like other people kept hamsters or songirds; he looked in on them every now and then to see if they were doing anything interesting, and if they weren't, he tickled them.'
The final exchange between Thaniel and Arinori:
"You're all right, you're all right. Get up."
There was a pause. "You know, I don't believe I am," Arinori said softly.
[...]
"No, look at me. Calmdown."
"I'm going to die."
"I think so. Better get it done properly." It was the worst thing he'd ever said.
Arinori let his breath out, and smiled, just about. "Yes. Good idea."
"'Miss Steepleton?' [Vaulker] added, in the patronising tone of people who hadn't met any chilren since they were children themselves. 'What do you say to Dr Willis?'
'Don't attack me again plase,' she said in her emotionless way."
"She'd never seen a dead person before, but, blanched in the cold, the body didn't look like a person at all anymore, just a clumsy impression of one; as though something lonely had tried to make a man from frost and shardsof birch bark." (this is such a stark, desolate image)
Thaniel re: the telephone: "Thaniel couldn't think of anything less civilised than making a terrible noise at somebody until they answered you. Everyone else on the Tokyo lines must have felt the same, because nobody ever telephoned unless they wanted to be rude."
The escape of people from the fear of Mt Fuji: "Nothing was right but what had been left on the side of the road."
"The man [House Mori captain] looked over Thaniel, Vaulkner, and Pringle as though he would rather leave Mori alone on the veldt with only some especially stupid giraffes for help, but he bowed back and turned away.'
"'Six,' Thaniel said, 'when someone's upset, you...'
'...consider it an objective problem with a solution.' She looked Mori over. 'Is a cherry bakewell the solution?' she offered, much more humbly."
23. Jo Walton, Among Others -- This book has been on my radar for ages -- it was the first context in which I'd heard of Jo Walton, but it had not crossed my path until now, and I'd heard enough mixed things about it that I didn't go out of my way to seek it out. Then I read my first Walton novel, The Just City, and my reaction was basically "huh" -- lots of interesting ideas, fairly enjoyable reading experience, but... I said in my write-up: "I didn't enjoy it in any of the ways I NORMALLY enjoy fiction -- I didn't love the world (it's interesting, but rather abstract and frequently wrong-headed, which is the point, but still), I didn't get attached to the characters (they all feel rather distant), I didn't get swept up by the plot (there isn't all that much of a plot, really), I didn't bask in the prose (it's quite utilitarian, for good reason, but there you go), and I didn't care about the theme (not a philosophy person). So, what added up to my enjoyment? I'm frankly not sure, but for all that, it worked for me in a way." I haven't picked up the sequels, and I think since I read it (it's been 4 years), my overall feelings have faded more towards the book just feeling kind of remote, in a number of ways, like, the opposite of visceral on a lot of axes, and me generally deciding that I strongly prefer Walton's writing about books to her fiction. But then Among Others was on Kindle sale for two bucks or something, so I went and got it, and, once my 'Pepperharrow' hangover wore off sufficiently for me to read otehr things, I cracked it open and unexpectedly found myself really engaged. I really liked this book??
I think the trick is, this book, which is a magical coming-of-age story that kind of takes off from a semi-autobiographical place, told in first person, in diary format, by a precocious teenage girl from Wales who loves sci-fi -- is basically the closest Jo Walton's fiction can get to Jo Walton writing about sci-fi books, which we've already established I really love. In fact, it was kind of an odd feeling at times, because on occasion Mori (the protagonist) would talk about books or authors who had been included in Jo Walton's Hugo book, so I knew Walton's personal opinions on them, and it was really interesting but odd to kind of have both in mind at the same time. It's not even that they are necessarily the same opinions -- mostly they aren't, because 21st century Jo Walton has the benefit of decades of SF reading experience and opinions that have had the chance to shift or deepen over time, and Mori, in the late 70s, has a lot of strong teenage passion. Like, Mori also doesn't seem to like Philip K. Dick books much, but she does not seem to have Opinions about him (the way I know Walton does), and she's still in the first flush of discovery with Dune, thinking about the attraction of being Paul Atreides and using the Litany Against Fear to protect herself against her mother, while I kept thinking about Jo's 'homeopathically good' comment about reading the sequels, and stuff like that.
I think I remember some reviews of this book complaining about Mori being... something? Not relatable, or not teenage-sounding enough or something else where she didn't really work for them as a character? Based on vague recollections of that, and my experience to date with Walton's characters, I was braced for that going in and instead I found Mori surprisingly relatable, actually! I mean, SPOILERS I did not grow up in Wales or go to boarding school or have a twin who died or a mother who was a mad witch, I did not have to deal with disability and chronic pain, and I was a toddler in the timeframe this book takes place, (and also I'm good at math), but those minor things aside, I actually felt like I could relate to Mori a lot. No, really, while the specifics are wildly different, there's a sort of broader feel to her childhood and young adulthood that I found very easy to understand, which made her a lot closer and more accessible to me than I'd been expecting: the idyllic childhood with a non-nuclear family, sort of being left alone to roam the landscapes of imagination, a major life shift around the transition to teenager (immigration for me, her sister's death and running away and boarding school for Mori), and, of course, poetry and SF. Different SF than I was reading at that age, for the most part, but with Lord of the Rings, ahaha, so much this, basically. That entry where she is LIVID at the temerity of anyone daring to compare anything to "Tolkien at his best" in a blurb, and holding this against Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Covenant books was, well, let me put it this way, if *my* Strongly Held Opinions about Tolkien from when I was fifteen survived somewhere, they would sound eerily similar, I suspect. (And, honestly, I still subscribe to a lot of the things Mori said about Tolkien. Especially: "The thing aout Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersian, this journey. It's not, I'm prtty sure, actually true, ut that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. [...] It is an oasis for the soul.")
After finishing the book I looked up a couple of reviews and they kind of made me go huh, even though objectively they were correct. One common thread of criticism was that nothing much happens in the book, which... is true, like, in term of over action. But it didn't FEEL like that to me, because Mori was experiencing tectonic changes even if outwardly they took the form of ordinary day-to-day stuff. One of the neat things is that it starts in such an unusual place compared to a normal genre story -- AFTER the protagonist has saved the world, in a way that's never even fully explained, because the book is not ABOUT that. She is victorious but altered in the experience, walking wounded, Frodo after Mount Doom, and you don't get many stories about that (LeGuin, a bit, in the later Earthsea books), and none that I can think of with a teenage protagonist, which is so interesting. The daily stuff Mori has to deal with, her loneliness and chronic pain (the part where she's in traction and starts out thinking that the doctor may not care about her but must know what he's doing and progresses from there, OUCH) and otherness at the boarding school and with her father's sisters, the conflict there that's completely mundane as well as the magical aspects -- it worked for me really well. The magic she does to bring about her karass, the enormous difference it makes when she has people to talk to about things she cares about, at last, and feels guilty about the magical manipulation aspects as well as the mundane "am I talking too much?" considerations -- that felt like enough of a plot for me. I also liked that Mori was both believably a clever, independent-minded teenager who reads Plato for fun and can discuss SF with grown-ups in a sophisticated and informed manner AND she had these huge blindspots that made me smile, like not realizing that Leonardo was also a scientist, wondering what happens if you eat kosher food when you're not Jewish, or the scene where Sam is telling her about his personal experience of the Holocaust, and suddenly she gets it, in a real way, clearly for the first time -- and her way of dealing with it is to think about writing a poem to say "Hitler, give me back my cousins," cousins, which is so very teenager while also being a legitimate way of working through one's too-big-otherwise feelings. And of course the way she filters everything new through what she knows from the SFF books she loves, like comparing the Communist Manifesto to LeGuin's Anarres and Plato to Brave New World, and musing that being (observant) Jewish is "like having a pile of geasas."
Another thing reviews mentioned was that the magic was such that it was completely deniable (which Mori herself lampshades) -- almost everything Mori experiences that is magical could be completely in her head; Wim does tell her he sees fairies when he is holding her walking stick, but, well, if everything else is in her head, I suppose that could be explained by Wim humoring her. Except the thought that the magic WASN'T real never even crossed my mind while I was reading the book -- I was completely in it with Mori, and the general feel to the magic I got was something like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin -- a magic that is so subtle and works through the existing liminal spaces of the real world for that kind of borderline feel (it was neat to see that EBear's review also noted the similar feel to Tam Lin). That the action climax of the book, inasmuch as it has one, was Mori's mother tearing pages out of Lord of the Rings and Mori's triumph was turning the pages into trees at the site of an abandoned factory in an echo of Isengard and Helm's Deep (and, OK, Macbeth) -- that felt really fitting. And speaking of the magical aspects, I quite liked the way the fairies were done -- that they're not really accessible, and that Mori doesn't really know what they are and can't always understand them perfectly, and that they can be either beautiful or grotesque or a mix of both, and that they are both helpful and menacing, often simultaneously, like Mori's faerie-gifted walking stick.
There's a lot of stuff going on in this book that isn't plot and is just... life being messy and complicated in all the tiny interactions and observations (I'm sure the book being stitched together from real autobiographical events, as it apparently was, has a lot to do with that). The class stuff, and the Welsh vs English stuff, and ableism, and sexual mores, and all kinds of things. Mori being loyal to Deirdre because Deirdre stuck by her but also finding her not very bright and not really the kind of friend she actually wants; Mori finding herself adrift from the friends she grew up with. At the SF club, Mori noticing that it's Harriet who brings in for discussion the two female authors (LeGuin and Tiptree after it's known that she's a woman); Janine taking sides around Wim's 'transgression' out of a feminist solidarity that's actually quite limiting (if Wim is telling Mori the truth, which he very well might not be); Hugh assuming he and Mori will become a couple because they're both 15 and not being a jerk about it when they do not but being confused (I wondered, from a couple of lines here and there if Hugh was actually supposed to be gay and either closeted or not having come to that realization yet: he mentions that "There were things that made me uncomfortable, in Dragonquest in particular" (when he answers "sort of" to Mori's question about whether he likes the Pern books, and then when Greg and Mori are talking about Hugh thinking he and Mori would be a thing, "Greg just laughed and said these things sort themselves out, and had I read McCaffrey? I don't know what that has to do with anything, but we talked aout Impressing dragons all the rest of the way back; and I also kind of wondered if some of Hugh's loyalty to Wim, on top of wim saving his life, or at least saving him from bullies, was also a bit of a crush) -- even in Mori's ideal, 'magic-summoned' karass people are still very much people, not idealized or flawless. I was kind of surprised by where things went with Wim -- I was mostly expecting him turn out to be a cautionary tale for Mori, but he didn't seem to be; although, of course, all we see of him is filtered through Mori's eyes and so might be a little too glowing. The other thing that surprised me was pretty much everything about Daniel, Mori's father -- he's such a weird figure, haphazardly trying to do right by Mori, belatedly, most of the time, and not very good at it, circumscribed by the life his sisters tethred him to (this was actually the one place in the book where the idea of magic as explanation felt more wish-fullfilment-y on Mori's part to me than real -- it's such a handy way to justify why he left, why he's kind of a flake, and maybe even the pass he makes at Mori when drunk, which she feels isn't even really incest since they're essentially strangers -- that the revelation that Daniel's sisters are witches who are controlling him was the closest I came to wondering if maybe the magic stuff was all in Mori's head.)
Another thing that the book did that I wasn't sure what it was doing with that was the revelation, fairly late on, that apparently Mori (whom everyone assumes is Morwenna) actually assumed her sister's (formal) name/identity? i.e. she is actually Morganna? It was mentioned so offhandedly that for a while I wondered if I'd misread that/made that up, but then I stumbled on Walton's Q&A about the book, and apparently it was really a thing -- part of Mori's grief reaction. (Another thing I noticed that looked like a trauma reaction but was never I think fully explained was Mori insisting on having her bag with her at all times, being the one to carry it -- not the contents of it, since she's happy enough to offload books, etc. to other people to help carry, but the bag itself. Well, trauma and/or magic, I guess, and I kind of like that it's not clear and probably both.) Oh, and I also appreciated Jo's answer to the question about Wim, down at the bottom of the linked page.
That page also links to a video interview with Jo (moderated by Nancy Pearl of the Four Doorways thing), which was both really interesting and occasionally hilarious. The talk about Among Others is in the middle, and had some (fairly depressing) nuggets about the autobiographical nature of the book: "All the bad stuff is true and all the good stuff is made up." She couldn't have written the book if her parents were alive -- either of them could've sued her. Also, Jo is VERY FIRM that the fairies and magic are real. (A discussion on how you don't necessarily "outgrow" magic as a grown-up led to this gem: "I've stopped looking for doors to Narnia not because I've stopped believing in them but because I've stopped wanting to go through them. [...] It's not growing up -- it's being happy.") I also really enjoyed her discussion about how it took her years -- being a mother and seeing her son go through this -- to figure out that part of the difficult time she was having those years was the conflation of the universal turmoil of adolescence and the disruptive situation in her life (leaving her grandparents and going to boarding school) that happened to coincide with it, but she just didn't know how to separate them at the time. I think that's a strong part of what I was reacting to as relatable with Mori -- I didn't have the unhappiness and not really loneliness so much either (I never really yearned for a karass, not being deperived of my closest friend all of a sudden, like she is, but also, at 11 I had met R and we were starting to become the kind of friends that Mori yearns for, though R had not been a reader before she met me). Also a thing she said about her childhood in South Wales made another point of commonality fall into place: it's not only that I had an idyllic childhood where I could sort of roam around unsupervised in a world stamped with an overlay of my imagination, it's that the underlying world was, as Jo puts it, a depressed area -- 80s Ukraine was quite far behind, economically, the world I entered lately, but it never felt like a lack. And a final bit from the interview that made me (and the audience) laugh: Jo reported going to her editor (PNH) and being concerned, like, "Patrick, this book is going to be completely incomprehensible if you haven't read LotR." And PNH responded, "Well, Renaissance painting is completely incomprehensible if you haven't read the Bible" -- which I like on all levels as a response :D
Quotes:
"I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now."
"All that I know about Judaism comes from A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dying Inside. Well, and the Bible, I suppose."
"Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people."
"And there's no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it."
"It's cheering, especially after reading Chekhov yesterday. I'm so glad I'm not Russian."
"There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head." [from Mori's litany of things worth living for, like finding out what happens at the end of Babel-17]
"I got quite drunk on Eliot and was lat for Latin and got an order mark. I got revenge y translating Horace just like Eliot, and she couldn't say anything, because it was also accurate." (I must say I adore this form of revenge XD)
About her mother: "(She has read LOTR, and I don't know if she read it identifying with all the evil people [...] This proves that just reading it isn't enough. After all, the devil can quote scripture.)"
On a production of The Tempest with a female Prospero: "I read him as a man who is remote, and good to bother with a toddler, but a woman like that would be too unnatural for sympathy. [...] -- how intresting that what comes out as doing the best he could in a man looks like neglect in a woman." And at the end, referencing the same play, she says, "I'll never drown my books or break my staff."
"It almost makes it worse that I'm going to see him tomorrow than if it wasn't for a week. I'd braced myself for that."
"I've noticed before that there are two kinds of people for going round castles. There are the ones who say 'And here's where we'd put the boiling oil and here's where we'd put the longnowmen,' and the ones who say 'And here's where we'd put the settee, and here's where we'd hang the pictures.' wim turned out very satisfactoril to be of the first camp."
"If you love books enough, books will love you back."
And from Walton's intro: "So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal uner them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though."
Also, it was very cool that the book got an intro from Ursula LeGuin, whose books are mentioned in Mori's diaries (though Mori is rather certain that even LeGuin is not fit to stand next to "Tolkien at his best" :P) and whose quote serves as one of the epigraphs of the novel. Just, everything being part of the Great Conversation, as Ada Palmer would put it, actually going back and forth for once, and it's really neat to see.
So, anyway, that was Among Others and I liked it a surprising amount! I suspect that it was kind of a perfect storm of a Venn diagram overlap between thing Jo Walton is doing in this book and things I like to read Jo Walton doing, but I'm really glad to have finally read it.
24. Emily Tesh, Drowned Country (sequel to Silver in the Wood) -- Huh. I had really loved Silver in the Wood (for Tobias and Mrs Silver and the way the sense of grounded forestiness permeated the magic), so while I did not expect there to be a sequel or think it needed one, I was excited to read it. I'd been expecting another Tobias POV novella, monster hunting with Mrs Silver. That was not what I got, and the beginning of the book was slow going for me. Silver himself was among my least favorite elements in the first book -- I was kind of reflectedly fond of him, primarily on Mrs Silver's behalf, but he was not a draw. Being stuck in his sulky POV at the beginning of this one drove home for me how much of my enjoyment of the first book was down to Tobias's gruff, decent narrative voice. What had been mostly indifference to Silver turned to active annoyance at being stuck with him for me, and although the book is very short, I almost wandered away at the 15% mark. Things did pick up once Maud Lindhurst showed up, and I read the rest of it in one sitting -- well, lying in bed when I woke up too early on a weekend morning. But the more I think about it, the leass I like the book. Spoilers from here:
I do like Maud! -- her stubbornness/determination, her liking to be right, her insistence on being first author, even her fairy-madness, the way he chasing after Fairyland was clearly at least as much her personality and enchantment. I liked her interactions with Henry, and the way how, though her unerliable view of her parents, he kind of gets a clue that he's not being objective about his mother, either. I liked Mrs Silver (wish there had been more of her), and Tobias's steady presence, and cameos from Bramble the dryad. But Henry was just... like a petulant child I wanted to tell to grow up, and even more so once I learned what it was that had made Tobias leave. Like, that took me from seeing Henry-as-love-interest for the character I liked as "well, if that's what you want, I guess" to "really, you can do better", and, like, just being better than Fay is not the bar to clear there (and Fay had a kind of dark charm at least that made him more interesting than Henry's overindulged child (ostensible) charm). I mean, I get it, Henry is quite young, but not THAT young, really, and the prospect of outliving everyone he cares about is definitely sad, but we see how Tobias bears up under it -- after 400 years of practice admittedly -- and I was just really not impressed. And when they have their quarre, Tobias says, "Well, you're a prtty fellow, and a clever one, and I'm a fool as I said; but your mothr was good to me when I would as soon have died, and I find I'd rather have her good opinion than yours, Mr Silver" -- and, like, yes, spot on there, and I saw no strong reason for him to change his mind, even at the end of this.
I also thought the ending was really muddled, like, thematically. First, it directly contradicts what the end of the last book said, that Henry had planted himself, and writes it off as Bramble just being wrong about Henry, which I didn't buy other than as a retcon.
But even more so, what was the POINT of all this, then? I didn't feel like Henry had really LEARNED anything from his stint as the Green Man / from the whole exprience (except maybe to appreciate his mother a bit more, and, like, did not sacrifice the world to his curiosity about the fairy queen? all fairly low bars if you ask me), and, like, as far as moral growth, was that just that he turned down Tobias offering to take up the burden of it from him? (I didn't think that was something that was possible, either -- it doesn't feel like a thing that SHOULD BE possible, nor Bramble just releasing Henry from the Wood. I feel like it undermines the worldbuilding of the first book that it could happen as simply as that.) It just makes the whole thing feel LESS, the way it brings things completely around, erases the bittersweet ending of book 1 and replaces it with a full circle for Henry with Tobias as a reward that I really don't feel like he's earned. I found book 1 poignant; this one was just completely emotionally unsatisfying to me.
I also don't know that the pacing choices this book made were the best -- starting with Henry sulking made the beginning slow and, for me, frustrating, and then going to the alternating flashback-and-now structure midway through gave the whole thing kind of a weird, patched shape.
A thing I loved about Silver in the Wood was the forest fuckery -- the way both the magic and the everyday details were rooted (heh) in plant magic and reading the book really felt like wandering in a forest alone, that majesty and stillness and timelessness. This book has Fairyland instead of the Wood, and it's creepy, sure -- the monoliths arranged in patterns were a nice touch, because having seen that sort of thing live (in Carnac), it does give one a very uncomfortable, alien sort of feeling -- but it's dreary and parched and antagonistic, whereas the Wood was at once dangerous and cozy, compelling.
At least the prose IS still really lovely, and I marked down a lot of nice quotes, including:
"He got an impression of red-eyed helplessness from the mother, pompous terror from the father, and polite handshakes all round."
"Mrs Silver stripped romance and delight from everything; she looked upon the rarerest and most extraordinary of beings rather as a rat-catcher upon rats."
"Silver found it hard to imagine a young lady behaving this way of her own free will. Although he also found it hard to imagine the vampire whose dark passions were inclined towards young women who dressed up in unflattering costumes and criticised Silver's articles in Folklore."
But the prose does not make up for my disappointment in the worldbuilding and the character arc, and on the whole I think I might've been happier just reading Silver in the Wood as a standalone. (It also made me think about what Rachel Hartman had said about duologies and how she structures them -- the first book the protagonist faces a personal problem, in the second they deal with a reflection of the problem in the world -- because I'm pretty sure one of the reasons this doesn't work for me AS a duology is that not only does this book/duology not do that, I don't think it has ANY compelling super-structure at all.)
**
I also watched the Worlds of Ursula LeGuin biopic when it was streaming on PBS (thanks to
sineala's link); looks like it also exists on YouTube, for the time being. I've been curious to see it ever since it came across my radar in Hugo homework context (it was one of the Best Related Work nominees this past year), which was an hour well spent. Most of what it had to say about LeGuin as an author I already knew, from reading her own essays, but it was still interesting to see her actually SAY those things. Also, while I'd known that her father was an anthropologist at Berkeley, and that the K in Ursula K. LeGuin stood for Kroeber, I had not, until the movie, realized that the Kroeber Hall at Cal, where I'd had some classes, must've been named after Ursula LeGuin's father, who was the first anthropology department chair. It was neat to see pictures of young Ursula LeGuin -- she looked like herself from a very young age -- and to see her family, her grown children, and how adorable she and her husband were through th ages. Intersting to hear from and see her contemporaries (Delaney looks like a badass wizard!), but also neat to hear from younger authors like Theodora Goss and Annalee Newitz, talking about her as the trailblazer she was. I quite liked the animation style that accompanied talking about LeGuin's stories, especially for Earthsea, and thought the choice to include a classroom discussion on "Omelas" paid off too; I wasn't sure about that at first, but it was interesting to hear from students who would choose three different things -- to stay in Omelas, to walk away (with a really intersting perspctive), and to rebel against the system and help the child -- and that each choice was represented quite articulately. I also liked the balance of praise and criticism in this, with LeGuin's response to the criticism -- the heartfelt way she talked about not having been at a point where she could find a way to write about a female wizard at the time she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea, and how she came to write Tehanu. I was hoping there would be a similar thing about The Left Hand of Darkness and using the male gender as the default, because I've read her essay on that, but maybe the movie footage predates it.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1133838.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
In 'Watchmaker' the "wait, what?" moment was Grace becoming the antagonist, and I was left feeling conflicted over whether I should thing she was completely in the wrong and Mori is a gentle soul who was doing everything for the greater good and occasionally acting in self defense, or whether Grace had a point and Mori *was* dangerous and not above acting selfishly. 'Pepperharrow'-- well. Spoilers! At first this book seemed to be willing to engage with the latter interpretation much more than the first book: Takiko seemed to believe Mori was dangerous (and seemed like someone who would know), as well as the head of his family, and Thaniel had that moment, after he learned that Takiko holds Mori responsible for the death of Kuroda's wife (and Mori seems to agree with that interpretation), where he thinks that "The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemteries of tery full of dead wives" -- and, like, that was great! I really like Thaniel's POV, but some acknowledgement that he is an unreliable narrator when it comes to Mori was very welcome, because I spent the ending of book 1 finding Mori's use of his powers a lot creepier than Thaniel seemed to, and this felt like acknowledgement that Thaniel was probably not objective on that score. But then... it turns out that Kuroda's wife volunteered, approached Mori herself and "gifted" her death to him to make use of, and really he was just carrying out her wishes because otherwise she would've had a horrible lingering death from illness -- it was, basically, assisted suicide for the greater good. Which, OK -- I didn't like that this uncomplicated Mori to a great degree, but it's OK if Pulley wants to make him less dark than I inherently see him as (more on which below), and it's actually kind of a neat use of his powers, and a neat bit of interaction between him and 'mundanes'. (I also kept trying to figure out if he was also trying to prevent WWII -- he clearly lived long enough to remember the atomic bomb, given his reaction to stopping in Nagasaki -- and not wanting to be at war with the Americans is the explanation he gives Pyotr. But I'm not sure I believe that Mori can change things on that scale, though I do believe he would try.) But apparently he did not tell Takiko the truth because he was afraid of her (or at least that's what he says; I'm assuming it's more likely that it was actually part of manipulating Takiko to have just the right attitude towards him to play her role in the gambit that plays out in this book, but I dunno, like I said, I tend to interpret him darker than I think I'm meant to...) The thing that got me was Takiko, once she learns the truth, choosing to sacrifice herself, basically -- which feels like the narrative validating that she was wrong to mistrust Mori and he is actually Good and Right.
Which, I dunno, man. Thaniel is quick to point out that just hastening the invention of the electron microscope, if it leads to a cure for TB faster, would save more lives than were lost in the events that brought it about; let's assume that's true. Let's even assume that in staging this Mori landed on a maximum of net lives saved; that there wasn't a more bloodless way to hasten the electron invention but have it arrive later, too late to save Thaniel (which I'm not at all sure I believe). That's still Mori making a specific choice of "these random strangers will die so that Thaniel and some other random strangers will live", and it's a choice I'm really uncomfortable with. Like, I would hate having Mori's abilities, because I would not want the responsibility for deciding those things, and I do think -- as he does too, I believe -- that exercising the making of such choices puts the person beyond Good and Moral status, even if they start doing it with the best and most selfless intentions (and I don't believe that Mori is selfless in his exercise of his powers). Because, like, I hate having to think about trolley problems in any event (I would be about as terrible as Chidi at it in any practical circumstances), but this is not just pulling a lever to decide whether to save five people and kill one or to do nothing -- this book shows that Mori goes off and builds a fucking railroad for the purposes of bringing about the trolley problem he wants, and that, to me, is a degree of premeditation that's really scary. Thaniel clearly does not agree with me, which is fine; Grace and Takiko seem to come around to at least the view of Mori being the lesser of other available evils, which I suppose is also fine, although it would be nice if there was some sympathetic character who was like, "cool motive, still murder" about it. More concerning to me is that I feel like Pulley thinks Mori is clearly in the right, and that bothers me more, because it makes me feel like I can't trust her? Me, I tend to be much more along the lines of the Duke of Choshi ("Now tell me,what manner of creature is it that waits for a person's darkest moment, and then appears from the shadows an says, I will save you; come with me?") and what seems to be Mori's own opinion: "'Evil. You're evil.' 'Yes.'[...] but he looked haunted, and sad, as though evil was a border he had crossed a long time ago and he was so deep into the country beyond that he could hardly remember anywhere else."
So that was my biggest problem with the book, which in fact is just the continuation of my problem with the first book. I also got kind of excited when the book opened with Grace's POV, but then she got shuttled off screen, and while I did enjoy Thaniel meeting up with her later and her contribution to the plot, it really drove home to me that Pulley isn't really interested in Grace as a character, only as a plot device -- she has a harrowing adventure and solves a scientific mystery and has some personal growth about Mori, but we don't get to see any of it except what she reports to Thaniel as necessary moments -- and that's frustrating to me. I was also puzzled by Thaniel thinking that Grace's animosity to Mori was because she wanted Mori to be interested in her and not in Thaniel. Grace's own thoughts -- "He was a quiet man, but she knew what it was like to be extremely clever in a very small space. You got bored." -- made more sense to me, though I definitely don't think that's all that drives Mori (but I'm willing to believe that Grace does, at least at that point.) (When I was complaining non-spoiler-ly to Best Chat about this book, ikel89 suggested I should read Bedlam Stacks because "it can't hurt you with Grace", and this is probably wise advice... XD)
I should mention somewhere, and it might as well be here, that I don't consider Mori failing to save someone, like Kuroda's wife, making him culpable of murder -- it's still Kuroda that killed her, even if Mori tells Thaniel it was him (and, well, I guess it was him physically that put her out of her misery, after Kuroda broke her skull). Takiko does hit him (and hurt him) after Kuroda's wife's death, but I don't see anything in the text that suggests she's done it before (other than Midori asking Mori if Takiko hurts him, and, well, I'm not sure her intent to hit him with a bottle counts even if it was serious enough that he reacted to it psychosomatically), and while I don't think there's an excuse for hitting one's spouse under normal circumstances, in this case even if Mori had not enabled/failed to prevent Midori's death, he absolutely helped Kuroda cover it up, and, like, accessory to murder of one's best friend is not a normal circumstance, I feel like. Not to mention that Mori could've stopped her easily if he'd chosen to. I do think it's an interesting parallel being set up between Takiko and Kuroda, but I don't think it's fair to her.
I do appreciate that at least Mori is allowed some genuine flaws, like being a misogynist apparently (not thinking women should vote, etc.) But also, hm, it does make me wonder that both books feature a woman antagonist or at least a woman who is in the wrong (and expiates her wrongness).
I did have another wait, what? moment in this one, though, shortly after Mori's return, which was the reveal that he had not anticipated Thaniel looking for him and worrying about him. Which is just... kind of ridiculous? He had apparently assumed Thaniel was just putting up with him for free rent, but... first of all he laid his plans at a time when he could still foresee the future, and even if he couldn't see clearly the outcomes of his plans of this gambit, surely there were various earlier "forks" that involved Thaniel where he would've been able to tell that Thaniel worries about him? It seems very unlikely that it wouldn't have come up at all. Second, even if he didn't KNOW with future-seeing powers, doing what he does means he has to be very good at understanding how people's actions and feelings are related, to understand people very well, and so not being able to interpret correctly how Thaniel feels about him, after 4 years together in linear time and a lot more than that counting the various futures and dead-ends he also has a memory of-- well, it just seems out of character for Mori?? Well, really, it seems like a bad writing choice, because I actually don't think it's necessary at all for Mori to have been clueless -- I would have bought any other number of explanations for his reserve, from thinking Thaniel and his English prudishness weren't up for anything more yet to the pre-emptive grieving that makes things difficult for him later on, or... just leave it alone? there are enough complications in Mori and Thaniel's individual and shared lives that "but does he looooove me" doesn't really need to be part of it. I just thought it was a weird choice.
Well, that's all the serious complaints out of the way. I have one more quibble, which is more of a puzzled feeling than a complaint, but I'll save it for the section where it belongs thematically. Now for the things I enjoyed, which is pretty much everything else.
When I first heard that the sequel was set in Japan, I was kind of disappointed because I have no particular interest in Japan as a setting, the flashbacks in Japan were the least interesting part of 'Watchmaker' for me, and I was not looking forward to a book full of stilted formal dialogue. But! I ended up LOVING the choice Pulley made with the Japanese dialogue, which she explains in her afterword; the result is not stilted at all but vibrant and hilarious, because in an effort to transmit the different levels of formality, she has a lot of characters talk in heavily colloquial terms, and it's really fun. I mean, I have no idea how it comes across to someone who speaks Japanese, but I personally was delighted by phrases like Tanaka's ""Yeah, mate, no offense, but will you fuck off?" But I do have a quibble on this score: the way people kept thinking of translations of the Japanese names struck me as really weird. I don't know if part of Pulley's Japanese scholarship opportunity thing was that the resulting project had to teach a certain number of Japanese words explicitly or somthing, but that's what it ended up feeling like. Like, OK, I don't speak Japanese, so maybe it's different, but it seems so weird to me that a native speaker, like Takiko, would flash to the literal meaning of common names (even if prompted by someone's purple scarf). Name translation games I believe in more, but that was a bit weird. And even Thaniel, who is clearly fluent at this point and presumably used to Japanese names, thinking of the literal meaning of Hikaru also felt odd, at least given what was going on at the time. On the other hand, I did learn a handful of Japanese words out of it, which is neat, I guess?
I was delighted to have Katsu back and to know that he survived the climax of 'Watchmaker'; I'd known *a* clockwork octopus was in this book but was thinking it was a diffrent one, Katsu 2.0, so knowing that he didn't perish in the explosion and only lost one tentacle was a very pleasant surprise. And he continued to steal the show as he'd done in the first book, cheering me up each time he appeared on page, accepting Pyotr's spoon and competing with the neighbors' cat and playing kraken with origami boats on a pool. ♥ Katsu! ♥
The other wonderful thing about this book for me was Six. I'd liked her as a little kid in the first book, but I REALLY liked her here. I can't say whether Pulley got everything exactly right, but I thought it was a really interesting portrayal of a child who was on the spectrum (though they don't have the words for that of course, and Thaniel just calls it being different), and gifted, and has survived some unspecified trauma in her workhouse years (""she tipped forward over her knees when somebody had told her she was in the wrong [...] It was appalling and animal. Thaniel hoped she didn't remember why she did it anymore.") I loved the interaction between her and Thaniel (and the way him being a father makes him feel kind of paternal towards the fresh-out-of-school juniors at the legation and the other young people he deals with), and the different relationship she has with Mori, who reassures her that he won't give her back to the workhouse if Thaniel were to die not by telling her he loves her but by telling her that Katsu lost the receipt he'd need to present (I really loved that moment), and lets her steal his watch so they can be linked by its golden chain. Six's unpredictability, possibly even for Mori, her peculiar manners but ability to make friends with both children and grown-ups, Thaniel's loving, deeply understanding-even-while-baffled frustration with her being able to handle the legation being on fire but not taking the "wrong" stairs to breakfast and "She wouldn't sulk if she was unhappy or angry. She would behave normally but then she would change all the door handles" -- I thought all of it painted a really cool portrait of an interesting character. Oh, and I loved that Six's choice of bedtime reading is a generator instead of a princess story because "I already know how princesses work" :D
I had not expected Mori to lose his ability to foresee the future as a result of this stuff, even though I suppose he must've known there was a very good chance it was coming, given the promise he gave Takiko. I liked the effects of it, though, like the revelation that he is terrible at directions (relatable!) and presumably only got around that before by remembering-from-the-future where he needed to go to find his way. That was a really charming detail! As always, thinking too much about parallel-futures powers makes my head hurt if I do it too much, but this had some neat applications of it, of course, like when I started to figure out that the guards dying off at the prison and the disasters befalling the other prisons was all Mori's clockmaker hand at work. Like Kuroda, I had assumed that Thaniel had been placed at the legation to save Akinori's life (I looked up him and Kuroda after encountering them, since they sounded like real people, and learned about the assassination), so was very surprised when that turned out not to be the case. Also, I'm now guessing that Mori showing Grace the carriage bolt at the end of the first book was less a threat and more of a nudge to get her to leave England and go to Japan and be in a position to do her part in accelerating the invention of the electron microscope. And the moment early on in the book, where he loses all his Russian -- that's the door closing on a future where he DID defect to Russia, right? That was cool!
The ghosts were neat, and genuinely creepy as well, before Thaniel and I figured out what they were. I actually did so a little ahead of him, in the monk's hut, as soon as we saw that thre could be ghosts of still living creatures (illustrated by the cat). I did NOT figure out that the reason certain people were seeing the ghosts was that fine particles in air revealed them, so that was cool. Also, there was a ghost T-Rex! (I don't think I needed to know about Mori's powers being legendary rather than randomly unique, or to have an explanation for why owls kept showing up ahead of him, but I also don't actively mind either of those things, so OK, I guess?) Oh, and the system for keeping Mori unbalanced using random numbers written down via the electrograph was very interesting, and the snatches of experimentation on Subject A suitably horrifying.
I had NOT expected the intensely gothic feel of the early part of this book, and I'm not really into gothics, but it worked really well, with Thaniel the outsider and rooms that can shift and translucent walls and nightingale floors -- the whole thing lended itself to a gothic treatment surprisingly well! And the moths, man! Ghost made of clairvoyantly delivered moths -- that was something!
I continued to like Thaniel's synesthesia and the elegant way it was integrated into his POV -- "the mist, most of it, was the noise of the birds. The world looked clearer when he covered his ears." , "Someone was walking over the nightingale floor, which made a constellation of white squeaks", "The safety catch snicked white", "Deep under the floor somewhere was that earthquake-purple thrum", etc. It's a really nice, distinctive POV trick that works very naturally. And also that he writes a symphony for Mori which is so vivid that Sullivan can recognize him from the music. In general the writing is really lovely, and I find Thaniel's POV pleasantly soothing until it turns quietly poignant -- he is a great POV character, as in the first book. I also really enjoyed Thaniel's first impressions of Japan, the first really unfamiliar thing being the telegraph poles being a different configuration than in England, being surprised by the familiarity of the clear cold mist that reminds him of Lincolnshire, feeling stupid by being blindsided by not everything being "cherry trees and temples".
Also, like, it's totally not the point, but I kind of liked Kuroda as a character, in his cheerful bully way, and would absolutely read Kuroda/Mori fic, because I feel like that's barely even subtext, what with Kuroda having him dressed up to have a flower on either side and anticipating his return to Japan with the excitement of his wedding night. Also this: "'Fuck you,' Kuroda wheezed, and kissed his cheek." XD And Kuroda's wife appears to be of the same opinion. (I mean, Kuroda is a terrible person who murdered his wife in a drunken rage, but he is interesting to have around and Mori acts interestingly with him.) And Takiko/Kuroda's wife, too, of course.
Quotes:
The Emperor: "It's Nagasaki. People will have sold them [the Russian fleet] fourteen different kinds of chicken and then stolen their lifeboats before they can even say privet"
"Like a banner, the old familiar joy of the fight unrolled in Kuroda's heart, dusty for having been packed away for so long, but no less bright."
"The light upset a heron, somewhere among the reeds. It made a prehistoric noise and clattered away."
Thaniel on his father's penny-pinching: "Really it had been a healthy experience, because now he knew that if anyone said 'it's the principle of the thing' then the correct response was to punch that person in the throat"
"Luggage had disappeared into the meticulous accounting of the ship's staff; it would appear at some point, though all the stewards seemed to think it was vulgar to ask."
"He wondered if he was hallucinating telegraphy. He hoped not. If you were going to hallucinate something, Morse was very dull."
Thaniel talking to the cook: "'I think I'm normally mannered, but Mr Vaulker seems like a...' You couldn't really say 'unreserved cock' in Japanese. It didn't translate. 'Difficult person.''
The cook about Vaulkner: "'I never know what he's saying' the old lady said, devastatingly unworried."
Kuroda thinking: "If Mori ever came across a rat, it wouldn't give him the plague; it would make friends, give him an enchanted present, and arrange for him to marry a moon princess before the end of the fortnight. Mori always ended up with princesses where everyone else got plague."
Kuroda on his wife: "She wasn't stupid. She wrote poetry, beautiful poetry. But she always pretended to be brainless, and he hated it, hated it like everyone hated concealed weaponry."
Takiko: "All the anger misted into the awful bleak frustration of being the strongest person in the room."
Takiko to Kuroda: "Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups."
"Arinori made friends with the lower orders like other people kept hamsters or songirds; he looked in on them every now and then to see if they were doing anything interesting, and if they weren't, he tickled them.'
The final exchange between Thaniel and Arinori:
"You're all right, you're all right. Get up."
There was a pause. "You know, I don't believe I am," Arinori said softly.
[...]
"No, look at me. Calmdown."
"I'm going to die."
"I think so. Better get it done properly." It was the worst thing he'd ever said.
Arinori let his breath out, and smiled, just about. "Yes. Good idea."
"'Miss Steepleton?' [Vaulker] added, in the patronising tone of people who hadn't met any chilren since they were children themselves. 'What do you say to Dr Willis?'
'Don't attack me again plase,' she said in her emotionless way."
"She'd never seen a dead person before, but, blanched in the cold, the body didn't look like a person at all anymore, just a clumsy impression of one; as though something lonely had tried to make a man from frost and shardsof birch bark." (this is such a stark, desolate image)
Thaniel re: the telephone: "Thaniel couldn't think of anything less civilised than making a terrible noise at somebody until they answered you. Everyone else on the Tokyo lines must have felt the same, because nobody ever telephoned unless they wanted to be rude."
The escape of people from the fear of Mt Fuji: "Nothing was right but what had been left on the side of the road."
"The man [House Mori captain] looked over Thaniel, Vaulkner, and Pringle as though he would rather leave Mori alone on the veldt with only some especially stupid giraffes for help, but he bowed back and turned away.'
"'Six,' Thaniel said, 'when someone's upset, you...'
'...consider it an objective problem with a solution.' She looked Mori over. 'Is a cherry bakewell the solution?' she offered, much more humbly."
23. Jo Walton, Among Others -- This book has been on my radar for ages -- it was the first context in which I'd heard of Jo Walton, but it had not crossed my path until now, and I'd heard enough mixed things about it that I didn't go out of my way to seek it out. Then I read my first Walton novel, The Just City, and my reaction was basically "huh" -- lots of interesting ideas, fairly enjoyable reading experience, but... I said in my write-up: "I didn't enjoy it in any of the ways I NORMALLY enjoy fiction -- I didn't love the world (it's interesting, but rather abstract and frequently wrong-headed, which is the point, but still), I didn't get attached to the characters (they all feel rather distant), I didn't get swept up by the plot (there isn't all that much of a plot, really), I didn't bask in the prose (it's quite utilitarian, for good reason, but there you go), and I didn't care about the theme (not a philosophy person). So, what added up to my enjoyment? I'm frankly not sure, but for all that, it worked for me in a way." I haven't picked up the sequels, and I think since I read it (it's been 4 years), my overall feelings have faded more towards the book just feeling kind of remote, in a number of ways, like, the opposite of visceral on a lot of axes, and me generally deciding that I strongly prefer Walton's writing about books to her fiction. But then Among Others was on Kindle sale for two bucks or something, so I went and got it, and, once my 'Pepperharrow' hangover wore off sufficiently for me to read otehr things, I cracked it open and unexpectedly found myself really engaged. I really liked this book??
I think the trick is, this book, which is a magical coming-of-age story that kind of takes off from a semi-autobiographical place, told in first person, in diary format, by a precocious teenage girl from Wales who loves sci-fi -- is basically the closest Jo Walton's fiction can get to Jo Walton writing about sci-fi books, which we've already established I really love. In fact, it was kind of an odd feeling at times, because on occasion Mori (the protagonist) would talk about books or authors who had been included in Jo Walton's Hugo book, so I knew Walton's personal opinions on them, and it was really interesting but odd to kind of have both in mind at the same time. It's not even that they are necessarily the same opinions -- mostly they aren't, because 21st century Jo Walton has the benefit of decades of SF reading experience and opinions that have had the chance to shift or deepen over time, and Mori, in the late 70s, has a lot of strong teenage passion. Like, Mori also doesn't seem to like Philip K. Dick books much, but she does not seem to have Opinions about him (the way I know Walton does), and she's still in the first flush of discovery with Dune, thinking about the attraction of being Paul Atreides and using the Litany Against Fear to protect herself against her mother, while I kept thinking about Jo's 'homeopathically good' comment about reading the sequels, and stuff like that.
I think I remember some reviews of this book complaining about Mori being... something? Not relatable, or not teenage-sounding enough or something else where she didn't really work for them as a character? Based on vague recollections of that, and my experience to date with Walton's characters, I was braced for that going in and instead I found Mori surprisingly relatable, actually! I mean, SPOILERS I did not grow up in Wales or go to boarding school or have a twin who died or a mother who was a mad witch, I did not have to deal with disability and chronic pain, and I was a toddler in the timeframe this book takes place, (and also I'm good at math), but those minor things aside, I actually felt like I could relate to Mori a lot. No, really, while the specifics are wildly different, there's a sort of broader feel to her childhood and young adulthood that I found very easy to understand, which made her a lot closer and more accessible to me than I'd been expecting: the idyllic childhood with a non-nuclear family, sort of being left alone to roam the landscapes of imagination, a major life shift around the transition to teenager (immigration for me, her sister's death and running away and boarding school for Mori), and, of course, poetry and SF. Different SF than I was reading at that age, for the most part, but with Lord of the Rings, ahaha, so much this, basically. That entry where she is LIVID at the temerity of anyone daring to compare anything to "Tolkien at his best" in a blurb, and holding this against Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Covenant books was, well, let me put it this way, if *my* Strongly Held Opinions about Tolkien from when I was fifteen survived somewhere, they would sound eerily similar, I suspect. (And, honestly, I still subscribe to a lot of the things Mori said about Tolkien. Especially: "The thing aout Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersian, this journey. It's not, I'm prtty sure, actually true, ut that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. [...] It is an oasis for the soul.")
After finishing the book I looked up a couple of reviews and they kind of made me go huh, even though objectively they were correct. One common thread of criticism was that nothing much happens in the book, which... is true, like, in term of over action. But it didn't FEEL like that to me, because Mori was experiencing tectonic changes even if outwardly they took the form of ordinary day-to-day stuff. One of the neat things is that it starts in such an unusual place compared to a normal genre story -- AFTER the protagonist has saved the world, in a way that's never even fully explained, because the book is not ABOUT that. She is victorious but altered in the experience, walking wounded, Frodo after Mount Doom, and you don't get many stories about that (LeGuin, a bit, in the later Earthsea books), and none that I can think of with a teenage protagonist, which is so interesting. The daily stuff Mori has to deal with, her loneliness and chronic pain (the part where she's in traction and starts out thinking that the doctor may not care about her but must know what he's doing and progresses from there, OUCH) and otherness at the boarding school and with her father's sisters, the conflict there that's completely mundane as well as the magical aspects -- it worked for me really well. The magic she does to bring about her karass, the enormous difference it makes when she has people to talk to about things she cares about, at last, and feels guilty about the magical manipulation aspects as well as the mundane "am I talking too much?" considerations -- that felt like enough of a plot for me. I also liked that Mori was both believably a clever, independent-minded teenager who reads Plato for fun and can discuss SF with grown-ups in a sophisticated and informed manner AND she had these huge blindspots that made me smile, like not realizing that Leonardo was also a scientist, wondering what happens if you eat kosher food when you're not Jewish, or the scene where Sam is telling her about his personal experience of the Holocaust, and suddenly she gets it, in a real way, clearly for the first time -- and her way of dealing with it is to think about writing a poem to say "Hitler, give me back my cousins," cousins, which is so very teenager while also being a legitimate way of working through one's too-big-otherwise feelings. And of course the way she filters everything new through what she knows from the SFF books she loves, like comparing the Communist Manifesto to LeGuin's Anarres and Plato to Brave New World, and musing that being (observant) Jewish is "like having a pile of geasas."
Another thing reviews mentioned was that the magic was such that it was completely deniable (which Mori herself lampshades) -- almost everything Mori experiences that is magical could be completely in her head; Wim does tell her he sees fairies when he is holding her walking stick, but, well, if everything else is in her head, I suppose that could be explained by Wim humoring her. Except the thought that the magic WASN'T real never even crossed my mind while I was reading the book -- I was completely in it with Mori, and the general feel to the magic I got was something like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin -- a magic that is so subtle and works through the existing liminal spaces of the real world for that kind of borderline feel (it was neat to see that EBear's review also noted the similar feel to Tam Lin). That the action climax of the book, inasmuch as it has one, was Mori's mother tearing pages out of Lord of the Rings and Mori's triumph was turning the pages into trees at the site of an abandoned factory in an echo of Isengard and Helm's Deep (and, OK, Macbeth) -- that felt really fitting. And speaking of the magical aspects, I quite liked the way the fairies were done -- that they're not really accessible, and that Mori doesn't really know what they are and can't always understand them perfectly, and that they can be either beautiful or grotesque or a mix of both, and that they are both helpful and menacing, often simultaneously, like Mori's faerie-gifted walking stick.
There's a lot of stuff going on in this book that isn't plot and is just... life being messy and complicated in all the tiny interactions and observations (I'm sure the book being stitched together from real autobiographical events, as it apparently was, has a lot to do with that). The class stuff, and the Welsh vs English stuff, and ableism, and sexual mores, and all kinds of things. Mori being loyal to Deirdre because Deirdre stuck by her but also finding her not very bright and not really the kind of friend she actually wants; Mori finding herself adrift from the friends she grew up with. At the SF club, Mori noticing that it's Harriet who brings in for discussion the two female authors (LeGuin and Tiptree after it's known that she's a woman); Janine taking sides around Wim's 'transgression' out of a feminist solidarity that's actually quite limiting (if Wim is telling Mori the truth, which he very well might not be); Hugh assuming he and Mori will become a couple because they're both 15 and not being a jerk about it when they do not but being confused (I wondered, from a couple of lines here and there if Hugh was actually supposed to be gay and either closeted or not having come to that realization yet: he mentions that "There were things that made me uncomfortable, in Dragonquest in particular" (when he answers "sort of" to Mori's question about whether he likes the Pern books, and then when Greg and Mori are talking about Hugh thinking he and Mori would be a thing, "Greg just laughed and said these things sort themselves out, and had I read McCaffrey? I don't know what that has to do with anything, but we talked aout Impressing dragons all the rest of the way back; and I also kind of wondered if some of Hugh's loyalty to Wim, on top of wim saving his life, or at least saving him from bullies, was also a bit of a crush) -- even in Mori's ideal, 'magic-summoned' karass people are still very much people, not idealized or flawless. I was kind of surprised by where things went with Wim -- I was mostly expecting him turn out to be a cautionary tale for Mori, but he didn't seem to be; although, of course, all we see of him is filtered through Mori's eyes and so might be a little too glowing. The other thing that surprised me was pretty much everything about Daniel, Mori's father -- he's such a weird figure, haphazardly trying to do right by Mori, belatedly, most of the time, and not very good at it, circumscribed by the life his sisters tethred him to (this was actually the one place in the book where the idea of magic as explanation felt more wish-fullfilment-y on Mori's part to me than real -- it's such a handy way to justify why he left, why he's kind of a flake, and maybe even the pass he makes at Mori when drunk, which she feels isn't even really incest since they're essentially strangers -- that the revelation that Daniel's sisters are witches who are controlling him was the closest I came to wondering if maybe the magic stuff was all in Mori's head.)
Another thing that the book did that I wasn't sure what it was doing with that was the revelation, fairly late on, that apparently Mori (whom everyone assumes is Morwenna) actually assumed her sister's (formal) name/identity? i.e. she is actually Morganna? It was mentioned so offhandedly that for a while I wondered if I'd misread that/made that up, but then I stumbled on Walton's Q&A about the book, and apparently it was really a thing -- part of Mori's grief reaction. (Another thing I noticed that looked like a trauma reaction but was never I think fully explained was Mori insisting on having her bag with her at all times, being the one to carry it -- not the contents of it, since she's happy enough to offload books, etc. to other people to help carry, but the bag itself. Well, trauma and/or magic, I guess, and I kind of like that it's not clear and probably both.) Oh, and I also appreciated Jo's answer to the question about Wim, down at the bottom of the linked page.
That page also links to a video interview with Jo (moderated by Nancy Pearl of the Four Doorways thing), which was both really interesting and occasionally hilarious. The talk about Among Others is in the middle, and had some (fairly depressing) nuggets about the autobiographical nature of the book: "All the bad stuff is true and all the good stuff is made up." She couldn't have written the book if her parents were alive -- either of them could've sued her. Also, Jo is VERY FIRM that the fairies and magic are real. (A discussion on how you don't necessarily "outgrow" magic as a grown-up led to this gem: "I've stopped looking for doors to Narnia not because I've stopped believing in them but because I've stopped wanting to go through them. [...] It's not growing up -- it's being happy.") I also really enjoyed her discussion about how it took her years -- being a mother and seeing her son go through this -- to figure out that part of the difficult time she was having those years was the conflation of the universal turmoil of adolescence and the disruptive situation in her life (leaving her grandparents and going to boarding school) that happened to coincide with it, but she just didn't know how to separate them at the time. I think that's a strong part of what I was reacting to as relatable with Mori -- I didn't have the unhappiness and not really loneliness so much either (I never really yearned for a karass, not being deperived of my closest friend all of a sudden, like she is, but also, at 11 I had met R and we were starting to become the kind of friends that Mori yearns for, though R had not been a reader before she met me). Also a thing she said about her childhood in South Wales made another point of commonality fall into place: it's not only that I had an idyllic childhood where I could sort of roam around unsupervised in a world stamped with an overlay of my imagination, it's that the underlying world was, as Jo puts it, a depressed area -- 80s Ukraine was quite far behind, economically, the world I entered lately, but it never felt like a lack. And a final bit from the interview that made me (and the audience) laugh: Jo reported going to her editor (PNH) and being concerned, like, "Patrick, this book is going to be completely incomprehensible if you haven't read LotR." And PNH responded, "Well, Renaissance painting is completely incomprehensible if you haven't read the Bible" -- which I like on all levels as a response :D
Quotes:
"I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now."
"All that I know about Judaism comes from A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dying Inside. Well, and the Bible, I suppose."
"Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people."
"And there's no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it."
"It's cheering, especially after reading Chekhov yesterday. I'm so glad I'm not Russian."
"There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head." [from Mori's litany of things worth living for, like finding out what happens at the end of Babel-17]
"I got quite drunk on Eliot and was lat for Latin and got an order mark. I got revenge y translating Horace just like Eliot, and she couldn't say anything, because it was also accurate." (I must say I adore this form of revenge XD)
About her mother: "(She has read LOTR, and I don't know if she read it identifying with all the evil people [...] This proves that just reading it isn't enough. After all, the devil can quote scripture.)"
On a production of The Tempest with a female Prospero: "I read him as a man who is remote, and good to bother with a toddler, but a woman like that would be too unnatural for sympathy. [...] -- how intresting that what comes out as doing the best he could in a man looks like neglect in a woman." And at the end, referencing the same play, she says, "I'll never drown my books or break my staff."
"It almost makes it worse that I'm going to see him tomorrow than if it wasn't for a week. I'd braced myself for that."
"I've noticed before that there are two kinds of people for going round castles. There are the ones who say 'And here's where we'd put the boiling oil and here's where we'd put the longnowmen,' and the ones who say 'And here's where we'd put the settee, and here's where we'd hang the pictures.' wim turned out very satisfactoril to be of the first camp."
"If you love books enough, books will love you back."
And from Walton's intro: "So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal uner them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though."
Also, it was very cool that the book got an intro from Ursula LeGuin, whose books are mentioned in Mori's diaries (though Mori is rather certain that even LeGuin is not fit to stand next to "Tolkien at his best" :P) and whose quote serves as one of the epigraphs of the novel. Just, everything being part of the Great Conversation, as Ada Palmer would put it, actually going back and forth for once, and it's really neat to see.
So, anyway, that was Among Others and I liked it a surprising amount! I suspect that it was kind of a perfect storm of a Venn diagram overlap between thing Jo Walton is doing in this book and things I like to read Jo Walton doing, but I'm really glad to have finally read it.
24. Emily Tesh, Drowned Country (sequel to Silver in the Wood) -- Huh. I had really loved Silver in the Wood (for Tobias and Mrs Silver and the way the sense of grounded forestiness permeated the magic), so while I did not expect there to be a sequel or think it needed one, I was excited to read it. I'd been expecting another Tobias POV novella, monster hunting with Mrs Silver. That was not what I got, and the beginning of the book was slow going for me. Silver himself was among my least favorite elements in the first book -- I was kind of reflectedly fond of him, primarily on Mrs Silver's behalf, but he was not a draw. Being stuck in his sulky POV at the beginning of this one drove home for me how much of my enjoyment of the first book was down to Tobias's gruff, decent narrative voice. What had been mostly indifference to Silver turned to active annoyance at being stuck with him for me, and although the book is very short, I almost wandered away at the 15% mark. Things did pick up once Maud Lindhurst showed up, and I read the rest of it in one sitting -- well, lying in bed when I woke up too early on a weekend morning. But the more I think about it, the leass I like the book. Spoilers from here:
I do like Maud! -- her stubbornness/determination, her liking to be right, her insistence on being first author, even her fairy-madness, the way he chasing after Fairyland was clearly at least as much her personality and enchantment. I liked her interactions with Henry, and the way how, though her unerliable view of her parents, he kind of gets a clue that he's not being objective about his mother, either. I liked Mrs Silver (wish there had been more of her), and Tobias's steady presence, and cameos from Bramble the dryad. But Henry was just... like a petulant child I wanted to tell to grow up, and even more so once I learned what it was that had made Tobias leave. Like, that took me from seeing Henry-as-love-interest for the character I liked as "well, if that's what you want, I guess" to "really, you can do better", and, like, just being better than Fay is not the bar to clear there (and Fay had a kind of dark charm at least that made him more interesting than Henry's overindulged child (ostensible) charm). I mean, I get it, Henry is quite young, but not THAT young, really, and the prospect of outliving everyone he cares about is definitely sad, but we see how Tobias bears up under it -- after 400 years of practice admittedly -- and I was just really not impressed. And when they have their quarre, Tobias says, "Well, you're a prtty fellow, and a clever one, and I'm a fool as I said; but your mothr was good to me when I would as soon have died, and I find I'd rather have her good opinion than yours, Mr Silver" -- and, like, yes, spot on there, and I saw no strong reason for him to change his mind, even at the end of this.
I also thought the ending was really muddled, like, thematically. First, it directly contradicts what the end of the last book said, that Henry had planted himself, and writes it off as Bramble just being wrong about Henry, which I didn't buy other than as a retcon.
But even more so, what was the POINT of all this, then? I didn't feel like Henry had really LEARNED anything from his stint as the Green Man / from the whole exprience (except maybe to appreciate his mother a bit more, and, like, did not sacrifice the world to his curiosity about the fairy queen? all fairly low bars if you ask me), and, like, as far as moral growth, was that just that he turned down Tobias offering to take up the burden of it from him? (I didn't think that was something that was possible, either -- it doesn't feel like a thing that SHOULD BE possible, nor Bramble just releasing Henry from the Wood. I feel like it undermines the worldbuilding of the first book that it could happen as simply as that.) It just makes the whole thing feel LESS, the way it brings things completely around, erases the bittersweet ending of book 1 and replaces it with a full circle for Henry with Tobias as a reward that I really don't feel like he's earned. I found book 1 poignant; this one was just completely emotionally unsatisfying to me.
I also don't know that the pacing choices this book made were the best -- starting with Henry sulking made the beginning slow and, for me, frustrating, and then going to the alternating flashback-and-now structure midway through gave the whole thing kind of a weird, patched shape.
A thing I loved about Silver in the Wood was the forest fuckery -- the way both the magic and the everyday details were rooted (heh) in plant magic and reading the book really felt like wandering in a forest alone, that majesty and stillness and timelessness. This book has Fairyland instead of the Wood, and it's creepy, sure -- the monoliths arranged in patterns were a nice touch, because having seen that sort of thing live (in Carnac), it does give one a very uncomfortable, alien sort of feeling -- but it's dreary and parched and antagonistic, whereas the Wood was at once dangerous and cozy, compelling.
At least the prose IS still really lovely, and I marked down a lot of nice quotes, including:
"He got an impression of red-eyed helplessness from the mother, pompous terror from the father, and polite handshakes all round."
"Mrs Silver stripped romance and delight from everything; she looked upon the rarerest and most extraordinary of beings rather as a rat-catcher upon rats."
"Silver found it hard to imagine a young lady behaving this way of her own free will. Although he also found it hard to imagine the vampire whose dark passions were inclined towards young women who dressed up in unflattering costumes and criticised Silver's articles in Folklore."
But the prose does not make up for my disappointment in the worldbuilding and the character arc, and on the whole I think I might've been happier just reading Silver in the Wood as a standalone. (It also made me think about what Rachel Hartman had said about duologies and how she structures them -- the first book the protagonist faces a personal problem, in the second they deal with a reflection of the problem in the world -- because I'm pretty sure one of the reasons this doesn't work for me AS a duology is that not only does this book/duology not do that, I don't think it has ANY compelling super-structure at all.)
**
I also watched the Worlds of Ursula LeGuin biopic when it was streaming on PBS (thanks to
sineala's link); looks like it also exists on YouTube, for the time being. I've been curious to see it ever since it came across my radar in Hugo homework context (it was one of the Best Related Work nominees this past year), which was an hour well spent. Most of what it had to say about LeGuin as an author I already knew, from reading her own essays, but it was still interesting to see her actually SAY those things. Also, while I'd known that her father was an anthropologist at Berkeley, and that the K in Ursula K. LeGuin stood for Kroeber, I had not, until the movie, realized that the Kroeber Hall at Cal, where I'd had some classes, must've been named after Ursula LeGuin's father, who was the first anthropology department chair. It was neat to see pictures of young Ursula LeGuin -- she looked like herself from a very young age -- and to see her family, her grown children, and how adorable she and her husband were through th ages. Intersting to hear from and see her contemporaries (Delaney looks like a badass wizard!), but also neat to hear from younger authors like Theodora Goss and Annalee Newitz, talking about her as the trailblazer she was. I quite liked the animation style that accompanied talking about LeGuin's stories, especially for Earthsea, and thought the choice to include a classroom discussion on "Omelas" paid off too; I wasn't sure about that at first, but it was interesting to hear from students who would choose three different things -- to stay in Omelas, to walk away (with a really intersting perspctive), and to rebel against the system and help the child -- and that each choice was represented quite articulately. I also liked the balance of praise and criticism in this, with LeGuin's response to the criticism -- the heartfelt way she talked about not having been at a point where she could find a way to write about a female wizard at the time she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea, and how she came to write Tehanu. I was hoping there would be a similar thing about The Left Hand of Darkness and using the male gender as the default, because I've read her essay on that, but maybe the movie footage predates it.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1133838.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).