The White Tyger Cycle
I recently finished Paul Park's much praised White Tyger Cycle (A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, and The Hidden World). It's a very unusual story and I found it to be thought-provoking. I'm not going to bother with much in the way of plot description as that's easily found and frankly, the series is almost opposed to plot in the usual sense. Another reviewer described it as profoundly character-driven, but it also ignores the conventions of character-driven pieces by having a very actively changing world around the characters that is also often changed significantly by their actions.
The central characters are teenagers Miranda Popescu, Andromeda Bailey, and Peter Gross in our world, and the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, Princess Aegypta Schenck von Schenck, and the Elector of Ratisbon in the "real" World. The premise is deceptively simple, Miranda is the last of the Brancoveanu's, the former royal house of Roumania, and her aunt Aegypta is a sorceress who creates our world to hide her along with two of her father's retainers from her enemies including the Baroness Ceausescu, and the Elector of Ratisbon along with many others. The retainers become Miranda's friends Andromeda and Peter.
The series takes many of its themes from its epigraph, Dorothy Parker's short poem, Comment:
Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong:
And I am Marie of Roumania.
The extent of which isn't truly apparent until near the end of the final book.
(Spoilers follow.)By that point, Park's central characters have explored every single line of the poem taken both at face value and ironically, and often to a remarkable extent. The "glorious cycle of song" is exemplified by Nicola Ceausescu's opera, which shares the title of the series, "The White Tyger," and is itself a marvelous invention. She gives the first performance by herself and it is a shaped version of her own tale, complete with all of her many questionable deeds and it is completed only slightly before her own almost offstage death. While we are left with the impression that the opera is a significant work of art, it describes a sequence of often sordid events.
The same is true of the story as a whole. This is not your parents fantasy; Park makes a point of dwelling on the mundane aspects of his fantastic world and relegating the differences to a casually assumed background. He does this despite his central trio of characters being from our world and hence in a position to draw these details to our attention easily. As a rule, these elements of the setting are almost disregarded, even the potentially earthshattering revelation that the history in our world was created largely to give Miranda lessons to draw on is rarely mentioned.
On another level, the story itself is in many ways a profound refutation of the traditions of heroic fantasy. The world that the characters find themselves in is full of people who believe that they command events, to the extent that any of them do, that influence is far more haphazard than it would seem. Additionally, the influence of destiny seems to be muted at best. In Miranda's case, in a more traditional fantasy story, one would expect her to eventually assume the throne of Roumania and avenge her father's death and her mother's imprisonment. None of this really happens, her father's murderer dies before she can intervene, her mother escapes prison independently of Miranda's actions and she herself never comes close to becoming queen.
The "medley of extemporanea" is aptly demonstrated throughout the series by the failure of almost everyone's plans. This is particularly true of Aegypta Schenck, Baroness Ceausescu, and the Elector of Ratisbon who all attempt to influence events through sorcery and the use of the hidden world. While the hidden world does play a significant role in events, sorcery is a profoundly unpredictable force and those who try to exert their power through it are often confounded. Miranda's realization of the fragility of this type of power is perhaps her greatest triumph in the story as it gives her a tremendous advantage over the rest of the sorcerors that she encounters.
Yet this appearance of plotlessness and unpredictability is an illusion. Park skillfully weaves his plot together out of his characters choices, even as those choices are often driven by their falliability, ignorance, and or arrogance. Those choices put our main trio into the right places to be both actors in and witnesses to history quite often while never seeming either contrived or driven by the narrative, a difficult feat indeed.
As for the last stanza, it becomes more and more apparent throughout the series that while Miranda is the heir to the throne of Roumania, she will never be in a position where pressing her claim to it is a plausible and moral choice. This is a strong refutation of the typical fantasy plot point of the lost heir regaining his or her birthright, and I suspect that Park developed much of the story toward this end.
I suspect that I will eventually reread this series both to further explore its reading of common fantasy tropes and to get a better sense of the world that forms the backdrop of the series.
The central characters are teenagers Miranda Popescu, Andromeda Bailey, and Peter Gross in our world, and the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, Princess Aegypta Schenck von Schenck, and the Elector of Ratisbon in the "real" World. The premise is deceptively simple, Miranda is the last of the Brancoveanu's, the former royal house of Roumania, and her aunt Aegypta is a sorceress who creates our world to hide her along with two of her father's retainers from her enemies including the Baroness Ceausescu, and the Elector of Ratisbon along with many others. The retainers become Miranda's friends Andromeda and Peter.
The series takes many of its themes from its epigraph, Dorothy Parker's short poem, Comment:
Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong:
And I am Marie of Roumania.
The extent of which isn't truly apparent until near the end of the final book.
(Spoilers follow.)By that point, Park's central characters have explored every single line of the poem taken both at face value and ironically, and often to a remarkable extent. The "glorious cycle of song" is exemplified by Nicola Ceausescu's opera, which shares the title of the series, "The White Tyger," and is itself a marvelous invention. She gives the first performance by herself and it is a shaped version of her own tale, complete with all of her many questionable deeds and it is completed only slightly before her own almost offstage death. While we are left with the impression that the opera is a significant work of art, it describes a sequence of often sordid events.
The same is true of the story as a whole. This is not your parents fantasy; Park makes a point of dwelling on the mundane aspects of his fantastic world and relegating the differences to a casually assumed background. He does this despite his central trio of characters being from our world and hence in a position to draw these details to our attention easily. As a rule, these elements of the setting are almost disregarded, even the potentially earthshattering revelation that the history in our world was created largely to give Miranda lessons to draw on is rarely mentioned.
On another level, the story itself is in many ways a profound refutation of the traditions of heroic fantasy. The world that the characters find themselves in is full of people who believe that they command events, to the extent that any of them do, that influence is far more haphazard than it would seem. Additionally, the influence of destiny seems to be muted at best. In Miranda's case, in a more traditional fantasy story, one would expect her to eventually assume the throne of Roumania and avenge her father's death and her mother's imprisonment. None of this really happens, her father's murderer dies before she can intervene, her mother escapes prison independently of Miranda's actions and she herself never comes close to becoming queen.
The "medley of extemporanea" is aptly demonstrated throughout the series by the failure of almost everyone's plans. This is particularly true of Aegypta Schenck, Baroness Ceausescu, and the Elector of Ratisbon who all attempt to influence events through sorcery and the use of the hidden world. While the hidden world does play a significant role in events, sorcery is a profoundly unpredictable force and those who try to exert their power through it are often confounded. Miranda's realization of the fragility of this type of power is perhaps her greatest triumph in the story as it gives her a tremendous advantage over the rest of the sorcerors that she encounters.
Yet this appearance of plotlessness and unpredictability is an illusion. Park skillfully weaves his plot together out of his characters choices, even as those choices are often driven by their falliability, ignorance, and or arrogance. Those choices put our main trio into the right places to be both actors in and witnesses to history quite often while never seeming either contrived or driven by the narrative, a difficult feat indeed.
As for the last stanza, it becomes more and more apparent throughout the series that while Miranda is the heir to the throne of Roumania, she will never be in a position where pressing her claim to it is a plausible and moral choice. This is a strong refutation of the typical fantasy plot point of the lost heir regaining his or her birthright, and I suspect that Park developed much of the story toward this end.
I suspect that I will eventually reread this series both to further explore its reading of common fantasy tropes and to get a better sense of the world that forms the backdrop of the series.