Carry On, by Rainbow Rowell
(A meta on metaness)
I went looking for meta on Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, and found this: many reviewers have complained that the book is “too meta” and hence too confusing. Do they deplore Shakespeare’s players in Hamlet? Who knows. But Rowell’s book is really not confusing. At most, if you are bad at describing things, then your description of it might be confusing: “this work of fiction was a fictional work of fiction in a previous fiction! And fictional characters wrote fiction about the fiction!” So convoluted! Not.
Carry On is a companion piece to Rowell’s previous work Fangirl, but it can also stand completely alone as its own story: Simon Snow, boy wizard, navigates a complex political conflict and unusual magical dangers that he has been prophesied to overcome despite not actually being very good at magic. That said, being familiar with Fangirl allows for a richer reading of Carry On. I read Fangirl quite some time ago, and wished that it was fresher in my memory when I finally got around to reading Simon’s story.
Fangirl is the coming of age story of Cath, a fan of the (fictional) author Gemma T. Leslie’s Simon Snow series, which occupies a similar cultural space to that of our world’s Harry Potter. In Fangirl, Cath struggles to balance the demands of starting a creative writing major at university, managing her crippling social anxiety, dealing with family drama, and writing speculative fanfiction about Simon Snow, including her wildly popular novel length work in progress, Carry On, Simon. Throughout Fangirl, we see excerpts of both Gemma T. Leslie “canon” and Cath’s fan stories written in the distinct (but related) voices of these characters. Carry On is an additional third imagining of the same characters written by Rowell as herself. The partial reuse of the title Carry On, Simon for Rowell’s own novel is intriguing, and promotes consideration of the relationship between original works and fanworks, and about divergent interpretations of people, events and artworks.
Carry On isn’t just enriched by it’s relationship to Fangirl. I also noted call-outs to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week. There may be others I’ve missed, but the Potter references at least are impossible to overlook. For the most part these references strengthen the novel in interesting ways. As a reader, it’s satisfying to uncover implicit connections, and in the context of Rowell’s interest in thinking about fiction, they’re a clear statement about how no work is written into a void, but stands in relation to the existing literary landscape. The idea isn’t incidental to the story itself; in the world of Simon Snow, magic draws its power from the shared experiences of language and cultural expression. Simon’s friend Penny, for example, tries to develop a spell based on the magic words the game is afoot: “this phrase has got to be good for something,” she says, “it’s Shakespeare plus Sherlock Holmes.”
The intertextual references in Carry On are generally effective at adding vivid splashes of colour to Rowell’s narrative because they don’t serve as crudely recycled elements to move the story along, and they aren’t a substitute for her own worldbuilding. It’s funny, for instance, when one of the office ladies at the children’s home that Simon’s been staying at whispers to another that he goes to a “special school” for “dire offenders”. It’s a clear reference to the Durselys’ narrative about Harry attending St. Brutus’s Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but unlike the Dursley’s systematic alienation of Harry, the incident in Carry On is a throw away line, not to be taken seriously even in-world: “the other woman doesn’t even look up.”
It makes sense that the majority of intertextual call-outs in Carry On are to Harry Potter, since those were the ones doing the most work in Fangirl before Rowell had decided to write Carry On itself. And while it was amusing to notice those echos to begin with, I found that there were just a few too many Potter parallels to let Rowell’s own inventive story telling shine as brightly as it could have. It makes sense that they’re there, and they do important work, but the balance of intertextual ideas to novel ones in the first part of the story didn’t quite strike the right balance. Happily, this imbalance doesn’t persist, and before long Rowell hits her stride to tell an imaginative, funny, and thoughtful story.
tl;dr:
The meta is a feature, not a flaw. Perhaps there are a few more Potter references than ideal at the beginning, but this is not a deal breaker. Carry On and Fangirl are both excellent books on many levels.
I went looking for meta on Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, and found this: many reviewers have complained that the book is “too meta” and hence too confusing. Do they deplore Shakespeare’s players in Hamlet? Who knows. But Rowell’s book is really not confusing. At most, if you are bad at describing things, then your description of it might be confusing: “this work of fiction was a fictional work of fiction in a previous fiction! And fictional characters wrote fiction about the fiction!” So convoluted! Not.
Carry On is a companion piece to Rowell’s previous work Fangirl, but it can also stand completely alone as its own story: Simon Snow, boy wizard, navigates a complex political conflict and unusual magical dangers that he has been prophesied to overcome despite not actually being very good at magic. That said, being familiar with Fangirl allows for a richer reading of Carry On. I read Fangirl quite some time ago, and wished that it was fresher in my memory when I finally got around to reading Simon’s story.
Fangirl is the coming of age story of Cath, a fan of the (fictional) author Gemma T. Leslie’s Simon Snow series, which occupies a similar cultural space to that of our world’s Harry Potter. In Fangirl, Cath struggles to balance the demands of starting a creative writing major at university, managing her crippling social anxiety, dealing with family drama, and writing speculative fanfiction about Simon Snow, including her wildly popular novel length work in progress, Carry On, Simon. Throughout Fangirl, we see excerpts of both Gemma T. Leslie “canon” and Cath’s fan stories written in the distinct (but related) voices of these characters. Carry On is an additional third imagining of the same characters written by Rowell as herself. The partial reuse of the title Carry On, Simon for Rowell’s own novel is intriguing, and promotes consideration of the relationship between original works and fanworks, and about divergent interpretations of people, events and artworks.
Carry On isn’t just enriched by it’s relationship to Fangirl. I also noted call-outs to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week. There may be others I’ve missed, but the Potter references at least are impossible to overlook. For the most part these references strengthen the novel in interesting ways. As a reader, it’s satisfying to uncover implicit connections, and in the context of Rowell’s interest in thinking about fiction, they’re a clear statement about how no work is written into a void, but stands in relation to the existing literary landscape. The idea isn’t incidental to the story itself; in the world of Simon Snow, magic draws its power from the shared experiences of language and cultural expression. Simon’s friend Penny, for example, tries to develop a spell based on the magic words the game is afoot: “this phrase has got to be good for something,” she says, “it’s Shakespeare plus Sherlock Holmes.”
The intertextual references in Carry On are generally effective at adding vivid splashes of colour to Rowell’s narrative because they don’t serve as crudely recycled elements to move the story along, and they aren’t a substitute for her own worldbuilding. It’s funny, for instance, when one of the office ladies at the children’s home that Simon’s been staying at whispers to another that he goes to a “special school” for “dire offenders”. It’s a clear reference to the Durselys’ narrative about Harry attending St. Brutus’s Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but unlike the Dursley’s systematic alienation of Harry, the incident in Carry On is a throw away line, not to be taken seriously even in-world: “the other woman doesn’t even look up.”
It makes sense that the majority of intertextual call-outs in Carry On are to Harry Potter, since those were the ones doing the most work in Fangirl before Rowell had decided to write Carry On itself. And while it was amusing to notice those echos to begin with, I found that there were just a few too many Potter parallels to let Rowell’s own inventive story telling shine as brightly as it could have. It makes sense that they’re there, and they do important work, but the balance of intertextual ideas to novel ones in the first part of the story didn’t quite strike the right balance. Happily, this imbalance doesn’t persist, and before long Rowell hits her stride to tell an imaginative, funny, and thoughtful story.
tl;dr:
The meta is a feature, not a flaw. Perhaps there are a few more Potter references than ideal at the beginning, but this is not a deal breaker. Carry On and Fangirl are both excellent books on many levels.