Among Others

Saturday we took our non-necromancy show on the road and entertained ourselves in the city an hour away while Walker played three chess games on the first day of a tournament. He now plays at the "expert" level, which means there's less drama; he knows many of his competitors and more of the games end in a draw. So we left him to it. Eleanor and I got haircuts while Ron sat in a next-door coffeeshop, and then we had a fancy lunch at the restaurant next door on the other side (Eleanor had her favorite, brie and pear pizza). We went to see Gnomeo and Juliet, which was mildly amusing. Walker went out to dinner with us, and then we took him back for the evening game and headed for the place we always go when we've done everything else and need somewhere to hang out: the bookstore. We all found some books and settled in for a while. When the while was over, I discovered that I was totally hooked on the book I'd picked up to see if it was as good as I'd read over at Things Mean A Lot-- Among Others, by Jo Walton. I had to buy it and carry it with me on the long, moonlit road home and wait until the next day after I'd taken Walker back for the second day of the tournament until I could finish reading it.

The first-person narrator of Among Others is a young girl who reads a lot of the kind of poetry and science fiction and fantasy I read when I was her age. Throughout her story, she says what she thinks of this book and that, and--especially because we don't always agree--it's kind of like having a conversation about the kind of most-beloved books that live deepest and longest in your imagination, the kind that have provided you with the metaphors through which you've always seen the world, like thinking that huorns should be coming to help when you've finally had the courage to do the thing that will vanquish evil.

Among Others is, first and foremost, a book about books-- not a genre I often like, because it usually strikes me as somewhat artificial and precious. This book isn't like that, though; it's more like a Victorian children's book in which the children have read a lot of the same books you have and loved them for most of the same reasons. She reads and talks about J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Plato, Poul Anderson, Mary Renault, C.S. Lewis, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon, among others. And if you've read some of the same books she has, you know exactly what she means when she says that sometimes a person she knows "gives me the creeps. Who could help wanting to Impress a dragon in preference? Who wouldn't want to be Paul Atreides?"

At one point when the narrator has to make a choice between life and death, she chooses life simply because "I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out."

The book-loving theme is the main attraction of this book, and it has an ending more fulfilling and satisfying than any I could have imagined. There are huorns, finally, and a reference to Burnham Wood, and the narrator says she had tears in her eyes, and I definitely had them in mine. This is the line you want to get to in this book: "If you love books enough, books will love you back." I'm glad I hadn't read Jo Walton's "big idea" post over at Whatever before I read her book, but now that I have, I like what she says about this line.

The other thing this book is about is fairies. Yeah, but don't look at me like that. Again, it's more like a Victorian children's book where the fairies are treated matter-of-factly than the kind of thing you might be imagining. Part of what the book is about is magic. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not mentioning the narrator's name.

Let me try to give you some of the matter-of-fact flavor:
"One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has....They couldn't believe I didn't know....It turns out it's a Bentley--I wrote and asked--which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want me to be able to place everyone very precisely....
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic."

The narrator occasionally wrestles with the necessity for using magic:
"I think I ought to do something about the way the universe is unfolding, because there are things that need obvious and immediate attention, like the fact that the Russians and the Americans could blow the world to bits at any moment, and Dutch elm disease, and famine in Africa..."

And she thinks about the way magic works:
"I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn't exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming around the corner, it isn't as if I'd be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they're going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I'd have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn't have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that's just for a bus."

What I like best about the magic, besides her descriptions of what particular fairies look like, is the way she always wonders about what she's trying to do in the world: "was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it?"

There are people you meet who fall in step with you, like the friends the narrator meets in town who turn with her towards the bookshop because they're "bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop." Reading this book is like meeting friends like that. And the book is about people who know how books can be friends--reading it gave me the pleasure of seeing how this new friend--Walton's narrator-- first met many of my old friends, and the pleasure of adding her story to theirs.

This book is for anyone who loves reading, anyone who claps during a performance of Peter Pan, and anyone who has been a teenager.

Tooth and Claw

Jo Walton's novel Tooth and Claw is, she says in the prologue, "the result of wondering what a world would be like...if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology." Dragon biology, that is.

Unlike Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels, which are concerned with the Napoleonic wars, Tooth and Claw "owes a lot," Walton says, to Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage. So it's a drawing room novel, commencing with the death of the patriarch and following the fortunes of his children, including two young, unmarried daughters. It is done without winking or allegory (Walton discusses the attempts of her translators to insist on allegorical meaning in her article about reading protocols for science fiction and fantasy).

The conventions are fun because they're so literal--when a young female dragon gets engaged or becomes a "soiled dove," she turns pink to show it. Class struggle involves not only having your wings bound so you can't fly, but includes the possibility of being eaten. Male dragons have more power because they have claws and, possibly, fire.

Dragonflesh has a particular appeal, because it bestows health and greater length on the devourer, causing some landowners to go too far in eating servants and the weaker children of tenant farmers. The novel begins with a quarrel over the bestowal of the patriarch's body and ends with the results of the lawsuit over the way his flesh was distributed.

Immediately after the death of the patriarch, his married daughter "came in, walking delicately as always. She sighed at Penn, and he knew she must have heard the whole quarrel and wondered how she would act. She bent and took one bite, but one very large bite, from the breast. It was a bite that satisfied both what Penn had said and her husband's insistence. She could say to Penn that it was one bite, but she could also say to her husband that she had consumed the greater part of the breast. It was a most diplomatic bite, and Penn, despite himself, was awed at her grasp of such nuance."

One of the funniest bits--because of the mental image--is about the casual way the dragons "dress" when they're in the country, as opposed to the way they must dress in the city (here called Irieth):
"In the country, in summer, it is permissible to go about with any hat or none. Blessed parsons may be seen in battered old toppers. Respectable young ladies fly around bareheaded, and August ladies take to the skies in caps of tattered lace...In Irieth, however, at any time of year, hats were obligatory for any dragon who wished to be thought gently born."
Don't you just love the picture of the dread beasts flying about with Victorian-style bonnets and top hats perched precariously on their heads?

The descriptions of dragon dinners were also amusing:
"As the family were alone, dinner consisted of six muttons, their skin and wool removed before they reached the table by farmers expert in that craft. Wool, and whole muttonwool fleeces, were much prized in millinery. The fleeces would be sent to the cities and reappear in the form of cunningly contrived headcoverings...."
"I wonder why it is that there is a prohibition on cooking meat?" Berend said, conversationally, swallowing a great bite of the fatty underbelly of her mutton. "It smells rather pleasant."
"Flaming at it isn't cooking it," Daverak said, looking a little guilty....
"The prohibition is because the filthy Yarge do it," Daverak said, turning his seared haunch in his claw a little as if wondering if it would make him a social pariah to eat it. "That's what they told me in school anyway. Apparently they tried to make us do it during the Conquest, and it was one of the reasons we revolted. Disgusting cooked meat sticks in the craw. That's what they said, anyway. I've never tried it myself."
"Is the haunch you flamed disgusting?" Berend asked.
"I already said that was different from cooking," Daverak said, frowning.
"But how does it taste?" Berend asked. "As cooked meat is illegal, that's probably the closest I'll ever come to seeing any, and it does smell pleasant, or at least interesting. How does it taste?"
"The same as always, only a little warmer," Daverak said, taking a tentative taste. "Besides, if you really want to try cooked meat there are places in Irieth you can get it. It's one of those thrills some dragons go in for...."

Humans, of course, are the "filthy Yarge," but there aren't any in this novel until the happy ending, when a Yarge ambassador comes to court for a formal occasion and a newly betrothed young lady kindly helps her mother-in-law-to-be bear the sight of him in public.

This is not an adventure story. Despite the dinner and dragon-eating scenes, it is not bloody. It culminates with a celebration of a happy--and propertied-- marriage for all the remaining characters, and so ends, as Oscar Wilde's novel-writing character Miss Prizm says all fiction should: "the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily."