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bloodygranuaileI finished Tamora Pierce's Mastiff nearly a week ago but I have been hesitant to review it, partly because I have busy playing Castleville working but also partly because there is no way I will be able to improve upon Alyssa Rosenberg's excellent review "Tamora Pierce's 'Mastiff' and the History of Social Change" at ThinkProgress. Also, it took me a week to calm down from going "Squeeeeeeeeeee new Tamora Pierce squeeeeeeeeeeee!"
Mastiff is about the slave trade. One of the things I really liked about this book is that the slave trade in Tortall is not based in scientific racism about the inferiority of black people to the degree that it drowns out all other considerations, so we get to look more at every other aspect of why slavery is wrong and has always been wrong and is horrible than I think most USians are really used to. It avoids the boredom that would be inevitable with a thinly-veiled American History Redux, and I also think it ends up making a sort of companion piece/apology for the Aly books (known in my head as "Tamora Pierce's Guide to Being a White Ally with Specialized Helpful Knowledge in an Anti-Colonial Revolution Without Being a Total Asshat About It"), which talked a lot about colonialism but really soft-pedaled on the main character getting sold into slavery, if I recall correctly.
This version of slavery has a lot more to do with class, right of conquest, the desperation of poor parents with too many kids in economic downturns, and--in a Very Timely Fashion--the nasty results of having a small class of people with inordinate amounts of power and money who are exempt from the rules. The slave trade, in this book, is a tool used by Tortall's 1% (nobles and mages) to aid them in their plot against the Crown, and their anger at the Crown comes from the threats of being held to even the tiniest amounts of accountability or responsibility (sound familiar?). In this case, the Crown has, for apparently two or three years now, been mitigating some of the privileges of the nobility to gratuitously exploit their commoners (for example, during the food shortage a few years before, the Crown allowed people to buy grain directly from the Crown storehouses, instead of selling from the storehouses only to the nobility so the nobility could sell it to their vassals at incredible markups). The final straw that led to the mages getting on board with treason was the horrible, shocking, deeply insulting proposal that magecraft be treated like a craft--subject to licensing and regulation. (My currently very #occupied brain was all like "MAGES=EXECUTIVES AT LARGE FOR-PROFIT BANKS AMIRITE?!?! I SEE WHAT U DID THAR") So they kidnap the Crown Prince (who is four), sell him into slavery, and cast some sort of weird spell on him so that every pain that he feels the King and Queen feel too.
Personally, I feel this is a dumb plan on their part ("THE KING AND QUEEN ARE ENGAGING IN ~CLASS WARFARE~ BY TREATING OUR INDUSTRY LIKE IT'S AN INDUSTRY OR SOMETHING AND GENERALLY BEING INSUFFICIENTLY APPRECIATIVE OF HOW MUCH BETTER AND DIFFERENT SOME CLASSES OF PEOPLE ARE THAN OTHERS. LET US INCREASE THEIR SYMPATHY FOR THE PLIGHT OF THE MOST OPPRESSED GROUP OF PEOPLE IN OUR COUNTRY BY LITERALLY MAKING THEM PHYSICALLY SYMPATHETIC, AND HAVING THE CROWN PRINCE LITERALLY WALK SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES IN THEIR SHOES. THIS WILL TOTALLY GET THEM ON OUR SIDE") (I exaggerate; they were quite past trying to convert the King at this point, but man did this plan leave them no room for a Plan B if the deposition didn't work out) but it provides one hell of an awesome adventure for Beka (newly bereaved, wherein "bereaved" means "feeling guilty that her fiance died right as she was planning on breaking up with him"), Tunstall, a weird mage named Farmer Cape (in my head, Farmer Cape is played by Charlie Hunnam), the Lady Sabine, and, of course, Achoo and Pounce. A completely Lord of the Rings amount of plot is devoted to running and running and running, but the periodic escapades that break up the running from the running are actually very plot-building and cumulative and not episodic at all. Yeah, I know that's really vague. The lack of episodic-ness (episodicity?) means I'm not comfortable telling you any of it because it's all spoilers.
The other major Specter of Modern Politics that I may be making up but which I could not avoid seeing anyway is the rise of the Cult of the Goddess as Gentle Mother, which I found very interesting and awesome in previous books both for the hilarious "Uh, yeah, suuuure" reaction from the cast of professional female badasses like Beka and Goodwin, but also for its portrayal of another historical fact that most Americans are stubbornly unaware of, which is that social progress does not only ever move forward (Sidenote: Martin Luther King, Jr. has the most amazingly stinging rebuttal of the fallacy of thinking that the passage of time itself has magical socially progressive properties. I have concluded that the "I Have a Dream" speech is completely overrated, and that "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is exhibits A through Z on Why Martin Luther King Jr. Was A Total Badass). In this book, the Cult of the Goddess as Gentle Mother gets about as suddenly louder and more reactionary as the rise of our current crop of "Government So Small It Fits In Your Uterus" Congressional Republicans. And in many instances, its portrayal is as cartoonishly hilarious as a Republican Presidential candidate debate. Lady Sabine in particular kicks delicate silk-skirted butt in manipulating the tropes and values of the Gentle Mother cult to serve the ends of the Hunt.
In other news, this book has more references to excretion than the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series thus far. It even includes a discussion about what law-enforcement lifestyles allow for different levels of comfort and utility in keeping what sorts of objects in which body cavities (apparently, if you are a runner, everything chafes eventually). While reading, I kept thinking "Man, Tamora Pierce's YA books have gotten a lot less Y and a lot more A since Alanna: the First Adventure." This is fine with me, as I am much older than I was fifteen years ago as well (otherwise I would be Edward Cullen), but I kind of have to wonder if someone picking up Alanna at the same age I did and then reading all of Pierce's opus in a month (which is how I tended to read things back then) would maybe have an experience less like my own joyful discovery of Pierce and more like my slightly traumatizing discovery of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles in eighth grade.
As Alyssa points out, this book also does a fabulous job of illustrating the learned helplessness, fatalism, and slow poisoning of the mind that happens to people who live under and around ubiquitous oppressive systems for long periods of time, and its effect on people who really are totally morally against this sort of thing, or really do hate living under it. I am afraid I cannot discuss this any further without giving away major, major huge spoilers, so you should probably go read the book. And you should read Terrier and Bloodhound first, if you haven't already, because books are better when you know what's going on.
Mastiff is about the slave trade. One of the things I really liked about this book is that the slave trade in Tortall is not based in scientific racism about the inferiority of black people to the degree that it drowns out all other considerations, so we get to look more at every other aspect of why slavery is wrong and has always been wrong and is horrible than I think most USians are really used to. It avoids the boredom that would be inevitable with a thinly-veiled American History Redux, and I also think it ends up making a sort of companion piece/apology for the Aly books (known in my head as "Tamora Pierce's Guide to Being a White Ally with Specialized Helpful Knowledge in an Anti-Colonial Revolution Without Being a Total Asshat About It"), which talked a lot about colonialism but really soft-pedaled on the main character getting sold into slavery, if I recall correctly.
This version of slavery has a lot more to do with class, right of conquest, the desperation of poor parents with too many kids in economic downturns, and--in a Very Timely Fashion--the nasty results of having a small class of people with inordinate amounts of power and money who are exempt from the rules. The slave trade, in this book, is a tool used by Tortall's 1% (nobles and mages) to aid them in their plot against the Crown, and their anger at the Crown comes from the threats of being held to even the tiniest amounts of accountability or responsibility (sound familiar?). In this case, the Crown has, for apparently two or three years now, been mitigating some of the privileges of the nobility to gratuitously exploit their commoners (for example, during the food shortage a few years before, the Crown allowed people to buy grain directly from the Crown storehouses, instead of selling from the storehouses only to the nobility so the nobility could sell it to their vassals at incredible markups). The final straw that led to the mages getting on board with treason was the horrible, shocking, deeply insulting proposal that magecraft be treated like a craft--subject to licensing and regulation. (My currently very #occupied brain was all like "MAGES=EXECUTIVES AT LARGE FOR-PROFIT BANKS AMIRITE?!?! I SEE WHAT U DID THAR") So they kidnap the Crown Prince (who is four), sell him into slavery, and cast some sort of weird spell on him so that every pain that he feels the King and Queen feel too.
Personally, I feel this is a dumb plan on their part ("THE KING AND QUEEN ARE ENGAGING IN ~CLASS WARFARE~ BY TREATING OUR INDUSTRY LIKE IT'S AN INDUSTRY OR SOMETHING AND GENERALLY BEING INSUFFICIENTLY APPRECIATIVE OF HOW MUCH BETTER AND DIFFERENT SOME CLASSES OF PEOPLE ARE THAN OTHERS. LET US INCREASE THEIR SYMPATHY FOR THE PLIGHT OF THE MOST OPPRESSED GROUP OF PEOPLE IN OUR COUNTRY BY LITERALLY MAKING THEM PHYSICALLY SYMPATHETIC, AND HAVING THE CROWN PRINCE LITERALLY WALK SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES IN THEIR SHOES. THIS WILL TOTALLY GET THEM ON OUR SIDE") (I exaggerate; they were quite past trying to convert the King at this point, but man did this plan leave them no room for a Plan B if the deposition didn't work out) but it provides one hell of an awesome adventure for Beka (newly bereaved, wherein "bereaved" means "feeling guilty that her fiance died right as she was planning on breaking up with him"), Tunstall, a weird mage named Farmer Cape (in my head, Farmer Cape is played by Charlie Hunnam), the Lady Sabine, and, of course, Achoo and Pounce. A completely Lord of the Rings amount of plot is devoted to running and running and running, but the periodic escapades that break up the running from the running are actually very plot-building and cumulative and not episodic at all. Yeah, I know that's really vague. The lack of episodic-ness (episodicity?) means I'm not comfortable telling you any of it because it's all spoilers.
The other major Specter of Modern Politics that I may be making up but which I could not avoid seeing anyway is the rise of the Cult of the Goddess as Gentle Mother, which I found very interesting and awesome in previous books both for the hilarious "Uh, yeah, suuuure" reaction from the cast of professional female badasses like Beka and Goodwin, but also for its portrayal of another historical fact that most Americans are stubbornly unaware of, which is that social progress does not only ever move forward (Sidenote: Martin Luther King, Jr. has the most amazingly stinging rebuttal of the fallacy of thinking that the passage of time itself has magical socially progressive properties. I have concluded that the "I Have a Dream" speech is completely overrated, and that "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is exhibits A through Z on Why Martin Luther King Jr. Was A Total Badass). In this book, the Cult of the Goddess as Gentle Mother gets about as suddenly louder and more reactionary as the rise of our current crop of "Government So Small It Fits In Your Uterus" Congressional Republicans. And in many instances, its portrayal is as cartoonishly hilarious as a Republican Presidential candidate debate. Lady Sabine in particular kicks delicate silk-skirted butt in manipulating the tropes and values of the Gentle Mother cult to serve the ends of the Hunt.
In other news, this book has more references to excretion than the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series thus far. It even includes a discussion about what law-enforcement lifestyles allow for different levels of comfort and utility in keeping what sorts of objects in which body cavities (apparently, if you are a runner, everything chafes eventually). While reading, I kept thinking "Man, Tamora Pierce's YA books have gotten a lot less Y and a lot more A since Alanna: the First Adventure." This is fine with me, as I am much older than I was fifteen years ago as well (otherwise I would be Edward Cullen), but I kind of have to wonder if someone picking up Alanna at the same age I did and then reading all of Pierce's opus in a month (which is how I tended to read things back then) would maybe have an experience less like my own joyful discovery of Pierce and more like my slightly traumatizing discovery of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles in eighth grade.
As Alyssa points out, this book also does a fabulous job of illustrating the learned helplessness, fatalism, and slow poisoning of the mind that happens to people who live under and around ubiquitous oppressive systems for long periods of time, and its effect on people who really are totally morally against this sort of thing, or really do hate living under it. I am afraid I cannot discuss this any further without giving away major, major huge spoilers, so you should probably go read the book. And you should read Terrier and Bloodhound first, if you haven't already, because books are better when you know what's going on.
