Entries tagged with medieval

Entry tags:

Princes and parliaments

I have had a copy of Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England sitting on ye olde TBR shelf for… probably ten years now? Anyway, I was chatting with one of the bartenders at East Reg who said he was reading it and was having a great time, so I bumped it up the priority list and started reading it last week. It’s about 500 pages long, so I wasn’t able to crank my way through it before I got un-sick enough that I had to start getting out of bed and doing things besides read, but it was very fun and fast-paced, so I did spend a few evenings last week staying up a little too late reading it.

I did not know a whole lot about the Plantagenets before going into this. I had heard the name, but my knowledge of pre-Tudor rulers of England is very spotty, and I had no sense of what order any of it went into. I knew there were way too many Henrys and I didn’t know anything about any of them except the seventh and eighth. I knew Richard the Lionheart was the king when the Robin Hood stories take place and that he was off on crusade sometimes. I knew Eleanor of Aquitaine was kind of a big deal but I couldn’t have told you how she was related to anybody.

As a result, this was a very good book for me! The blurbs on it frame it as basically a “primer” on the Plantagenet dynasty, and that was exactly what I needed. It walks us through the 300 or so years of history from the reign of Henry II through the deposition of Richard II and into the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses with the ascension of Henry IV. I have another book on the Wars of the Roses that I am now interested in reading quite soon, although it is not the one by this author, who seems to have written quite a number of popular medieval histories and also hosted a TV show I’m now watching on Netflix called The Secrets of Great British Castles, which is exactly what it sounds like and perfect edutainment content for me.

The main narrative throughline in this book in terms of trying to tie it all together into an argument for historical importance is the relationship between Plantagenet monarchs and the rest of the English political community. We all learned at least a little bit about the Magna Carta at school but other than that, US kids don’t get all that much in the way of lessons about UK civics; hell, in a lot of places we barely learn about US civics. Here, Jones walks us through the changing relationships between the Plantagenet kings and their barons, knights, and occasionally the commons, and the increasingly sophisticated system of charters, parliaments, courts, and other administrative apparatus that governed England as it chugged slowly and unknowingly toward the modern era. Disputes over the taxes to finance the endless wars with France, Scotland, Wales, the Holy Land, and occasionally Ireland and Spain bring together military and financial history in a way that’s fun and easy to follow even if you are the sort of person who usually likes the military history more than the financial history (I do like financial history but I can recognize that it’s sometimes dry. This is not dry).

There are probably more scholarly books on the Plantagenets you can read if you want to be really serious about it–Jones provides a pretty intriguing “further reading” list at the back. But if you are just like “I can name all six of Henry VIII’s wives and what happened to them, but I couldn’t tell you if Prince John from Robin Hood and King John from Shakespeare’s King John are the same person or not if you put a gun to my head,” then this is certainly the book for you (they are indeed the same person). A few years ago I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and when Merricat’s list of things she liked included “Richard Plantagenet” I was vaguely embarrassed that I wasn’t sure who that was other than that it probably wasn’t Richard III because nobody liked him. I am now no longer embarrassed because even though there are two Richard Plantagenets I now know enough about them to be pretty confident that it’s the first one because nobody liked Richard II, either. I am also very pleased to be confident that if I ever have to watch another adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV I will be able to at least sort of tell some of the Henrys in it apart.

Entry tags:

Now the gallant Sir Gawain in God's name goes

Sometimes when I am sick I like to read poetry, and sometimes in the winter I like to read Arthuriana. Last week I was both so I decided to read the ancient paperback copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s been sitting on my shelf for I don’t know how long. I can tell the copy is ancient because the price on the front cover is 95 cents. You can’t buy anything for 95 cents anymore.

I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of this a few years ago, but it was long enough ago that I was ready to give the poem a “reread,” although this translation is by one Brian Stone. Brian Stone may not have written The Lord of the Rings but he does seem to know what he is about as far as medieval poetry goes, as well as the art of translation. I found this version of the poem gripping, surreal, and full of lively, concrete detail. The story itself is fey and freaky, and also seasonal–Gawain’s deadline is the New Year, so most of it takes place during that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s when time comes unmoored and we are all confused and full of cheese.

The storyline is simple enough. One New Year’s, the Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court and demands to play a game–one of Arthur’s knights will cut his head off, and then in a year, the Knight will return the blow. Young Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, takes up the challenge and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and is like “See you in a year! Come find me” and rides out. Gawain procrastinates trying to find the Green Knight again until after Halloween, then goes riding around the countryside looking for the Green Knight’s chapel, to no avail. Around Christmas, he finds himself in a strange castle in an icy wood, and becomes the guest of the jovial castellan and his lady. The castellan tells him that he knows exactly where the Green Knight’s chapel is, and it’s less than two miles away, so Gawan should feel free to just hang out and celebrate Christmas week. This he does. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the castellan goes out hunting, and Gawain stays in and gets in a set of awkward politeness dances with the castellan’s lady, a sorceress who is trying to seduce him. In an interesting set of scenes, which read as very gender-swapped from a modern perspective, Gawain tries to defend his chastity without doing anything as impolite as overtly refusing the lady, caught between two opposing standards of honorable behavior. Gawain navigates this dilemma mostly cleanly but does find himself succumbing to the temptation of letting the lady give him her girdle as a favor, although this is less because he wants the lady’s favor than because it is a magical green girdle that is enchanted so the wearer of it can never be harmed. Gawain wears this convenient item to his appointment with the Green Knight, whose blow cuts through the skin of his neck but stops at the muscle, leaving Gawain with just a superficial cut, which will scar to remind him forever that he did do a tiny little sin in order to save his own life. Gawain is very penitent about this because a knight should face death fearlessly, but the Giant thinks it’s incredibly funny and that it’s very understandable to value your own life, and forgives him. In fact, the Green Knight, who unsurprisingly is also the castellan, knew all about his enchantress wife’s seduction attempts and thinks that Gawain is a jolly fellow who handled his tests pretty well, and considers them BFFs now. All the rest of Arthur’s knights are also pretty pleased that Gawain’s not dead once he gets back to Camelot.

Thus is the story, in brief, but the point of epic poetry is not to tell it in brief, it is to tell it very dramatically and with lots of scene-setting about the shining and richly embroidered armor and clothes and stuff everyone is wearing, and the food they are eating, and the savage beauty of the northern English or maybe Welsh countryside in the middle of bitter winter. This the poem does beautifully. The introduction tells us that it also describes armor and hunting and other parts of medieval life very accurately, showing that the anonymous author of the poem was well acquainted with courtly life and generally knew what he was about. I don’t know much about hunting so it’s nice to know I am not being led astray.

Really good medieval poetry really is quite like nothing else; the atmospherics are great and the rhythms of alliterative poetry are very unlike that of the rhyming poetry that would come to dominate later eras of English literature. I am always very glad when I revisit one of these types of works when they are translated well.

Entry tags:

In days of old when knights were bold

The first book I finished this year (I started it a few days ago but it counts for 2025!) was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, one of the great works of nineteenth century medievalism, a time period I unabashedly love because it feels like the first real modern invention of fantasy nerds. Except it took itself with typical Victorian dead moral seriousness (the morals were sometimes bad, but they were for sure serious) and is even now taken with dead artistic seriousness.

The copy of the Idylls that I own was acquired for a mere $5 at Brimfield, probably because the spine and slipcover are so faded. Inside, it is a really very lovely edition, with thick linen paper and deeply stamped print, and fanciful full-page line drawings of what appear to be not just the characters but specifically statues of the characters, on pedestals in little alcoves like you’d find in an old cathedral. This is one of the factors that made it a good winter break book, since I didn’t need to take it anywhere and could just go full sitting-by-the-fire cozy and be generally picturesque about it. I feel like the kinds of people who did Victorian medievalism would appreciate that.

Anyway. The Idylls are several narrative poems about different characters in and around King Arthur and his Round Table, some of whom I was already familiar with and some of them, apparently, I was not. Some of the key moments of Arthuriana are in there, such as the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Fall of Arthur, and the winning of Guenevere. There are also a number of tales of essentially random knights of the Table, which are fun. There are a few tales of basically the tragic glories of heterosexuality, some of which are better than others. The tale of Lancelot and Elaine is effective in presaging the ruin that Lancelot and Guenevere’s adulterous love for each other will wreak on Camelot, although I am probably not the right audience to be fully bought into a story about how noble it is for a teenage girl to die of heartbreak over a guy three times her age. (Snap out of it, Elaine!) The most painful poem was the one between the heathen sorceress Vivien and famous old guy Merlin, in which Vivien tries to seduce Merlin into telling her a charm that will let her essentially bury Merlin alive but magically. Because Merlin is supposed to be wise and old and not a complete fucking idiot man who will do any fool thing the instant a pretty girl asks him to, this poem is really fucking long, as it takes an interminable time for Vivien to wear Merlin down into doing the transparently idiotic thing, so we are treated to pages and pages of painfully gender essentialist pseudo-medieval-but-actually-Victorian moral speechifying. This is the one poem that I will denounce as just straight up bad. In the rest of them, the general Victorian gender nonsense is certainly there, but also they are good poems and good stories, full of evocative imagery and daring deeds and all that good stuff, and it would be silly to expect a Victorian story about early medieval times to be about exploring today’s moral dilemmas, anyway. So all the stuff about Christianity and bloodlines and whatever is just part of the worldbuilding, and I can roll with it, even up to and including basically blaming Guenevere personally for the entire realm falling apart. But the Vivien one is just too much.

While the first couple Idylls are fun and even lighthearted (“Gareth and Lynette” is very funny and cute), as the story progresses the sense of melancholy and foreboding grow, and Tennyson’s overall take on the glories of Arthur’s rule seems to be that it was ultimately a failure. This is done very well and further makes the book an excellent choice for gloomy midwinter reading. It’s all very tragic and sad, and Tennyson never once fucks up his scansion or any of that other stuff that’s important to the actual craft of lyrical poetry, which is very impressive. It definitely makes me want to immediately run and read more Arthuriana rather than feeling like I’ve had my fill of it for now.

Entry tags:

Murder most foul and vengeance most verbose

Since I am in my epic poetry era and was apparently also doing Medieval January, I decided to follow up Beowulf with a much later medieval epic that I’ve had sitting on my TBR shelves for much longer: the twelfth-century German poem The Song of the Nibelungs, also known sometimes by its actual German name The Nibelungenlied. The copy I have is from the ‘70s and is a verse translation by one Frank G. Ryder.

This saga tells the story of Siegfried of the Netherlands, the most heroic hero to ever hero (as the subjects of all heroic epics are), and his wife Kriemhild of Burgundy, who is of course the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Siegfried does various heroic deeds to win Kriemhild’s hand in marriage, including helping her brother, the Burgundian King Gunther, win another superlatively lovely maiden’s hand, the Icelandic princess Brunhild. Gunther and Brunhild’s marriage, starting off strong with trickery and lies, puts into motion a series of events that culminates in Siegfried’s murder by one Hagen of Trony, a vassal of Gunther’s. Hagen is not punished even though everyone knows he did it—in part because he stole Sigfrid’s sword in the process—because these people have no concept of a trial apparently, and I guess they expect Kriemhild to just get over it eventually.

Kriemhild, however, is not one to get over things, and after several years of staying at the Burgundian court crying, she marries the recently bereaved Attila the Hun. I think it is supposed to be that Attila the Hun even though this one is kind of useless and never picks up a sword the whole poem. Everyone thinks Kriemhild is finally getting over Siegfried but in fact she’s just playing a long (though not real subtle) game where she invites the whole Burgundian court to come visit her and then gets all her Huns to fight them until literally everybody dies. And that’s the story, basically.

More than anything else, this poem is a fascinating look into the chivalric mindset and its frankly bonkers set of ideals. The first noticeable thing is that it has a bad case of the superlatives. Everything mentioned is the most thing to ever thing. Ever knight is the strongest and most valiant knight, every woman is the most beautiful woman, every occasion of gift-giving is the most generous display of largesse in the history of largesse, every outfit is the richest outfit, you get the idea. It’s honestly a little silly. Another noticeable thing is that everything must be done through personal prowess at arms. Kriemhild would rather get tens of thousands of knights killed in a big epic multi-phase fight than learn how to poison Hagen or even slit his throat in his sleep. However, it’s hard not to conclude that this is sort of what everybody deserves, given how much time everyone spends in the final act wibbling about the ethics of killing each other based on stuff like guest-right and kinship networks and oaths of fealty but absolutely nobody but Kriemhild gives a single shit that Hagen murdered Sigfrid.

That said, the poem is still a grand old sword-swingin’ time, and I’m glad I finally read it.

Entry tags:

Iron cocoons, pointed shoes, and other travesties of fashion

For the book club we are reading my favorite type of book right about this time of year: 700-page chonkers about medieval Europe. The lucky tome this month is A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning popular historian Barbara Tuchman. This book was published in 1972, but still seems to be considered pretty credible, as far as popular history goes.

Though the framing is that it’s about the 14th century world, this is really a book about 14th century Europe, focused predominantly on France. France is of course actually smack in the middle of Europe, although Europe only thinks it is smack-dab the center of the world. But this is only annoying in the intro and outro chapters. The rest of the book is just a wild ride through Europe and has a much, much more interesting framing device: our unifying thread through the story is the life one Enguerrand VII de Coucy, lord of a castle in Picardy with a ridiculously large central keep. Enguerrand survives for most of the century by a combination of being very lucky and being actually kind of smart, or perhaps more specifically wise, which isn’t really among the noble classes at this time.

The 14th century was a bad time in Europe. It was certainly exciting, but mostly in awful ways. The second half of the century was punctuated by outbreaks of the Black Death, which first hit in 1347 and of which there were about half a dozen waves by 1399. This was also the century of the infamous schism in the Catholic Church, where there was a Pope in Avignon and a Pope in Rome and then at one point a third Pope somewhere else. Most of the hundred years of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England fell into this century. There were a bunch of Crusades that all went comically poorly (they certainly weren’t comical at the time, but from the vantage point of 700 years and personal apostasy from the Catholic Church, I cannot help but think it’s funny when the Christians lose crusades). Whenever the wars stopped, big groups of discharged warriors formed little bandit companies and roamed around continuing to do warfare-type activities upon the populace. Medieval warfare appears to have consisted about 2% of embodying the chivalrous ideal of knights heroically stabbing other knights in pitched battle on an open plain, and 98% things that have since been (theoretically) banned as war crimes and terrorism under the Geneva Convention. (This math leaves 0 percentage points available for newfangled tactical tomfoolery like “reconnaissance.”) If you, like me, enjoy reading about awful things, 14th century France provides an embarrassment of riches. It also provides an embarrassment of riches if you, like me, think people ought to be embarrassed about the riches they acquire by violence and dispossession.

The writing style of this book is not dense, as in it is neither dry nor academic, but instead infused with a sort of dryly chatty sense of humor that might not be wholly objective but which I enjoyed a lot. This is important because the content is very dense, in that there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of people to keep track of. The morass of repetitive names and titles can make it very easy to forget who we are talking about at any given time, and at some point I had to decide to just roll with it instead of constantly going back and trying to re-establish who was who. This is of course not Barbara Tuchman’s fault–she did, after all, go to great lengths to give us a distinctive “main character” whose name was neither Philippe, nor Louis, nor Charles–it’s mainly the fault of the French and the English. Tuchman is able to turn some of the repetitiveness of the 14th century into jokes as well, such as an extremely funny running gag about how much the moralizers of the time hated pointed shoes, which persisted in being popular despite being objectively one of the dumbest fashion trends of all time. I am sure book club will have a nice deep conversation about the politics of the time and what it says about the politics of now but I’m just gonna be like “lol, pointed shoes” the whole time.

Anyway, I loved this book. Get thee to a library anon and check it out.

Entry tags:

Hwaet and hirpling and heroics from Heaney

This summer, at a used bookstore in Maine, for the low low price of four dollars I picked up a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf–the one with the Old English text on the verso-side pages and the modern English translation on the recto sides–and for six months or so have been nurturing cozy visions of reading it in January, the traditional time of year when I get obsessed with medieval and ancient world literature of the frigid North, ensconced in blankets while January happens outside. I kind of originally envisioned doing this as soon as the new year kicked off but I got delayed by the enormous tome that was Menewood, but I am pleased to say that I still got this poem in in two sittings in January. I read Heaney’s magnificent introduction and the first few pages of the poem’s text itself in the bath, which was lovely, and then zipped through most of the poem on Sunday, despite several attempts to slow down and puzzle out what was going on on the left-hand pages.

The very basic storyline of Beowulf is, as many have pointed out, mainly a bonkers action movie. Works like Beowulf have a long legacy in popular culture even if it’s mostly students and scholars that read the poem itself anymore. The poem follows a big damn hero with the strength of thirty men, as he single-handedly arm-wrestles the monster Grendel to death, then fights Grendel’s mom in an epic underwater hand-to-hand combat (he uses weapons this time but he has to find an epic sword in Grendel’s mom’s lair because his regular epic sword wasn’t epic enough), and then at the end of his life he heroically battles a dragon, slightly less single-handedly this time because he needs a young sidekick to witness his epic passing and the sidekick has to do something useful in order to be worthy of being Beowulf’s sidekick. The sidekick’s name is Wiglaf, and he is not a comic relief character like “a sidekick named Wiglaf” would be these days.

The basic storyline is only sort of the point. The point is the atmosphere, and the wild world of mead-halls and war, and the heroic warrior code that makes such great songs even though it seems like such a truly awful way to live it’s amazing that so many human societies stuck with it for so long. Genealogies and gold are apparently also the point; there are a lot of both. Heaney’s somber (mostly), stately (again, mostly), Ulster-inflected translation really brings a certain weight and tone, even if I did have to look up some of the more obscure Hiberno-English and other niche English terms he uses (I had a good giggle at “hirpling,” and then looked it up; it’s a Scottish term for limping). Heaney’s introduction, which I probably didn’t give quite the studious attention I should have given that I was reading it bath (mostly for the sake of not bringing a library book into the bath; I still wasn’t done with Menewood), is tailor-made to be Relevant To My Interests, starting off with some praising of Professor Tolkien for his critical treatment of i>Beowulf as a work of art and not just a historic artifact, and working its way through Heaney’s feelings about the cultural politics of the English and Irish languages.

A notable thing about Beowulf is that although it is a Foundational Work of English Literature, and written from a Christian perspective, the story it tells takes place in the pagan long-ago over in Scandinavia. This is because “the English” didn’t really start to begin to exist as a people until about the seventh century or so when the Angles from Scandinavia and the Saxons from also Scandinavia started to blob together into the Anglo-Saxons of Angle-land, so it’s not like they popped out of nowhere. But this lack of an early English mythology, instead making do with bits and pieces of mythology from elsewhere in Europe because the ancient mythology of the British Isles was all Celtic, saddened the deeply English (and Catholic) Professor Tolkien so much that he wrote all the Lord of the Rings books about it, thus changing the face of fantastic writing forever.

Anyway, as much as I want to check out both Tolkien’s older translation and the slangy new Maria Davana Headley one, the Heaney seems to now be the definitive, “classroom standard” translation and it’s likely to stay that way for a while. The “classroom standard” bit is helped along by not only being a very good translation, but also by having little guidepost notes in the margins, and having the two languages side by side so you can pretend to be studious by gawping at them. If you can do a little actual studiousness about Old English pronunciations then this edition also allows you to put on your most stentorian Gandalf impression type of voice and read it out loud, which I certainly have not done and therefore cannot vouch if it’s nearly as fun as it sounds, it’s just an idea.

Entry tags:

Of Os-things and Yffings, and sheep

I have finished the first book of the year! It’s later than I intended and later than usual even for a 700-page book (usually I read the first 600 pages in December and then I can finish it on January 1 or 2), but I’ve done it! The honors this year go to Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to Hild, which further follows the fictional adventures of the early life of the renowned seventh-century abbess Hild of Whitby.

Menewood kicks off a few months or so after the end of Hild (if I recall correctly) and things seem to be going well for the now 18-year-old Hild. She is the Lady of Elmet alongside her husband and secret half-brother Cian Boldcloak, sworn gesith to King Edwin and Lord of Elmet, and she is pregnant. Elmet is small and under-defended but they are building it up, and Hild and Cian are also secretly supplying a refuge in a hidden valley within the boglands of Elmet: the titular Menewood.

Hild hopes they won’t have to use it, but the winds of war are blowing, and this promising beginning–all the things Hild has won for herself by the end of the first book–are set up pretty much just to be brutally knocked down, so Hild has to start building all over, and that’s what makes up most of the book. King Edwin is threatened by a Southern king named Cadwallon, who loathes the Yffings and wants to burn them and everything they have ever touched (which is… most of northern England) to the ground and kill them all and steal their gold. He has essentially no interest in ruling Northumbria; he just wants to loot it and make sure nobody else within six degrees of separation from the Yffings gets to rule it either. Cadwallon has allied with another southern king named Penda, who is slimier if less psychotic, and taking out Penda is shaping up to the subject of Book 3, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Cadwallon and Penda manage to pincer a desperate and pretending-to-be-confident Edwin Yffing and decapitate him, killing off a good half of the cast we’ve met so far in the process, including Cian Boldcloak. Hild is grievously injured in the battle that she wasn’t able to avoid being caught in, despite being literally nine whole months pregnant, and as you can probably imagine that doesn’t go well for baby. With the help of her former slave Gwladus and her young runner Morud, Hild manages not to die, but she’s pretty severely injured, both physically and emotionally. I must say that Griffith does an excellent job of building up the dread and sense of claustrophobic inevitability leading up to Hild’s darkest hour, and having read nothing at all about the book beforehand I was definitely caught up in the oh no how are they going to get out of this one, I don’t see how they’re going to get out of this type of anticipatory dread and it is because, broadly speaking, most of them don’t get out of this. The first third of the book is some of the bleakest shit I’ve read in a while, and it was hard to read more than a couple dozen pages at a time. It was very good January reading after all.

Menewood, however, serves its purpose, and after Hild spends a couple months recuperating with a bunch of poor fisherfolk who live on the very edges of what passed for civilization even in seventh-century Britain, a bit of tough-love therapy from Gwladus, and a surprise visit from some of Hild’s former group of mutilated spearmen–the Fearsomes, technically sworn to King Edwin when he was still alive–Hild and co. make their way to Menewood and start slowly and carefully rebuilding, gathering allies and news and resources as Hild starts to put together a plan to take down Cadwallon Reaver and install a suitably sensible, non-psychotic king of Northumbre. This involves a lot of fun intrigue and heists and letter-writing and diplomacy and teaching a bunch of traditional gesith types how to do things like “sneak” and “steal” and “ambush very quietly” instead of always charging honorably into battle face-first with your flag flying. After the bleak and brutal first part of the book, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a complex plot come together, with all sorts of characters and resources and stuff, and all go off magnificently, as Hild takes the offensive back and pulls all the squabbling factions of People Cadwallon Has Fucked Over into one big, complicated, sneakily implacable instrument of revenge. I feel like I just ran a marathon and can’t wait to see them take on Penda (although I am hoping this campaign does not necessitate the total destruction of everything Hild built over the course of this book, both because we’ve already done that and because I’m not sure I could take it).

The texture of this series is great if you like really immersive historical fiction; it is less great if you don’t like reading about bees and sausage-making and tonsures and sealing-wax and 500 different people all named Os-something and basically every detail of life in seventh-century Northumbria that a character could possibly run across while interacting with every level of society. I personally love this shit, although there were a couple nits I had to pick with some of the words Griffith chose to not modernize–is it really necessary to say “middaeg” instead of “midday”? I don’t think “midday” would have hit me as sounding too modern, just that I expect the novel to be translated into modern English and not actually be written in “Anglisc” (Old English/Anglo-Saxon). If I want to read stuff in seventh-century languages I have a copy of the dual-text Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf (which is shouted out in Menewood as both new and a favorite of Edwin’s). But overall I love the language; the book contains not only a map and a cast of characters but also family trees and a glossary, to help those of us modern dumb-dumbs who don’t know our names for the different ages of sheep but still want to be able to follow what’s going on when the characters talk about sheep (Griffith isn’t going to insult us by pretending that nobles in the 7th century weren’t concerned about sheep. This was a pre-industrial society. You were never too rich to stop caring about sheep, certainly not if you wanted to stay rich).

I hope it doesn’t take a full 10 years for the third book to come out, but if it has to take that long to be as good as the first two, then Nicola Griffith should take her time and I will pick up that third book as soon as it’s published, likely no matter what else I have in the hopper.

Entry tags:

Arthur King, Arthur King, the biggest and the coolest thing

It’s been a big winter for me wanting to read medieval British nonsense, partly due to the cold wet dark New England weather this time of year and partly due to not being allowed to leave the house. Having enjoyed reading some of his Anglo-Saxon poetry translations around Thanksgiving I therefore decided that I would dig into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur, an original poem done in the style of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry and yet somehow still the least intimidating bit of Arthuriana left on my TBR shelves. (The other two are Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort D’Arthur and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which is 800 pages long.)

The poem itself is unfinished and consists of only five cantos, leaving off right as Arthur sets out for his final battle against his treacherous nephew Mordred. Like all good Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is meant to be read aloud, so much so that it’s almost difficult to sit and read it with your mouth shut; the temptation to declaim it or at least to mouth the words along is too strong. The style is purposefully archaic but quite comprehensible, similar to many of Tolkien’s other original works. It is also fairly short–maybe fifty pages of the 230-page book is given to the actual text of the poem. The rest is commentary by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, walking us both through the evolution of the legend of Arthur and the evolution of this particular poem through its early drafts and bits of scratch paper. Personally, I found the historical tour of the Arthur cycle to be the most engrossing part of the book; Tolkien quotes liberally from a variety of older sources in both their original language and, for the Latin and Old English ones, translated into modern English; for Middle and Early Modern English, however, we get raw, un-spelling-corrected transcriptions with footnotes where necessary (there are a lot of footnotes). I am the sort of dork who thinks lines like “Betwixte me and Launcelote du Lake/Nys man in erthe, for sothe to sayne,/Shall trews sette and pees make/Er outher of vs haue other slayne” are hilarious to read, and I really enjoyed both the prose and poetry versions of Arthur’s last voyage to Avylyon to hele his grete woundes. (It’s possible that an adolescence spent reading Discworld has rotted my brain.)

Anyway, this book took me one evening to read, and I feel very edified, and like I can go back to wasting my time hunting dire chinchillas in The Sims Medieval with a clear conscience.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: none

Entry tags:

In which there's a lot going on under the surface

Do you ever, like . . . read a book wrong? Because that's sort of what I felt I did with Kai Ashante Wilson's short but intricate debut novel, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. Though it's less than 250 pages long, it took me nearly three weeks to read, mostly in small chunks of 10 pages or less.

This is not the recommended way of reading this book. There's too much going on, and it's not all laid out and explained as clearly as one might need if one is, you know, not actually fully paying attention.

The basic storyline is that of a demigod (put simply) named Demane, a healer, who is traveling with a band of mercenaries/security guards to escort a caravan across a magically-guarded road through the Wildeeps to its destination. The road is supposed to be protected from the mysterious time-and-space-bending monster-filled magic of the Wildeeps, but there are reports of something coming onto the road and eating people anyway. Demane and another demigod-posing-as-a-human, who goes by "the Captain," have to protect their fellow mercenaries and hunt down the threat, while simultaneously pretending to be humans and hiding their relationship with each other from the humans, who are apparently not OK with that sort of thing. If that sounds boring, it's because I'm explaining it badly. The narrative is structured nonlinearly, with a lot of flashbacks and bits that are hinted at, and it's a very character-driven story, so the main point of the thing is really more Demane's struggles to find a place within the humans' weird ways of doing things, managing his relationships with all the other fighters in the caravan, and, eventually, learning to go back to and harness his demigodhood to protect them.

The language in the book is a big glorious colorful tapestry of code-switching, blithely ignoring the constraints of any one register or sensibility of real-world history. Some of it dips into a sort of modernist, poetic stream-of-consciousness style; other parts are gory and action-movie-y; some bits are silly to the point of slapstick (some humans are silly to the point of slapstick too, so I supposed that's realism); the setting is mostly in the pseudo-medieval-fantasy vein--although it's more of a McAfrica than McEurope--but there's elements of science fiction, or at least science fiction terminology, woven in there too. There's slang that sounds very modern to my ear, which I admit I could be entirely wrong about since it's mostly Black slang and I'm not very well educated on Black slang, and there's bits of French and Spanish tossed in (which was fun but frankly a little jarring since it's a secondary-world fantasy), and basically the point here is that it's a ridiculous ton of fun if you like playing with language! Also it keeps you on your toes.

People closer to the topic than me have written, and in all likelihood will continue to write, insightful things about what it means that nearly the entire cast of characters in this book is black men, and the two leads are queer black men. I will read those things; right now I'm only going to say that I don't think this should be such a rarity. (Also I don't think reading it damaged my fragile white lady brain or anything.)

I'd be very interested to read more things set in this universe, partly because it was really engaging but also partly because there's clearly a lot more to it than was actually explained in the book itself and now I'm curious. I'm also not sure if this is a standalone novel or the first in a series; it has an abrupt ending that really seems like it could go either way.

Current Mood: tired

Entry tags:

orders Chinese food

I picked up Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix back when I was dropping lots of money on e-books, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it until just now. I didn’t know much about it going in except that it was Chinese-inspired fantasy and it was girl-led YA, which, honestly, were pretty much the only things I needed to know. I went in expecting probably a fun sort of adventure fantasy romance thingy, and that is exactly what I got.

Our heroine is a seventeen-year-old girl named Ai Ling, who is not married because her parents are having trouble arranging one, because of some sort of scandal that her father was involved with twenty years ago that Ai Ling doesn’t know the details of. When her father has to go back to the Palace he’d been expelled from twenty years ago, on some sort of ill-defined business trip, he doesn’t come back—so Ai Ling sets out to find him. Along the way she has many adventures of the sort that make a long ride/long walk quest fun, including being attacked by many scary demons, coming into possession of magical talismans, discovering the extent of her own magic powers, meeting a handsome young man with his own tragic backstory, gaining a fun companion who then sadly dies, eating a lot of lovingly-described food, and riding a dragon. (Is “riding a dragon” not a trope used in every single quest narrative? BECAUSE IT SHOULD BE.) There’s a strong theme of sexual jealousy running through the various backstories and larger plot, adding an element of heaviness to the standard pro-romantic-love, anti-arranged-marriage theme that’s so prominent in historical fiction and historical fantasy. (My verdict on Chen Yong, the love interest: Sometimes broody due to Tragic Backstory, but almost 100% not an annoying jerkface.) (Anyone who knows my opinions on dude romantic leads will know that this is basically glowing praise coming from me.)

This book is pretty squarely within a certain tradition of teen girl adventure stories that is unabashedly my favorite and that I tend to turn to as comfort reading, so I ate right through this with probably not enough of a critical eye for plot holes or tropes that have been overdone (they are mostly tropes I like. But I know that I have read them in, at this point, literally hundreds of different novels). The world is fun, a lived-in-feeling pseudo-medieval Chinese set of kingdoms and some nonhuman realms that I think are based at least partly on Chinese myths and legends that I’m not very familiar with (but if so, apparently there are some wicked creepy Chinese legends out there!). Ai Ling is a pretty relatable, likeable character (with the notable exception of one episode of egregious obliviousness that almost gets everybody killed), and there’s some really well-done fight scenes and a fairy-tale structure/flavor to the whole thing that appealed to me.

The ending sets up a sequel, with the broody non-jerkface mixed-race love interest faffing off on another quest to find his father instead of proposing to Ai Ling already because apparently he is also sort of obtuse, so I think in the sequel she goes on the quest with him? I hope? I’m totally up for another quest with these characters, so long as Chen Yong proposes at the end. And this is not even because I’m super invested in their relationship as because it’d just be stupid of him not to and I don’t like stupid love interests.

I could see this getting a movie adaptation if the live-action Mulan does well, although sadly I could also see it getting a really bad movie adaptation even though the book itself has a lot of strong cinematic elements, because YA adaptations.

Current Mood: productive

Entry tags:

Historical historical fantasy

I found an article on Strange Horizons the other day that piqued my interest: it was called "The Woman Who Made Fantasy: Katherine Kurtz" and I had never heard that name before, nor did I recognize the accompanying cover art of a young man in garb with a flaming sword facing off against a dragon of blue fire. But it turns out that Ms. Kurtz' Deryni Rising was one of the very first entries in the tradition of secondary-world historical fantasy--the tradition that contains many of my all-time faves, including Tamora Pierce's Tortall works and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Turns out Deryni Rising, published in 1970, predates them all.

There are a lot of things in this book that have since become cliches, and interestingly, there are some aspects to the worldbuilding that I think would have been "corrected" in a book being written today because they're too historical and not fantasy enough--mainly the use of Latin and Greek in the Church Militant, which is not only heavily modeled on the Roman Catholic Church, but uses most of the same trappings and terminology. And to be entirely frank, much of the prose is a bit clunky. Basically, it was written in 1970 and you can kinda tell.

That said, I still found it a solid, entertaining, engaging fantasy story from beginning to end. It takes place in a little pseudo-British Isles-y kingdom populated mostly by humans and a little bit by a race of sorcerers called the Deryni, who used to be in power several centuries back but are now persecuted by the Church and mostly in hiding. Some humans can learn Deryni magic, including the ruling line of our setting kingdom with its unpronounceable faux-Welsh name. When King Brion has a very mysterious heart attack despite being in prime health, a lot of things go into motion. His son and heir, Prince Kelson, needs to come into his powers, which means he needs help from the Deryni Lord Alaric Morgan. But the Prince's mother is dead set against her son dabbling in magic, and is plotting to have Morgan arrested for treason. And an old enemy of King Brion's, a rogue Deryni sorceress, plans to take out Kelson and Morgan both. Morgan, Kelson, and a few loyal others have precious little time to get the new king crowned and fully vested with his powers... and, of course, nothing goes quite according to plan during any of it. There's a good deal of fighting, magic, assassination attempts, political plots, treason, and all that good stuff we've come to expect from historical fantasy in the 45 years since it was first published.

It's probably not going to win over anyone who's not already inclined toward fantasy, and it's got some awkward representation issues (the only two prominent female characters are both villains, and then there's the stereotypically henchman-y depiction of Moors, which doesn't make sense if there's not Northern Africa, wouldn't they have another name?). And it's a little shorter on backstory than I like, although there's enough to make sense of the characters and their actions. I could probably come up with complaints about it all day, really. But for all that, I really enjoyed reading it! The pacing is good, there are a couple really good plot twists, and there's no obligatory romantic subplot. I may well check out the sequels.

Entry tags:

Return of the Teenage Assassin Nuns

I was a bit worried that the third installment of Robin LaFevers’ His Fair Assassin trilogy, Mortal Heart, would be boring after the deep fuckedupness of Dark Triumph, especially since it follows the angelic Annith rather than the madness-prone Sybella. But it turns out that Annith’s secrets are just as screwed up as either of our previous protagonists’.

Annith was brought to the convent as a baby, and she doesn’t have some of the things the other daughters of Mortain have—namely a birth story, or any sign of the various gifts that each of his daughters usually display one of. What she does have is secrets, and more skill at every task the young assassins are taught than any of the other girls, in part due to starting so early, and in part because of her treatment at the hands of the Dragonette, the former Abbess.

In addition to the ongoing war with France, which has formed the main source of conflict through this series, most of the conflict in this book comes from Annith’s being denied the opportunity to go out and actually serve as an assassin—the only thing she’s ever wanted, and the thing she’s been trained for. Instead, the current Abbess declares that Annith, because she is so biddable and obedient, will stay at the convent and train as its new Seeress. Biddable obedient Annith—who has deliberately done her best to be the perfect novice so that she will be entrusted with an off-island assignment—promptly runs the hell away. Or not that promptly, really, but quite shortly afterwards, after doing some snooping around.

The dual threads of war with France and Annith’s uncovering of her own family secrets—and they are some seriously messed-up secrets—are woven together tightly, bound with a lot of mythology about Brittany’s nine pagan gods. Up until now we’ve mostly only known about Mortain, the god of death, but here we meet followers of Arduinna, protector of innocents, and hear a lot of different versions of the story of Mortain and his ill-fated marriage with Arduinna’s sister Amourna. We also meet the hellequin, Death’s riders, earning penance for their misdeeds in life by escorting lost ghosts to the Underworld and hunting down malevolent ones. Annith’s romance with the lead hellequin, Balthazaar, seems somewhat obligatory and tacked-on for the first half of the book or so, but then plot twists happened and I changed my mind. Balthazaar has secrets too! Everyone in this book has secrets!

But this book doesn’t just use secrets for shock value—the whole book, at its core, is a surprisingly thorough exploration of how people can be bent to one another’s will—through secrets and lies, through promises and praise, through coaxing and tricking and teaching them into effacing their own wills voluntarily. Though Annith certainly has enough reasons to complain on her own—she’s been treated abominably and robbed of the expected payoff that had been her reason for putting up with it—it’s her concern for the other girls being lied to and manipulated in the same way that allows her to really become a powerful moral force.

I also love that (and here there be spoilers) in this book about assassins, the final climactic “assassination” that saves Brittany involves shooting someone—with love! Love saves the day, huzzah! But also shooting by a teenaged assassin nun! Idunno, I thought it was great.

Putting all three of the together, this trilogy is one of the strongest YA trilogies I’ve read in years—and you know how much I love YA and how many trilogies there are! Usually one of them is weak; either the middle book has Middle Book Syndrome or the last one is rushed and just falls apart. But this series, along with Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Lynburn Legacy, is really just stellar all the way through. With some surprisingly thoughtful themes lurking behind the main action of war, mayhem, and glorious medieval nonsense, it’s really everything I want in a YA fantasy.

Entry tags:

Beauty and the Beast

In a most timely boon from the library gods, Dark Triumph, the second book in Robin LaFevers’ His Fair Assassin trilogy, became available just in time for a weekend bookended by four-hour bus rides between Boston and New York, where me and some of my lovely friendesses were going to check out some awesome Gothy New York things, like the “Death Becomes Her” Victorian mourning fashion exhibit at the Met, and a trendy foofy cocktail bar called Death & Co.

Dark Triumph is considerably darker than Grave Mercy, and Grave Mercy was already about assassins, betrayal, and threat of sexual violence. To this, Dark Triumph adds heaping helpings of child abuse, incest, infanticide, spousal murder… you know, basically everything.

The protagonist of this book is Sybella, a secondary character in the first book, who arrives at the convent in the middle of a full-fledged psychotic breakdown from the goings-on of her previous life. In this book, she’s been sent to infiltrate the family of the sadistic Count d’Albret, a man who already has six dead wives to his name and has repeatedly threatened—and in one case, attempted—to rape thirteen-year-old Duchess Anne if she doesn’t keep the marriage contract that was made on her behalf when she was very young (one of many such contracts). Sybella’s ability to infiltrate this family and spy for the convent is made easier, from the convent’s perspective, but harder, from Sybella’s, by the fact that Sybella is the daughter of Count d’Albret’s fourth wife. And Sybella’s family makes the Lannisters look like the Brady Bunch. Sybella spends a good deal of the book, particularly at the beginning, being near-suicidal, kept going only by the hope of getting permission to kill her supposed father (as an assassin of this particular convent, Sybella’s actual father is Death).

Things start to look up, for a pretty messed-up definition of looking up, when Sybella springs the injured Beast of Waroch from d’Albret’s jail. Beast is a big ugly berserker dude who is nevertheless super friendly and awesome when he is not in the grip of battle rage, and who is a staunch ally of the Duchess. Additionally, the Beast’s sister was d’Albret’s sixth wife, leading to many feelings and much tragic backstory for everybody. Their romance, though of necessity pretty angsty, especially on Sybella’s part, is pretty sweet, in a dark sort of way, with both of them coming to terms with their own darkness and tragic pasts and all that stuff and supporting each other, and generally being heartwarmingly messed up.

Despite all the deeply disturbing stuff, which is really quite disturbing indeed, Dark Triumph still manages to be fun in a way that a story about medieval teenage assassin nuns cannot help but be fun. It’s action-packed, vivid, twisty, fast-paced, sometimes witty, and full of rich characterization and richer intrigues. I highly recommend the bejesus out of it.

Entry tags:

Assassin nuns and wars for independence

One of the many, many book clubs I am (at this point, rather half-assedly) in is Gail Carriger’s online book club. I haven’t participated since reading Blood and Chocolate, a YA werewolf novel that, despite being about werewolves, brought me back to my adolescence in the worst way. But I’d already bought a copy of Robin LaFevers’ Grave Mercy, the first installment of the His Fair Assassin trilogy, in one of those Kindle Daily Deal things a while ago, so I figured I might as well read it. It did, after all, have a lot of things about it that seemed right up my alley, like teenage girl assassins and medieval Brittany.

Grave Mercy is the story of Ismae Rienne, a novice at the convent of St. Mortain, patron saint/old god of Death. Like everyone at the convent, Ismae is supposedly one of Mortain’s actual children, and therefore has a number of odd death-related gifts, including the ability to see the “marques” of Death on her targets. She also has a couple of gifts that are less common among the convent’s occupants, such as immunity to poison.

Despite many misgivings by many parties on a number of subjects, Ismae is sent off to the court of the young Duchess Anne of Brittany, in the guise of the cousin-but-probably-mistress to Anne’s half-brother, Gavriel Duval. Her actual role is to spy, and to assassinate anyone who needs assassinating. But there are layers and layers of plots afoot, and Ismae develops suspicions that maybe the people she’s assigned to spy on might not be the people she really needs to be spying on. As the threats to Brittany’s independence build and the young but awesome Duchess is betrayed by various power-grubbing nobles, Ismae’s doubts grow and she has to set herself to some serious learning—about the plots surrounding her, about the nature of Mortain and her service to him, and about her pesky feelings for Duval.

Duval is pretty much not an asshole, even though they do the classic romantic comedy bit of getting off on the wrong foot and getting mad at each other a lot, so that’s pretty good for a romance. The romance subplot is at least actually tied in pretty closely with all the fun stuff, since the main plots are dependent on questions of people’s loyalties and principles, that sort of thing, so it doesn’t feel tacked on, even if it is pretty obvious right from the beginning.

There’s a lot of historical detail here, and fairly little magic—all the magic that we see is deeply religious in nature, having to do with Ismae’s service of her god and her relationship with him as his daughter. But much of it is historical-fiction sort of stuff, and pretty heavily researched, which is completely OK by me. I like all the snooping around and trying to untangle plots and remember everybody’s family history, and am also 100 percent OK with there only being a couple of major action scenes. This book also doesn’t dick around with how limited women’s roles were in the late middle ages/early Renaissance, especially when there’s nobody to put any sort of check on the most power-hungry men.

My biggest issue with the book is that there is one small plot hole that I made into a much bigger OH NO than I think most people would. At one point, Ismae makes plans to meet with her convent sister Sybella, who may have News about Betrayal and Shenanigans and all the general badness that’s going on. On her way to meet Sybella, Ismae is interrupted by having to have a scene with the Duchess and one of the villains. And then… there is no follow-up to her missing her meeting! Sybella does show back up, but there is no acknowledgement that they had a meeting and missed it, and Ismae doesn’t go to any effort to make contact with Sybella again or wonder what information Sybella was going to give her that she now doesn’t have or freaking anything, like she completely forgot she had ever been supposed to meet with Sybella at all. I kept waiting for this to come back up because I thought missing the meeting was going to be important, and it just… didn’t.

The second book in the series is from Sybella’s point of view, and I think I’d like to read it, since Sybella was one of the best characters despite having little screen time.

This is the sort of book that would make a really fun movie if it was done properly and had any sort of budget, but if it were adapted, would probably be done improperly and with many stupid budgeting decisions and would at best end up as bad trashy fun like the Queen of the Damned movie or something.

Entry tags:

Sorcery squared

So, despite generally falling super far behind on reading along with Mark Reads, I did manage to finish up Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery only a day or two after the final post went up.

Sourcery is one of the books that I have only read once ever, and therefore have forgotten basically everything about. There are quite a number of these, particularly early in the series. I’d had it mentally filed away as one of the “not very good” ones, comparatively speaking, and for some reason I thought it was a standalone (perhaps I was mashing it up with Eric in my head?), even though it is actually a Rincewind book.

This time around, I think it’s still not going to stick with me as a particular favorite Discworld book, but hopefully I’ll remember that it is good, because it’s worth remembering. Sourcery charts the rise and fall of Coin, a sourcerer—the eighth son of a wizard who was already the eighth son of an eighth son, and so who is himself a source of magic, instead of just someone with the ability to wield it. This is deeply, deeply dangerous, particularly as eight-year-old Coin, armed with his father’s deeply creepy staff, sets out to have wizards conquer the world. This, of course, causes chaos and death and destruction and, as usually happens, opens a path for the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions.

In all this, Rincewind, having run away, partly due to his own cowardice and partly on the urging of the Archchancellor’s Hat, falls in with a couple of weird adventurers and proceeds to have lots of chaotic shenanigans where Rincewind keeps trying to run away and his damn friends keep trying to save the world. Eventually, Rincewind, with the help of the Librarian, who continues to be awesome, manages to figure out what’s really going on with little Coin, and then things get deep and sad as well as chaotic and wacky, because that’s how Terry Pratchett books work.

There are some particularly excellent puns in this one that I am glad to have rediscovered, especially the one about appendectomies, and it’s great to start to see some more continuity and character development across books as the series starts settling into being a series, and with Rincewind’s sub-series specifically.

Current Mood: disheartened
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: Sinead O'Connor, "Her Mantle So Green"

Entry tags:

A conclusion to an excellent trilogy

After nine years, I have finally gotten around to reading Monica Furlong’s Colman, the third and final book in her Wise Child series. Wise Child was one of my favorite books when I was a young wannabe-witch (as opposed to now, when I am an old wannabe-witch), but I always thought of it as a stand-alone (mostly because it was during the period when I was rereading it frequently) so Colman was never really on my radar as a real thing. But after I reread Juniper earlier this year, I figured it was about time.

Colman follows directly on the events of Wise Child, which I admit I had sorta forgotten, and I might need to dig that out and reread it. But it looks like Juniper, Wise Child, Wise Child’s father Finbar, her cousin Colman, and their former-leper friend Cormac are all on Finbar’s boat running away from the town and Cormac’s religious zealot brother. At first they flee to Ireland, where Cormac has family, but then they head to Juniper’s old home of Cornwall, where she was a princess, and where she has a feeling that all is not well.

Upon arriving in Cornwall they find Juniper’s parents dead, her brother Brangwyn imprisoned and kept as a sort of puppet regent, and her aunt Meroot and uncle-in-law the Gray Knight having taken over Cornwall and a big chunk of the Northlands. Meroot and the Gray Knight are not good rulers, oppressing the people with enormous tribute demands and enacting severe violence upon them when any demand is not met. The people are also forbidden from meeting in groups larger than six, which is always a bad sign. The lot of them, with the help of Juniper’s ornery mentor Euny, conspire to save Prince Brangwyn and take down Meroot and the Gray Knight. The actual doing of this involves arms smuggling (largely on Finbar’s part), disguises, a lot of doran magic, some help from the goddess that lives on top of the tor near Euny’s hut, the obligatory getting work as a scullery maid in order to infiltrate the castle, and some surprising streaks of doran power from Colman, our narrator. Apparently there are sometimes male dorans, they just aren’t very common. I wonder what Granny Weatherwax would have to say about that.

While the general story development of this book is perfectly fine—it’s an exciting and satisfying way to wind up the trilogy, bringing in elements of both previous books into one storyline—one does get the feeling that if Monica Furlong hadn’t died, it could have gone through another round or two of editing/rewriting, and could have been better. The dialogue is sort of awkward and chunky in parts, and I think some parts could have used further development. This book was published posthumously, so I don’t really want to complain that anyone has done anything wrong in the development of the book—Ms. Furlong simply cannot be expected to rewrite sections posthumously, and I’m very, very glad that her estate did allow this story to be published, so that we her fans could read it and find out how the story ends. The whole thing’s just very sad—perhaps not tragic, as Ms. Furlong did live a long and interesting life and she died at a respectably old age (I think she was 72?), but definitely sad. The choice to make Colman the POV character is a bit odd, but I think it works, as Colman is still essentially a child so we get to see his understanding of what is actually going on grow as the story goes on. He’s also sort of a dorky and likeable and fairly everyman sort of character, which I think works well when there’s a lot of weird magic going on. It allows him to do a lot of observing.

I would particularly have liked more Finbar. Finbar is great! He goes away for part of the book, which is fine, but then he’s kind of ignored for a bit when he does come back, and I am going to assume that had this book gotten more polish, someone would have pointed out when Finbar was forgotten and added him back in.

I highly recommend reading Wise Child sometime in the year or two before reading Colman, unless you have a really great memory, which I don’t. But even having forgotten how Wise Child ended, it was still a beautiful read, and really makes me want to learn more about early-Christian Wales and Cornwall. There’s not nearly enough really early, historically-based Celtic fantasy out there.

Oh, and the cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon is gorgeous, as usual.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: blessed quiet

Entry tags:

Counterfeiting! Riots! Chases! And... some douchebag

Reading along with Mark Does Stuff, I've just finished rereading what might be my favorite Tamora Pierce book, Bloodhound. Predictably, the stuff I thought was the most awesome was precisely the stuff that bored some other people, and the stuff that irritated other people did not irritate me at all, and the few things that I did dislike basically bugged only me.

Whatever. I still think Bloodhound is fabulous. The main plot is about counterfeiting, which I think is amazing because economics are awesome, and it really fits in well with the “doggy books'” exploration of class, being the only Tortall subseries about people who aren't noble (or live closely with the aristocracy) and who live paycheck to paycheck. I also love the exploration of Port Caynn, because port cities are fun, and having Beka, who is so tied to Corus and whose identity is very much bound up in her home and her neighborhood and her people, have to adjust to working in a whole different environment and try on a whole new identity while she's at it.

Pearl Skinner is also a great villain because, in a refreshing departure from the sympathetic genius villains we see so much of, she is thoroughly unlikeable in every way, and she is stupid. And honestly, don't mean and stupid people often seem to rise to the top in the real world? Charisma certainly helps, and the charismatic villain is someone we should all read lots of stories about and learn to watch out for, but there really are quite a surprising number of people who seem to acquire and keep power through sheer assholitude, despite a total lack of ability to actually manage it or to get anyone to like them. And with those kinds of people, having that power seems to further insulate them from having to ever get a fucking clue, and they just get dumber and meaner until, in the real world, they're writing whiny Wall St. Journal op-eds about how those lazy peasants are so meeean and ungrateful these days, just because we crashed the entire world economy to the ground, like that has anything to do with someone being unemployed or losing their house, where do they get these crazy Communist ideas? ...Ahem. Anyway, in Pearl Skinner's case, she's mean and vicious and stupid and irresponsible, and surprise surprise, she'd rather kill herself then actually face up to the consequences of her actions. Also she abuses her minions and kills off co-conspirators until the remaining ones are chomping at the bit to turn on her the second it looks like they might get away with it, which is one of the elementary Evil Overlord mistakes on that list that was popular around these here Internets a few years ago.

There is, of course, more to this conspiracy than Pearl, because Pearl is too stupid to have come up with it on her own; just stupid enough to go along with it.

The bulk of this books seems to be Beka Learning Things, even though she's not in training anymore like she was in Terrier. She learns how to handle her adorable scent hound, Achoo, and she learns about Port Caynn, obviously. She learns more about detective-ing and continues to conquer her shyness and learn the “soft skills” needed in a people-facing job like Dog work. She also learns How To Flirt, which is a subplot of the book that I have very strong but also somewhat contradictory feelings about.

One the one hand, I do appreciate that How To Flirt is presented as stuff Beka must learn and think about, that it is awkward and uncomfortable when she just applies the usual Stuff Is Happening sorts of mental processing to it, and that she has to decide to deliberately employ certain maneuvers that she has copied from other people. I appreciate this because God damn do I hate it when people act like flirting is just a naturally occurring consequence of being older than 13 and like there is no social learning or construction going on. I mean, it's one of my pet peeves when people act like any kind of knowledge is naturally occurring and does not have to be learned, but stuff involving sex and romance pisses me off the most, most likely because if you actually start paying attention and looking at who thinks what and where are you getting your knowledge or basically apply any form of metacognitive or critical awareness, it becomes screamingly obvious that finding two people who actually have the same ideas about How It Works Obviously is next to impossible. And yet most people seem really certain that there is a universally understood Way It Works and apparently no amount of endless miscommunication will convince them that this is actually a confusing and ambiguous subject, and, for all the lip service given to The Importance of Communicating in Relationships, it's next to impossible to get someone to actually identify their expectations and tell them to you in plain English so that you can compare your ideas about How It Works. So I like that Beka is not automagically on the same page as everyone else just by existing.

On the other hand, the text still sort of presents Beka as the odd one out and all third parties as being fully on the same page about what is in the body of knowledge that Beka has to acquire in order to pursue romantic relationships. This is bollocks. Also, I really hate Dale. I never particularly liked him—I thought he was sort of boring and I used to kind of breeze through his sections without thinking about it very much like I do with most other Obligatory Romantic Subplots in fiction—but reading along with the MR community really made me hate him more. This is because in the MR community there was a lot of discussion about who liked what and what wasn't working for whom etc. etc., and generally the only thing that occurred universally was that everyone in the commentariat is a relatively sensible and aware-of-other-persons-existing sort of person and, as such, we all agreed that people's mileage may vary greatly in what they do and do not find sexy or annoying. This, for me, threw into sharp relief how much not a single person in the cast of Bloodhound thinks that anybody's mileage may vary, and Dale is the worst of the lot. It's not that Dale is a bad person. It's just that Dale is a rake, and so I hate him for the same reason I hate most rakes, which is that they get into a particular groove of this is their rakey way of doing things, and they forget that their personal groove is not an immutable law of the universe and human nature. And I realize that having the whole conversation about what individual people do and do not like and what each person's expectations are and etc etc etc all that stuff that most dudes won't even arse themselves to talk about with supposedly serious partners (I say “supposedly” because of the number of times I've seen—and, once, been subjected to—“serious” being assumed out of a certain length of time without any discussion of what it means or whether the other party wishes to take the relationship to some sort of “next level”) isn't fun, and the whole point of being a rake is to just have fun without the serious bits, but the result tends to be self-absorbed, oblivious people who expect pretty members of their preferred gender to just automatically and seamlessly slot themselves into the rake's preferred modus operandi, and apparently they somehow manage to shield themselves from ever even learning that not everyone is guaranteed to be playing their game the way they're playing it, and they act all shocked and confused and surprised like they've never heard of such a thing when one of their marks has some sort of personal like or dislike or quirk or history or, you know, anything. I think they might block it out on purpose because it would require effort to remember. Dale is not only not an exception to this, he's pretty much the quintessential embodiment of oblivious lazy rakish assumption-making. I mean, if a dude in his twenties who's supposedly met oh so very very many ladies in his day tells you he's never met a woman who doesn't like being snuck up on and grabbed from behind in the street at night, that dude is either deeply, deeply stupid, or he's lying and he thinks you're deeply, deeply stupid, because it is wildly statistically unlikely that that is actually the case.

Dale also makes Beka sit around and watch while he plays games. This is a practice that needs to die in a fire.

Unfortunately, the book rather comes down on the side of Here Is What Flirting Is, Everyone Agrees On It, You Will Like It Once You Learn Because It Is Fun, Period. Which, sorry, Tamora Pierce, 99% of what you write is pure genius, but that's the most stupid lie about human sexuality I've heard since Cassandra Clare had someone dead seriously describe Jace Wayland as “everyone's type” and had another character use him as a test for whether or not she was a lesbian. I understand it's important to have books for teens that don't shame female characters for being sexual but everyone needs to stop portraying shit as universal when it isn't universal. (This goes double for whoever wrote Blood and Chocolate; I still have a headache from trying to follow the characters' thought processes in that book.)

Luckily, Beka's being unthinkingly groped by Dale is only part of what she spends her time in Port Caynn doing. She meets a lot of characters who are actually intelligent and interesting, from Master Finer, the cranky genius silversmith, to Amber Orchid, a nightclub performer and a transwoman who lives by day as a dude named Okha in a relationship with a gay man (apparently Port Caynn's queer scene doesn't have their terminology sorted out nearly as neatly as the modern world does) and who also gathers information on Pearl Skinner and her court but simultaneously refuses to act as a birdie to her boyfriend, who is a Dog. Amber is a very smart lady and I would read an entire book just about her. Beka also learns a lot about what a really corrupt police force looks like, which I really appreciate—a lot of cop stories show the cops as being pretty unequivocally the good guys, but I feel like the Beka Cooper books do a much better job of simultaneously illustrating how cops can be the good guys and why it is that societies need well-functioning police forces, but also not shying away from the fact that well-functioning police forces are actually pretty rare and difficult to achieve, and at least as often what you get is a bunch of venal bullies with power issues demanding respect without doing much to earn it. (Although even in Port Caynn it looks like none of the corrupt Dogs have been casually choking random civilians to death. Also, can the news go away this week?) And there's a rather heartbreaking bit about one of the Cage dogs in particular, how she left the street beat and became a Cage dog (that's the professional torturers, basically) for the sake of her kids, in order to stay safe so she could raise them without worrying that she was going to die, but the job has inured her to enacting violence upon the helpless so much that she's started hitting her kids.

Also, the action scenes are great. Tamora Pierce has always been fabulous about writing action scenes, but these are extra-great, because they are so visceral and gross and I really get the feeling that with Beka's books she's leaving the “YA” idea behind as anything other than a marketing designation—Beka is an adult and these are adult action scenes. Also, I think it's very important to have violent visceral action scenes in a book that's mostly about money, in order to ground it. So we get the bread riot, a solid punch in the gut to bring home what's really so bad about crop loss and rising food costs, and this is effectively placed at the beginning of the book in and among a lot of conversations about the chaos that could occur from runaway inflation, which is a thing that is basically also all the prices rising, just with different money theory stuff behind it. Also, the climax isn't just, like, smashing up all the counterfeit monies; it involves literal swimming in shit, which I think serves as a nice metaphor for a country being awash in money that isn't even worth shit.

In short, COUNTERFEITING YAY.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: "Let it Go," Idina Menzel, Disney's Frozen

Entry tags:

"...And then he died, having become excessive fat."

Back in January, my Classics book club read La Princesse de Cleves, by Madame de La Fayette. I did not read it at the time, since the meeting was the same weekend as Arisia. Instead, I began reading it in Paris, on the train to Versailles. Sadly, my Kindle died during the plane ride home, so I had to take a break from reading it until I could buy Kyle’s old one off him (thanks, Kyle!). I have finally finished the damn thing.

La Princesse de Cleves (or, in English, The Princess of Cleves) is one of the great French romantic novels, and a very early specimen thereof, having been first published in 1678. It is one of the first, if not arguably the first, psychological novels, most of the page space being dedicated to recording the various characters’ thoughts and emotions, and occasionally dialogue. There is fairly little action, although people do die a lot, mostly of vague illnesses that seem to be brought on by strong emotions.

The story takes place about a hundred years before its publication, in the 1550s, during the reign of Henri II. The French royal court is still based squarely in Paris, at the Louvre. Historical figures such as Diana de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and Mary Stuart run around, although it is frequently difficult to figure this out, since everybody is referred to only by their titles at all times, which is doubly confusing when people’s titles change (at one point, the king dies, and is succeeded by his son, the king). I couldn’t tell you what the hell Catherine de Medici actually does in this book because I can’t remember if she’s the Queen, the other Queen, or the Queen-Dauphin.

As a result… I can’t tell you what our protagonist’s name is. She starts off as the Mademoiselle de Chartres, a superlatively beautiful and sweet and witty young noblewoman in a France predictably full of beautiful sweet witty young noblewomen. (At least Madame de La Fayette doesn’t pull a Tolkien on us and individually introduce every female character as “the most beautiful and with the best hair” like that’s supposed to differentiate them from the others; she just introduces The Court as being a place full of fabulous attractive people, straight up.) Mademoiselle de Chartres catches the attention of pretty much everybody, but the person whose attention she catches first, and who is the only one who pursues her, is the Prince de Cleves. Since her mother had only brought the virginal innocent sixteen-year-old(!) Mademoiselle to the den of vice that (apparently) was the Court in order to make her an advantageous marriage, and since Mademoiselle has no experience fancying people at all and is a little vague on what it’s supposed to be like anyway, but like the Prince perfectly well enough as a friend and a person, the Prince’s suit is rewarded and Mademoiselle de Chartres becomes Madame de Cleves.

The Prince, who is passionately in love with his wife, keeps trying to Win Her Heart, and Madame keeps being like “Sorry? I like you just fine, honey, I’m sorry it’s not more… whatever you’re on about” but other than that things are great until the Duc de Nemours returns from wherever he’d been faffing about, probably something to do with the Italian war. The Duc de Nemours is apparently the ideal man, from French romantic perspective—in addition to being rich and titled and intelligent and brave and dashing and honored in battle, he is so terribly handsome that everybody falls in love with him, and so terribly kindhearted that he can’t help being kind and sweet and attentive to anybody that wants his attention, and is fond of pretty much everybody, and doesn’t have any macho douchy attitudes about women, instead genuinely liking their company and conversation, with the attendant result that he’s happily a giant slut. There’s enough Duc de Nemours for everybody! At least, there is until he meets his best friend the Prince de Cleves’ new wife.

Predictably, the Duc falls passionately in love with the Princess, and the Princess falls passionately in love with the Duc, which confuses her dreadfully and also makes her feel bad because she’s already married to a kind honorable man who is her very dear friend and who she genuinely holds in quite high esteem. The Duc keeps trying to find ways to see and speak to the Princesse without being obvious about it or compromising her virtue; the Princesse alternates between trying to find ways to see the Duc without being obvious either and deciding to stay away from him in order to get over him. Eventually she confessed to her husband that she’s in love with someone else and feels terrible about it and wants to stay away from Court, but she won’t tell him who it is. The Duc, who is HIDING IN THE GARDEN EAVESDROPPING BECAUSE WHAT THE HELL (apparently in the days before Facebook you had to actually stalk your unrequited crush in order to torture yourself mooning unproductively after their lovely visage, at least until you can steal a copy of their portrait, which you will actually do if you’re the Duc de Nemours), overhears this confession, and is so joyous (and so certain it’s about him) that he runs and wibbles about it to one of his friends, who tells somebody else because nobody in the French court can keep a secret (except Madame de Tournon, who has a subplot that starts with her death), and eventually it gets back to the Prince and Princess, each of whom thinks the other told the Duc. Then there’s some crazy business with a letter that was addressed to somebody other than the Duc but the other dude is trying to get the Duc to pretend it’s his so he doesn’t get into trouble with the Queen or the other Queen or the Queen-Dauphin, I don’t even know. ANYWAY. A bunch of stuff happens, the King dies in a joust, the Duc de Nemours blows off the opportunity to maybe marry Queen Elizabeth of England, one of the French ladies gives the world’s most fucking hilarious summary of the sage of Henry the Eighth and his wives I have ever heard in my life, and a lot of people fake being ill, mostly the Princesse de Cleves.

At some point, the Prince sends his manservant or somebody to follow the Duc de Nemours, and the dude follows the Duc right into the Prince’s garden outside Paris, where the Princess is shut up in an attempt to avoid Court and all its gallantries and nonsense, and to avoid the Duc. While in actuality the Duc is just hangin’ around in the gardens spying on Madame de Cleves like a creeper, the poor woobie Prince thinks that the Duc and the Princesse are sleeping together, and gets so jealous that he falls deathly ill. Madame de Cleves is distraught by this and is very attentive and stuff and eventually they actually talk out what the Prince thinks is going on and what was actually going on, but it’s too late, and the Prince dies. Of jealousy, apparently. The Princesse is still passionately in love with the Duc de Nemours, but also basically figures that he killed her husband by skulking about in the garden and causing jealousy, instead of keeping the fuck away from her like she’d been trying to keep the fuck away from him, so when the Duc shows up all declaring his love and proposing marriage, she declares her love back but declines the marriage, and moves out to the Pyrenees and joins a convent until she dies. THE END. No happy ending. Just guilt and virtue and overthinking the shit out of everything. The Princesse seriously needed some Captain Awkward in her life. The Duc probably did, too. And the Prince. And… the entire French court, really.
Predictably, I loved this novel. I always say I’m not super big on love stories, but I make an exception when the psychology is really good (i.e. spelled out every step from first principles for idiots like me who won’t understand it otherwise) and when there’s a shit-ton of drama and intrigue and ridiculousness. This book hits ALL those buttons. Much of it is genuinely moving, and a great psychological portrait of someone who has no idea what’s going on and no idea what to do except to refuse to get involved. It’s also just straight up wacky as hell. The Princess spends like half the book faking being ill and half of what’s left actually being ill, people talk in long involved paragraphs to the point where the conversations seem less like conversations and more like taking turns making speeches, random scandals pop up and have to be discussed in detail, except that everyone uses vague euphemistic terms for everything so it’s impossible to tell who’s having sex and who’s just making mutual cow eyes at each other. Madame de La Fayette’s method for describing people is the opposite of the modern laundry list of physical characteristics, nobody is ever given a hair or eye color or even so much as a height; they’re just comely and graceful and well-formed and other glittering generalities that tell you absolutely fuck-nothing about what anyone looks like except that you’d totally find them attractive, I promise. Also she tells us a billion times that the Duc de Nemours is a brilliant conversationalist but any time when she actually transcribes his words (like, in quotation marks and that sort of thing) it’s really not all that impressive.

My biggest beef with this book is some weird stuff about the translations; the titles are translated or not translated really haphazardly, so sometimes our protagonist is Madame de Cleves and sometimes the Princesse de Cleves and sometimes the Princess of Cleves, her husband is usually the Prince of Cleves but her love interest is usually the Duc (or Duke) de Nemours, and once I noticed it became really jarring. And there’s a lot of use of “you was,” which is just dated for English; I don’t care what the French was there, you done translated it wrong. This is supposed to be Court French, not gamin argot.

Other than the translation issues, it was glorious. It was everything I love about overwritten old novels. And everything I love about over-everything ancien regime France. I recommend it highly.

Entry tags:

Mother taught me always to be polite to dragons

Finishing out the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Mark Oshiro, and therefore I, just got through the fourth volume in the series, Talking to Dragons.

Talking to Dragons is the one I read the least frequently when I was younger, and as a result, it is the one I had forgotten the most about. I remembered that it took place several years after the end of Calling on Dragons, and that the main character was Daystar, and something about a fire-witch, and obviously that it wrapped up the whole Wizards Have Imprisoned King Mendanbar plot. I also mostly remembered not liking it as much as the others, probably due to the relative lack of Cimorene.

While there was indeed a sad lack of Cimorene, I found I actually did like the book quite a bit this time around! I cannot help but wonder if some of my change in opinion comes from knowing that this book was actually written before the other three, rather than before. The style is definitely a bit less developed than the other books, particularly the humor—it’s cute and silly and funny but I still feel like it’s a bit less polished than the rest of the series. I’m also really, really super impressed that the references to/summaries of the previous books match up exactly and quite specifically; I guess even if she wrote this book first she had the whole series outlined or something? I mean, I was basically listening with an ear towards seeing if she fucked up, and she didn’t, and I think that’s very impressive because honestly, there’s continuity errors between the first and second Discworld books and they’re just one story.

The basic plot of this book is that Daystar, son of Cimorene and Mendanbar, has no idea who he is, and is therefore very surprised when one day, following a visit by the wizard Antorell, his mother gives him a magic sword and kicks him out of the house in the general direction of the Enchanted Forest. Daystar survives the Enchanted Forest largely by being very polite to everyone and everything. He means a dreadfully impolite but sasstastic fire-witch named Shiara, a small excitable lizard named Suze, Morwen (yay), Telemain (also yay), a silly princess and her doofy knight, and a small, nameless, genderless, slightly whiny adolescent dragon, not necessarily in that order. At one point, Daystar, Shiara, and the dragon are in the Caves of Chance and they all meet an ineptly demanding pile of animated blackberry jelly, which is something I had clean forgotten about right up until they met it and then it all came flooding back to me that I had once thought this thing to be the cutest little monster ever.

`Overall I think it makes a solid conclusion to the series in most ways, but it will probably forever remain the odd one out for me.

Entry tags:

THE DOGGY BOOKS

So I reread Terrier last year and now I have just reread it again, this time with Mark Reads. And it was glorious! The Beka Cooper books may be my favorite Tortall subseries; despite being the most recent and therefore having the least place of nostalgia and importance to my childhood, they are super up my alley. Beka is the Tortall heroine I probably most relate to—she’s shy, she looks the most like me, she wears a lot of black, she is fifty million billion percent uncomfortable with flirting and gets hostile when people try to engage her in it, she has a tendency to take things super seriously, and she’s kind of morbid—although in her case, it’s because she’s able to hear the dead and is an informal priestess of the Black God, whereas I am just a regular sort of morbid gothy person. Also, I’m pretty sure I’d be a terrible police officer.

Like all the best crime novels, this story actually focuses on two cases, which are related. In a deviation from the usual formula, we actually find out how these cases are related pretty early on: the Shadow Snake, the child murderer who kidnaps small children to extort treasures from their families, has killed the grandson of Crookshank, a neighborhood crime lord who seems to be doing some sort of hidden mining operation involving fire opals, and killing off his diggers. It’s the murder of baby Rolond that kicks off investigations into both of these plotlines.

Beka Cooper is just starting out as a trainee member of the Provost’s Guard, which is basically the city watch/rudimentary police force. She is assigned to the two very best and most well-known and awesome pair of Dogs (as they call themselves) on the Evening Watch, which is the interesting one. These are Mattes Tunstall, the laid-back goofy one, and Clary Goodwin, the hardass sarcastic one. They are both great, great characters as well as great Dogs. Beka, having moved out of Lord Gershwin’s house where her family lives, is also living in her very first own apartment (which is apparently a one-bedroom, as there are other people in her lodging-house but they’re not in her “rooms”, which makes me super jealous! My first apartment was an eight-bedroom. I would love a one-person apartment. On the other hand, apparently medieval apartments do not have kitchens, which would make me sad). She makes FRIENDS!! with a bunch of other Puppies (trainee police) and also some “rushers” (persons on the other side of the law) from Scanra, who are all darlings despite two of them being professional killers. Rosto in particular is like a bizarre mashup of Jamie Campbell Bower as Jace Wayland in the terrible TMI movie and Jamie Campbell Bower as Slutty Playboy King Arthur in that terrible Camelot show. He’d definitely be bad news for Beka but as a character he’s hilarious and weird and there is lots of very bizarre UST between him and Beka and it’s just gloriously awkward.

The journal format seems to have bugged a lot of people, but I have a giant soft spot for journal format books. I also love the extra-old-fashioned language—I remember it throwing me off a bit the first time I read the book, but it’s just so fun! The swears in particular! Every time I read a Beka Cooper book I remember that I have to call more people terrible medieval names like “sarden cankerblossom” in real life instead of just being like “What an asshole” every time someone’s an asshole, but alas, I keep forgetting.

Reading this with the MR commentariat also meant I learned a lot of interesting stuff along the way, including recipes, and that twilsey is a real thing that you can make with fruit vinegar because fruit vinegars are also a real thing. (My foodieism needs serious work. I must become a proper foodie; they know how to have fun. Especially in Paris.) (By the way, does anyone know what you actually do with vanilla butter? I bought some…)
Thumbs up A+ would read again, I freaking love Tamora Pierce.