I read the seventh Harry Potter book, but I talk about that over on the Harry Potter thread on this journal.

Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Chindren's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, by Charles Butler, is my upstairs read. I am not a scholar, so my reading in letters is haphazard at best. So, as far as I know, this is the first literary treatment of writers who came after Tolkien, but there's a twist. This work does not tread Tom Shippey's ground (it's not an apologia for Tolkien and his influence); Butler is neutral about Tolkien--even-handed with pitfalls and praises--as he looks at four writers who attended Oxford when Tolkien (and Lewis) were teaching there. And then goes on to examine the work of writers who may or may not have been influenced by Tolkien, but who then went on to find their distinctive fantastical paradigm and voice.

Alan Garner, arguably, shows the most influence with his first popular book, though he loudly denied it later. I remember reading Weirdstone as a kid, and thinking that it was a rehash of JRRT. But with each succeeding book he left the shape of the Tolkienian quest tale farther behind. Butler gives us a good look at Garner's subsequent work from the inside and outside.

His take on Diana Wynne Jones is excellent. I'm glad when I see discussions of her work other than the witty (and true) Tough Guide to Fantasy. Butler, being a writer himself, has an exacting eye for Jones's qualities. Here's a random quote, which I think enlighting on why Jones isn't more popular with those who need to slot books into neat categories:

. . . Jones has come to cross generic border with increasing frequency. Jones herself has expressed impatience with generic restrictions, and certainly there is no reason why writers need feel constrained by convention from combining genres, but such hybridization is not without consequences. [SF] tends to extrapolate from our current world to a time or place that may be vastly different, but that still belongs to the realm of hypothetical possibility. Its distance from our reality can be measured along what in Jakobsonian terms we might call the syntagmatic axis. Fantasy, by contrast, is related to our world by analogy rather than by extrapolation, and is a fundamentally paradigmatic form. This is, of course, a crude formulation: there are many science fiction worlds that have metaphorical application to our own, and I have argued elsewhere that a purely metaphorical reading of fantasy is unlikely to be satisfactory.

And here's a bit from the opening of the chapter called "Plotting the Map to Logres":

The synthetic and analytic capacities, the abilities to see connections and to make distinctions, are basic tools of perception and of argument. But there are fashions in these as in other things, and I think it fair to say that in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Garner, Cooper, Jones, and Lively began to be published, it was in a climate more hospitable to the synthetic impulse. .[interesting summary of Eliade, Murray, Graves, and Rees] . . As I write we seem to be at the opposite end of the cycle . . .[interesting summation of debunking and reassessment by skeptical academics of subsequent generation] . . .While academics retrench, a portion of the general public seems eager to accept each fashionable New Age idea that comes to its notice, often with little apparent demand, and even some scorn, for hard evidence. With a dogmatically skeptical academic community on one hand, and a credulous popular taste for all things mystical on the other, fantasy writers of the present day can only look back in envy at the relatively-homogeneous climate of thirty years ago, when it seemed much easier to find territory both imaginatively fertile and intellectually defensible

As you can see, this is no gosh-wow fangush, it's a fascinating, witty, well-written, meticulously researched piece of work. (And I might add on the short list for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for this year.)

Territory by Emma Bull is finally out. And I am sipping it slowly as my downstairs book. Bull has a gift for being at the right place at the right time: her War for the Oaks not only was deservedly popular, but hit the zeitgeist so centrally that the subsequent decade or so was filled with spinoffs in which rock bands use their music magic to fight off the bad Sidhe, or Winter Court of Faerie. At that time (gross generalization here) readers were looking for something besides yet another quest for a magical object through a fantasy landscape, so here was magic and pretty elves brought right to our world, and all tied up with True Thomas, which is still a profoundly effective myth: you don't have to believe in anything, but you can still be sacrificed, or give yourself up for sacrifice, for the greater . . . what?

In Territory Bull has taken the gritty, gunslinging west with its edgy co-existence alongside other cultures (Chinese, Mexican, Native American). She added the legendary Earp and Clanton feud. She infuses both with disturbing possibilities outside everyday experience, as newly widowed newspaperwoman Mrs Benjamin meets a strange gunman who just rode into town, trailing whispered speculation about robbery--and radiating unexplained heat. I haven't gotten very far yet, but the vividness of the setting, the fascinating characters whose tension is underscored by the alienness of that territory that was far from being civilized, the deft use of dry, electric heat and its opposite cool, life-giving (and sometimes threatening) water, are slowly adding up to a powerful book.

The Gospel of the Knife by Will Shetterly is a sequel to Dogland, which I really, really wish was used in classroom reading across the country. It's a subtle, vivid, exciting, and very well-written book about character, family, self, one's place in the world, and clashing ethics . . . in the form of racism. It takes place in southern Florida, at a strange sort of park-zoo where various breeds of dogs are kept. Shetterly makes this book eminently accessible to young readers by taking the time and care to build up the human story (one could call the protagonist, Chris, a puppy!) but don't think the dogs won't be i mportant. Nooooo-hooo!

I've read this book aloud to eighth graders, to stunning effect. And it kicked off terrific papers, with thirteen year olds trying to deal with subjects they'd previously called boring. The discussion spilled over into history class, and even got other grades involved. I really wish more teachers were hep to it: I think for example, it could be used as a springboard to Huck Finn.

Anyway, I was delighted to discover that there is a sequel to Dogland though I wondered how the heck that story could be followed. Right from the beginning it's clear this is no rehash--Christopher is not the puppy boy of 1963, it's 1969, he's fourteen, and the issues are very different. He seems to be a typical (for some of us at the time) wannabe hippie, living uneasily in an area that seems to be populated by those who want to hold hard onto the old ways, especially the violent methods of seeing that everyone else toes the white, conservative line as well. The story is told in second person present tense, which I usually distrust (it often seems unnecessarily intrusive, a "Lookit me being clever and literary!" wall between reader and text) but here it works because it underscores the bewildering immediacy of being a teen. Christopher does some really stupid things for no reason than emotional turmoil (and by the way, the rating for this one would be "much older teen" unless the young reader is mature enough to handle rough language and a sex scene right up front).

Then Christopher gets a very strange offer: a full ride to an exclusive school. He meets a strange family first, and everything he'd ever believed about life changes with the careless shot of a gun.

The Pirate & The Three Cutters by Captain Frederick Marryat. I put the "captain" there as this one is really for Marryat completists. It's interesting for its being a bridge between the rough and tumble world of Regency age fiction and the refined later Victorian sedate euphemisms; there is Marryat's curious sympathy underneath the thoughtless racism. He obviously knew and worked with and liked persons of color and different ethnic backgrounds, yet he still carelessly uses the opprobrious slang of the time, and mirrors some of the unthinking white Western superiority. The ship detail, though, is so perfect, so clear, one can see O'Brian's footprints all over these stories.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a funny, friendly guy I met at Worldcon last year. This is the first novel in what seems to be shaping to be a series. In it we meet Kvothe, the main character. He's a tired, stressed, innkeeper with a very strange companion named Bast. After some mysterious events he tells his story to a Chronicler who writes down his exact words. So this book is mainly backstory. Kvothe may seem a bit of a Gary Stu (everything he does is better than anyone else) but Rothfuss offsets that by not stinting with the trouble Kvothe gets into, and by a wry, witty tone. If Rothfuss's voice reminds me of anyone it's Scott Lymch--who is about Rothfuss's age. Anyway, Kvothe is not the least full of himself, gifted as he is--he's got a quest, a dangerous one. Maybe a fatal one. It's a dynamic first novel and I really look forward to the second one.

Return to Currently Reading Menu