Books – Page 2

Resistance Reading: An Introduction

December 6, 2016 No Comments

When I was in my 20s, I read extensively about Germany in WWII. I was seriously dating a Jewish man, and seriously considering converting to Judaism. At the same time, I was reckoning with my vaguely Germanic family background. My obsessions (now bearing fruit as a trilogy of long novels) are in Germanic history and myth, the same myth twisted by the Nazi party for its own imagery.

The question, the obsession, the object of my search, was how could they do it? Would I, asked to do what German soldiers, SS officers, ordinary people, or highly placed officials, do what they had done, or would I resist? I didn’t know. It’s easy to tell yourself you would, but you don’t know until you’re in the situation. So I read widely, vast numbers of books about genocide and its perpetrators. About Nazi doctors, and SS officers, about ordinary Germans, and resistance fighters. I learned that after the war, many said that they had feared being killed if they resisted, but I also learned about many who refused orders, and were only transferred to a different unit. Resisting did not carry the penalty that many feared it did. Denmark, conquered, discovered this, and saved their Jews, going almost unpunished as they did so.

Masha Gessen, a reporter in Putin’s Russia for many years, made a list of how to deal with encroaching fascism, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, and one of the items on the list is, “Don’t obey in advance.” Require them to make their threats, loudly, where everyone can hear.

I hope that all of us who fear that the election of Trump is the beginning of the end of the American experiment, and the rise of an authoritarian superpower are overreacting. I hope that people can laugh at us in four, eight, twenty years. I want to be wrong with all my heart.

But I don’t want that hope to blind me to what is really happening. To mistake the desire for things to be okay with them actually being okay.

When Trump was elected, I was despondent, for reasons both selfish and, hopefully, not. I’ve never wanted to find out what I would do in extreme circumstances, if I had to choose between my life and what I believe is right. Or even between my comfort and my beliefs. I wanted to be an author, and maybe teach creative writing. Or go back to working at a tech company if I couldn’t sustain myself with writing–but no matter what, to enjoy the fruits of privilege, to vote and give to charity sometimes, to sign petitions against injustice, and maybe sometimes go to protests. To read political news and get angry, but rarely do more than that.

When Trump was elected, I realized that not only could I not do that in the future, but that I shouldn’t have been doing that in the past. That I am incredibly lucky to be able to ignore the problems that grind other people down, take their lives, their livelihoods, see them facing horrific injustices, and only engage on my own schedule.

I didn’t want to think about putting my body between police and Muslims. Or being put on a list of dissidents. Or having to flee, or help others flee. I still don’t. I want to prevent us from getting there.

In researching my novels, I learned that vikings believed that the day of a person’s death was ordained, but between birth and death, they had a good deal of free will. But if you’re going into battle, you may as well fight bravely. If it is your day to die, then you will die bravely. If it is not your day to die, then you will gain honor and glory for fighting bravely. Easy to say, hard to do.

Every culture tries to grapple with death in its own way. In the affluent west, for us lucky, privileged few, we don’t have to think about it very often. Trump’s election has given me, and many others, a glimpse of a chaotic future, a preview of life asking us questions we don’t want to have to answer, and fear that we may not answer bravely.

Masha Gessen also says that one of the advantages we have over the Jews in the ghettos, who did not know if it was better to collaborate somewhat with their Nazi captors, to provide lists that today determine who will be fed, and tomorrow determine who will be killed, or to resist, is that we have history to draw from. We know what has been tried and what has worked or failed to work. If we look, we can see the signs, the patterns of history being written again in our present times, and we can choose a different path. Authoritarianism thrives on making accomplices, and whithers without them.

In the coming years, I will be reading books of the resistance, books of history and philosophy that teach us how to resist, how to hope, how to have moral courage, books that tell us what has worked and what has failed. This is in addition to doing daily, weekly, and monthly actions, because my antidote to despair is doing–not just reading and writing, but turning that reading and writing into action.

My first book, which I just finished reading, is Hope In the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, and it has indeed given me hope, which I hope to pass onto you in my next post.

Books

Draken Harald Harfagre Part 2

November 30, 2016 No Comments

As soon as I got home from touring the Draken Harald Harfagre, I wanted to find a book to tell me all about it, and I found this beautiful volume available from The Wooden Boat Store. The book is about the building of the ship, from examining the archaeological evidence, to finding the trees to build the ship, to the sail, the ropes, the carvings, and the modern conveniences like radar and a motor that make it a little less of a risk to sail.

The book is in both Norwegian and English, and full of beautiful full-page pictures of the process of building the ship. It is put together in the “clinker-built” style of 19th century boats. It’s called “clinker” because hundreds of nails are used, and then the ends of the nails are hammered by hand which makes a clink noise until they are pounded round by the hammer’s blow. It takes approximately 100 blows on each nail.

The Draken Harald Harfagre is the first modern viking ship built by ship-builders instead of archaeologists. Viking ships that have been unearthed often have curved keels, but it’s possible that the keels warped after being under ground for over a thousand years. After doing tests with small mock-ups, the builders discovered that a straight keel performed better.

The sail is made of silk, which is lighter than the wool that most viking ships would have used. In the Viking Age, silk would have had to be imported at enormous cost, but it was not unknown for a king’s ship to have a silk sail. The Draken Harald Harfagre uses hemp rope, which is not historically accurate, but the two materials used for rope in the Viking Age, lime bast (bark from a lime tree) and seal skin, were not practical or humane.

Perhaps my favorite anecdote was from tree selection. They cut down a tree from a Danish forest, cured it and began sawing it, and found a musket-ball in it from the Napoleonic war! It’s such an amazing palimpsest of history, and also gives an idea of how old the trees that went into ships were.

The ship has many “knees”, which are single pieces of wood with a right angle bend in them, that secure the sides of the ship to the bottom. I should have realized this by looking at them, but was very interested to learn that all of those knees are carved from a section of root where it meets the trunk, and they have to find just the right angle. The knees are extremely strong and heavy.

Sourcing the timber was a challenge–many of the best trees were found in Germany, not Norway, since Germany has done a better job with its forestry over the centuries. The builders worked with German forest rangers to select trees that were not so old they were protected by law, and also whose removal would not threaten the forest’s ecology.

The book is a bit of an investment, but totally worth it to me! Not only are the construction techniques interesting, but the personalities of the team that built it emerges, and they are all charming.

Books

Comfort Reading: College Novels

November 18, 2016 No Comments

I love it when novels invite me into a group of interesting people and let me feel like one of them, a member of a clique of interesting, elegant, off-beat people. Sometimes it’s people with a secret, as the groups in Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, and even Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. In the case of the novels below, it’s being in college together. I read all of these for the first time in high school, and even after my own college experience was nothing like any of these, I have still re-read each of the books below more times than I can count, finding comfort in these ivory towers.

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

Tam Lin (which I first read in an edition with a gorgeous cover by Thomas Canty) is a retelling of the folktale/ballad of Tam Lin, but set in a small liberal arts college in Minnesota in the 1970s. Our heroine, Janet, is the daughter of a Classics professor, and ends up friends with an odd, interesting, difficult group of people, who she eventually discovers are more than what they seem. The book takes a long time to get there, though, and for me, most of the pleasure is hanging out with the group of people, who discuss literature and poetry and theater all the time, and if they must discuss any of the sciences, they always have an apt quote from a literary giant (or Gilbert and Sullivan) to express their frustration. But beware the Classics department…

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Really beware the Classics department at Camden College, in Donna Tartt’s first novel. This is a psychological novel about a group of Classics students at a small Vermont liberal arts college in the 1980s who murder one of their classmates on the very first page. Over the next 500 pages, the reader learns why they killed him and, in my case, grows sympathizes with them, even while finding them monstrous. The clique in this novel is so seductive and our narrator so hungry for acceptance, it is clear why he ends up going along with and participating in the murder, and that leaves the reader feeling horribly, deliciously complicit.

Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff

It’s impossible to describe this novel, set at Cornell in the 1980s, set among every landmark I know so well from growing up in Ithaca and then going to Cornell University. There is a writer who can do magic, a muse, a Tolkein fraternity, a motley assortment of knights on horses and motorcycles, sprites invisible to the human eye, a dragon, a dog searching for heaven with a world-weary cat who helps him, and finally a war that takes place on planes both ridiculous and deadly serious. I wanted to be one of the Bohemians when I first read this book in high school, and though Risley did not want to let in an Engineering student (single tear), I believe I am a Bohemian now.

Books

Halloween Book Recommendations

October 28, 2016 2 Comments

I have a bit more time to make blog posts in this period between novels. I’m going to outline the sequel to The Sea Queen and then make some plans for researching other novels. But I’m taking this week mostly off. While I was working on The Sea Queen, I was working every day, including weekends, so it’s going to be nice to take a little break, catch up on some reading. And since Halloween is in a couple days, here are some scary, creepy, and horror novels I highly recommend.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

No one can beat Shirley Jackson for psychological horror. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the story of a wealthy family in a small town that, at the outset of the novel, only has three members remaining because, six years ago, all the others were poisoned. The novel is narrated by the younger daughter, who lives in a strange world of her own, full of rituals she uses to hold the outside world at bay. I don’t want to say too much for those who haven’t read it, but this is one of the best examples of an unreliable narrator I’ve ever encountered.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I’m a total wimp about horror movies, so I’ve never seen any of the many movie versions made of this novel. I don’t know how they could live up to the psychological terror of the novel, though. It is a deceptively simple story of a group of people going to explore a haunted house, and how the house works on their perceptions. The strength of the novel is in how well-drawn, and rather horrible, all the characters are. While there are supernatural elements, the book left me with the feeling that these people would have created their own doom without a haunted house to help them along.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

This is one of my favorite novels of 2016. This is a series of linked novellas about a black family in the 1950s, dealing with racism and Lovecraftian horrors. H. P. Lovecraft was one of the fathers of modern horror, and a hideous racist. The horror of his stories often comes from a fear of the other, and of the mixing of pure blood with unpure. Ruff, along with Victor La Valle in The Ballad of Black Tom, turns Lovecraftian tropes on their head and uses them to comment on racism. The scariest moments in Lovecraft Country come from racist police officers, not supernatural threats, and that is part of the point. I recommend both this and La Valle’s book, but if I had to pick one, it would be this, because it also has a humorous rebelliousness threaded through it. I like my horror with a helping of gallows humor and absurdity.

Sabriel and sequels by Garth Nix

Sabriel begins a series of novels about the Abhorsen and the Old Country. The Abhorsen is a necromancer who uses his or her powers to fight the dead and put them to rest. The Old Country is a country full of magic, and beset by evil necromancers and sorcerers, old elementals imperfectly bound, an order of seers who live in a glacier, and a lost dynasty of kings. It is a YA series that mixes horror and heroism, with a touch of school novels as well. I recently re-read the first three books in the series, and found them just as engaging the second time around.

The Sonja Blue Novels by Nancy A. Collins

Vampire fiction has been done to death, right? These novels, written in the late 80s, are original no matter how many vampire novels you’ve read before. They go deep into the horror aspect of vampires, which I really appreciate. Vampires have been metaphors for all kinds of societal concerns through the centuries, but I think they are at their most effective when they stand in for people who give up their humanity for power. Our heroine, Sonja Blue, is a half-human vampire, who kills other vampires, while trying to find the vampire who made her and ended her mortal life. Nancy A. Collins has developed a complete cosmology that incorporates vampires, zombies, ogres, incubi, and even seraphim. Sonja Blue’s encounters with vampires and with her own darkness are gruesome and graphic. I’ve read them several times, and I am always horrified by the violence and depths of these novels. What keeps me coming back, though, is the hope they offer. Sonja Blue’s world is dark but not irredeemable, and even her worst monsters have glimmers of humanity.

Books, Writing

Genre, Passion, and Infinite Variety

September 8, 2016 No Comments

When I applied to MFA programs, I used the first few chapters of The Half-Drowned King as my portfolio material, which usually counts for 80-90% of the admissions decision. I wanted MFA faculty to know that I was a writer of historical fiction, with swords and kings, and prophetic dream right in chapter one. I was worried that MFA programs would be full of literary snobs, and I wanted the program that chose me to know what they were getting.

NYU’s program was pretty good on that front. The students represented a variety of genres in their writing, many writing realist literary fiction, but some wrote fantasy, mystery, thrillers, and surreal fiction. The professors too, many of them, welcomed different genres. Rick Moody’s class on Ancient Forms reminded me that genre as a classification is a recent phenomenon, and many early writers were writing epic fantasy novels in verse. The Odyssey is a fantasy novel; I will hear no arguments on that point.

Some didn’t though. I did work with a professor or two who clearly had no use for historical fiction, or fantasy, and some fellow students as well. And outside the program, I saw it even more, in blogs, review sites, agents.

This is a great time to be a genre writer with a literary bent, or a literary writer with a genre bent. Books like The Golem and the Jinni, The Book of Esther, and so many other are blurring the line between fantasy and literary fiction, between genre and literary fiction. Nerd culture, also, is ascendant, with the success of so many super-hero TV shows and movies.

But I want the walls to come down entirely. And more than that, I want people to stop looking down their noses on one genre or another. It’s all storytelling. Either it’s a good story, or it’s not, and that has nothing to do with whether there is magic in it.

I want people to realize that a preference for realist fiction over fantastical, or vice versa, does not make you a better, more sophisticated reader. It’s simply a preference. There is nothing more limiting than believing that your preferences and the gaps in your knowledge are some kind of virtue. You might not read much science fiction, and that’s fine, but that is a choice, not a moral victory. (And give a new genre a try. You might learn something.)

The same goes for things outside literature. You might not be interested in sports. That’s fine. Life is short and you should spend it on things that you are interested in. But that doesn’t make you better than people who do like sports. (Check out this great comic on the narrative purpose that sports serve, which is different from, and complimentary to, fiction.)

Here is a list of things I don’t care much about, and in some cases am outright hostile to:

Cruises
Meat loaf (this is where the hostility comes in)
NASCAR

Not caring about or liking those things does not make me a better person than those who do. And yet I see people who find disliking sports, fantasy novels, makeup, etc. to be important facets of their self-worth, a source of pride.

People’s passions and quirky interests are to be celebrated. I love meeting someone who is passionate about something I know nothing about–then I can learn from them. I remember an interesting evening with a gentleman who cared very deeply about stereos and sound. He explained his stereo and the speaker placement in the room, and showed me how sitting in different parts of the room changed the sound. That wasn’t the entire evening, but it was a very interesting digression–and he knew when he’d reached the limit of my interest. He didn’t make me into a stereo connoisseur, but he did show me the detailed, infinite little world contained within his passion. I love writers who can do that. Reading a book should be about exploring something new to me.

Dismissing entire genres, and sneering at other people’s passions, makes us smaller, less interesting people. Our time is short and the world is huge, and full of infinite variety. Every door you open has a vast landscape inside it. Even if they only carve out a small part of it for themselves, the writers I respect the most stand in awe of world’s variety, not on some false pedestal above it.

Books, Life, Writing

Whose story is it?

August 2, 2016 1 Comment

On Friday, I had a bit of a wrestle with the fate of a minor character in The Sea Queen. My plot question was “should s/he live or should s/he die?” and I was trying to figure that out based on my answer to: “what does it mean to my main characters and plot if either happens?”

I could make it work either way, but neither choice felt right for the narrative, and usually when I’m working out plot issues, one choice will simply feel right for the story. The question that shook me loose was: “How can the fate of this character show respect for them as a person rather than a prop?” And then I knew what to do. When I’m writing, I can do anything I want to my characters, but they only come alive when I don’t ask, “What is done to them?” but “What does life ask of them, and how do they answer?”

A couple months ago, I read Man’s Search for Meaning by psychologist Victor Frankl. The most affecting part of the book is his years in Nazi concentration camps, and how that experience illustrated, in the starkest terms, some essential truths. These are:

Doing something that has meaning is a person’s highest calling, not happiness
Even when every freedom has been taken away, people can find meaning and purpose in how they meet their situation

He found that prisoners in the camps who felt that their lives and choices had meaning, who had someone to live for, a memory that sustained them, or a desire to help their fellow sufferers as much as they could, had a better chance of survival than those who did not have that purpose. Those without purpose were more likely to become their worst selves, to steal from one another, and eventually, to give up and die. To Victor Frankl the central question for everyone should be not, “What do I want from life?” but “What does life want from me?” Perhaps the answer to the first one always, for everyone, is “meaning”, and the answer to the second is what creates that meaning.

Story is meaning, and meaning is story. Humans tell themselves stories all the time, at every moment of every day, when we are not listening to others’ stories ¹. Even when we sleep, our minds make up stories. One of the symptoms of PTSD is an inability to give meaning to an event, to create a narrative around it. Sufferers of PTSD cannot tell their story, and often relive it instead. And people are more likely to suffer PTSD if they are prevented from sharing their trauma and telling their story ².

The stories we tell ourselves about our lives become our truths. Do you tell the story where everyone screwed you, and everything went wrong, and therefore you failed? Or do you tell the story where you had a lot of experiences that taught you things, and you had to make adjustments along the way, but every step you took led you to where you are now. For many lives, either story has a grain of truth, but which person do you want to be?

One of my writing teachers always asked “What does this event mean to this character?” because the importance of a plot is not the plot itself but what it means to the characters experiencing it. As Hamlet says, “for there is nothing either good or/bad, but thinking makes it so.” Thinking is storytelling is meaning-making, and every character makes their own meaning. It’s one of the hardest writing questions to get your mind around. It requires knowing a character very well.

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing fiction is choosing the right main character. I got into an argument with a friend early in my MFA program, where I was railing against writers who write about characters exactly like them, usually young writers from Brooklyn. And my friend was saying that every story is worth writing, and that I was being a snob to think otherwise.

I think we were both right. I do think there is a higher degree of difficulty writing about yourself or someone very like you, because we don’t see ourselves very clearly, and we may not see our own agency. A character can have lots of bad things happen to them, but they still have a choice in how they react to that. Even being passive is a choice. And with a skilled author, who can tease out the reasons for the passivity, and the consequences of it, that can be an interesting story. But the author needs to understand that while the character may seem to have everything happen to them, and perhaps that’s even the story the character tells himself, the truth is that he has choices, agency, no matter what. Maybe terrible choices, maybe the only choice is in how he faces his situation–what meaning he takes from it–but he has a choice.

(This is not to excuse terrible things, or to say there is something wrong with ‘being a victim’. People do terrible things to one another, and the victims of that have every right to be angry. And they have a choice of what to do with that anger and every other feeling about it. In Victor Frankl’s practice, he found that helping his patients find meaning helped them heal from whatever they had been through.

This is also not to say that everything in life happens for a reason and Frankl is very careful to state that as well. His point, and mine, is that things happen–life asks things of you–and you get to decide how you’re going to answer.)

Readers want to read about characters who do things, who make things happen, who make choices. I’m not the type of author (at this point) who can make a passive character interesting, or the type of person who has enough sympathy for a passive character. My characters do a lot, do everything, do too much. All they do is make choices and try to make things happen, often to a fault–a lot like their creator.

So this is both a post about writing or life. Whose story is it? In life, it’s always your story. You can tell it as other people’s story, as the story of everyone who did you wrong, or as the story of how you overcame that. In fiction, it is your protagonist’s story. They always have choices. And it is also the story of every other person in the book–none of them should feel like props, and all of them should have their own stories, no matter how briefly they intersect with the protagonist. Because we are all protagonists, making choices, searching for meaning, answering what life asks of us.

¹ The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
² Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay

Books, Life

The Faroe Islands Part 1

July 13, 2016 4 Comments

I’ve been dragging my feet writing posts about my travel, because I often find travel narratives, especially by non-travel writers like myself to be very dull: I went here, saw this. I went there, saw that. (Of course, I love this travel writing.)

The travel books I like tend to either be about cold places, like The Magnetic North by Sarah Wheeler, or books about very entertaining people traveling, like In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, or the best of both worlds, Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier. Well, the Faroes are in the far north, but while I hope to be an entertaining writer, I’m not sure I am entertaining as a person.

But I shall try. I wanted to go to the Faroe Islands because I have some action in The Sea Queen set there, and it’s always better to see a place in person.

The Faroe Islands are north of the United Kingdom. If you sailed in, for instance, a viking ship, from Bergen, Norway, to Iceland, you would run smack into the Faroe Islands. Today they are an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Like the Scottish Isles and Iceland, Irish monks were some of their earliest settlers before more settlers came from Norway during the Viking Age. There is also some evidence of settlement beyond the Irish monks from 400-600 AD. The Faroese language is similar to other Scandinavian languages, but it contains many more words borrowed from Gaelic, and its pronunciation rules are very different.

Side note: When I was in the National Museum in Iceland, I overheard some academics, historians of Icelandic Sagas, and a computational linguist, sort of smirking about how one of their friends had to have “viking” put in the title of his book, even though it’s actually about early medieval Scandinavians. To which I say Thhhhhbbbbpppttt. (It’s a technical term.) The Viking Age is defined as the years between 794, when vikings attacked the monastery at Lindesfarne, and 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. During that time, Scandinavian sailors, as well as sailors from the Baltic, expanded out from their homelands. Many were farmers. Some were chieftains or kings. They traded or raided, depending on what seemed more profitable. They started to wage longer wars and settle in some places. These people are known to us as vikings. There is no sharp delineation between who was a viking and who wasn’t–in fact, aside from knowing that “vik” means “bay” or creek, the etymology of the word viking is a bit hazy. There’s really no problem with calling early medieval Scandinavians vikings as a shorthand, as far as I’m concerned. Especially if you want your book to sell outside of academic circles.

ANYHOO.

We arrived in the Faroe Islands just a few days after midsummer, and they are far enough North that it never gets dark. The sun doesn’t even dip below the horizon until just before midnight, and it’s up and shining again by 3am. Even when it’s down, the sky stays blue and orange.

We used AirBnB to stay in an 19th century house in historical Torshavn with a lovely hostess. On our first full day, we took a helicopter ride to Suderoy, the southernmost island, flying over and landing on other islands on the way. The smallest, Litlá Dímun, is uninhabited, and the second-smallest, Stóra Dímun, only has one family living on it. The weather patterns mean that it rains almost every day. The islands gather clouds to them that sit on the crests like a grey felt cap. Deep fjords cut through the islands, and down the fjord walls cascade more waterfalls than I’ve ever seen in one place before.

As we were flying over the islands, we saw a lake sitting on top of a cliff, like this one. (I did not take this picture.)

On Suderoy, we went for a 6 mile hike through some fields full of sheep to a hidden lake. I have never seen more sheep in one place than in the Faroe Islands, and I have been to Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand. Also, wonderfully, at least half of them were black or brown sheep. None of them wanted us in their fields, and complained bitterly, in a hilariously passive aggressive tone. (Or maybe I’m projecting.)

The Faroese notion of “an obvious path” is somewhat different from mine, even having grown up in the middle of the woods, following deer trails from a young age. So we lost the path a bit, but luckily we had a pretty good description of the path, and knew generally where we were going. And since the Faroe Islands have no trees, it’s hard to get lost. At all the points when we didn’t know where we were going, we could look back and see the town we needed to get back to at the end of the hike.

When we were finished with the hike, we took the 2 hour ferry back to Torshavn, and watched the cloud-capped islands go by, as the ferry went through water black as ink.

And I guess I’ll save the rest of the Faroe Islands for following post. Next: I find out what seagull tastes like.

Books, Comics, Writing

Gods and Themes

June 16, 2016 1 Comment

Last night I finished reading Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Blades, the second book in Divine Cities series. This, along with the previous book, are some of most interesting, sophisticated fantasy novels I have read in the last few years. Speculative fiction (and historical fiction too, really) is at its best when it uses its fantastical or otherworldly elements to explore a real world problem. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of my favorite examples of this. Vampires, magic, curses all serve different purposes, but, especially in the first three seasons, they always explored the problems of growing up. Buffy’s status as a Slayer stood in well for a teenager discovering that she’s not who she’s always tried to be, who her mother and her peers want her to be. When Angel’s curse makes him turn evil after they sleep together, that is a heightening of the more prosaic drama that many teenage couples enact.

Bennet’s series proposes a world that used to have gods in it, but doesn’t anymore. An oppressed, enslaved people threw off the yoke of their oppressors, and in the war, killed the gods that kept their oppressors in power. In the first book, Bennet used the death of the gods, and the artifacts they left behind to explore the uses and abuses of religion. He tackles the problem that an involved, powerful deity can’t escape being a villain, at least to someone. If a god helps your sports team win, then he’s helped someone else’s fail. A god that does not fall into this trap has to cease to be a god entirely.

In the second book, Bennet explores war and violence through the aftermath of the death of the goddess of war. Different characters approach the uses and necessities of violence, what justifies it, if anything, and how civilized societies can and should use it. This exploration is very powerful–perhaps even more so than the first book, because our protagonist is a retired general who has committed atrocities in her past, and who can hardly live with those memories. She embodies one aspect of the cost of violence, as other characters do in different ways.

Mike Carey’s Lucifer series of graphic novels is one of my other top fantasy “novels.” In this series, the titular character, Lucifer, has abandoned hell, and is forging his own path. He is an uncompromising and mostly, but not entirely, inhuman character. The books explore Judeo-Christian and other mythologies, and invent new ones, while Lucifer rails against a problem that even a being as powerful as him cannot escape: a person cannot be his own creator. Lucifer cannot stand the fact that God created him and gave him a purpose. He cannot stand the idea that everything he is comes from his creator.

This is a totally different, yet still incredibly fruitful way of using the idea of gods and an all-powerful creator God to tackle the central problem of growing up and establishing one’s self as an adult. If Lucifer cannot escape his creator, who can? Sometimes I look at my life and the ways that I am like my parents, shaped by the things they showed me as a child, and think that I have not fallen very far from the tree, though I went farther and deeper with the ideas they gave me than they ever could have imagined. Who knew that D’Aulaire’s book of Norse mythology would take such root?

At the same time, it explores the question of whether a literal, all-powerful God can exist and not be a villain (theodicy) in a very different way from Bennett’s work. Lucifer shows, more than once, what happens when a creator gets too involved with their own creation–it is even more dangerous and destructive than not getting involved at all, and so an all-powerful God must be very remote.

Chuck Wendig is one of my favorite (and one of the most profane) writers on writing, and I very much agree with his statement that theme is what gives a work of fiction staying power. I agree with his definition too, that theme is the book’s central statement. What it is trying to say. City of Blades says, explicitly and implicitly, that the only just way to use violence, to be a soldier, is to use it in the service of greater good and expect no great rewards in return. To be a servant, who does the terrible things that are necessary sometimes to protect. Lucifer says that no one can be their own creator–and no one can escape their origins entirely.

If theme is well-realized, it grounds every conflict in a piece of work, whether the conflict is specifically about that theme, as most of them are, or serves to illustrate, in this case, the cost of violence, the cost of making a stand on one side or another of the argument.

I also agree with what Wendig says about theme being a statement, not a question. So far I’ve begun my works with a question, but by the end of this trilogy I will have answered it. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Either it will come through or it won’t.) Theme can be hit too hard, but a work without a theme, or with disorganized approach to its theme will not come together. Speculative fiction gives writers the opportunity to explore themes in a more literal way than the internal struggles of real-world fiction do. I hope one day to write speculative fiction and try my hand at it as well.

Books, Life

I went to Ireland!

June 7, 2016 No Comments

The last time I was in Ireland was 11 years ago. In Ireland, my now-husband (hereafter known as the Wanderer) proposed to me, as we were walking back over the Rock of Cashel to get lunch at a pub. This was after I had made innumerable “Welcome to The Rock” jokes in a bad Sean Connery accent, because I am a KEEPER, y’all.

Now that I am setting my own schedule, when I found out the Wanderer planned to attend a conference in Ireland, I thought I’d tag along and get some research done. THE SEA QUEEN, the sequel I am currently writing, has some scenes set in Viking-Age Dublin, and there’s no substitute for seeing a place in person, even after 1200 years have passed.

I also wanted to see The Book of Kells at Trinity College, which historians think was probably created in Iona, a Scottish island, at a monastery founded by an Irish saint, and then moved to Kells to protect it from Vikings.

I had one full day in Dublin, so I went to see The Book of Kells first, and also got to experience the wonder of the “Long Room”, the Ur-Library, the library of which all others are poor copies.

Next I visited the Museum of Archaeology and History, which is full of Irish treasures from the Neolithic Age through to the Medieval period. The Bronze Age material impressed me most. Ireland was one of the wealthiest areas in Europe at that time, and the weapons and decorative arts reflect that. The museum also contains several of the famous bog bodies, Bronze and Iron Age corpses discovered in Irish bogs in the 19th and 20th centuries, preserved by the bogs so that archaeologists can learn about what food the people ate, and what injuries they suffered before they died. The Bronze Age Irish practiced human sacrifice, especially of their kings. One body had its nipples mutilated, which was done, apparently, to disqualify the man from kingship. Because suckling at a Bronze Age king’s nipples was a common way for his subjects to show submission. Such a weird and fascinating detail! Almost too weird to put in a novel, if I ever write something set in Bronze Age Ireland. But too interesting to forget.

After a mediocre lunch (don’t order a burger in the British Isles unless you like them burnt), I went to Dublinia, a somewhat kitchy but still worthwhile tour through Dublin history from the Viking Age through the Norman invasion. Dublinia contains computer simulations of the layout of Viking-Age Dublin which will be very helpful for writing about it. Also recreations of the inside of Dublin Viking houses, which were probably smaller than the high-born houses I am familiar with in Norway and Denmark.

After that I relaxed on the grounds of a church and listened to the bells while reading In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English by Carmel McCaffrey. All of this makes me want to re-read Morgan Llywelyn’s retellings of Irish myths, which I haven’t read since high school–she does a nice job of bringing reality to the magical tales of Cuchulain and Finn Mac Cool.

The next day we took a bus to Cork and spent a few days there in the slightly more modern world, including visiting the Cork Butter Museum, which, sadly, contains no butter sculptures. I really wanted to quote this exchange from The West Wing. (I did anyway.)

It’s fun to travel with a research agenda–it gives focus to my touring, the same way reading with a research agenda gives me (some!) focus in a book store or library. Later in the summer, the Wanderer and I are going to Iceland and the Faroe Islands for more research

Books

Some thoughts about The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

April 14, 2016 No Comments

I read The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker a while ago, and recently decided to re-read it. It is the story of a newly created female golem who immediately loses her master, and a jinni trapped in human form, both of whom end up in fin de siècle New York and have to create new lives for themselves. It is a book that is easy to get lost in, and makes me excited about the mixing of literary and genre fiction. They’re excellent separate, of course, a good literary dissection of a marriage, or a life, where the drama comes from everyday triumphs and tragedies. And I love a good pulpy fantasy novel, with serviceable prose, and well-worn tropes make the reading feel like putting on comfy old sweatshirt.

But I am thrilled about novels like this, a literary novel with an urban fantasy plot. Like the best literary novels, it creates complicated, not always likable characters, and wrings as much drama from the little ways that they choose to get through their days as the more operatic confrontations of the ending.

I also admire the way the author narrates the novel in an omniscient voice. I am more familiar with omniscient voice in 19th century novels, where the narrator has a particular point of view and that voice is as much a part of the novel as any of the characters. Who is it that tells us that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” if not the author? (I will leave aside whether that author is Jane Austen or the persona that she is putting on for another day.) It is Thackeray’s voice for Vanity Fair that endears Becky Sharp to us, because his affection for her is so evident, even with all her cruelties and vanities.

The voice in The Golem and the Jinni is more subdued, but still very skillful. The point of view moves from character to character, smoothly, and when necessary, tells the reader about things outside the characters’ sphere of knowledge. It also goes deeply into individual characters so that we know them inside and out. It has all the advantages of a shifting third person, with just a bit more. It helps give the novel a slightly old fashioned feel, in keeping with its setting. Omniscient third has fallen somewhat out of favor these days.

What it accomplishes by going so deep into point of view and then coming out of it, is an intimacy that many modern books in omniscient third lack. The switches happen so seamlessly that it gives the narrator a remarkable freedom.

By creating two creatures who are new to turn-of-the-century New York City, she gets to give them the joy of exploring this place and time, and letting the reader explore with them. That is not something that I’ve gotten to do in the historical fiction I’ve written so far, where all of my characters are more or less familiar with their milieu, although each of them pushes their boundaries. This book is a good reminder to sit in those moments when my characters are in a new situation, a new place, give them time to discover it, be inspired by it or afraid of it, whatever their personality dictates.

I’ve never wanted to write reviews here, rather to talk about books that I’ve enjoyed, and what I’ve learned from them. It’s interesting to see some reviews on Goodreads saying that it has far too much description of old New York, when I could have read twice as much. I don’t think it’s a perfect book–I’m not sure such a thing exists–but it worked, and it was intelligent and thoughtful, charming and moving, and I highly recommend it.

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