Books read, late February

[mrissa]

M.A. Carrick, The Liar's Knot. I wanted to immerse myself in secondary world fantasy, and this fits the bill. Complicated clash of cultures! Deception, magic, familiars, secret societies! This is the second in its series, and I think you'll do better for having read the first, but good news, it's in print.

Susan Cooper, Greenwitch. Reread. An interesting note as the middle book of this series, allowing the kindness of a human girl to hold sway after the general internalized misogyny of the first two. I thought of this as "the girl book" in the series when I was a little kid, and I don't think that was wrong--the place where Jane is allowed power is still explicitly fairly feminized and held as a sphere apart from the rest. But as I said rereading the ones before it--I see the flaws in these and still love them anyway, or in the case of this one still like it, this was not one that I loved. As an adult I see how I appreciated that the kids were not instant friends, that they could, amidst a fantasy plot, have ordinary kid resentments and assumptions and annoyances. That's a lot more typical of fantasy writing for kids than it was when this was written, and this series is part of why.

Alex Danchev, Magritte: A Life. Well, it was bound to happen. You read enough biographies of people, and you'll get to one where all the interest of the person was in their work. Danchev wrote quite well about Magritte--you can tell he's good at this--but Magritte, at the end of the day, was a fairly tedious subject. Because of that I can't recommend this biography even though Danchev did a good job with it.

Sandra Jackson-Opoku, The River Where Blood Is Born. This is a generational novel about nine generations of Black women in a family that spans Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. I read a lot more of this type of novel when I was a teenager (and in fact that's when this one came out), and voice is completely crucial to whether I'll enjoy it--voice and variety of character, which this one definitely has, from country quilting grandmas to city party girls to globetrotting seekers after their roots.

Kathleen Jamie, ed., Antlers of Water. This is an anthology of Scottish nature writing and art, with essays and poetry and photos included. It's very much in the "if you don't like this one the next will be quite different" school of anthology, and Jamie has made sure to reflect the diversity of modern Scotland with her choices of authors. The main voice I missed here was, of course, hers.

Abir Mukherjee, The Shadows of Men. Do you like chase scenes? because this book has chase scenes. This book has enough chase scenes to make me wonder whether someone in Mukherjee's writing group challenged him to fit the maximum chase scenes per word count and whether there's another book out there in competition with it for that prize. What it also has: a murder mystery set in Raj-era India, with the characters thinking quite hard about religious issues and Indian independence. This is fifth in its series, and the characters are allowed to grow and change, and I like that.

Naomi Oreskes, Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don't Know About the Ocean. She is so good, she is so extremely good, as thinkers about how modern science is done she is just so hard to beat, I just love her work. By which, of course, I mean, I am depressed and appalled by her work. But also wow, just wow, watching how sharply Oreskes zeroes in on places where people completely fail at epistemic neutrality--she just lays it out for you, here is how the way this experiment is designed is presupposing the results it wants, here's what they didn't even bother to investigate, here's the entire field that was considered crucial to oceanography in the 19th century that was sort of shoved away in the 20th and a pretty clear indicator of why. And further, she's really great at getting into why people would behave in the ways that they did--the places where researchers would be lying to themselves about some forms of influence, not just to us--and she's so good at advocating for transparency and yes, this is 500 pages plus notes but it went so fast.

Erica L. Satifka, How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters. The "disasters" in the title is not an accident, and it's not an indication of bad craft--Satifka does her work very well here, but almost all of the stories have a disastrously grim view of humanity and any other intelligence it might ever encounter. If you're a person who deals with hard times by going dark, this is a very well-done collection and probably for you. If not, maybe save it for brighter days.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Thomas, et al, eds. Uncanny Magazine Issue 45. Kindle. For me the absolute hands-down stand-out of this issue, the story I needed right now, was the Maureen McHugh story that opened the issue. It's dealing head-on with a great many things at once, homelessness, addiction, the pandemic, none of them "fun escapist things," but the way it makes science fiction of them is humane and human and lovely.

E. Catherine Tobler, Sonya Taaffe, David Gilmore, et al, eds., The Deadlands Issue 10. Kindle. In addition to the Amanda Downum column, which is always a pleasure, my favorite thing in this issue was the haunting story from Fran Wilde.

Sarah Tolmie, All the Horses of Iceland. Discussed elsewhere.

Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen. Tomalin is such a pleasure as a biographer, sympathetic without making excuses, able to see her subject's point of view without shutting out that of others. I actually did not read this because I had a passionate curiosity about the life of Jane Austen but rather because Claire Tomalin is so good at her work, and I intend to keep doing that with other authors. That said, she really did so well with things like Austen's long depression/writer's block/whatever it was. It was all beautifully handled. What a good book.

Piers Vitebsky, Living Without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos. This is about a culture in India that shifted, over the years Vitebsky visited them, from shamanism to a mix of missionary Baptist and orthodox Hindu, and he talked about how and why and when that happened. The structure of the book is a little dry at first but you can see academically why he wants you to have the groundwork in who is what to whom, and it picks up a great deal after that. One of the things I found most interesting about the entire process is that some of the very social functions that this particular instantiation of Christianity destroyed for this particular group are social functions it has served perfectly well elsewhere--but were not the focus of the missionaries who came to this group for various reasons. So people who wanted to argue the benefits of the different religious approaches would need to look at the local versions, not their preconceptions of What Christianity Means To Me or What Shamanism Means To Me or etc. Vitebsky does a really good job of making it specific and real and human.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Friends for Robots. This is such a warm and friendly and loving collection. There are old favorites here, there are things I've never read before, there are things to make you laugh, this is...if you're a person who deals with hard times by trying to reach out to others and build something good, this is the collection for you.

Comments

[sovay]

But as I said rereading the ones before it--I see the flaws in these and still love them anyway, or in the case of this one still like it, this was not one that I loved.

I have a weird relationship with Greenwitch not because it's the girl book but because it's the sea book and yet I don't love it as I love other books in the sequence, even as I love Cooper's Seaward. I love the descent of the Wild Magic on Trewissick, which I realized decades after the fact that I had associated since childhood with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny." I love the painting of the sea-spells. I agree on the importance of Jane's compassion and the making of the Greenwitch feels like a real folk ritual. But the childishness of the Greenwitch made it less alien than I thought it should be and I have never liked Cooper's Tethys, the cold realm of desperation and hunger and fear, as a child because I thought it was unfair to the sea, later as I came to notice how feminine these ancient, raging, amoral powers are. (I know the Greenwitch is canonically genderless, but the making is so very much the magic of the women's side and Tethys is firmly she—the White Lady, cf. Robert Graves. The book was written when the default term for humanity was "men," so that I can't be confident of how much gender to read into some of the dialogue around and between Tethys and the Old Ones, but it's very hard to parse it as neutral. Silver on the Tree goes some way toward amending this idea of the feral, primordial feminine when it associates the Lost Land and its King with the Wild Magic, but the Lost Land is still a version of the underworld, deep-sunk in the past and under the sea. And far more successfully numinous than the realm of Tethys, which I also minded.) There's still an image in it that got into my mind so long ago, it worked itself out years ago in something I wrote without my noticing it until afterward, but it always feels like a book I should have loved and don't. Though apparently I think more about it when I'm not looking than I thought.

[mrissa]

There is so much of "female is the marked state, the neutral state is male rather than neutral" in this, and redeeming feral/primordial stuff from being exclusively feminine means that there's very little that's powerfully feminine in this series at all, so it's a two-edged sword.

But yes, exactly: it feels like a book I should have loved and don't. It always has. I just...feel like Susan Cooper's idea of what was possible for Jane and mine were so many worlds apart that everything Jane is in feels hollow and sad for me.

And I completely agree with you about the Greenwitch, it didn't feel alien at all, it felt like a human child, a human small child, not an alien with an element of childishness but a human small child clear through.

[sovay]

and redeeming feral/primordial stuff from being exclusively feminine means that there's very little that's powerfully feminine in this series at all, so it's a two-edged sword.

Agreed. Without re-reading, the Lady is the only counterexample that comes to mind. And even the patterning between the Lady and Jane is one of the things that is broken by the ending, which I hated as a child and still hate. (rushthatspeaks has suggested that Cooper was trying to pull off something like the ending of the Prydain Chronicles and blew it; I think he's right, but Cooper really blew it. Especially since the run-up to it is full of crucial metaphysical choices, and then no choice at all. Statistically there must be a reader who is fine with it, but I have never met one, including my mother.) I have trouble counting Blodwen Rowlands because I have never been sure that she was the true form of the White Rider any more than red-haired Mr. Mitothin was the true form of the Black, but I might be crediting the mythos with more fluidity than written: if Cooper framed her universe so dualistically, then it would suit the great powers of the Dark to come as Will and Bran see them in the Lost Land, white/black, left/right, female/male: always the matched set of extremes. I love so many of the images of these books, like icons, like stained glass, they are deeply embedded in me, and it is useful to be able to take them out every now and then and look at them.

I just...feel like Susan Cooper's idea of what was possible for Jane and mine were so many worlds apart that everything Jane is in feels hollow and sad for me.

It isn't as strong for me as desolation, I think, but I was dissatisfied.

Have you written at all—poetry, fiction, nonfiction—about this?

And I completely agree with you about the Greenwitch, it didn't feel alien at all, it felt like a human child, a human small child, not an alien with an element of childishness but a human small child clear through.

The one note of strangeness for me is its self-awareness as a thing made for sacrifice, which suggests the new construction of its form containing something older and more continuous than each year's making. That works for me; that's weird. But everywhere else it is emphatically a child and cyclically so, different this one year only because Jane felt sorry for it and because it was moved to anger by the painter from the Dark, and I suppose it must be a child so that Tethys can be identified as its mother, but then I worry that Jane's compassion is itself understood by the narrative as a kind of mother-rehearsal, the nurturing girl who can reach the child where the efforts of men fail, which might be unfair of me, but this really is the book in the series where the gender essentialism went boink. Why did it have to be the sea-book. Beyond the obvious, which doesn't help.

[mrissa]

It will come as no surprise to you that I also hate the ending. It is, of course, still on the horizon for my reread, but gosh I do hate the ending so much. I hate the ending so much that it is the very archetypal example of how I hate that kind of ending--I have hated other endings of its type a bit, but it is first and in many ways worst.

I also absolutely see mother-rehearsal in Jane's compassion, and/or a kind of prepubescent purity: she is not old enough to coo, "oh, Greenwitch, make a boy [or worse, Will, as the only non-family member at hand] like me" which is basically what the other women are doing. We don't see any of the other wishes being any other kind--even though they're framed as being grasping, selfish, what they're shown as grasping at is adult sexuality, which Jane is not quite ready for--but the other little girls, the ones who properly belong to the village, aren't there to do what she does. But also we're not shown any older women whose wishes for themselves might not be for themselves but also aren't for the Greenwitch. And--sure, it's not that kind of ritual. If one of the ladies who is making the Greenwitch is thinking, "Greenwitch, send me a cure for my sister's sickness," she's not going to shriek it to the crowd and dash away laughing. But that is the sample wish, not a motorbike but a man. There is basically nothing any of the women do in this book, though, that is not squarely in the realm of traditional femininity. So traditional that even "eee, them girls and their high heels" is not traditional enough.

It's strange, the things that I haven't written about because the thing I was going to write about them was poetry. It's like an entire hall of doors, some of which are very obvious and easy to open, I just...didn't go down there for a bit. Hmm.

[sovay]

and/or a kind of prepubescent purity

How old is Jane for Greenwitch? I always thought she was about Will's mortal age, because Simon is a little older and Barney is conspicuously younger, which would make her eleven-ish. I guess that would take her out of even the liminal edge of adolescence, although she always reads as older, because she's the one who's always—again, maternally, domestically—worrying about the others.

We don't see any of the other wishes being any other kind

Yes. I actually deleted a piece of my earlier reply because I couldn't figure out how to weave it in other than pointing to it, but it's not just that we don't see any other kind of wish, we are specifically told that the traditional wishes are for love and fertility: "those who are crossed or barren." Jane not asking for herself gives her wish a curious kind of maturity, but it ties right back into the caring for the welfare of others that is so often expected of women that it doesn't dent the gender essentialism at all, even to the degree of not-like-the-other-girls.

It's strange, the things that I haven't written about because the thing I was going to write about them was poetry.

I was thinking a poem, but I wasn't going to push you.

[mrissa]

Yeah, I thought she was eleven-ish, too. And some eleven-year-olds are absolutely old enough to wish for a boy to like them or to do some particular thing--smile at them, hold their hand, whatever--and others are not, and others are old enough and don't do it. But Jane has not shown any inclination toward wanting that in the first place, so not asking for it doesn't really...I don't know, it would be like me not asking for a diamond tennis bracelet. I'm not being principled about the diamond industry when I don't ask for a diamond tennis bracelet, or considerate of a loved one's budget, I just have no desire for a diamond tennis bracelet, we don't get so far as it being a credit to my principles because it is not to my taste. And we're not seeing Jane going, "oh, he's cuuute" and then thinking, oh no, I shouldn't ask the Greenwitch for that. She just--doesn't have that going on in this book.

Which is not to say that her wish that the Greenwitch should be happy is not a kind one. It absolutely is, and to her credit that she thinks of it when others don't. But it's not the same kind of credit.