Judith Tarr, Rising and Resplendant

One of my favourite fantasy writers (and yes, I have many favourite fantasy writers) is Judith Tarr, who for some strange reason has not achieved the popularity she so richly deserves. She writes both high fantasy and historical fantasy, and I believe she does so brilliantly.

I recently went back and read one of her very early works, the high fantasy Avaryan Rising trilogy, and started reading her later, second trilogy, Avaryan Resplendant set in the same universe - I still have one more book in that trilogy to locate and read. The books in the first trilogy are:

The Hall of the Mountain King
The Lady of Han-Gilad
A Fall of Princes

And the two I've read from the second trilogy are:

Arrows of the Sun
Spear of Heaven

Tarr is a very good writer. Her plots are often highly original, her characters are full, well-developed and and consistent, she often puts wonderful touches of humour into her books, her awareness of historical detail and all sociological, political and military possibilities of the kinds of cultures you find in both high and historical fantasy - pre-industrial theocracies, feudal monarchies, empires and the like - is profound (I think the PhD in history might help some there).

The first book in the Avaryan Rising series deals with the homecoming of Mirain, the child of a sungod and the long-lost heir to a small kingdom, as he struggles to assume political power in his long-deceased mother's home country and fights off the first of many adversaries he and his descendants will face - rival claimants to his throne who are worshipers of another deity (in this world, in addition to the standard kinds of secular magic, the gods are real and interact with their priests).

What is very interesting about the path of the first trilogy is that as time passes and we become more invested in the main character, Tarr starts giving us hints that all is not quite what it seems to be, and that we are not reading the standard hero fulfils his noble quest story. If the reader is perceptive, there's a line early in the first book that revels what is off-kilter, but it's not until the end of the first trilogy that we are fully shown Mirain's fatal flaw. Tarr puts a lot of focus on political intrigue, power struggles and the difficulties of integrating several very well-realized but very different civilizations into one political unit, but she shows this through the actions of her characters rather than telling us about it, letting us understand the upheavals of nations from the experiences of the people driving, and caught up in, all of this change.

There are several things I did not remember about the early books but now find very interesting. One is that Tarr was writing very positively in the late 1980s about same-sex relationships, and she has a very important protagonist in the third volume of the original trilogy who is magically transgendered. The other was that Tarr made her line of demigods dark-skinned, and all the early covers of her books show her protagonists as being white. This error has been corrected in the covers of the second trilogy, where the protagonists are shown as being multi-racial - which, given that Mirain and his successor marry people of other, lighter-skinned races, is just about right.

The second trilogy deals with Mirain's descendants, who by now rule half the planet and are investigating the unknown other half. The novels and their themes - or at least, the first two in the trilogy - are perhaps a little less complex in plot and theme than those of the first trilogy, but they are still fine examples of high fantasy.

Romance in the Blood

Tall, Dark and Dead, Tate Hallaway

It's pretty much an open secret that Lyda Morehouse, the author of a truly wonderful religious cyberpunk series of novels - Archangel Protocol, Fallen Host, Messiah Node and Apocalypse Array - is currently writing "supernatural romance" under the name Tate Hallaway. While I hope someday to see more Lyda Morehouse novels with the sf bite of the Archangel series, the first Tate Hallaway is a lot of fun to read, too, and I'm awaiting the publication of the second one with some impatience.

Tall, Dark and Dead is an adventure-romance about a witch on the run and a vampire who wasn't turned in the usual way. There's humour, and sex, and plot twists, and blood and magic and betrayals and a nicely crafted love story, plus some solid knowledge of occult matters (although as a former professional astrologer myself, I have a small nit to pick with her on the distinction between progressions and transits). There are also some welcome Morehouse touches - for instance, the Vatican has a secret squad of witch-hunting assassins. A good read.

A Deeply Nested Delight

Think of a matroyoshka doll, but with multiple dolls within the first one, nested two or three to a level. Or one of those computer programs with so many nested subroutines you need the flowchart to follow the logic.

That's the structure of the enthralling The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente. A child prince listens to the stories told by a young girl who lives in one of his father's gardens, sotires that tell of people who listen to stories told by the people they meet about the stories that they have heard... and on and on. As the stories move from one protagonist to another, it becomes, slowly, clear that all the various tales are interwoven accounts of different elements and times and places of one larger story.

Not only is it fascinating to see the threads coming together as one person's tale links to that of another's, but the source material Valente draws on in crafting the individual stories come from a myriad times and places - I think I recognised themes and styles from cultures as far apart as Saami and Dravidian.

It's like putting together a literary jigsaw puzzle. I suspect this book or its sequel, In the Cities of Coin and Spice might not be for everyone, but I was delighted by it and I recommend it to those who enjoy threading their way through the labyrinth and putting the pieces together.

A White-collar Farce

Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich

Bait and Switch was clearly intended as a counterpoint to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich's expose of the difficulties faced by working-class Americans in just trying to keep their heads above water and food on their children's plates in the post-industrial North American economy.

Unfortunately, it's not nearly as successful in getting across the hazards and trials faced by the average middle-class white-collar worker in an age of down-sizing and rapidly moving cheese. But I don't think that's entirely Ehrenreich's fault. She applies the same methodology - assume the appropriate work and life history, and do everything the average person with that background would do in looking for a job - and she writes just as well about what she experiences as she did in Nickel and Dimed.

It's just that the world she was exploring in Nickel and dimed was a world of obvious disparities, injustices and barriers, in which people without power of any kind were regularly diminished, degraded and marginalised. It was a tragedy.

Bait and Switch is a farce. Her accounts of her encounters with all kinds of placement consultants and services supposedly designed to help a recently de-hired middle-management type find a new job were bizarre in the extreme, from cult-like networking groups to back-to-the-Bible prayer meetings disguised as information sessions for the white-collar job-hunter. If this is indeed what corporate culture in Noth America is turning into - and certainly none of the people Ehrenreich talked to during the period of time she was doing her undercover research thought there was anything inappropriate about the kinds of experiences she encountered - then I am very glad that the company I work for has an academic corporate culture instead of the sales and appearances oriented culture that Ehrenreich's subjects have apparently become accustomed to. Because I couldn't function in an environment that fake and farcical, and I suspect that if they allowed themselves to think about it for a minute, most of her subjects would realise that the very environment they are so desperate to re-enter is the last place that any sane person would want to work in.

Among other things, Ehrenreich talks about the role of "personality" in corporate job-hunting and how in many companies, having the right kind of personality, as judged by a host of tests that may well be meaningless and for the most part have little or no real scientific research behind them to determine their accuracy as indicators of anything (and this apparently includes the Myers-Briggs typology online tests that go around the Internet in waves every few months), is considered more important than experience or competence in one's field. Scary stuff.

Unfortunately, unless you actually live by the kinds of values that Ehrenreich's corporate job-hunters and their erstwhile employers apparently do, this book leaves the reader without the empathy and anger evoked by Nickel and Dimed. Instead, one is left wondering why on earth intelligent people would buy into any of this crap, and, sadly, struggling not to laugh at the sheer madness of it all.

Catching up, Part 3

Over the past year, I've been re-reading several series of fantasy books, some of which I've already mentioned in earlier posts. I've now finished re-reading two series that I'd noted starting to re-read some time ago.

Mary Stewart:
The Crystal Cave
The Hollow Hills

As good as ever. This series remains one of the great modern approaches to the Arthurian myths.


Melanie Rawn
Sunrunner's Fire
Stronghold
Dragon Token
Skybowl

Have I mentioned before that I love these books? Politics, dragons, complex plots, well-developed cultures, two different and competing magical systems, great characters including some very strong and unforgettable women, heroes who make mistakes and have insecurities but manage to muddle along and finally sort of win but sometimes at great cost... good stuff.

To Hope, Perchance To Dream

Drag King Dreams, by Leslie Feinberg, is a powerful book, an important book, a book that carves the lived reality of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and ability oppression into your mind and heart with bold, precise cuts. This is a parable of how power is used to define, control, and suppress difference in a security-conscious post-9/11 world where questioning and dissent have been reframed as terrorism.

The main protagonist, Max Rabinowitz, is an aging transman and former radical activist. Lacking the “paper” that recognises him as who he is, he struggles to survive on low-paying cash jobs in Manhattan clubs that feature performances by drag kings and queens. Alienated from most members of his politically radical and Jewish family of birth, he has found for himself a family of choice composed of others like himself, people living their lives at the stresspoints of intersectionality of gender, race and class.

One arc of the novel deals with the impact on this community of marginalised people of the brutal death of their friend Vickie, murdered by an unknown and never-found assailant who was most likely motivated by hate. Another deals with Max’s re-entry into activism, shocked back to life on by the mysterious disappearance of a Muslim neighbour, and spurred on by the young activists around him. Through these arcs, the dangers of being disappeared, through marginalisation, oppression, individual and state violence, and the hope that resistance and protest can force injustices performed under the cover of silence, fear and ignorance out into the light where they can be seen, named and fought are sketched out for those of us who think we are less at risk to see.

Feinberg is hirself* a political activist with a profound personal and theoretical understanding of both intersectionality and state oppression. Ze is not afraid to have hir characters talk about politics, about political theory, about the bridges between the personal and the political and the revolutionary actions that are the only chances for a drag king’s dreams to come to some kind of fruition.

The great value of "Drag King Dreams," like "Stone Butch Blues," is that it is a tool to help oppressed and working-class people break out of isolation. To know Max Rabinowitz is to know you’re not alone in your struggle—and that’s something we all need, especially these days. (online review)

I could not put the book down, and it filled me with horror, outrage and hope that somehow, despite the forces lined up against a day of reckoning, the people of this world will continue to find the courage to resist, to march, to speak out, to demand a change.

*Feinberg’s preferred pronouns are ze (instead of he or she), hir (instead of him or her), and hirself (instead of himself or herself).