Truth Sayer

Thomas the Rhymer, by Ellen Kushner

Ellen Kushner’s retelling of the Scottish legend of True Thomas, a man gifted – or cursed - with truthtelling and prophesy by the Queen of Elfland (with a touch of Tam Lin thrown in for good measure) won both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award for best novel of 1990. It’s not difficult to see why. The characters live and breathe, the story – rounded out and given beginnings, ends, and meanings – rings true, and it’s a pleasure to read.

Thomas is a wandering harper, a carrier of news and gossip and tales of love and adventure, and a bit of a rogue, especially as regards his dalliances with women, both high-born and low-born. In the book, his tale in the world of men is told through the eyes of others – an older crofter couple, Gavin and Meg, with whom the wandering harper visits when he is in the neighbourhood, or fallen upon hard times, and their neighbour, the young and beautiful Elspeth. It is only during his seven years in Elfland – where Thomas himself cannot speak save to the Queen of Elfland herself – that the book gives us his point of view.

The strength of the novel is the depth and honesty of its characterisation, and the simplicity of its unfolding. There is no complex plot – although there are a few unexpected turns – and only in the Elfland section do we see anything like the complicated motives and interactions that are such a important and well-crafted part of some of Kushner’s other novels. What there is, is truth.

Hero, Quest, Completed

When Darkness Falls by Mercedes Lackey, James Mallory

When Darkness Falls is the last volume of Lackey and Mallory's Obsidian Trilogy (previous volumes in the series briefly discussed here) and it certainly brings a thoroughly enjoyable heroic, sword and sorcery, elves and dragons, good vs. evil epic to a fitting and satisfying end. With wiggle room and enough loose ends for another volume or two if interest and sales figures warrant - and should that happen, I'm definitely up for another visit to this particular universe.

There were some very nice touches, particularly in the depictions of the elven way of life. Lackey has a fondness for the trope of the willing sacrifice in her work (see the Last Herald-Mage trilogy and Brightly Burning for just two examples) but here it is done particularly well, and with strong but harmonious echoes of C.S. Lewis's iconic narrative of Aslan at the Stone Table.

And the unicorn has the last word.

Victorian England Was Never Quite Like This

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

Tooth and Claw is a Victorian-style family drama, complete with dark secrets, stolen inheritances, and impoverished young members of the gentry struggling to regain – or improve on – their social standing in a world where even the most skillful veneer of manners can’t conceal the vicious competition for place and status, and where even the slightest misstep can mean catastrophe for one’s self and one’s family.

The plot is quite traditional for such novels. To quote my partner glaurung (from an email discussion list):

… two brothers and three sisters gather for the premature death of their father. The elder brother has become a parson, and the elder sister is married with a generous dowry, but the younger brother is trying to build up his wealth in the civil service, and there isn't enough wealth left to properly dower the two younger sisters. There's a dispute over an ambiguity in the will, with the selfish brother-in-law bullying a full share for himself and his wife, leaving the younger siblings even more impoverished than they had thought they would be. One unmarried sister goes to live with the her brother the parson, and the other is forced to live with her overbearing brother-in-law and her sister, whose character has sadly changed since marriage to resemble her husband's. Against all the odds, all three younger siblings find someone who wishes to marry them, who is of a higher station than their own, and who, coincidentally, they happen to love as well.

And it’s all about dragons.

As Walton says in her prefatory notes to the novel:

It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren't like that. Women, especially, aren't like that. This novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology.

As it was for humans in the Victorian novel which Walton takes as her starting point, social status is everything for the propertied class. The gentry live off the peasant class, while those who make their fortunes through trade life off the working class. Males achieve their ambitions through careful management of their estates and businesses, through political and social alliances, through schemes and deals and application of power and status. Females take their social place from their fathers, then their husbands; making a good marriage is the only respectable way to gain status, and only a respectable – that is to say chaste and uncompromised – female can rise in society.

Walton’s dragons literally improve their social standing by consuming the flesh of other dragons – the only way they can grow larger and become stronger. A dragon’s greatest inheritance is the flesh of his or her parents. A dragon of property grows powerful off the flesh of his tenants’ and workers’ offspring. A dragon who wins in a battle of law, business or honour may advance to greater heights by consuming the flesh of his opponent. Female dragons must follow the rules of respectability without exception, because a female dragon, once made aware of passion, changes colour – appropriate, even required, in a bride or matron, but forever damaging to an unmarried female of whom unsullied maidenhood is demanded. All the “axioms of the Victorian novel” regarding human behaviour are literalised in the bodies of Walton’s dragons.

The title of Walton’s novel is from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., with the crucial lines quoted at the beginning of the novel itself: “Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine.” Appropriately enough, not two stanzas further on, one finds the lines “Dragons of the prime,/ That tare each other in their slime.” These dragons, red in tooth and claw, make for excellent reading.

Each book of Walton’s that I read, impresses me more and more, with her originality, her versatility, her wealth of literary and historical knowledge that serves to deepen and enrich everything she writes, and her stunning talent in creating characters that live in one’s mind for a very long time after one turns the last page.