Uprooted (Naomi Novik, 2015)

 

OK, let's be honest for a moment... there's a very good reason that the first thing I always do when I go to the library is check the new books to see if there happens to be anything hanging out in the Dewey 398.2 slot.  I honestly can't remember a time I didn't love fairy tales, to the point that I've actively gone out of my way to incorporate them into my assignments in college classes when I'm able to.

And yet, somehow, I managed to not get around to reading Naomi Novik's Uprooted until now, despite having checked it out from the library multiple times, and having one particular online friend bug me about needing to read it for most of this year, as well.  I found a copy at a St. Vinnie's, though, so getting it more formally onto my shelf was maybe a better way to get it read.

The setting is somewhat unusual here in that, although we're in a fairy-tale setting, it's based more on Slavic lore than German or French, the way most of the best-known tales are.  The land that things are happening in is Polnya, clearly inspired by Poland, with a vaguely-menacing foreign power called Rosya; a Venezia is mentioned as well, but only once and in passing.  Names fit this setting, as well; the narrator, Agnieszka, is perhaps the most obvious instance of this, but every character has a certain eastern-European feel to their names, unless they're a mage going by the noun-based nomenclature they use for outsiders.

Around the edges of the setting, bordering both Polnya and Rosya, is The Wood.  This is a vast, horribly corrupted forest, seemingly implacable and always trying to encroach deeper into human lands.  Anything from within its reaches can only serve to spread the corruption further; at one point, the characters travel through a village that, within living memory, was outside the forest, but was overtaken in a single day.  The Wood is also intelligent on its own, able to make decisions based on the effects that an action will have in the long-term, laying traps for those outside in an effort to destroy everything that holds it back.

Agnieszka lives in a valley that directly borders the Wood, where its encroachment is held back through the magics of the Dragon, the local mage-lord (not an actual dragon).  He's a cold, unapproachable sort, actively avoiding any but the most necessary interactions with the villages under his protection.  All he asks, beyond the annual taxes, is that every ten years, one girl from one of the villages be provided to him to be his live-in servant until the next Choosing.  The girls he chooses always say that he never laid a hand on them, nothing of that sort, but they also invariably leave the valley entirely within a month of being released from service, and never come back.

The book opens with a Choosing; Agnieszka (and indeed her whole village) are utterly convinced that the Dragon will be choosing her friend Kasia, who has all the best qualities (beauty, grace, stalwart bravery)... but Agnieszka doesn't know that she carries the gift of magic in her, and so she has to be trained, and thus she ends up chosen instead.  The first part of the book deals with Agnieszka being seemingly unable to actually get the hang of magic at all; it's not until she's forced into action by having to fend off an attack on her home village while the Dragon is away dealing with a different attack by the Wood that she's able to really start showing her abilities; while the Dragon (and indeed most witches and wizards in-setting) relies on a very rigid, almost scientific understanding of how magic works, Agnieszka's gift instead acts in a more artistic way, with her abilities being based less on the rules and more on what feels right.  Art instead of science, as it were.  This shows itself most clearly when she's able to use the spellbook of Jaga (that J makes a Y sound), a long-dead witch who was known for doing things mages oughtn't be able to do and having spellbooks that are utterly useless...  at least, until Agnieszka gets her hands on one.

If this was a Harry Potter book, the entire novel would be about Agnieszka's training.  Instead, it quickly changes to instead be about the ongoing battle that she and the Dragon wage against the Wood, as it plots to bring down the human kingdoms entirely.  This begins with Kasia being kidnapped by one of the Wood's creatures and corrupted, but quickly becomes something far more wide-spread when word of Kasia's rescue reaches the palace and the ear of Prince Marek, second in line to the throne and absolutely certain that where one person could be rescued, the queen (who was taken twenty years prior) surely can be as well.  This goes... rather disastrously; the second half of the book deals largely with the aftermath of the 'rescue', along with delving into exactly what the Wood's true nature is.

Unfortunately, it's hard to get a good read on exactly what's going on in most characters' heads.  We spend a lot of time with Agnieszka and Kasia, but while the rest of the cast is largely understandable in broad strokes, it's difficult to get a good idea of why they act the way they do.  Even when the reason for the Dragon's aloofness in regards to the lands he watches over becomes clear, it offers little in the way of background for him; he's still a cipher, just one with some explanation for why he acts the way he does in this one specific area.

If there's one thing that disappointed me, really, it's that despite Jaga being mentioned as having appeared at a prince's christening long after she had died (and apparently commenting that she was in the wrong time period before vanishing abruptly), she never actually figures into the narrative beyond her spellbook in the Dragon's library and the way that her existence as a liminal figure among mages leaves her as more of a creature of folklore than an actual person, with one wizard outright telling Agnieszka that Jaga is just a fairy tale.  Baba Yaga is one of those characters who really fascinates me, where you're never quite sure going into a story that she appears in whether she'll be good or bad for the other characters, and I think it would have been interesting to see her appear, though at the same time, even invoking her throws a lot of the rules into question.  You just don't know what's going to happen, any more than Agnieszka knows what's necessarily going to happen when she starts a spell.  She actively works magic that she's been told is impossible, several times; over and over, she exceeds everyone's expectations.

I think I'm going to have to keep an eye out for Novik's other books, now.

The Councillor (E.J. Beaton, 2021)

 

It might be rather less than a surprise to anyone who reads what I have to say, but I like books that give me something to chew on, mentally.  There's a lot to be said for conspiracy themes, then; they're like a literary puzzlebox, where the clues are there if you know what to look for, but you might miss them easily.  It's the same idea as fair-play mysteries, where the reader can see all the pieces after the end, and could perhaps have figured it out before the characters do, just with rather larger stakes for the characters.

As such, it takes a deft hand to not only write a compelling conspiracy thriller, but place it in a fantasy setting that has to be built at the same time.  It says a lot for E.J. Beaton that she managed to pull this off so effectively in her debut novel, The Councillor.

The titular character is Lysande Prior, a scholar in the employ of Sarelin Brey, the Queen of Elira.  We're dealing with a generally low-fantasy setting in this book; medieval technology rules, and what fantastical creatures explicitly existed (such as the chimera seen on the front cover) are established early as having been killed off.  There are 'elementals' referenced as part of the population, who are capable of manipulating the elements at will (we see examples of wind, water, fire, and mind-control is alluded to) but this is a decidedly downtrodden group, forced to live in hiding because their mere existence is considered criminal.  Hello, civil rights issues.

Elira itself is a nation made up of five city-states, each of which has its own leader.  There are significant cultural differences between the states, but in all cases, there's a strong degree of social stratification.  The leaders of all five states are largely hereditary, with a clear aristocratic class ("silver-bloods") maintaining power over the commoners.  There is significant poverty in some parts of the nation, and vigilantism is rampant against elementals, whether or not they have done anything to deserve it, given the state-sanctioned illegal nature of their existence, regardless of whether they even choose to be that way.

The first chapter ends with the assassination of Sarelin, apparently at the whim of Mea Tacitus, the White Queen (who attempted to lead an elemental coup some twenty years prior) and the discovery that, in the event of her death, as she has no heir, she has tasked Lysande with selecting the next person to wear the crown, from among the remaining city-state rulers.  However, an important question remains before the scholar: nobody knows who was able to execute the assassination, and it's important to ensure that the new ruler won't be a puppet of the White Queen.

From there, we're introduced to the leaders of the four other city-states, and Lysande starts trying to decide who would be the best ruler.  This initially seems like it is going to be a selection of 'tests of worthiness', but when further disasters start to threaten the potential rulers (a piece of metal specifically-sized to be a choking hazard hidden in food, a vicious wolf let free in the coliseum when it's not supposed to be... yes, there are blood sports in this setting), she decides that the best option is, instead, to put off selecting a new monarch until the threat of Mea Tacitus is sorted out, placing the four leaders as a ruling council, instead.  She herself is added to the group at the urging of one of the four, as a representative of the fifth city-state, despite having no claim to any throne, and in fact being "low-born".

With this new governmental structure in place, the narrative then shifts to a larger question, that of what the apparently unprovoked attacks on trade ships and attempts on the lives of the council itself might mean.  This is complicated by the introduction of international politics to the mix; one of the two bordering kingdoms believes that their ships are being attacked by Eliran vessels and wants things to be made right, while mercenaries apparently paid by that same country are causing problems.  Lysande's knowledge serves her well, helping her to figure out what's going on, but not quite quickly enough to prevent a diplomatic incident, and not the last one in the narrative.

So, we have a book that's working on several levels.  The primary narrative deals with this conspiracy, where the question of who the traitor in the midst of the council is drives the story forward.  While this makes for the puzzlebox level of the narrative, what drew me to the book in the first place, I found that the far more interesting level was Lysande's development over the course of the work.  She starts out as a devoted servant of Sarelin, who uses the fallen queen's words as a guide for how she should act and how she should lead.  Even at the start of her time as Councillor, while she sees where social ills can be sorted out easily, she's unable to bring herself to take anything more than the smallest steps toward sorting them out.  Her background as a low-born orphan who had it drilled into her head that the appropriate way to express herself is to "restrain, constrain, subdue," anything to keep from getting too many thoughts into her head of acting above her station.  This motto or mantra appears throughout the book, as she grapples with her desire to enact real change to make the lives of all Eliran citizens better, despite her social status.  Her development over the course of the narrative into a genuine leader who is able to easily win the hearts of the populace is interesting to watch, and her slow realization that her low-born status is more a boon than she ever realized.

Definitely an interesting book, and given that the author is already working on a sequel, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.  The specific conflict that I spent much of the book expecting to see never quite materialized, but it's clearly still on the horizon, and two of the five city-states haven't been explored on a cultural level yet, so there's plenty of worldbuilding and narrative to see in the future.

Summer Reading 2015 (5(a)): The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart, 1970)

Summer Reading 2015, #5a: ‘A trilogy’, part 1

It’s time for Merlin!  Well, young Merlin.  The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart is the first Arthurian tale I’ve read in... longer than I care to admit.  Especially given my background in such things.

I’ve been a fan of different takes on the Arthurian mythos since a very young age.  Admittedly, part of that is just the fun of the romanticized medieval setting that usually comes with it.  As a child, it absolutely caught my attention, something that certainly wasn’t hurt by a gift I was given for my eighth birthday, an Arthur-themed pop-up book that features no shortage of excitement in its pages.  The Sword in the Stone may not have been my favorite Disney film growing up (that would be Robin Hood), but that didn’t stop me from being fascinated by the story of the boy king.

(As an aside, my aunt, who gave me said pop-up book, never ceases to remind me that at the time, I was reading The Hobbit, and it made her feel kind of bad about giving me a pop-up book.  I always remind her that quite honestly, it's the only pop-up book I had as a child that stuck with me into adulthood quite that way.  Part of it may be the way it doesn’t bowdlerize the content; the illustration pictured here features those weapons plunging into and through the combatants, and the arms make plunging motions as the pages open and close.  My aunt was unaware of its presence in the book.)

So, on to this one.  The Crystal Cave is the first of Mary Stewart’s books dealing with the Arthurian themes, and focuses solely on the early life of Merlin.  Arthur only puts in two appearances, both in visions of the future.  Of course, Arthur’s childhood is the theme of the next book, so that can be better-explored next time.  Merlin is positioned as being the grandson of a Welsh king, the bastard son of Ambrosius, the cousin of Arthur, and rather than the Disneyesque wizard that he might be depicted as in many conceptions, comes across almost as a variation on Leonardo da Vinci, much of his magic being simply a sharp mind and the ability to take poetic metaphor and drag usable knowledge from it, then apply that knowledge to his works.

From the start, Merlin is an outsider, the sort who is far more interested in learning how the world around him works than in learning the ‘traditional’ male things of the era.  Even as he grows up and is drawn into travels outside of his native Wales, he’s always in that mindset, devoting his energies to a combination of learning engineering and mysticism from the chain of teachers he learns from over the years.  And these skills are put to good use; by the end of the book, Merlin has used the know-how he’s developed to get a large stone moved from Ireland to Amesbury to serve as a centerpiece to Stonehenge, here positioned as being already ancient but with the stones having fallen, a problem that he remedies as well.

Stewart absolutely knew what she was doing here; even though she calls herself out on the historical inaccuracies in an appendix at the end, it’s largely a matter of language used, not technology or politics, erring on the side of ‘recognizable’ in the sense of saying Cornwall instead of Dumnonia every time.  Honestly, I see no problem with this; one doesn’t read Arthurian lit for historical accuracy.  She also provided, as the first appendix to the book, the passage regarding Merlin from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, which she drew from in order to construct her narrative.

Of course, the story of Merlin is, almost by definition these days, inextricably linked with that of Arthur.  And as good a read as this was, it really does leave you wanting more, not least because of how it sets itself up, from the introduction but especially in the last section of the book, as being the first part of a longer tale.  Speaking of which, on to The Hollow Hills.