fairy enchantment and other authorial hazards
A review of sorts: Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age.
The things we delight in the most have the greatest capacity to frustrate us. Do you know that feeling? You feel it when one of the protagonists of the TV show you're so attached to suddenly starts acting way out of character. When that band you love releases an album that just doesn't quite get there. If you had no interest in this thing and it suddenly took a turn for the worse, you reaction would be a shrug. But you are invested in it and so it's painful to see this new, wrong direction, and so there's the sensation of being simultaneously pulled toward it and pushed away.
That's the long-winded version of how I feel about Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron. It's not that I'm already a huge fan of Ms. Bear (I've only read one other book by her, a sci-fi novel called Hammered. It was 'aight.) The attraction here is the whole idea of the book: the intersection of the mythical world of the fairy and our modern century, a place where goblins and imps live in the shadows of Times Square, where Merlin is the lead singer of a band, where creatures of myth prey on unsuspecting souls near the waterfront, where a clan of werewolves live in a village in Scotland. That's the attraction, the pulling, the thing that made me plunk down twelve bucks for this thing at the cash register. And all these things are certainly in there between the covers, and more, done with style and imagination.
The pushing, aye, there's the rub. You see, in fiction, the magical and the fantastic must be given boundaries. If the reader is not clear on what the limits are, or more specifically, what actions are within the scope of the characters' abilities, the plot is drained of tension and its events become, to the reader, random and arbitrary. If the world of the novel, however fantastic, does not have well-defined rules it loses its concreteness, its density and degenerates into a series of overwrought descriptive passages. The need for concrete boundaries is all the more real when your fantastic world intersects with the reality that the reader is already familiar with. How does your reality square with my reality? Play fast and loose with something the reader knows well, and you'll lose them.
Blood and Iron suffers from these kinds of problems. Most of the main characters appear able, just for starters, to magically teleport almost anywhere. Yet occasionally someone has to swim a river of blood or chase a quarry down a dark alley and we don't know why this person could simply be there before but can't now. Not only that, but without a sense of movement scenes become senseless, lacking context. It's cool to meet characters like Morgan the witch queen or the mother of all dragons, but the author seems to simply float into the tiny cottage or the subterranean lair and then leave again on a whim. There is no tension and no logic to it.
Where the rules are defined, fascinating things happen. There is a character called Whiskey, a magical being of great power, who is bound to our protagonist, Seeker, at the beginning of the novel. We quickly learn three rules about the relationship between Seeker and Whiskey: 1) Whiskey is extremely powerful and dangerous and would kill Seeker given the chance, 2) If one person is bound to another they get three chances to kill their new master and break the binding and 3) if the master is killed by someone else, the bound servant also dies. These rules, clearly understood, concretely define their relationship and keep it very interesting. On the one hand, Whiskey is compelled to be a loyal servant to Seeker and might even willingly serve her in hopes of being voluntarily set free. On the other, he's definitely going to take advantage of his three chances.
The Whiskey/Seeker axis also nicely illustrates the problem with the book - it's never made explicit exactly what Whiskey even is, let alone what the lmits of his power are. Vague and flowery prose make it sound as though he's a horse made out of water that can also transform into a humanoid form. Whiskey's powers also seem to grow stronger with proximity to water. What, exactly, this entails is unclear. In one early scene he summons up a storm to drown Seeker, but she defeats him by casting a magical net at him. Um, OK, magical net beats storm? Noted.
Bear's characters spend a lot of time walking around, having cryptic conversations with powerful magical beings and shifting between the real world and the fairy world with great abandon. But again, the delineations of these physical and political geographies are always left quite vague, and so the reader is left to flounder in a sea of lovely prose.
I want so much for Blood and Iron (and whatever subsequent books follow) to be wonderful. But the more the author draws me into her magical world, the more she pushes me away.
I'm still reading, not even half way, and I certainly plan to push on through. Hopefully over the subsequent pages the author will communicate a firmer idea of her brave new world. On one aspect we are already quite clear - the world of the fairy is a dangerous place for mortals, and for authors.
The things we delight in the most have the greatest capacity to frustrate us. Do you know that feeling? You feel it when one of the protagonists of the TV show you're so attached to suddenly starts acting way out of character. When that band you love releases an album that just doesn't quite get there. If you had no interest in this thing and it suddenly took a turn for the worse, you reaction would be a shrug. But you are invested in it and so it's painful to see this new, wrong direction, and so there's the sensation of being simultaneously pulled toward it and pushed away.
That's the long-winded version of how I feel about Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron. It's not that I'm already a huge fan of Ms. Bear (I've only read one other book by her, a sci-fi novel called Hammered. It was 'aight.) The attraction here is the whole idea of the book: the intersection of the mythical world of the fairy and our modern century, a place where goblins and imps live in the shadows of Times Square, where Merlin is the lead singer of a band, where creatures of myth prey on unsuspecting souls near the waterfront, where a clan of werewolves live in a village in Scotland. That's the attraction, the pulling, the thing that made me plunk down twelve bucks for this thing at the cash register. And all these things are certainly in there between the covers, and more, done with style and imagination.
The pushing, aye, there's the rub. You see, in fiction, the magical and the fantastic must be given boundaries. If the reader is not clear on what the limits are, or more specifically, what actions are within the scope of the characters' abilities, the plot is drained of tension and its events become, to the reader, random and arbitrary. If the world of the novel, however fantastic, does not have well-defined rules it loses its concreteness, its density and degenerates into a series of overwrought descriptive passages. The need for concrete boundaries is all the more real when your fantastic world intersects with the reality that the reader is already familiar with. How does your reality square with my reality? Play fast and loose with something the reader knows well, and you'll lose them.
Blood and Iron suffers from these kinds of problems. Most of the main characters appear able, just for starters, to magically teleport almost anywhere. Yet occasionally someone has to swim a river of blood or chase a quarry down a dark alley and we don't know why this person could simply be there before but can't now. Not only that, but without a sense of movement scenes become senseless, lacking context. It's cool to meet characters like Morgan the witch queen or the mother of all dragons, but the author seems to simply float into the tiny cottage or the subterranean lair and then leave again on a whim. There is no tension and no logic to it.
Where the rules are defined, fascinating things happen. There is a character called Whiskey, a magical being of great power, who is bound to our protagonist, Seeker, at the beginning of the novel. We quickly learn three rules about the relationship between Seeker and Whiskey: 1) Whiskey is extremely powerful and dangerous and would kill Seeker given the chance, 2) If one person is bound to another they get three chances to kill their new master and break the binding and 3) if the master is killed by someone else, the bound servant also dies. These rules, clearly understood, concretely define their relationship and keep it very interesting. On the one hand, Whiskey is compelled to be a loyal servant to Seeker and might even willingly serve her in hopes of being voluntarily set free. On the other, he's definitely going to take advantage of his three chances.
The Whiskey/Seeker axis also nicely illustrates the problem with the book - it's never made explicit exactly what Whiskey even is, let alone what the lmits of his power are. Vague and flowery prose make it sound as though he's a horse made out of water that can also transform into a humanoid form. Whiskey's powers also seem to grow stronger with proximity to water. What, exactly, this entails is unclear. In one early scene he summons up a storm to drown Seeker, but she defeats him by casting a magical net at him. Um, OK, magical net beats storm? Noted.
Bear's characters spend a lot of time walking around, having cryptic conversations with powerful magical beings and shifting between the real world and the fairy world with great abandon. But again, the delineations of these physical and political geographies are always left quite vague, and so the reader is left to flounder in a sea of lovely prose.
I want so much for Blood and Iron (and whatever subsequent books follow) to be wonderful. But the more the author draws me into her magical world, the more she pushes me away.
I'm still reading, not even half way, and I certainly plan to push on through. Hopefully over the subsequent pages the author will communicate a firmer idea of her brave new world. On one aspect we are already quite clear - the world of the fairy is a dangerous place for mortals, and for authors.
posted by braun at 2:01 PM
1 Comments:
Hmm, thanks for the nice words and the definition - I've never heard of a kelpie before... I'll have to look them up.
I agree with your review: Bear is an author whom I'm waiting on to do something really special, but hasn't done it yet.
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