Hugo Nomination #1: Naomi Novik's Uprooted

I haven't sent in my Hugo nominations yet--I need to get on that--but one of the novels I'll certainly be nominating is Uprooted.

Agniezska is the brave, stubborn, sensitive heroine of Naomi Novik’s 2015 novel — and she’s about to steal your heart. She comes from Dvernik, a remote village on the edges of the enchanted Wood, the dark forest that creeps like a blight over interior Polnya. The only thing holding the Wood back from engulfing the land is the Dragon, a feared sorcerer who lives nearby. For his work keeping the danger at bay, every ten years the Dragon demands one young woman from the village. As the time for “the taking” approaches, everyone in the village expects the Dragon to choose Kasia, Dvernik’s golden girl and Agniezska’s best friend. However, something about Agniezska catches the Dragon’s eye and she is the one chosen to leave her family and friends for ten years to serve him in his tower.

The setup might lead you to expect a typical Beauty and the Beast story, but Uprooted quickly becomes to something else. Novik’s plot weaves in elements of myth, magic, politics, coming-of-age, and yes, romance. It is easy to see the fairy-tale inspiration at work, but not always easy to pick out exactly which fairy tales she’s working from. There’s a good reason for this: Novik’s novel grew out of Polish fairy tales that her mother read to her when she was a child, mixed in with a healthy dose of her own imagination. As such, her story is populated with figures we know, such as Baba Jaga, the witch from Slavic folklore who is ferocious or maternal by turns, and figures we don’t know, such as woods-walkers and heart-trees. And an ancient legend of a marriage between a human king and a fairy queen becomes the linchpin to defeating the evil in the Wood.

The myth and legend that Novik evokes in Uprooted is only one aspect of some fantastic worldbuilding. As with her TEMERAIRE series, Uprooted is an alternate history of a medieval Slavic world; Polnya is Poland, locked in a hostile relationship with its near neighbor, Rosya (Russia). The reason for the conflict lie in the Wood itself; the queen of Polnya was taken into the Wood by a Rosyan prince and has never been seen since. In their efforts to rescue the Queen, Agniezska and the Dragon visit the capital of Polnya, navigating the treacherous waters of politics at court.

They also enter deeper into the Wood than anyone ever has, encountering horror and death. In The Wood, Novik has created an incredible setting, the fairy-tale analogue to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. It isn’t haunted — not precisely — but it is corrupted. Like more creepy versions of the apple trees Dorothy encounters in Oz, the very plants and animals of the Wood have become toxic. Something as simple as drinking water or touching a leaf in the Wood can sicken a person, sometimes with an illness that is visible like horrible deformation, and sometimes with an illness that doesn’t present itself until the person finds themselves in the midst of some unthinkable act, like murdering their family. The farther into the Wood one goes, the less likely it is that they will ever make it out, much less come out unchanged. [spoiler, highlight if you want to see it:] Kasia is taken by walkers, which are like giant men made of sticks and branches, and thrust into a heart tree, one of the Wood’s many strongholds. Although she only resides there for a night, cleansing her of the corruption inside and out requires all of the magic that Agniezska and the Dragon can summon. And even when they succeed, Kasia is forever changed into something part flesh, part wood. This kind of corruption is like possession, and it is a visual metaphor for something the Wood wants desperately—to overtake all of Polnya. It’s like evil kudzu.

I don’t use the word “evil” lightly here. When we finally meet the real villain, she is terrifying and powerful, but though the darkness within her threatens humanity, it is actually a creation of human hatred and violence. The final conflict is resolved a bit too quickly for me, but it works within one of Novik’s themes, the idea that human ties to the land are deep and healing and that, in reclaiming land, we restore and strengthen ourselves. While Uprooteddoesn’t telegraph any particular message or moral, this particular bit of the story could easily be a parable about our current relationship with the planet, reminding us that what we poison will eventually end up poisoning us.

Relationships are key to Uprooted. Agniezska’s relationship to the land, to the valley she grew up in, is part of what gives her such enormous power. But her relationships to others — her stubborn loyalty to Kasia, her affection for her family — are what humanize her and make her a fantastic character. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about one of my favorite relationships in the novel: the romance between Agniezska and the Dragon. Novik creates great chemistry between these characters, and Agniezska’s willful boldness complements the Dragon’s arrogant reserve. He has no idea how the outside world sees him until she comes into his life and shows him. It’s like a fantasy version of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, but Novik doesn’t gloss over the parts that Austen left out, if you know what I mean. In other words, the romance between the two fulfills all my dreams of what a satisfying fictional romance should be. Even if you’re not a fan of romance, however, there is plenty in Uprooted to enjoy and savor.

This review originally appeared on FantasyLiterature.com, where I (and the rest of the FanLit reviewers) gave the book 5 stars.

The Necromancer's House

The Necromancer’s House, by Christopher Buehlman, is a scary, funny, fast-paced urban fantasy novel with a rich voice and likeable characters. With its multiple viewpoints and several satisfying reveals along the way, it is one of the most well-crafted and exciting books I have read in a while.

Buehlman tells the story of Andrew Blankenship, a charming, brilliant modern wizard who drives an antique Mustang, wears his long black hair in a samurai bun, and goes to AA meetings regularly. He lives in the woods of upstate New York, in a house stocked and protected with ancient magic, much of it stolen from Baba Yaga in Soviet Russia. He’s in love with his lesbian apprentice, sleeps with a rusalka (a mermaid in Slavic myth), and is served and protected by the reanimated heart of his dead dog in the body of a wicker man. To put it simply, his life is not without complications at the beginning of the novel, but things are about to get a lot worse for Andrew.

After the rusalka drowns a Russian national, Baba Yaga is awakened to Andrew’s continued existence and vows to bring him down. She sends her daughter, along with other arcane magical forces, to hunt Blankenship and destroy him. At this point, it takes all of Andrew’s considerable magical knowledge, combined with that of several of his friends, to evade the arch-witch.

Buehlman has a background in both poetry and drama, and these influences make his writing shine. His dialogue is winding and funny, like the best plays, and some of his prose, laid out on the page in one-sentence paragraphs, reads like poetry. Descriptions like “an embarrassment of stars, like a fay court,” and “a tumble of scratches and playful bites and cheek-licking, a dance as old as man and dog and meat and fire” make the reading experience feel like a treasure hunt.

One of the most powerful tools in Andrew’s toolbox is his house — after all, the book is called The Necromancer’s House. He has armed it in several ways, forming layers of magical protection around himself. These are uniformly fascinating. It’s fun to watch Andrew change skins in his Room of Skins, although the consequences of leaving one’s human skin lying around are pretty bad if enemies get in. There is a tiny replica of the house in the attic with a dangerous surprise inside, a sleeping giant made of car parts in his front yard, and his bathroom appliances can be used to travel to other bathrooms (like in Harry Potter, not as in a flying toilet). In short, the house has so much personality, it’s basically a character in the book.

The other characters in The Necromancer’s House are just as interesting and well-developed. Even the ones we barely meet, like Radha, the computer mage from Chicago, have distinct voices and personalities. My favorite was Anneke, Andrew’s protégé and AA sponsee. She’s sharp and bad-ass and a little bit self-deceiving. Buehlman’s best description of her is as follows: “Anneke doesn’t do regret, or at least she tells herself that enough that it has become her mantra. If she were in Game of Thrones, her household words would be, ‘Yes, I did do that. And fuck you.’”

Andrew’s backstory is fully explored, including the tragic reasons for his alcoholism. Despite his arrogance and vanity — literally, one of the reasons he has left his defenses down for so long is that he uses magic to make himself young — I liked and empathized with him. I cried at the scene near the end of the book, when Andrew spends a last few moments with his reanimated dead dog, and then allows him to die — to go “outside” — for good.

The one era of his life left blank — intentionally — is his time in Soviet Russia as a prisoner of Baba Yaga. He relates this tale to a character in the book, but we do not get to hear it. Instead, Chapter 34 consists of one sentence: “He tells them what happened to him in Russia.” This narrative technique works much like Edgar Allan Poe’s negative description of the pit in his short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” When we don’t know exactly what Baba Yaga is capable of, she could be capable of just about anything.

Full disclosure for you horror fans and/or –phobes: The Necromancer’s House, which is categorized by the publisher as “horror,” didn’t scare me. This is fine with me. I don’t usually like horror; I get too easily frightened and, unlike adrenaline junkies, don’t find it a pleasant experience. I couldn’t go to sleep the night that I watched Shyamalan’s The Village because I kept imagining the fake-monster-things looming next to my bed, and that’s horror-lite! (Pity me, for I am weak.)

The thing that really scares me is inhuman evil. Anything from Lovecraft, or Stephen King’s terrifying oil slick in “The Raft,” or even human killers who kill compulsively, with joy, instead of for “normal” reasons to murder someone (such as power, or revenge, or bad grammar). These are terrifying monsters to me, ideas that won’t let me sleep at night. Some of the creatures in this book would fit that category, but the main antagonist, Baba Yaga, seemed just as human as Andrew Blankenship. Despite the terror she unleashes (including several very inventive deaths), she wasn’t inexplicable to me. Or perhaps I just read too many illustrated books when I was a kid portraying her as a kindly old babushka with a neat house. Either way, I was happy that I was able to read Buehlman’s book without resorting to huddling beneath my comforter.

*This review originally appeared here at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 4.5 stars.

The Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey

**This review originally appeared here at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 2.5 out of 5 stars.**

The Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey, part of her ELEMENTAL MASTERS series, is a fun, harmless read based loosely on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.

Growing up, I had always been drawn to Mercedes Lackey books, mostly because of the lush cover art, usually drawn by Jody Lee. But then, unfailingly, I’d read the blurb and decide not to read it; they usually sounded too involved, too conspicuously “high fantasy,” or otherwise cheesy and formulaic. (I love high fantasy, but I must have been a hipster when I was a kid because I couldn’t stand it if the book seemed like it was trying too hard.)

So I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging I found this book. Lee’s artwork is the perfect companion to Lackey’s prose, which is rich and descriptive. The world she creates for The Gates of Sleep is set in the English countryside and is replete with rushing brooks, dappled forests, and bright flowers. It feels like the work of the Pre-Raphaelites set in prose, which is no accident, given that Marina Roeswood, Lackey’s protagonist, spends the first sixteen years of her life living with her godparents in what amounts to a provincial artist’s colony. Lackey spends a lot of time setting the scene, describing the paintings, tapestries, carved wood furniture, and pottery that Marina’s godparents surround her with.

Her godparents aren’t only artists, however. Each of them is an elemental mage. They can channel spirits of specific elements — fire, earth, air. Marina, as her name suggests, is a budding water mage who also has an affinity with the element of air. She spends her days posing for her painter uncle, cooking, reading, playing music, and hanging out outdoors with the sylphs and undines that correspond to her magical powers.

Unbeknownst to her, Marina was cursed at her christening by her aunt Arachne, who was not supposed to have magical talent. Her estranged parents and devoted godparents have spent sixteen years looking for a way to counteract the curse while hiding Marina away. Just before her seventeenth birthday, however, Arachne’s minions show up and whisk Marina away to a huge estate where she is watched night and day by Arachne and her son, the “odious Reggie.” Their sinister plan is to drain Marina of her magic while also gaining access to her money and land, inherited from her parents (killed mid-book by Arachne).

I listened to The Gates of Sleep on audio, read by Kayla Fell. Her narration was good, but not exceptional. I’m not an expert on regional English accents; most of the book she read in an accent that, hard-pressed to describe it, I’d call “northern” or even “Yorkshire.” She kinda sounded like Ygritte from Game of Thrones, drawing out long vowels — “Yooo knooooow nothing, Jon Snoooow” — which was fun. But she mispronounced a couple of words, and I felt unconvinced by some of her character voices.

I liked that The Gates of Sleep kept surprising me, heading one way when I was sure it was going to go another. For instance, I was sure that Odious Reggie would be reclaimed and turn out to be Marina’s Prince Charming…  until his extracurricular activities made it clear that no amount of reclamation would make him a suitable mate for our heroine. I also really appreciated how much time was spent discussing the system of magic; Lackey established early on what methods the mages used, and what limits there were to their magic. Her characterization, too, was deep and heartfelt. I felt as if I knew Marina and her family, and I liked them.

Unfortunately, the villains were not as well drawn. Madame Arachne and the odious Reggie were like cardboard cutouts of villains. Arachne reminded me of the stepmother from Cinderella, all icy propriety. In fact, her role visavis Marina ended up being more that of the wicked stepmother than the malevolent fairy, since they were thrown together in the same stately manor and Arachne was charged with grooming the girl for society. Reggie was even worse than his mother. Everything he said was so fatuous (which was partly the point) that it seemed difficult to swallow that he was really involved with a complicated magical bid for revenge. For instance, he kept addressing Arachne in Latin — “mater” — which made me imagine him as the kind of dude who has a pencil mustache, a linen suit, and a monogrammed cigarette holder. (Incidentally, Kayla Fell was really good at making Reggie sound like an awful douchebag.)

The other big drawback to The Gates of Sleep was how complicated and rushed the ending was. The culminating battle introduced so many new rules and methods to Lackey’s carefully drawn magical system — We can fight in dreams now! And if I kill you in a dream, you die! — that it was like a whole host of deuses emerged from the machina. And the inevitable romance between Marina and a humble but magical country doctor came out of nowhere. As in, “she suddenly realized that she loved him,” when there had been no significant flirtation or discussion of burgeoning feelings beforehand. Maybe this is just the effect of reading a fair amount of chick lit, but when I’m reading a book with several detailed descriptions of dresses, I expect an equal proportion of emotional play-by-play. Marina’s situation in the big, lonely house watched over by unfriendly relatives was too much like an Austen or Bronte heroine for there to not be any corresponding relationship angst.

Post-Dissertation Writing Projects

I sent my dissertation to my professors about two weeks ago. Since then, I've been doing another kind of writing, one that I've been putting off for a long time: fiction. Specifically, literary fantasy.

I can hear the gasps from here. But I've wanted to write fantasy for a long time. I had ideas, and I puttered around with them, and I shelved them for schoolwork, housework, travel, and play rehearsals, but mostly I shelved them because I lacked the confidence to write and the willpower to work.

But if there's one thing I learned from writing my dissertation (and let's just get this out of the way: I learned a lot more than one thing), it's that I have the willpower and ability to see a long project with a lot of moving parts through to its conclusion. Tapping into this willpower feels a bit like magic itself; it's amazing, when I look back on it, how much work I accomplished despite rarely feeling like working.

This ability to make myself do something I dread, not just once, but day after day after day, is miraculous (and largely due to the Pomodoro Timer, praise be its name). And now that I know I have it, I am putting it to use, and writing all the things! In two weeks, I've finished one short story and begun writing another, both with specific publications in mind. Once I defend, I plan to finesse a couple of things I have lying around into critical articles, send those out to journals, and then get back to writing short stories. For the next couple of years, I'm going to try to write four articles a year, and one short story a month--basically three short stories for each article I write (I respond well to the reward system).

The other thing I've noticed since finishing my dissertation is how much clearer my mind is when it comes to craft. Like I said, these fantasy ideas have been knocking around my head for a while, but mostly confined to their own room while the dissertation had the run of the house. Now that I'm letting them out to play, I find that they've developed. I have much more defined opinions now about what I want my narrative voice to sound like, about what I think makes a good story, even about the idea of magic itself.

For example, we went to a cookout today and a bunch of kids in the house were watching the movie Enchanted. I'd seen the movie before, but I watched the Central Park musical scene between Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey. I found myself admiring the tension the movie creates around the incursion of magic into the real world. Here is this cartoon princess, earnest and innocent and sparkly, whose very presence causes supernatural events like choreographed singing and dancing, and on the other side is the real-life cynical guy who comments on the fact that everyone seems to know the words to the song, even though he's never heard it, and how unnatural it is that everyone is suddenly dancing. But even he is caught up, at the end, in the magic; he bobs his head to the music before he catches himself and shakes it off. I like that; that's how magic, if it were real, would be--it would catch us up before we realized it, but it would be, should be, obviously alien. And, in a world less kid-friendly than Enchanted, a little (or a lot) scary. (Even evil magic in Enchanted is just bumbling and foolish; the poisoned apple eats through the biker's helmet and gives him an oddly placed bald-spot, cue the laugh track.)

The point is, things that used to generally annoy or delight me are sharpening in focus. I'm able to articulate more clearly what I like and don't like--in media at large, but specifically in speculative fiction. I'm not only developing my taste, I'm theorizing it. Which is fun, and which I hope to (at some point) work into a writing class lesson or two. Voice and style are really hard to teach, but they're so fun to talk about.

The Devil Is An Ass

Okay, okay, okay, sometimes I like Ben Jonson. THIS PLAY is awesome. And really really weird.

Remember the way Marlowe's Dido begins on Mt. Olympus, among the gods? This play begins in hell. Pug, a junior devil, is asking Satan if he can be allowed to come to London to tempt people and cause mischief (classic Screwtape Letters scenario; if Wikipedia wasn't blacked out, I'd look it up to see if Lewis was inspired at all by this play). Satan says that Pug isn't ready for the kind of evil that London needs, but he eventually gives in and sends Pug to wait on Fitzdottrell, a squire of Norfolk.

So the first question is, what does the title mean? Is Pug an ass (an idiot) for thinking that he can do anything to London that London hasn't already done to itself and worse? Is Satan an ass (an idiot) for agreeing to Pug's proposition? Or is Satan an ass(hole) for allowing Pug to make a fool of himself?

Fitzdottrell's desire to see a devil is pretty funny. He's sort of obsessed with it and doesn't really tell us why, just tells us that he's been "run[ning] wild and call[ing] upon him thus in vain . . . these twelvemonth." Hilarious. What does that even mean? I imagine him out on the moors, naked, doing some sort of devil dances. And of course, he's so obsessed that he has to see the play The Devil is an Ass, which is mentioned in the play. So meta. (Also, Dick Robinson, an actor in the play, is mentioned as an actor who might do very well at playing a woman, one of the tricks that goes on in the play.)

Fitzdottrell is very gullible, though, and sells 15 minutes of conversation with his wife for a nice cloak. The wife is, understandably, outraged at this. She does not intend to cuckold him but she is dismayed by his lack of care for her and for their properties, which he is willing to sign away for any cockamamie plot to make money. As such, he is a gull, a target for "projectors" who try to sell him on such ideas. And, selling time but not bed-time, with his wife, he is a sort of wittol, too. When he sees (or suspects) signs of love for the young gentleman in his wife, he shuts her up.

This situation is a weird amalgam of testing and taming that I can't quite figure out yet. He trusts her enough to withstand being wooed, but not enough to talk back. And when she fails the test by having affection for her lover, she is punished and kept inside. Naturally, she seeks help but not by trading in her body; she persuades her lover, Wittipol, to give up his suit of her which dishonors them both, but to help her save her husband's money.

He does the right thing, and the con-men are conned, Fitzdottrell gets his wish to see a devil and realizes it is more terrifying than he thought, and the married couple are reconciled to each other, with a slight hope that Fitzdottrell will die early so that Wittipol and the wife might be married, a better match.

This play has a slight preoccupation with clothing, as some of Jonson's others have. Fitzdottrell makes sure to dress his wife in the height of finery. For himself, he is partial to fine clothing but cannot resist buying them secondhand, thinking he is getting quite a deal that way. The bit with the cloak is interesting; this cloak seems to be irresistible to Fitzdottrell, much to the amazement of everyone else. And Pug, the devil who has taken on the hanged-man's body, has stolen clothing; as a result of this theft, he is put back into the jail where the hanged-man was earlier executed. And at the end, the stolen clothes (and stolen body, clothing for Pug's spirit) is left behind.

There is also the preoccupation with women's makeup. Tailbush, Eitherside (extremely suggestive names for women), Lady Fitzdottrell, and the "Spanish woman" discuss "fucuses" for quite a while, in dizzying and disgusting detail. The Spanish woman uses a mish-mash of Spanish, French, Italian, and Latin to discuss these face-paints, interesting in light of today's lists of ingredients which might be equally obfuscated to the reader. As in Epicoene, one of the women is not a woman, but a man dressed as a woman, listening to feminine secrets.

And, at the end, Fitzdottrell has his own disguise, a madman who his wife has enchanted by devilry, by using soap to foam at the mouth.

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

With a tentative composition date in 1589, this work by Robert Greene is one of the earliest plays I'm reading.

Like Romeo and Juliet, it begins with a lovesick young man being questioned by his companions as to his melancholy. Ned, the Prince of Wales is in love with Margaret of Fressingfield, a commoner, whose beauty he describes in glowing (but somewhat incongruous) terms involving Venus and cheese. His clever fool Rafe has an idea of how he will win Margaret to his bed (he doesn't want to marry her, and she will not give up her virginity for less than marriage). They disguise Lacy, one of Ned's noble friends, to become friends with Margaret and get her opinion of Ned, and then Ned goes to the famed Friar Bacon, a sorcerer, who will make Ned into a silk purse, which Margaret will put into her placket, and then hey-yo! He's in her skirt! Foolproof plan, no doubt. Lacy, of course, says that he will execute his charge "as if that Lacy were in love with her." Foreshadowing!

At the same time, Friar Bacon has this idea to make a brazen head that will "unfold strange doubts and aphorisms" and "compass England with a wall of brass." I think this is a magical item that will not only prophecy but will also protect England from invasion. Bacon makes a brave speech about his powers, much like the speech Prospero makes in The Tempest when he says he can "rift Jove's stout oak," etc. He makes people appear and disappear in a whirlwind like Faustus, and like Faustus, he seeks knowledge and to "strain out nigromancy to the deep."

So Margaret falls in love with Lacy, not with Ned. Ned finds out about this, and retaliates, through Friar Bacon's magic. He eventually realizes that they really love each other and gives her up to marry his royal bride, Eleanor of Castile. The delegation from Castile has brought a magician with them who has a magician duel with Friar Bungay, a friend of Bacon's. He bests Bungay, and then Bacon bests him without even trying. Lacy leaves Margaret who takes holy orders but then goes back to Lacy when he returns, saying that he was just testing her love (what is with all this love-testing?). Bacon's brazen head falls to pieces when Bacon's servant, Miles, does not wake him up in time to respond to its first words. Bacon renounces magic, and Miles decides quite cheerfully to go down to hell and become a tapster for the devils. He rides away on a devil's back, cracking jokes all the way. And Margaret and Lacy, and Ned and Eleanor, are married.

The obvious comparisons are between this play, Faustus, and The Tempest. All three magicians use their magic to spy on others, to create tricks and illusions to entertain others, and to manipulate others. All three get sunk so deep in study that they forget what is good for the world and those around them. All three experience a "come to Jesus" moment when they are called to renounce magic (and two do). Prospero doesn't deal with devils and his immortal soul is not at stake, but he lays down his staff and drowns his book all the same.

The comedy in this play is similar to the comedy in Faustus--merry servants trying to take on some of their master's reputation for themselves and failing. Even though Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are funny lower-class characters, their comedy seems more funny and more sophisticated. Am I saying that because it's $hakespeare? I'm honestly not sure. Caliban himself seems a more interesting "servant" character than Rafe and Faustus's clowns, because he has such antipathy for his master, because the audience is allowed such sympathy for him, and because he's not entirely human. The clown scenes in FBAFB and Faustus seem driven by a dialogue of one-up-man-ship, each character making their line a punchline. I guess the struggle and conspiracy of the three clowns in The Tempest seems more motivated, more real, and that makes it funnier to me.

Friar Bacon has to duel another magician, Jacques Vandermast. Do Faustus and Prospero ever have to duel? Prospero sees the old witch Sycorax as his enemy but she is dead and we aren't sure they ever came into contact.