Jemisin, N. K. (2010). The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. London, Orbit.
A lot of people are raving about this book, and I'm not about to do that, but I think we have to put that down to the fact that I am not--at bottom--a lover of fantasy so that much of what I think appeals to others leaves me untouched. I'm not terribly interested in the worldbuilding, which I found thin, and the god-mythos bored me. The content/story did not really catch. I also kept trying to turn it into sf. I found myself really *wanting* it to be sf, a thing to think about in itself.
However, and it's a big however, I found the book technically fascinating, so as everyone else will be talking about content, I'll stick to technique.
Let's begin with that thin world building: I couldn't make up my mind whether my sense of "nothing there" was a deliberate contrivance of the author. The further I went, the more I thought it might be. Yeine is a traveler in a portal fantasy, leaving her own land for the Sky city, a matrilinear barbarian people for an Athenean style city. But I ended up knowing so little of either place I found myself thinking of her also as a traveller into a pocket universe and when, at the end, we discover why she is crucial, I realised that I was not entirely wrong. If this is a world in which Yeine's perceptions are all the perceptions we have access to, it may be because (metaphorically and literally) she is the centre and creator of the universe.
Following on from this, I don't think I've read a novel in a long time which is so addicted to "as you know Bob". Almost the entire novel is told in first person, and as much of the novel is structured around Yeine asking questions and being given answers (most misleading) one has the odd feeling that Yeine is a permananent Companion. Only the Doctor is missing. The consequence is that not a lot happens at the same time as a very great deal happens indeed. Think of an entire novel written in the mode of a drawing room confession scene from Poirot. It really shouldn't work, and yet because Jemisin keeps us *so* very firmly in Yeine's head it does.
Which takes me back to the portal fantasy. The flaw in portal fantasies is not that the protagonists are reliant on what they are told, it is that they *choose* to be dependent on what they are told. Too often they sign up with the Good Guy withoout question. Jemisin's Yeine is more cautious: she is ignorant but she is well educated and she parlays this and others expections of her into a much less niave version of the form. In doing so she also challenges it's colonial structures (as does Jemisin the author) because this is no outsider brought into save us all, but an outsider brought in as potential sacrifice, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe told by Edmund.
A book I wish I'd had on hand when I wrote Rhetorics...
However, and it's a big however, I found the book technically fascinating, so as everyone else will be talking about content, I'll stick to technique.
Let's begin with that thin world building: I couldn't make up my mind whether my sense of "nothing there" was a deliberate contrivance of the author. The further I went, the more I thought it might be. Yeine is a traveler in a portal fantasy, leaving her own land for the Sky city, a matrilinear barbarian people for an Athenean style city. But I ended up knowing so little of either place I found myself thinking of her also as a traveller into a pocket universe and when, at the end, we discover why she is crucial, I realised that I was not entirely wrong. If this is a world in which Yeine's perceptions are all the perceptions we have access to, it may be because (metaphorically and literally) she is the centre and creator of the universe.
Following on from this, I don't think I've read a novel in a long time which is so addicted to "as you know Bob". Almost the entire novel is told in first person, and as much of the novel is structured around Yeine asking questions and being given answers (most misleading) one has the odd feeling that Yeine is a permananent Companion. Only the Doctor is missing. The consequence is that not a lot happens at the same time as a very great deal happens indeed. Think of an entire novel written in the mode of a drawing room confession scene from Poirot. It really shouldn't work, and yet because Jemisin keeps us *so* very firmly in Yeine's head it does.
Which takes me back to the portal fantasy. The flaw in portal fantasies is not that the protagonists are reliant on what they are told, it is that they *choose* to be dependent on what they are told. Too often they sign up with the Good Guy withoout question. Jemisin's Yeine is more cautious: she is ignorant but she is well educated and she parlays this and others expections of her into a much less niave version of the form. In doing so she also challenges it's colonial structures (as does Jemisin the author) because this is no outsider brought into save us all, but an outsider brought in as potential sacrifice, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe told by Edmund.
A book I wish I'd had on hand when I wrote Rhetorics...