Two More Reads

So the awesome thing at this point is that after spending a month awed that I was reading so much, and reading new things instead of just rereading comfort things, it's become sort of self-perpetuating. I read new things and challenging things and things I've been meaning to read because I say to myself "Now's your opportunity, you have reading energy, take advantage of it," and so I just keep reading.

I read NK Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms last week, long, long after I knew I should read it. I've enjoyed everything of Jemisin's I've read, but that type of epic political fantasy is often not quite my cup of tea, so it was a matter of resolving that balancing act. In the end, I was left admiring a lot of the worldbuilding Jemisin did, and appreciating the character-building of her pantheon, but I found her plotting a little off. It was transparently clever in the way I find the first novels of gifted writers often are. The movement of characters toward a sacrifice that doesn't work the way the characters expect it will was foreshadowed a little too obviously, and the sacrifice therefore didn't feel as impactful as I hoped it would, because a few too many people (and the reader) were in on it by the time we got to it. I also felt that Jemisin reinforced the idea that Itempas loved and hated Nahadoth a little too much just by telling us. So the ending, while perfectly maneuvered and intellectually prepared, didn't quite land emotionally as hard as expected. But I'm definitely going to read the sequels.


I then read Kazuo Ishiguro's new fantasy epic The Buried Giant. In general, I think it is the good kind of SF novel as written by a non-SF writer... the kind that surprises us by not being beholden to the conventions of the genre, but which does not disappoint us by falling victim to the subset of tropes of the genre that have leaked into the mainstream.

I found myself trying to analyze the book according to Moorcock's "Epic Pooh" schematic, which was kind of bad because I haven't read "Epic Pooh" in a decade and I didn't understand its aesthetic agenda back then. "Epic Pooh" is a famous critique of Tolkien that I think suggests that both at a linguistic level and at a structural level, the Lord of the Rings is children's literature disguised as something more adult than it really is. Literally, Moorcock says that Tolkien's prose resembles Milne's prose in Winnie the Pooh. I think Moorcock is particularly critical of Tolkien's approach to death. But then, I don't really remember the essay that well, and I only read it back then because it was being trotted out as a comparison point for Mieville's anthem of the New Weird. So mostly I was thinking about "Epic Pooh" and the New Weird as posturing rejections of Tolkien. I saw it as similar to the way that punk music's aesthetic isn't so much politically meaningful in what it says, as the provocation of social norms is itself a political statement. The medium is the message. I didn't see what Moorcock was saying as being very aesthetically meaningful in its own right, and I couldn't figure out how to apply it to any of Moorcock's own fiction.

All of which leaves me unequipped to say what Ishiguro is doing with Moorcock, since The Buried Giant is an epic fantasy quest novel, dragon slaying and all, with deliberate Winnie the Pooh pastiche, with the kind of arch 'dear reader' asides that balance awfully strangely against the serious adultness of the plot, which is about a pair of elderly lovers, and two rival knights, confronting the sins of their past and preparing themselves for death and separation and the pain that comes of the consequences of our actions.

Ishiguro's plotting is actually pretty masterful, another distinguishing characteristic between The Buried Giant and most 'literary' SFF crossovers. Despite a small set of characters and the kind of quest narrative typically peopled with either obviously helpful and obviously malevolent creatures to encounter, Ishiguro manages an awful lot of ambiguity of motive, making for a plot that kind of mashes up the Fellowship-style journey into the unknown with Game of Thrones-style intrigue. And this ambiguity of plot is well reasoned, so that when we discover true motives, or what we have to settle for in place of true motives, it's never a sudden plot twist for the sake of surprising the reader.

I enjoyed it quite a lot, more than I expected I would.