(no subject)
Sep. 27th, 2015 08:54 amSorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
A story about sorcery and politics and colonialism in Regency-era England, starring the first non-English Sorcerer Royal of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, Zacharias Wythe. Certainly it's propulsive, particularly after Zacharias is joined by the magically powerful outcast Prunella Gentleman, whose obeisance to the stricture of English society is extremely limited.
And I liked the magical system, which is underpinned in the relationship between humanity and Earth's ecology- magic is 'atmospheric' and consumable, and flows from Faery to the mortal lands through boundaries that can be managed and manipulated from both sides. This flow is advantageous to both sides, as a blockage in the flow from Faery would cause dangerous and disruptive build-ups in atmospheric magic in Faery, and would also cut off English access to powerful magic.
But something about the social rulesystem felt off to me and it limited my enjoyment and ability to immerse myself in the story. Prunella's resolution of her social limitations seemed too easy, her refusal to follow the rules of conduct met with too little punishment, for her success to really feel narratively satisfying. I've been reflecting on why I felt this way, since![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants made similar complaint about The Goblin Emperor, which I didn't object to, and had no such objection to Sorcerer to the Crown, which I felt was too easy.
I think the distinction I make is thus:
-In The Goblin Emperor, there are complicated rules of conduct that restrict Maia and keep him from getting whatever he wants. He has social power, as the Emperor, but there are limits to that power. In response, he and his advisors carefully study the rules and figure out clever ways to work within the rules and still get much of what they want accomplished. There is a fantasy involved, and the fantasy is a fantasy of competency: If you are clever enough, you can (with some sacrifice) get everything you want while staying within the rules of the system.
-In Sorcerer to the Crown, there are complicated rules of conduct that restrict Zacharias and Prunella and keep them from getting whatever they want. They have social power, as the Sorcerer Royal and as a very attractive single woman with sponsorship from nobles, but there are limits to that power. In response, they carefully study the rules and decide that if they stop believing in them, they will stop holding power over them. There is a fantasy involved, and the fantasy is a fantasy of egalitarianism: If you are meritorious enough, you can suspend the rules of the system and force it to do what you want.
This may be my foundational conservatism at play, but I tend to like stories in the former class much more, and I tend to find them more believable, even though I recognize that both are fantasies, and that in both cases the more realistic result would most likely be far more tragic than either posits.
Which brings me to
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Which is highly tragic, and also really beautiful and moving. (The thing I've been telling people lately, since I have recently read and enjoyed Hemingway and Wharton, is, "It turns out that the classics are often really good." A friend had a post a while back on facebook about how few of the Nobel Prize for Literature winners she'd read, and one of her friends responded with this long, baffling comment about how we modern readers find the classics boring, but the trick is to remember that back in his day, Hemingway was groundbreaking and original. Baffling, I say, because I still find Hemingway's writing cracking and exciting. In any case.)
I'm particularly interested in doing any reading I can find about the medical angle of Ethan Frome: Zeena's illness, her 'troubles' and her 'complications' and her 'sick spells' are at least to some degree treated in the text as being psychosomatic, and certainly her doctors have no ability to make useful sense of them, but this kind of illness is common in pre-20th century literature and uncommon in 21st century literature and I wonder what kind of diagnoses modern medical technique would apply to her case.
But yeah, I loved how the tragedy was baked into the darkness and sorrow of a New England winter, how the unnamed narrator, an engineer from the power company, represented the changing culture of New England and the end of the kind of subsistence farming that doomed Ethan and Mattie and Zeena to such desperate, miserable lives, so that Wharton's book almost seems nostalgic for that kind of beautiful misery, a private, lonely, 'manly' misery that modernity threatens to sweep away. The narrator finds Ethan the most compelling figure in Starkfield, and in return Ethan finds the narrator a sort of link to the world of engineering and science that he'd given up to take care of his parents, and opens up to the narrator to share his tale of woe because he has been so ill-treated by his own dreams of engineering... The train station bypassing his road has destroyed his farm's value for sale. New technologies are making shopkeepers rich and enriching bigger farmers, but they remain inaccessible to him. He dreams of a future of machines, and is meanwhile a victim of creative destruction.
(another aside: somehow in my head I'd partially mixed up my osmosis of Ethan Frome and Silas Marner, so I kept wondering when we'd learn about Ethan's hidden gold. I'm planning to read Silas Marner soon so I will no longer have this confusion.)
A story about sorcery and politics and colonialism in Regency-era England, starring the first non-English Sorcerer Royal of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, Zacharias Wythe. Certainly it's propulsive, particularly after Zacharias is joined by the magically powerful outcast Prunella Gentleman, whose obeisance to the stricture of English society is extremely limited.
And I liked the magical system, which is underpinned in the relationship between humanity and Earth's ecology- magic is 'atmospheric' and consumable, and flows from Faery to the mortal lands through boundaries that can be managed and manipulated from both sides. This flow is advantageous to both sides, as a blockage in the flow from Faery would cause dangerous and disruptive build-ups in atmospheric magic in Faery, and would also cut off English access to powerful magic.
But something about the social rulesystem felt off to me and it limited my enjoyment and ability to immerse myself in the story. Prunella's resolution of her social limitations seemed too easy, her refusal to follow the rules of conduct met with too little punishment, for her success to really feel narratively satisfying. I've been reflecting on why I felt this way, since
skygiants made similar complaint about The Goblin Emperor, which I didn't object to, and had no such objection to Sorcerer to the Crown, which I felt was too easy.I think the distinction I make is thus:
-In The Goblin Emperor, there are complicated rules of conduct that restrict Maia and keep him from getting whatever he wants. He has social power, as the Emperor, but there are limits to that power. In response, he and his advisors carefully study the rules and figure out clever ways to work within the rules and still get much of what they want accomplished. There is a fantasy involved, and the fantasy is a fantasy of competency: If you are clever enough, you can (with some sacrifice) get everything you want while staying within the rules of the system.
-In Sorcerer to the Crown, there are complicated rules of conduct that restrict Zacharias and Prunella and keep them from getting whatever they want. They have social power, as the Sorcerer Royal and as a very attractive single woman with sponsorship from nobles, but there are limits to that power. In response, they carefully study the rules and decide that if they stop believing in them, they will stop holding power over them. There is a fantasy involved, and the fantasy is a fantasy of egalitarianism: If you are meritorious enough, you can suspend the rules of the system and force it to do what you want.
This may be my foundational conservatism at play, but I tend to like stories in the former class much more, and I tend to find them more believable, even though I recognize that both are fantasies, and that in both cases the more realistic result would most likely be far more tragic than either posits.
Which brings me to
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Which is highly tragic, and also really beautiful and moving. (The thing I've been telling people lately, since I have recently read and enjoyed Hemingway and Wharton, is, "It turns out that the classics are often really good." A friend had a post a while back on facebook about how few of the Nobel Prize for Literature winners she'd read, and one of her friends responded with this long, baffling comment about how we modern readers find the classics boring, but the trick is to remember that back in his day, Hemingway was groundbreaking and original. Baffling, I say, because I still find Hemingway's writing cracking and exciting. In any case.)
I'm particularly interested in doing any reading I can find about the medical angle of Ethan Frome: Zeena's illness, her 'troubles' and her 'complications' and her 'sick spells' are at least to some degree treated in the text as being psychosomatic, and certainly her doctors have no ability to make useful sense of them, but this kind of illness is common in pre-20th century literature and uncommon in 21st century literature and I wonder what kind of diagnoses modern medical technique would apply to her case.
But yeah, I loved how the tragedy was baked into the darkness and sorrow of a New England winter, how the unnamed narrator, an engineer from the power company, represented the changing culture of New England and the end of the kind of subsistence farming that doomed Ethan and Mattie and Zeena to such desperate, miserable lives, so that Wharton's book almost seems nostalgic for that kind of beautiful misery, a private, lonely, 'manly' misery that modernity threatens to sweep away. The narrator finds Ethan the most compelling figure in Starkfield, and in return Ethan finds the narrator a sort of link to the world of engineering and science that he'd given up to take care of his parents, and opens up to the narrator to share his tale of woe because he has been so ill-treated by his own dreams of engineering... The train station bypassing his road has destroyed his farm's value for sale. New technologies are making shopkeepers rich and enriching bigger farmers, but they remain inaccessible to him. He dreams of a future of machines, and is meanwhile a victim of creative destruction.
(another aside: somehow in my head I'd partially mixed up my osmosis of Ethan Frome and Silas Marner, so I kept wondering when we'd learn about Ethan's hidden gold. I'm planning to read Silas Marner soon so I will no longer have this confusion.)