Sorcery and Cecelia--Patricia Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

This is a fascinating book. It's an epistolary novel, consisting of letters back and forth between two young women, but each woman is written  by a different author. Isn't that brilliant? I really want to do this. In fact, Jacob and I started one of these but he dropped out after a couple, which apparently happens all the time. I had no idea this was a thing! I absolutely want to do this now, so if there's anyone out there who has the commitment and follow-through for such a fun project, let me know!

Also, the authors did this wonderful thing. Remember how I'm always complaining about magic being poorly written? And I insist on a good metaphor? Well, they have one. There's a thing called a focus, which a magician uses to strengthen and increase and, well, focus his or her power. And the authors describe it as glasses, spectacles. I kind of want to quote this because it's brilliant.

"It seems there are a great many magicians who, in order to use their magic most effectively, must have an object through which to focus their power. This object must be kept nearby when casting spells. (I believe it works along the same lines as wearing spectacles--some people need them, others don't; every pair is different and it does no good to try to use someone else's; one can see without them, but not nearly so well; and they do one no good whatever if they are not in place when one requires them.)"

I can't believe I just quoted a parenthetical since former students will know I'm rabidly anti-parentheses, but still! What a great metaphor, huh? In this case the focus is  a chocolate pot. A pot for hot chocolate. The book is set in 1817, did I mention that?

I actually had a terrible time reading this book. The two girls seem nearly identical in the way they write and act and even by the end I was going, "Wait, Kate is the one who got sick. Is she? Which one goes riding?" The only way to distinguish them was that one can do magic, which is only helpful if she's actually doing the magic. They both go to parties and dance a lot and think a lot about clothes and boys.

I often feel like apologizing if I can't tell characters apart, assuming it's my fault, like I can't remember which college student is Taylor and which is Tyler. It's true, I'm almost incapable of sticking those names on properly. Once I had a class with two of each in it, except one of each was a boy and one was a girl. A girl Tyler, a boy Tyler, a girl Taylor, and a boy Taylor. You try it!

One was in London and the other in a small town, but since they spent nearly all their time indoors, that didn't help either, unless someone went to Vauxhall or was out riding a horse.

Really I think the characterization was just weak. They should have had different writing styles and vocabularies, spoken differently, had different writing tics like lots of short sentences, or using words wrong, or something. Because as it was, I had to wait to the end of the letter to see which it was, and then that didn't help because one was Cecy and one was Kate. Yeah, I still don't know which was which. Though the guys they liked were a lot more vivid. I think this is a big weakness in a book, y'all.

Still, I read the whole thing, and I enjoyed it despite having no idea who was writing when and not being able to tell the characters apart.

I am a huge fan of epistolary novels, especially modern ones where there's texting, voicemail, email, notes, and all sorts of varieties of written communication. Papers written in college, job application letters, thank you cards, etc. So much you can do! I did start writing one of these and really liked it, especially the possibilities for multiple points of view and ambiguity. Obviously the weakness is that everything is narrated by someone. You have no direct action. But I've seen this done beautifully, including in Sorcery and Cecelia, where someone describes something and it slides into direct storytelling, away from the narrative format. I mean, it stops reading like someone telling a story and becomes just a story. Then afterward you might think, "Hey, wait a minute," but most often it disappears.

Epistolary is something I really love and want to play a lot with. I mean, think of a chapter where someone is telling someone else about watching a movie with a third person. You get that one level of narrative, plus the movie's story, plus of course the conversation during the movie, plus you know they're both texting to others.

It's so rich in potential because it's always multi-level narrative, someone telling a story to someone else for a particular reason. And people have weird and crazy reasons to tell stories sometimes. To gross someone out! To impress! Because it upset them! Because they're excited! Because they're sad! Because they're distracting that person while someone else is setting up a surprise party in the other room! Because they want something! Because the other person was a jerk and this is a moral fable for our time!

It all goes back to Chaucer and the frame tale. I'll never recover from how amazingly well he did it. The stories his characters told, where they think they're illustrating one thing about themselves that they're proud of, but actually they're shining a much less flattering light. Those have left my mind permanently blown.

And I seem to know people lately who do the same thing, especially one person who tells stories bragging about completely hateful and awful things, really reprehensible things, but told in such a way that you can tell they are real points of pride. And tells outrageous lies where everyone in the room is listening politely and knows that they are plain flat-out lies. Sometimes the lies are so completely ludicrous that it's almost embarrassing because the person isn't self-aware or smart enough to make up something plausible.

Someone who thinks they're the smartest person in the room when they're really, really not is great in fiction. As long as you hate that person. I'm reminded of the boss lady in Meg Cabot's epistolary novel, one of the Boy series--is it The Boy Next Door? Where the boss does something bad to impress someone else, and then has to keep doing more and more drastic things to cover it up. But you maybe feel a bit sorry for her, definitely by the end, because she's ruining herself completely in the process.

If I were ever rewriting Canterbury Tales, heaven forbid, I would make it so that all those excellent characters had a whole story around them. This one wants something from that one, that one did something wrong to that one, the other owes the fourth a huge favor and is trying to get out of it, and all kinds of complex Battlestarry backstory. All of which you'd learn from what they say and don't say, and what they reveal inadvertently.

Awesome. Isn't this what people are after when they watch DVD commentaries and try to learn all about authors? This is that extra level we want. It's that mental sifting you do when you see an actor or author interviewed, where you want to separate the fiction from the real world. Only it's all inside the fiction.

Imagine an epistolary novel about someone with delusions of grandeur, or a very vivid imagination. Not so much I Am the Cheese as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Or both, really. I think every time anyone tells a story, they're living out both of those. So what I want is the story that shows you that person living those two, without being aware of it. Excellent.

I don't see why epistolary novels should be WYSIWYG when there is infinite possibility for so very much more. When nobody ever tells the plain truth anyway, even when they try really hard!

I'd rather see what Meg Cabot does so well, where someone reports an event in such a way that you can tell that that interpretation is a very loose one. Like someone who tells a friend a story about this guy who is in love with her but hiding it, so he just reads his book and is careful not to look at her. Except from how she tells it, you can tell the guy is actually just reading his book. THAT. Only lots, lots more.

Anyway I'm infinitely grateful to Sorcery and Cecelia for making me think about all of this. Hurray!