Maggie Stiefvater: The Raven Boys

            The Raven Boys begins with a prophecy that our main character, Blue, has heard about herself her whole life long: that if she kisses her true love, he will die. Her family is all psychics who are good at their jobs, so we know this prophecy will come true somehow. The next thing that happens is that her half-aunt shows up and tells her this is the year she will fall in love. And immediately following, we’re in a ruined church on a ley line on St. Mark’s Eve, the time when a psychic can see who will die in the upcoming year. Although Blue isn’t a psychic, she makes psychics more powerful, so she’s there when a “raven boy” who will die in the next year makes an appearance. And she learns his name: Gansey.

            The raven boys of the title are the wealthy and privileged students at the private school in town, all of them with a raven crest on their sweaters and blazers. Blue hates raven boys for being entitled and wealthy, something she definitely is not. In fact, she works several jobs, including waitressing at the pizza joint where four raven boys make her acquaintance in a humiliating way for all of them. One of them, of course, turns out to be Gansey, who Blue now knows will definitely die within a year.

            Wealth versus poverty is a huge theme throughout this book and this series. But the prophecy about Blue killing her true love and the prophecy about Gansey dying within a year are the crucial information that isn’t shared. As readers, we don’t even know that Gansey is the boy at the pizza place until later on. Blue is the only person who knows all of the pieces of the puzzle, though as she falls for one of the other boys, Adam, a poor local kid like herself who is working three jobs to put himself through the expensive academy, she reveals the kiss of death prophecy to Gansey.

            This book is so tightly plotted and so well put together, I think it might be the best structured thing I’ve ever read, next to Jellicoe Road. I’m interested in it here because of the ongoing research into what we know and when we know it. The more I study these books where hidden information plays a big part, the more careful I want to be with this type of thing in my own writing. Dramatic irony is powerful but sometimes it seems to be more important than the story. Withholding crucial pieces of information can feel a bit gimmicky sometimes. After all, the original greatest example is the Oedipus cycle, where everyone knows all the prophecies, but are unable to change the course of events no matter how hard they try. That’s major tragedy! An author just not telling us that Gansey is Gansey when we meet him is not operatic, but legerdemain.

            That said, the secret that Blue will kill her true love with a kiss resonates powerfully throughout the book, and the series. There’s no way around it: this will happen. And Gansey will die. We know this, but we don’t know how it will happen, or why, or what it will do to the group of characters we grow very close to throughout the stories. That gives us the operatic feeling of inevitable doom that I love. And Blue refusing to tell anyone, that’s the type of personal trait that figures into events the way Oedipus tries so hard to avoid his fate. Personal choices, essential personal characteristics, when these cause events to unfold as though fated, I’m riveted, not least because it strikes me as incredibly true to life. Tragic flaws, speaking of ancient Greek drama. Who hasn’t watched someone make the same bad choice over and over and over? Is it really a choice at that point? It’s as though we really don’t have control over our own destinies because of our psychological makeup, like we’re the mixed ingredients for a cake stuck in the oven and trying so hard to be a pie.

            The inevitability of the hand we’re dealt in life plays into the questions all of the characters deal with throughout the book, which is where wealth and poverty are so important. While Gansey’s father is running for Congress and his sister owns a helicopter, Adam is physical beaten by his father on the front steps of their trailer over money issues, because he’s trying to better himself by going to an expensive school, because he gets driven home by rich boys with fancy cars, since he doesn’t have a car of his own. Gansey repeatedly gets dismissed in his earnest attempts at friendship because he’s wealthy, so he’s taken as trying to “buy” friendship. Class and money and teenagers trying to make futures for themselves, these are terrific chewy issues to build into a magical story about destiny and fate.

            The presence of magic is not at all problematic in this work, since it’s addressed right at the beginning and confirmed as fact not just by Blue but by the raven boys. The four boys and Blue pursue Gansey’s obsession, finding the sleeping Welsh king Glendower in the mountains of Virginia. As loopy as that sounds, the quest is deadly serious and set up so plausibly that we start thinking it could actually be true. Parallels between this series and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising turned out to be anything but coincidental, I just found out. Balancing magic and modern machinery makes for a wonderful mix. There’s a Camaro that needs to be coaxed into working half the time, an excellent example of our modern sympathetic magic approach to mechanical things.

            For suspension of disbelief issues, magic is fine, but the abuse of Latin in the book raises such a funny obstacle for me. The Latin is tremendously awful, but not deliberately so, and completely threw me out of the story. I can believe that the trees are alive, that the trees are talking, even that the trees speak Latin. But I can’t believe that the Latin-speaking trees don’t know the difference between first person plural and third person plural, or that they don’t understand how deponent verbs work. Really? That’s a point where I just get angry at the author for not bothering. It’s not a word or two here and there, either. There are whole conversations in unspeakably inaccurate Latin. Even when it’s accurate, it’s only idiomatic for English and uses English syntax. So do German trees use German syntax? Everyone has their stumbling blocks and mine is dead languages, I suppose. I wouldn’t even mind if it were bastardized Latin as used in the Renaissance. It’s just flat out wrong. Dear oh dear.

            I can see why authors want to use Latin to stand in for the intrinsic language of all things, the way that there is an essential language in The Wizard of Earthsea books, where if you know the true name of a rock, you can control the rock, if you happen to be a wizard. For Western culture, of course that language is Latin, our arcane religious tongue. I can even see why Stiefvater would use it, practically, since prep school boys would likely learn Latin, so they’d conveniently be able to communicate with the Latin-speaking trees. Latin’s just a language, though, not even a very old one. Now maybe if they were using reconstructed Indo-European…no, of course not.

            This might be my issue with authorial information withholding, also. It kicks me out of the story. I’m aware of the author standing above the book with marionette strings in hand, and some of the strings are connected to me. I don’t want to see the author or know that she’s there. In fact, while I’m reading, I prefer to forget that any of us exist at all. Truly great fiction makes the whole world disappear and takes its place. The Raven Boys gets very close to that. It’s still one of the best books I’ve read, and I realize that terrible Latin won’t bother most people. But these things are so distracting and detract so much from the reading experience, I want to remember them to avoid doing these things in my own writing.

            Authorial obsessions are tricky things. I always think of John Irving and the way there is always a black Labrador, wrestling, New England, and incest. Again, it’s fine the first time you read it, but when these things keep cropping up, it’s like recognizing that one character actor and losing suspension of disbelief because you know him from that one Bones episode. I know I tend to do this myself with things like tea and knitting, and with themes like running from our own lives, searching for home, and building a family. I try not to be precious about it, though, and I’m certainly going to try harder not to be self-indulgent. Everything in the writing has to play a role and should not bounce the reader out of the fictional world.

            What if Blue told everyone everything at the beginning? What if, in the pizza parlor, she had said, “Holy crap, you’re Gansey? You’re going to die within a year. And guess what, this is the year I fall in love, and when I kiss my true love, he’s going to die. Coincidence? Do you want garlic breadsticks? Just let me know when you’re ready to order. And don’t die here. I need my tips.” One reason not to do that is that if Gansey knew everything, the story would be about him, and instead the story is about Blue, because she holds all the cards. She’s the one who has to make decisions with full knowledge of what might happen. That’s power, but it’s also a heavy weight. Blue is responsible for what happens, not just to herself but to all of them.

            I feel a Spiderman quote coming on. “With great power comes great responsibility.” I’d like to remember that both for myself as author and for my poor characters, who I like to put through as many wringers as possible. I want them to have power and responsibility, especially for what happens to them. There’s nothing worse than when a character simply reacts, like a pinball bounced here and there. I want them to have goals and then have an absolutely terrible time achieving those goals.

            My friend Jacob used to say, back when we were both utterly obsessed with Battlestar Galactica, that the show would give us “everything we wanted, in the worst way possible.” You want these two characters to get together? Okay, but it’ll destroy their lives. You want this person to know the truth, really understand the truth? Okay, but she can’t handle it and will die, and there will be terrible ramifications. And so on. It’s wonderful in fiction when we as readers or viewers want something so much we almost can’t stand it, and then we get it, but not in the way we imagined, and it’s so much better and so much worse than we thought. Maggie Stiefvater may not know Latin, but she’s an absolute pro at this exact thing. I went to a reading she gave earlier this year and jokingly tried to mug her for the manuscript of the final book in the series, but she said it wasn’t in any kind of shape for anyone to read it yet. But at least I got to tell her this was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I just hope the series ends well. Writers have such a responsibility to pay things off. I have to remember this lesson, too.