Robin McKinley: Chalice

I don't read much fantasy. I find a lot of it poorly thought out and derivative to the point of absurdity. You know, smiths who make swords, but nobody is mining anything, that sort of thing. Huge armies with no way to support them. Impractical romanticizing and fetishizing of a particular pre-industrial moment in human history, but without all of the negatives that would imply. 

Point being, this is one of the rare fantasy books I've read over and over. 

Mirasol gets the role of Chalice because some rods (???) divined that she's the one. And she definitely is. Her bees suddenly make enormous quantities of honey, her goats are producing prodigious quantities of milk, and some mead in the cellar overflows and fills the whole space and smells up her house so much that she has to sleep outside.

This is why I love Robin McKinley for fantasy. She's practical and grounded and knows how things actually work. So maybe that's what I dislike about most fantasy. It's full of farming and beekeeping and soldiering and so on written by people with zero idea what they're talking about. That's so irritating no matter what the topic is. Luckily we can all learn! We can get on YouTube and get an education even if we're the laziest writers who ever wrote.

So Mirasol becomes Chalice, one of the essential circle of roles that run the demesne. That's another thing that tends to irritate me about fantasy, as long as we're looking into that. Oddly inappropriate medieval terminology. But in this case, it's fine. It's out of place because it's a French word and would be used post-1066 and not before, but there's no sense that this is a world in which 1066 happened. But unless you're a medieval linguist, this probably won't bother you. 

(She also uses sennight for a week, which does bother me. What's wrong with week? It's a perfectly good old Germanic word. It's almost identical in German and Norwegian as in English. So if it's a prejudice against Latinate words sounding too French and post-1066, this makes no sense.)

ANYWAY.

Mirasol doesn't know how to do the job, never got trained, but figures her way through it by instinct and trial and error. She's doing great, but feels highly insecure about it. And then she makes a big mistake because she was never trained and accidentally shows support for this awful Heir brought in to supplant the actual Master.

There isn't really magic in this book so much as things working the way they do in a somewhat mystical or supernatural way that is perfectly normal and part of life. I like that very much. I get extremely annoyed at most uses of magic in fantasy, like it's a get out of jail free card. If it can do absolutely anything any time, it utterly ruins the narrative. Where's the tension? Where's the agency of the characters? Most of the time it's a disaster for narrative tension. Then you end up with artificial limitations put on it because suddenly the writer realizes there's no tension. So it can do anything except when it's convenient for it not to do anything. Annoying, again.

Mirasol's Master is the sort of lord of the country/county/state. It's not a huge area but it's not small either. He's not so much a political leader as an integral part of the land, which I like very much. And because he was sent away to become an adept of Fire, when he's suddenly brought back, he's not quite human. The first thing he does is burn Marisol's hand to the bone. But then later when he realizes, he takes some fire and squeezes it down to a drop of honey and puts it on the burn that has stubbornly refused to heal, curing it immediately. 

This I like. I like that he's absolutely devoted to fire and became part of the fire to the point where he can hardly walk and can't touch anyone without burning them. Marisol is all about bees and honey all the time, to the point where they follow her around and cover her with a warm bee blanket when she's cold. It's not control. It's becoming part of the thing. This is something I adore about this book.

There are the usual rituals that make no sense in any way, as always with anything having to do with magic. I don't ever get those. You have to say these words and drink this thing and then something happens. I don't ever like it because it's nonsensical and it's just reenacting our regular Earth experience of religion, where it also seems nonsensical to me. I understand the psychological power of ritual, but I don't see that it actually does a thing in the world. 

And so when Mirasol has to spend a whole week racing around the entire demesne sprinkling specific drops of this or that mixed with this special water to wake up or align the earthlines (???) I just roll my eyes and skip ahead. I understand the narrative point of it. She has to Do a Thing to make everything all right. But dripping special honey water on a rock does what how? Burning a certain candle does a thing how? None of it works for me. And it goes against the earlier sense of how these things work.

It works in the story, though. She manages to line up all the earthlines or whatever with the Master's help and unify the demesne and help him fight off the stupid hateful Heir, who gets blasted into a burned up cinder because somehow Marisol's power and millions of bees take all the fire out of the Master and put it into the Heir.

See. If I feel stupid saying it, there's an issue. It's a weaker ending than the book deserves. Because ultimately Marisol is a fantastic character who is in over her head and trying her hardest to do the right thing, something I always adore in any fiction. And the Master is likewise pulled away from what he was devoted to and is trying to do the right thing despite his obvious red-eyed situation and the burning touch and all. 

You have to work super hard to write magic in a way that won't set off my alarms. I wrote earlier that magic should be like another skill we have in the world. Snowboarding, or playing piano, or using computer languages, or whatever. I think we do best with a good analogy. Here we do great with the analogies she uses, up until suddenly we're in do the thing and say the special words world, ugh. 

What else do we have to show this narratively besides doing the thing and saying the special words, though? This is the pickle that Chalice always leaves me with. What else is there? Most amazing things in the world are done either by practicing over and over, boring to watch, or sitting quietly and working with a pen and paper or computer, also boring to watch. So I'm not sure what I would like to see. Yo-Yo Ma's magic comes from many years of practice and innate talent. He performs as a RESULT of that. He doesn't do the magical thing right then.

I'm about to read Naomi Novik's Uprooted, so we'll see how that measures up to Chalice. 

And if anyone knows what happened to Robin McKinley, please let me know! She disappeared off the internet in about 2018. I hope she's okay! I want to read The Blue Sword soon also. When she's good, she's incredibly good.

Susan Cooper: Silver on the Tree

I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the case of the Dark Is Rising books, you really should not do it.

What I loved was the Drew children, because Stone Over Sea is a wonderful book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't finish the fifth book, Silver on the Tree. Good lord. He magically gets all these outrageous powers with no effort, then is a rarefied Old One and crucial to the survival of the world.

First, I hate it when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He doesn't have to fight for anything. Third, his powers are awfully convenient, or inconvenient, and that's just annoying. Every E. Nesbit book is infinitely more careful about powers and rules and costs than these books.

Silver On the Tree was the worst offender, followed closely by The Dark Is Rising, for being full of convoluted and nonsensical challenges and mysterious labyrinths of guesswork. About fifty pages of Silver on the Tree, the part in the Lost Lands, could have been cut out with no discernible loss.

I went back to read these because of my own writing in YA, and I did learn a lot, but I never expected so much of it to be what not to do! I learned a tremendous amount about writing terror in children. Stone Over Sea is completely terrifying, Barney and Jane and Simon constantly in situations far beyond their understanding or capabilities. But that is nearly always human danger, danger from recognizable human sources, even when those are driven by the Dark.

When the danger is oversized and silly, it's impossible to grasp, like the absurd Tethys and the bellowing Greenwitch, who just become bizarre and almost laughable in Greenwitch, after a promising beginning with an extremely frightening figure made of branches and leaves. Whereas by far the most terrifying thing to me in the whole series was the farmer who shot Bran's beautiful dog. I'm still in shock from that.

So when I write YA with supernatural elements, I want to be sure to keep my evil and my danger located firmly in the human. The supernatural is always a metaphor, somehow, isn't it? The supernatural Dark should stand for the darkness within us, not the other way around.

Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch

This is a shorter analysis because I truly despised this awful book. Don't read this if you liked the novel. You have been warned. 

*****

If you think smoking, drinking, drugs, vomit, crime, and cruelty are cool, this is the book for you. The writing is gorgeous, if exhausting and overblown, but it's in the service of the most atrocious characters. The plot is strong but inflated to easily triple the size it needed to be, maybe quadruple. The narrative dribbles along in slow motion and is full of pointlessly baroque scenes and entire massive chapters that go nowhere. Pace your work, writers of the world.

The main character is by far the worst thing about the book, after all the vomit. Have I mentioned the endless vomit scenes? He has no spine and makes no decisions and in no way drives the story. All he does is lie around being squalid, very nearly ruins the life of the kind man who took him in when he was homeless, and follows others around doing whatever they want him to do. For the denouement, he gets shut into a hotel for weeks a country away. I'd do the same. But even then, he does nothing. He never looks at his phone, then mysteriously destroys it by plugging it in. (This is only one of many dozens of examples of impossible things shoehorned into the story purely for narrative convenience.) He never calls home to explain where he is or what's going on. He even fails to flee because his crime boss best buddy has his passport and he can't figure out how to replace it. He writes suicide notes then can't do that either. 

This terrible useless character makes two active choices the whole novel long: one, he saves a dog, very good--there's a whole book called Save the Cat that explains why this is a good thing for a writer to do for an otherwise irredeemable character. Two, he shoots a guy. Everything else, he sort of falls into it accidentally or acts like he's being pushed into it, including the actual stealing of the painting that drives the entire novel. He has a pointless adolescent crush on a manic pixie dream girl but he never speaks of it or or acts on it in any way except by giving little gifts. He steals from his friend and business partner and very nearly ruins the man's entire life. He's the most useless character I've ever seen in fiction. I even wondered whether Tartt was somehow playing off Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, because nobody ever shuts up about it, but no! The novel has no connection to it.

This is an overblown, self-indulgent, beautifully written, well plotted, vastly over-inflated paean to a worthless lump of a character and descriptions of vomit in infinite loving ways. The buffalo chicken vomited onto a white carpet springs to mind. Or the time when the main character feels like he vomited a quart of lemon juice. Nobody ever needs to hear this much about that and I can't think what would induce someone to write it. Lusting after squalor is not worthy of time or energy.

That said, the plot about the painting drove the story and made me stick with the novel to the point where I read the entire thing in one day because I had to find out what happened. I did not see a good way out for this terrible character, though of course anyone else could think up great ways to get the painting returned. Mail it to the museum, just as the first example that leaps to mind. It's just more evidence that he can't think his way out of any situation at all. It's an artificial obstacle and that is extremely annoying. How can a story that leans so hard on plot as one of its own redeeming features have so many enormous plot holes?

I read for character, generally. I despised this character. I found him lazy, weak, and worthless. I did not see anything sympathetic about him at all. What makes a character good to read about is CHOICE. Choices, consequences, choices, consequences. Who you are is what you choose to do. He neither chooses his situations nor gets himself out of them, right up until the very last few pages, when he goes around making amends for the harm he has done.

Lots of people adore this novel. I think they must be reading for the writing and not the character or the story. Or they're in love with bleakness and alcoholism and drug use and vomit as some kind of gritty realism, maybe? It bothers me because of the utter cheapness and weakness, the way these things so often seem to get checked off as though a list is issued at the beginning of a literary novel. Here's your list: put in drugs, alcoholism, death, neglect, body horror, pain, isolation, cruelty, weakness, infidelity, crime, guns, on and on. 

I have things to say about these choices in literary fiction and the damning things they say about our literary culture, but that's probably for another day. Or never, realistically. I simply can't figure out why anyone would recommend this book to me when it is everything I hate in the world and in fiction. And I can't imagine anyone who has actually suffered through these kinds of behaviors in real life wanting to read about them either. I would never spend a moment I didn't have to with someone so self-pitying and self-indulgent and self-destructive, especially if the person doesn't really exist and therefore is entirely optional in our lives. I'm feeling nauseous even writing about this book for this long.

Meg Cabot: The Boy Next Door

I have a whole row of candy-colored Meg Cabot books on my shelf, but the three "Boy" books are my favorites. The Boy Next Door, Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy's Got One. They're epistolary in the sense that they're built out of journal entries, email, messaging, voicemail, letters, notes, even documents from office work. 

The Boy Next Door tells its story through conversations between Mel Fuller, a newspaper columnist, and her friends and co-workers, as she works through finding her neighbor unconscious, the victim of an assault, and tries to take care of the neighbor's Great Dane and two cats with the help of a man she thinks is the neighbor's relative. He isn't--and they fall in love--which is the twist that drives much of the drama of the book. 

I'm interested in the epistolary format for something I'm writing myself, so I wanted to dig into these three books and see what works and what doesn't. 

Epistolary is brilliant for lies and for contrasting points of view. Lies are evident when one person tells a second person something but a third person something else. I don't know why this is so much more fun in an epistolary format, but probably it's because of the very limited access to multiple points of view in traditional narrative. In epistolary, we can just see that John is lying to Mel because we've seen his email to Max where Max asks him to lie. In traditional narrative, everything is limited to the point of view character in first person or the variously biased limited omniscient narrators. 

This makes me think of Agatha Christie more than anything, because she is so good at giving you the information but not telegraphing what you're supposed to think about it. The Tommy and Tuppence books are leaping to mind, possibly because there's a common element of youthful zaniness. We meet multiple characters in the first Tommy and Tuppence book whom they and therefore we misread, or trust in error, or don't quite grasp for various reasons. 

Trust seems to be an important element here. Trusting the wrong person. The main character not trusting his or her instincts. This is a fascinating thing for me in any narrative, truly. Why do we trust someone? Why don't we? 

Our main character, Mel, is right to trust the person she does and right to mistrust the person she does. That seems crucial in this type of story, where our heroine can be tricked but can't be an idiot. We don't lose affection for Tommy and Tuppence because they're far outclassed by these various international spies and so on. But it would be completely wrong if Mel liked the villain and didn't like the hero. We have to know we can accept her point of view as truthful because we're right there in her email with her. That surprises me, in retrospect. I wonder whether epistolary can succeed when the main character is full of lies? 

The other comparable novel I adore is Rainbow Rowell's Attachments, but half of it isn't epistolary. And it involves one person reading messages between two others, but not communicating with them. It's not really epistolary, strictly speaking. 

The conceit of the epistolary format combined with these particular twists seems to be: it's a lot easier to for someone to lie to someone else (and not have us judge the one getting lied to) when the whole thing is via written communication. 

In other words, it's easier for us to accept dramatic irony via written communication. We all think we can spot a liar when they lie to our faces, even though that's evidently not true, so we judge those who get lied to and tricked more when they are told lies to their faces, too. 

We know that John is not Max. Mel does not, partly because he's being such a good guy and taking good care of the animals, and even her when she gets sick. However, John is lying to her. He does beat himself up a lot about it, especially in email to his sister-in-law, which she crucially forwards to Mel to prove to her how good a person John is. Evidence! Written evidence matters.

Also we as readers know from evidence that John is a good guy, so we don't mind so much that he's lying to Mel about his identity. This is crucial to this format, I suspect.

There are some extremely funny strings of emails in which Mel divulges a little bit of personal information and it gets passed around and discussed by her whole office. There are excellent emails from John's young nieces, Mel's mother, Mel's best friend's husband, and so on. 

The emails from Aaron Spender were delightful because he's a pompous jackass all full of his own wounded self-importance. He uses language in a way that shows how overly dramatic he is about himself. 

Cabot does this extremely well, maybe even better, in Boy Meets Girl with the character of Stuart Hertzog, who goes into an amazing false elevated style to try to sound high-flown and serious, then turns around and makes crass, childish threats to his siblings. Amy Jenkins does the same thing, uses false elevated style with him, then makes ugly and crass racist and homophobic cracks about him and his family to other friends. I think it's the dual voices there from one person that make this so brilliant. There's even an amazing failure to respond from one of her friends that shows exactly what the friend things of her after this.

My conclusion is that people who have dual agendas and dual voices that showcase them are perfect for the epistolary genre. Liars, people with something to hide, people who talk behind other people's backs. We love to see those people get taken down by their own words and actions. The entire plot of Boy Meets Girl hinges on that. The plot of The Boy Next Door hinges on an actually harmless lie that turns out not to be harmless because of the relationship that begins because of it. 

Does epistolary narrative have to turn on lies? I keep thinking about Dracula, probably the most famous epistolary novel of all time. It's not so much a lie as more dramatic irony, as we definitely know that Dracula is a vampire, while everyone else is confused or figuring it out. Maybe the first readers were as confused as the characters, but I don't think anyone reading it now could possibly be unaware. So maybe like with all dramatic irony, the pleasure is knowing what the characters don't and watching how it all plays out.

The project I'm working on has two characters going through experiences together but hiding very different ugly histories. I'm not sure the dramatic irony holds up, since revealing the truth won't cause a disruption between them. It's more about hiding an unfortunate past. But then, children blame themselves for what happens to them and believe others will blame them as well. Getting past that self-blame is a huge step for a child who has undergone terrible things. 

I'm not sure epistolary will be the best route for this, but I'm still thinking about it. 

My MFA was adamant that first person is only interesting and worth doing when it diverges from plain reality, when there is an attitude or twist or confusion or lies or something else going on. I am coming to think that epistolary is the same way. Currently I have a whole draft of two dueling points of view and interpretations of the same events. Would epistolary add something to that? It could add a lot of levels of lying, but the lies have to be essential, like one person planning to leave on X date and not telling the other fragile person about it, so only we know.

Though I also really enjoy someone muddling through life and presenting one face to the world and another to their private journal and their communications. Saying, "I'm super great" to the people around them and "This is horrible, get me out of here" in a text. We're back to dramatic irony again, though. And again, I'm not sure that's enough to justify epistolary. It might be if I were starting this from scratch, but it's a major rewrite, so it needs to be eminently worthwhile. 

Writing The Boy Next Door without the epistolary format would render it less interesting, less compelling, less fun, because we would lose all those various points of view and inputs on everything. We would lose the amazing Vivica and her twenty-five life-sized driftwood sculptures of dolphins, as well as her painful realization about Mel's article at the end. We would lose a lot of what makes the whole story fun. Nobody writes omniscient narrators who jump around from person to person anymore, do they? So that is a big part of the point of the epistolary format. Lots of points of view and attitudes. Lots of ways to know someone is lying. Lots of fallout from those lies.

My own book definitely needs to be enriched by all of those extra points of view and complex lives the characters left behind them and all of their contacts and friends and families. I'm instantly seeing how much better it would be to SEE the terrible things their aunts say than to have them just talk about all of it. Think about how enraged you'd get upon seeing a mean text someone sent your friend, versus just hearing about it. 

And it is so important to me to see the private journal and text and messaging versions of reality versus public-facing versions of reality. I love that contrast so much. That's worthwhile. I'm going to do it.