I recently reread Naomi Novik's Uprooted for maybe the tenth time. I was struck again by something brilliant she does that I've rarely seen elsewhere, though I think it happens in an Alan Dean Foster novel called Glory Road. I need to reread that one. And there's something related in A Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which I also need to reread. It happens in one of my favorite movies (despite the disempowered heroine), Jupiter Ascending.
I'll come back and write more about this when I've reread those.
What Novik does is start out with a character with an extremely limited view of the world she inhabits, then move that character into a larger and more complicated world, over and over and over, almost every single chapter.
Agnieszka starts out as a village girl who gets yanked unwillingly into the Dragon's tower to serve him as a cook and cleaner, though also she has the power of magic, though she doesn't know that. Just going to this new place enlarges her world in ways she could not have foreseen or understood ahead of time.
That keeps happening. I can't stress enough how little she grasps about the world she's in. She knows the Wood is scary and dangerous, yes, but she doesn't understand that there's a malevolent intelligence behind it. She knows the Dragon takes a girl from their valley every ten years, but doesn't understand that there's something special about their valley and the girls' connection to it fades after that time, so he pays them well and lets them go and replaces them with a new, untrained, and extremely annoying clueless girl.
Agnieszka takes steps for humanitarian reasons that end up drawing the attention of larger political forces within the kingdom. Again, she has not the slightest clue that such things exist. She is vulnerable to being manipulated by everyone she meets because she doesn't (and can't) know about the power struggles or the rivalries or any of it.
And every time she gets her feet on the ground and starts to feel a little secure about things, the world expands again and suddenly it's all strange and scary and unfamiliar again.
It's like Novik has bottled that baffling and alarming expanding world feeling of adolescence and applies it over and over.
One possibly less enjoyable effect is that Agnieszka is always a clueless rube no matter how much she learns. I found it implausible that she would not recognize that Lady whoever it was in the big city, who pretended to be her friend, was actually being really mean and making fun of her. That's not a country/city thing. That's a human nature thing. But most authors are impossibly bad at writing inexperience (or being from the sticks) and nearly always conflate it with stupidity this way.
The brilliant thing here is that since Agnieszka doesn't know the ins and outs of any of these new worlds she enters, she can do things that she doesn't know are impossible. She has all sorts of insights and abilities that the much more experienced people are unable to access. That's a wonderful side of this constantly expanding world phenomenon.
In my experience, people navigate new worlds by using the rules they already know. Agnieszka does this somewhat, but more often she just follows her instincts and figures things out, or does things because she simply doesn't know that she can't, which gives her an amazing ability to achieve the impossible.
I really liked the way she had no idea that there was an intelligence behind the Wood. She treated it like a natural phenomenon and was brought up short by learning there was a mind behind it, that this mind would do things like let someone be freed because then it could use them as a channel or puppet in areas it could not otherwise reach. That's terrifying. Imagine discovering that a natural force you're dealing with, the wind or the ocean, is actually operating with intelligence.
There's a whole underlying metaphor throughout the novel that troubles me because of this constant reiteration of innocence. That's "corruption." I wished constantly that the novel had used a different metaphor or image for this. And ultimately it's just something like bitterness or hatred that lies behind the corruption anyway. I get it, but corruption carries such deliberately venial associations. It's politicians cheating the system out of greed. In the novel, it's more like some kind of grotesque moldy rot or something.
I was never quite comfortable with "corruption" as the metaphor because it implies a state of purity and innocence that then is marred and defiled by what, experience? Evil? So is Agnieszka corrupted as she learns more and more about the world , as she does every chapter? Is she corrupted when she and the Dragon get into a sexual relationship? The weirdly judgmental or even Biblical view of corruption as the opposite of innocence means that the city people should be the most corrupted, but they're not. It carries echoes of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. No coming back from that. It's a deeply flawed metaphor. That's specifically why I don't like it.
However, I don't really have a better idea. Supposing hate causes this vile thick green evil to grow in you, what would we call that? But it has to come from the source, from contact with an infected source. It's definitely MUCH more like an infection than anything else. We're more in the realm of The Thing or some other more moralistic zombie type horror story, where you only get infected when you make mistakes, so you deserve it. But since there's a moral element to this "corruption" as well as a contagious element, it feels like it teeters on the edge of saying innocence is good and knowledge is evil, even though obviously it never quite goes there. Corruption is such a fraught word to choose.
Anyway, I deeply admire the thing Novik does where the world expands and expands and expands again, becomes more complex and nuanced and vast with each passing chapter. It's absolutely brilliant.
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