Tuesday
30 June 2009 9:27 pm
Margaret Mahy's
The Tricksters is one of my very favorite books in the entire world, so it is with great sadness that I report that
The Magician of Hoad has some wonderful bits and some very good bits and some really not at all wonderful bits that all add up to, well, not adding up in the end. It has one of those endings where a character has to explain everything that just happened to the audience, which is almost always a bad sign, and where large chunks of the plot happen because a mysterious past or future self or prophecy says they have to happen that way even though that is not a sensible way to happen, which also is almost always a bad sign, and when you put the two of these things together, it is addition rather than multiplication, which is to say that rather than the two negatives canceling each other out and creating a postive, you just get a
bigger negative number, or, in the case of books rather than equations, a bigger plotting problem.
The Magician of Hoad starts off with a young boy named Heriot who is growing up happily in a farmhouse in a long-conquered country ruled by the Secondcomers. Heriot's people all have brown skin and black hair, so I thought they were probably Maori despite having Old English names, because Margaret Mahy is from New Zealand, but maybe they are Picts. It's hard to tell. The Secondcomers also have English names but are all blonde. Heriot's family seems to be a loose matriarchy, although that may just be an effect of all the adult men having been recruited by the Secondcomer lords and killed off in a recent war. Heriot has seizures and visions and loves working in the garden and hero-worshipping his older brother Radley and arguing with his middle siblings and is quite happy in his backwoods home until the local lord, Glass, notices he has visions and decides to recruit him as the King's magician. Heriot runs away to avoid this, but is not very good at geography, since he ends up running straight to the King's city, where he bumps into the King's youngest son and becomes the King's magician after all.
( I don't think this spoils anything important but you may disagree )There are long subplots about the King's third son, who appears to be mad because Heriot has been appearing to him in visions while Heriot has seizures, in order to create a bond of friendship between the two that isn't particularly evidenced elsewhere in the book, and about the relationship between the King's third son and a noble girl who will eventually rescue him from durance vile, and about Heriot's friendship with a mad beggar child of mysterious origin, and the thing is, that while each of these subplots has its own beauties and well-done bits, there is no reason for any of them to be in the same book as another, and they don't so much combine to come to a grander conclusion as just act as delaying tactics for Heriot's realization about what it means to be a magician, and also for his divided soul -- which he visualizes as an outside occupant, like a little alien telling him to do things -- to heal over time. This means that many important decisions are made not by Heriot, but by the occupant, as if the entire book were Dr. Watson telling us about his medical practice and occasionally mentioning in asides that his friend Sherlock Holmes had solved some crime or the other and also saved the British Empire, and meanwhile, time to order some more bandages. That is, important things happen, and sometimes they even happen on screen, but they so seldom happen to our POV characters.
Miscellaneous things that are good: I quite liked the way the women in the story were active and determined and frequently saved their men, although this never managed to get them positions of power. I also liked the way sexuality is seen as part of adulthood, sex is seen as knowledge and power, and this
does carry on through the rest of the book -- I read it, deliberately or not, as a response to Phillip Pullman, where sex is Big and Important and Good and Full of Huge Symbolic Weight and in terms of the plot means the book is over and the people who have had sex will never see each other again and will go off and dedicate themselves to politics or the dissolution of the Catholic Church or something. Counteracting this, unfortunately, is that one of the major villains is a Gay Nihilist. I mean, really, that is his entire characterization, he is gay and he is unhappy that the world means nothing and he's going to make the rest of the world unhappy about it, too. Also, he is gay. Have I mentioned he is gay in this paragraph? I had better mention it again, just to make sure! Gay! And a villain! A villain! And gay! We're all clear on that, right? It's very important we're all clear on that and that there are no other gay characters in the book, except his lover who is exiled and has no lines of dialogue.
I loved the bits about Heriot's magic, and I wish we'd gotten the book that was actually about him growing up into a magician, instead of the book that's mostly about him hanging around on this plane of existence where somewhere else his occupant is growing up into a magician. The glimpses we get of this book are gorgeous and too few:
There were no words in the language of Hoad for the layers of cells or the busy, inner life of the tree, but [Heriot] could make others feel, as he felt, that each tree was not only a changing object, but a process of spirit. At that moment he could make each blade of grass live, each leaf, each root hair reveal itself as both one and many[....]
Trees so tall their tops were now lost in distance, smooth trunks brocaded with tiny luminous mosses, shed tears of gold that ran down the bark and then fell, burning harmlessly, into the perpetual twilight under their branches, while the forest retreated without visible end. The space between the tables, between the people sitting at them, grew vast beyond understanding. Each man and woman in the hall was alone with the trees. A wind composed of light and the breath of dragons beat through the company, rustling careful clothes and tangling hair, and there in the dimenss Heriot began to shine, the broad planes of cheek and forehead remaining dark, the lines from nose to mouth, the creases of his eyelids etched on the night with fine lines of fire, each hair a thread of silver lifting with reluctant grace when the wind blew. He appeared to be not so much contained by the air as embroidered on it.
This entry was originally posted at http://coffeeandink.dreamwidth.org/1019405.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Tuesday
30 June 2009 9:57 am
Because I love books about cities,
Maggie Helwig* recommended this to me, and she was right:
Have you ever smelled this city at the beginning of spring? Dead winter circling still, it smells of eagerness and embarrassment and, most of all, longing. Garbage, buried under snowbanks for months, gradually reappears like old habits--plastic bags, pop cans--the alleyways are cluttered in a mess of bottles and old shoes and thrown-away beds. People look as if they're unraveling. They're on their last nerves. They're suddenly eager for human touch. People will walk up to perfect strangers and tell them anything.
Brand centers her story on Tuyen, who makes art out of the scraps she finds on the street, and whose family still mourns Quy, the son they lost while fleeing Vietnam in the 70s. Tuyen longs for family approval, family disapproval, the love of her best friend Carla, who will sometimes make out with her and sometimes not. Carla loves and despairs of her younger brother Jamal, her charge, slipping away from her into carelessness and criminal activity. The women's other closest friends also slip between friendship and romance: Oku, living in his parents' basement, half dropped out of college because of the indifference of courses that do not acknowledge his existence, ever (poet Oku, reading literature and history and book upon book upon book of white men), in love with fashionista boutique owner Jackie, who is dating a white boy.
Brand excels at the complex multiplicitous interactions of city life, of personal history and public event, of a city made by the interactions of people of color and then flashing, in an instant, a terrible a hostile face, of a city that belongs to the people who live and work in it but also and simultaneously never belongs to them at all: the body is the battleground, the city claimed by the body (Jackie's parents, gone from Jamaica to provinces to Toronto, claiming the city in dance clubs, clubs busted up by white cops), the body not even owned (Oku's and Jamal's different but equally desperate reactions to bodies that can be claimed, judged, abused, touched, beaten by white cops at any time).
The story, though, seems strangely imbalanced, not certain whether it revolves around the connection between the four friends or around Tuyen's family drama; first-person chapters from the POV of a Vietnamese refugee named Quy, who may be Tuyen's lost brother, intrude oddly, and finally become part of the Toronto story in a melodramatic outburst, extremely violent and strangely coincidental. Such an odd place to end the book: I feel like that was only the halfway point, not the ending; or else the book needed to be reworked, rebalanced, more explicitly focused on the painful negotiations between bonds of birth and bonds of choice and all the connections and disruptions of love.
* Her
Girls Fall Down is another gorgeous Toronto novel that explores the profound connections between city and body.
This entry was originally posted at http://coffeeandink.dreamwidth.org/1019322.html. Please comment there using OpenID.