Beyond Selidor

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 28: Bought at my fave independent bookshop

My favourite independent bookshop, Galaxy Books, is sadly no more. It was a specialist fantasy, science fiction and horror bookshop in central Sydney, and you had to go down a flight of stairs into a basement to access it. Once inside, there were rows and rows of books, as well as DVDs of SFF TV shows and films. Whenever I was in the city, I would always make a point to spend a bit of time in Galaxy.

The owners of the shop also owned another independent bookshop, Abbey's, which was nearby, and I think at some point the rent for all these buildings got too much, so they closed Galaxy and reopened it inside Abbey's as its own floor.

As I say, I read a lot of books bought from Galaxy, but today I'll talk about Jo Walton's Tir Tanagiri Saga, a secondary world fantasy that retells the Arthurian story, but in a way that emphasises the importance of creating laws that will outlast the rule of any individual king, markets to support people's livelihoods, networks of roads and messengers to keep people connected and so on, rather than glorious battles or feats of chivalry. In the Tir Tanagiri world there is sexual equality, so women ride into battle alongside their rulers (who may themselves be women), and indeed the main character is a soldier fighting beside Urdo (the Arthur analogue) to unite the country.

I reviewed the series a while ago, and I still stand by my main point:

What makes this series special is the focus on the really terrible struggle Urdo faces to unite his country. As he points out on numerous occasions, his claim to the High Kingship is no better than any other regional lord in Tir Tanagiri. Lots of books that focus on this kind of heir-to-throne-consolidates-his-power storyline seem to give their hero an air of entitlement. And they don't make the struggle seem believable. It is not enough for the king-to-be to fight simply one battle and then be in control of a country as volatile as fifth-century Britain was. Walton shows that it was a hard slog, a careful balancing act between justice and expediency, full of compromises, unlikely alliances and sheer dumb luck. She resists the urge of so many other fantasy writers to make the struggle between Christianity and 'the old religion' simplistic and black and white. Sulien herself has no time for the priests of the White God, thinking them and their religion stupid and a religion of slaves, but Walton never seems like she's on an anti-Christian diatribe. Sulien is a pragmatic heroine. She recognises that hers will be the last generation of religious pluralism, and she moves on, seeing that uniting the country is more important than fighting a religious war.

It's an Arthurian novel that makes it about pragmatic political decisions, where the real heroes are quartermasters laying supply caches, scribes writing law books, and stablehands keeping the vast collection of army horses well looked after, and I love it to bits.

( The other days )

So, a little while ago I whined about fantasy novel clichés and promised to write a little bit about fantasy novels that either bypass these clichés or at least reinterpret them. The first series I want to hold up as an example is Jo Walton's Tir Tanagiri Saga. They're a retelling of the Arthurian legend, but in an alternative world (Britain is Tir Tanagiri, Romans are Vincans, Saxons are Jarns etc). What's this, an original take on the Arthurian story? I hear you ask, but Walton truly does something special with familiar ingredients.

The story is told from the point of view of Sulien ap Gwien, the daughter of a minor Tanagan aristocrat and one of the 'Last of the Vincans'. The story opens with her rape at the hands of Jarnish raiders, an event which comes to colour all of her life. The raiders also kill her younger brother (and her father's heir) and destroy her home. Sulien winds up as a soldier in the 'Ala' (like the elite army) of the new young king, Urdo (the Arthur figure in the stories). During the course of the two books, Sulien helps Urdo in his quest to unite Tir Tanagiri in the face of Jarnish invasion and the loss of the Vincan legions (which mirror the ending of a Roman presence in Britain and the Anglo-Saxon invasion), as well as in the face of the encroaching new religion of 'The White God' (Christianity). So far, so predictable. It could be any Arthurian retelling.

What makes this series special is the focus on the really terrible struggle Urdo faces to unite his country. As he points out on numerous occasions, his claim to the High Kingship is no better than any other regional lord in Tir Tanagiri. Lots of books that focus on this kind of heir-to-throne-consolidates-his-power storyline seem to give their hero an air of entitlement. And they don't make the struggle seem believable. It is not enough for the king-to-be to fight simply one battle and then be in control of a country as volatile as fifth-century Britain was. Walton shows that it was a hard slog, a careful balancing act between justice and expediency, full of compromises, unlikely alliances and sheer dumb luck. She resists the urge of so many other fantasy writers to make the struggle between Christianity and 'the old religion' simplistic and black and white. Sulien herself has no time for the priests of the White God, thinking them and their religion stupid and a religion of slaves, but Walton never seems like she's on an anti-Christian diatribe. Sulien is a pragmatic heroine. She recognises that hers will be the last generation of religious pluralism, and she moves on, seeing that uniting the country is more important than fighting a religious war.

Walton's characters are all also fully fleshed out, and yet symbols and ciphers at the same time. In some fantasy, especially that written by women with female protagonists, there's often a tendency to write stereotypes rather than flesh-and-blood characters. The heroes are always pure and good, and the villains are always base and are motivated by stupid motives. In the Tir Tanagiri books, everyone has a bit of villain in them (except Urdo, who is viewed through Sulien's platonicly-adoring eyes and can do no wrong). Their actions are thus comprehensible because they are all human. At the same time, they're all symbols, in the way that characters in mediæval tales are all symbols. It's a tricky combination to pull off, but Walton manages it.

Without giving too much away, I'd also finally like to commend Walton for her heroine in this book. It's a terrible cliché, and, like many clichés, there's truth in it, that 'women's fantasy' tends to focus on romance. The central theme of much mediæval or historical fantasy is an unlikely relationship between the narrator/protagonist and a male character. It's the mechanism that drives the plot, and the tidily-wrapped up ending usually involves the heroine and the hero realising that they're in love, saving the world and ending up together. Well and good. I mainly read this kind of story, so I can't be too sneery about it...

BUT I will love Walton forever for creating a heroine who is not driven by unrequited or unrecognised love. Sulien is an entirely sexless being. It doesn't really matter wether she is turned off men after being raped, or whether she is asexual to begin with, for whatever reason, the quest to find true love is removed from the story and thus as a motivation for the series' heroine. Sulien's a thoroughly original heroine, the leader of an army, a military tactician, a representative of the old order while trying to build a new world at the same time. She witnesses enormous change during her long lifetime and she records it wryly, with affection and the rueful vision of hindsight.

Walton writes beautifully, and her story is enhanced by the various poems she sprinkles through it. (I hear you scream in horror - a poetry-spouting fantasy novel - but these poems really are accomplished. As someone who's studied Old Irish, Middle Welsh, Old Norse and Old English literature, I can appreciate what she's trying to do.) She's managed to do something very difficult for a fantasy novelist: create a new world with its own, utterly believable internal logic, an Otherworld that draws you away from reality, and yet every so often throws you back with a quote that seems drawn from your own personal experiences. I'll leave you with the opening lines of the first book, The King's Peace, which is one such quote that has a special resonance for me:

'What it is to be old is to remember things that nobody else alive can remember. I always say that when people ask me about my remarkable long life. Now they can hear me when I say it. Now, when I am ninety-three and remember so many things that are to them nothing but bright legends long ago and far away. I do not tell them that I said that first when I was seventeen, and felt it too...So I have been old by my own terms since I was seventeen.' - Jo Walton, The King's Peace, Penguin, p ix.