A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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Fudoki, Kij Johnson (2003), 314 pp (hb).
When I first heard that Kij Johnson would be writing a sequel, or at least a follow-up of some sort, to her marvellous first novel The Fox Women, I was genuinely curious not only about what she would write about, but also about whether her sophomore effort could possibly approach the quality of her debut. I'm truly delighted, therefore, to say that Fudoki certainly equals The Fox Woman in quality; in some ways, it may well exceed it.
If The Fox Woman was Johnson's meditation on romantic love in a Heian Japan setting, then Fudoki is her meditation on battle and adventure. But really, those are blatant over-generalizations, inaccurate to the point of uselessness. Fudoki is a tale within a tale: a minor character from The Fox Woman , the imperial princess who brushed up against Shikujo's life in that story now takes center stage (and, in a nice inversion, Shikujo in turn becomes a minor character here, making a cameo--obviously her tale as related in the earlier novel is overlapping the periphery of this tale--about two-thirds through the story) as the protagonist. Our narrator, then, is Harueme, half-sister of the recently-deceased emperor, aunt of the current emperor; elderly and subject to an unnamed illness that she senses will soon take her life, she is slowly dispensing with the many accumulated possessions gathered through a lifetime as an imperial princess, simplifying her affairs prior to departing to spend her last months in a nunnery. As she does so, she begins writing a story down on blank notebooks, a monogatari tale about a young kitten whose clan, her fudoki, with all it entails (history, meaning, sense of place and position) is destroyed in the fire that follows an earthquake that strikes the capital.
This young kitten, Kagaya-hime, sets out on the road because she has nowhere to settle down. Because this is a magic tale, and these sorts of things happen in magic tales, one day she wakes to discover that she has transformed into a young woman--although because she's still a cat inside, she retains some rather odd abilities. She continues along the road, eventually falling in with a travelling noblewoman and becoming embroiled in her concerns--chief among which is war and revenge against a rival clan. Amid our kitten's peripatetic wanderings is woven our narrator's commentary, reflections, reminiscences, and observations. Like this vingette from when she was young, and more than a bit of a hoyden:
"Then what's the point of being a mouse? They're not going to learn anything, so they'll just have to come back as a mouse again next time. What's the good of that?"
The gardener laughed a little. "Maybe that is the point of being a mouse, little one--being eaten. Maybe the lesson they learn is grace in the face of unavoidable tragedy."
This made sense to me: monogatari tales are full of women (and sometimes men) dying gracefully. But--"What's graceful about mice? They don't write little poems before they die, or throw themselves into Uji river because their lover forgets to visit"-- for my nurse had been reading to me from Genji's tale.
He laughed louder. "You think most people face tragedy with poems? No--we are a lot like mice. Some of us squirm under the cat's paw. Some fight, some freeze. I suppose a few have dignity." [...]
The gardener leaned closer to me, or perhaps to the mouse. "Little one, the truest grace comes after the squirming and the fighting and the panic. To accept tragedy without despair. Can you do that?"
I did not know the answer then. But I thought about it when my father died; and when my golden-eyed lover returned to the east, betraying us all; and when Shirakawa died; and now, as I feel my lungs fight this losing war to breathe. At last, perhaps I find and answer.
To show grace in tragedy? All those irritatingly stupid women in monogatari tales exhibit this, with their elegant little death poems, their lovely corpses floating on willow-clogged waters. And they are stupid. What man, what lost love or deceased kinsman is worth death? The space in my life that my half-brother once filled is an aching icy pain, like the hole left after a tooth is pulled, and I am dying in weeks or months--and yet I still fight for life, as every mouse does, until the final beak-blow. The grace in tragedy is not to succumb, but to fight on.
Indeed, it soon becomes clear, if it was not already at the outset, that this is as much or more a tale of the narrator as it is about the characters of the tale-within-a-tale. Although that tale-within-a-tale is interesting and engaging, as well. Our narrator has a rich voice, full of experience and the wisdom of a long life apparently lived in full. It's lovely to just follow along with her voice, waiting for little anecdotes or nuggets like this one to pop out:
I knew war must be like any child's game. You could play without interference if the adults were busy elsewhere and you were not too noisy about it. But if for some reason the adults noticed you, they would stop you. In war, this meant the government sent troops and generals into the hinterlands, and expected a certain number of severed heads sent back to show progress. (At the age of six, severed heads fascinated me.)
Even as an adult, I have not been able to discern why this conflict is considered worthy of the council's attention and the empire's resources, and that one is treated like the bickering of children in another room: only worth sending someone to see what is the matter if the tears and shouts become serious. The few people I discussed such things with [...] could not always explain the differences. "It is because you're a woman," they said in their various ways: "too complicated, really." Water-clocks were also complicated, and yet I had little trouble understanding them, so I knew this was a convenient lie to cover the fact that none of them--not even the emperor--really understood the differences.
Fudoki never flags; it starts strong and stays strong through the end, when it concludes with a moving meditation on the blurred line between writer and character. There's supposed to be a third book to round out Johnson's "Heian Trilogy" coming sometime in the future, and there's no longer much question whether it will be good, only whether it will stand on the same plateau with its two siblings. This is good stuff.
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The King's Name, Jo Walton (2001), 304 pp (hb).
This is Walton's second novel, the continuation and completion of the story begun in The King's Peace. As a preliminary matter, while, unlike Chad, I don't as a general rule hate faux-academic framing devices in my stories, I have to say that in this specific case he's quite right; it's really pretty off-putting in this book, for some reason. That's a minor matter, though, soon dispensed with at the beginning, or even skipped if you don't like that sort of thing.
At any rate, although I came to this some time after reading its predecessor, and as a result had well and truly forgotten most of the important characters and all but the general outlines of the plot, it took very little time to be caught back up to speed; indeed, the plot moves at a rapid enough pace, and there's enough "in-cluing" woven in, that I rather imagine one could read this with enjoyment without having even read the preceding volume.
This is the story of Sulien, right hand man--saving she's a woman--to Urdo, high king of the island of Tir Tanagiri. The earlier tale told of Sulien's rise to prominence in the king's warband and the establishment of Urdo's rule over the other kings on the island. At its close, Sulien was called home by family responsibilities; five years have passed when this tale takes up the thread. Various plotters, impelled in large part by Urdo's scheming, twisted son, have fomented rebellion and threaten the hard-won king's peace and the budding civilization and rule of law that go with it. Sulien and Urdo and their comrades must take up arms to defend what they've tried to build.
This is told in a first-person, largely retrospective narrative voice, and others have observed that Sulien-as-narrator has quite a distinctive voice. Something about the narrative voice bothered me from the beginning, and although I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was in the first book, I think I have at least a tenuous hold on it now. It's that Sulien's voice is so resolutely matter-of-fact. She relates everything in a practical, no-nonsense "we did this, we did that" tone, even when the subject is weighty and/or mythical. I'm not sure why this bothers me, but it does. It's a good book, and it has important things to say about fealty and the fight for civilization, so it's a bit of a shame to feel distanced from it like that, but there it is.
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Flashman and the Tiger, George MacDonald Fraser (1999), 342 pp (hb).
Now we in truth come to the end (Wait! Late-breaking update! Apparently, there will be a new novel out next spring Yay!). Flashman and the Tiger is not a novel, per se, but a collection of three tales, the first of which is novella or short novel length, and the other two more like short stories. The first and longest has Harry caught up in an assassination plot against the Emperor Franz-Josef of the Holy Roman Empire. The second has Harry and his wife Elspeth (who turns out to be the heretofore unknown key to a heretofore unexplained mystery) involved in what was apparently a notorious card-cheating scandal way back when. And the third has a split personality; in the first part, we see Harry making an appearance at both Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift (they happened only a day apart, and hey, if you're going to have a larger-than-life character, why not have him show up at both?), before bumping into another character that was also there back in London years later. This one is notable (to me, at least) chiefly because Fraser has old Harry (and he is getting on in years by this point) bump in to another famous fictional pair, Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson. He does a great send-up of Holmes's ludicrous deductive reasoning (i.e. Holmes sees some obscure physical detail and immediately reasons to precise conclusions. In Doyle's hands, Holmes is always astonishingly right; In Fraser's, he's laughably wrong), something I often found myself muttering about when I read Sherlock Holmes stories.
Anyway, these are fluff, but still fun.
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Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, George MacDonald Fraser (1994), 361 pp (hb).
Alas, we come to the end of the Flashman novels, although there is one compendium of misdeeds yet to come. It's a fitting enough adventure for old Harry, as he's thrust into the maelstrom immediately preceding the American Civil War. Both sides--the Federal government and the Secessionists--seek to use Flashy by inserting him into John Brown's band several months prior to his famed, doomed raid on Harper's Ferry.
The real interest in this volume is in its look at John Brown, an historical figure for whom the word "controversial" seems a serious understatement. He took the notion of "any means necessary in furtherance of a just cause" and used it as the tinder to spark the Civil War. Or at least so it is often said...I'm not a Civil War buff, by any means, but I suspect that the political and social environment in the autumn of 1859 was sufficiently volatile and poisonous that another spark would have come along shortly.
It's always an open question, as I think I've commented before, just how accurate the reflection of history is when seen through the prism of fiction. That said, it's interesting to observe John Brown, purported pillar of rectitude, through the lens of Harry Flashman, amoral reprobate. Somewhat surprisingly, Harry has a fair amount of sympathy for old John, although not on account of his principles (Harry doesn't give a fig for abolitionist sentiment one way or another). At any rate, a decent tale, although for me, it was, as I indicated, more interesting for its look at the period and the person than for anything Harry was getting up to.
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