Among Others by Jo Walton
Jun. 3rd, 2011 06:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacA little late to the party, I have finally finished reading this book. I read it on B's e-reader, because that's where we had a copy. This is the first time I've read an entire book that I'd never read before on an e-reader. I found the medium to be difficult going. The tiny page size, even with the print set on small, and the awkwardness of flipping through pages, was irksome. More than with print books, I found myself turning back one, two, five pages to figure out where I was. I kept using the reliable but clumsy search function to re-find earlier things I'd remembered reading, or, just as often, to fail to find things that I didn't remember reading which seemed to be referred to by what I was currently reading.
None of those, except the last, was the author's fault. In fact, the author made e-reading easier for me by writing the book entirely in the form of the protagonist's mostly short diary entries. I'd been thinking about getting some Victorian novels for my e-reader, the kind with paragraphs that go on for a page. Now I don't think that's going to work.
Anyway. Some of the reviews have made Among Others sound like it's a collection of Mori's science fiction book reports. Fortunately, it isn't. Oh, sure, I enjoyed the book talk, and there's not a novel mentioned that I haven't either read myself or know a fair bit about, so I avoided what must be the most defeating aspect for readers who haven't that background, Mori's tendency to refer to characters or situations in novels without identifying which novel she's talking about, or even that it is a novel. (For instance, "Sam" is the name both of one of her grandfathers and of a character in one of her favorite books, The Lord of the Rings, and if you know nothing about the latter, you might not always be entirely sure she's not talking about the former.)
But the books Mori reads are not the story, though the reading she does is a large part of the story, if that distinction makes sense. She spends most of the book negotiating the twin awkwardnesses of her complex family and her new boarding school, and, as a sensitive, highly articulate teenager, who has questions about life that don't always get answered, she commands interest and sympathy. She also - very occasionally - practices magic of a vague, elusive kind, and she sees creatures, invisible to most people though some can catch a glimpse, that she calls fairies, though she doesn't know really what they are. These are gnomic in both senses of the word: they speak aphoristically, and many of them look like gnomes.
This is a kind of delicate, hard to pin down fantasy that I like very much. I think the author was aiming at something unique here, but she did not succeed at failing to remind me of other books. There's something of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, in the form of a school story that's gradually impinged upon by magic, though the manner and details are entirely different. A magic system similar to this one, in which nothing supernatural happens that couldn't be explained by coincidence, has been used effectively by Diana Wynne Jones. It's effective here too, the more so because such a system requires underplaying the lights and whistles, allowing the small to loom large. There's a scene in which Mori is, or thinks she is, under magical assault from her aunts, in a manner I at least would not have expected. Nothing actually happens beyond a couple brief intense arguments with the aunts, but I found it hair-raising.
Mori spends some of her attention on trying to figure out how the magic works, and she openly shares these conjectures with her diary. There's a naivite about this, and about much of Mori's writing, clear-sighted though she is, that reminds me of the quite different approach to a similar aesthetic in Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. I consider that Brust's finest book, though few seem to agree with me. Both that book and this one intrigued me for seeming to try to put themselves over as much more simple-minded than they actually are. Or am I fooling myself, and the subtlety I'm seeing is not really there?
None of those, except the last, was the author's fault. In fact, the author made e-reading easier for me by writing the book entirely in the form of the protagonist's mostly short diary entries. I'd been thinking about getting some Victorian novels for my e-reader, the kind with paragraphs that go on for a page. Now I don't think that's going to work.
Anyway. Some of the reviews have made Among Others sound like it's a collection of Mori's science fiction book reports. Fortunately, it isn't. Oh, sure, I enjoyed the book talk, and there's not a novel mentioned that I haven't either read myself or know a fair bit about, so I avoided what must be the most defeating aspect for readers who haven't that background, Mori's tendency to refer to characters or situations in novels without identifying which novel she's talking about, or even that it is a novel. (For instance, "Sam" is the name both of one of her grandfathers and of a character in one of her favorite books, The Lord of the Rings, and if you know nothing about the latter, you might not always be entirely sure she's not talking about the former.)
But the books Mori reads are not the story, though the reading she does is a large part of the story, if that distinction makes sense. She spends most of the book negotiating the twin awkwardnesses of her complex family and her new boarding school, and, as a sensitive, highly articulate teenager, who has questions about life that don't always get answered, she commands interest and sympathy. She also - very occasionally - practices magic of a vague, elusive kind, and she sees creatures, invisible to most people though some can catch a glimpse, that she calls fairies, though she doesn't know really what they are. These are gnomic in both senses of the word: they speak aphoristically, and many of them look like gnomes.
This is a kind of delicate, hard to pin down fantasy that I like very much. I think the author was aiming at something unique here, but she did not succeed at failing to remind me of other books. There's something of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, in the form of a school story that's gradually impinged upon by magic, though the manner and details are entirely different. A magic system similar to this one, in which nothing supernatural happens that couldn't be explained by coincidence, has been used effectively by Diana Wynne Jones. It's effective here too, the more so because such a system requires underplaying the lights and whistles, allowing the small to loom large. There's a scene in which Mori is, or thinks she is, under magical assault from her aunts, in a manner I at least would not have expected. Nothing actually happens beyond a couple brief intense arguments with the aunts, but I found it hair-raising.
Mori spends some of her attention on trying to figure out how the magic works, and she openly shares these conjectures with her diary. There's a naivite about this, and about much of Mori's writing, clear-sighted though she is, that reminds me of the quite different approach to a similar aesthetic in Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. I consider that Brust's finest book, though few seem to agree with me. Both that book and this one intrigued me for seeming to try to put themselves over as much more simple-minded than they actually are. Or am I fooling myself, and the subtlety I'm seeing is not really there?
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-03 03:57 pm (UTC)It seemed to me, though, that there were some points of resonance between the books. The sense of isolation, and of magic not always perceptible to others.
I have to run, or I'd try to have a real thought here.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-03 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-03 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-04 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-04 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-04 03:18 pm (UTC)I don't actually think that Walton is trying to "put [the book] over as more simple-minded than [it actually is]." I think she's just trying to get the narrator's voice right, and have the subtleties come through in the way that teenagers' subtleties actually come through, i.e., other than in the actually spoken.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-04 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 04:18 pm (UTC)I don't think the surface naivite is so much the author's intent as it is inherent in the way she chose to tell the story: entirely first-person from a juvenile standpoint, and told immediately, without any retrospection whatsoever. (Kind of the opposite procedure from the first-person juvenile of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is told by the adult Scout trying to recollect and reconstruct her childhood feelings and experiences.)