The Process of Bewitchment

Jo Walton describes the process by which one person can bewitch another, gradually, over time. 

“They buy his clothes. They buy his shoes. They buy him glasses and whisky. They own the house and the furniture. He wants to drink the whisky, and the chair wants that and the glass, and of course nothing could be easier than making him drink so much he can’t get up to drive me to the station…Probably over the years they’ve done more and more little things, not meant to hurt him, but never letting him go, binding him up in spider-strands of magic so that he stays, does what they want, he has no will. It would take something very strong to get through that.”

-- Mori, describing how her aunts have bewitched her father (p. 182, Among Others)

Book Review: Among Others

Among Others

Jo Walton

2010

Awards: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Among Others is the poignant but never too mushy story of Mori, a fifteen-year-old Welsh girl coming to grips with the recent death of her identical twin sister, the malicious madness of her mother, her reintroduction to her alcoholic, absentee father, and her new, obnoxious private girls’ school.

The book is written in the form of Mori’s diary, and it is well done; the daily entries give very little explanatory background, as would be true if she really had written them for herself alone. Anything you learn about her history, like how her sister died, or how she became permanently disabled so she walks with a cane and constant pain, or how her mother really is an evil, malign witch bent on controlling her, you find out almost incidentally as she records events in her present life. It makes her past all the more intriguing and ominous.

Two interests pervade Mori’s world and help to ground her as she navigates the shoals of her life. One is magic and the other is books.

                                                               

Like her mother, Mori has the ability to perceive and influence magic in the world around her. Magic is everywhere for her. Sometimes it is evil and she must avoid it or defend herself from it, and sometimes it is helpful and soothing, but it is always more or less there.

Mori explains that magic doesn’t really work the way it is supposed to in books. Real magic is subtle, slow-moving and sometimes anticlimactic. It doesn’t work instantly; it works by shifting things around so that what you want to have happen does happen, eventually, but you’re never really sure whether it was the magic that did it or if it would have happened anyway. For example, there was a Phurnacite factory near the home where she grew up. She and her sister performed a ritual to make it go away, and it did, but it took the form not of the factory immediately disappearing in a puff of smoke, but of the factory the next day announcing it was running out of money and was laying off its employees. She never really knew if her actions had made it go bankrupt and leave.

                                                                                                  

Mori can also sense when objects contain magic. Objects are imbued with magic by how a person uses them—with evil or with fondness. Mori’s Grampar’s chair is only truly comfortable and settled when Grampar is sitting in it. Mori’s aunt has a knife that she cut her hand on once, and the knife has had a hankering for blood ever since.

And, perhaps most importantly, Mori is able to see faeries. She can communicate with them, after a fashion, and they often ask her to do practical things for them that they, in their insubstantial form, cannot do. The faeries, too, aren’t what they are supposed to be in books. They don’t always look like people; sometimes they look like dogs or gnarled stumps or combinations of creatures. They speak vaguely and unclearly in unspecific terms without many nouns, and they are very skittish.

Mori is comfortable with her more passive powers, like sensing the magic in objects or communicating with faeries. But she has a moral dilemma about doing active magic. Over the course of the book, she starts to feel that it is morally wrong because it is all about manipulating other people to get what you want. It turns everyone into puppets. Are her friends really her friends because they truly like her, or because she magicked them to like her? What if everything she does and thinks is because of someone doing magic on her in the future? It’s an original perspective that fits perfectly with Mori’s heightened self-awareness.

The other pervasive element in Mori’s life is books—particularly science fiction. She reads a LOT. It is the main thing she shares with her father, and it is the way she eventually makes friends (through an after-school SF book club that she may or may not have magicked into being).

On the one hand, it is fun that she is so voracious and so steeped in the genre. But on the other hand, the constant references to specific books, particularly the now more obscure ones by authors of the ‘60s and ‘70s, started almost immediately to seem like ostentatious and exclusive. Mori would often use them to illustrate something going on in her real life, with little helpful context. I could see it getting pretty annoying if you hadn’t read all the same books she had. She would say, for example, “I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognised that they were from The Chrysalids,” with little explanation of either book or what that comparison means. It’s like a Victorian novel where the author sprinkles Latin and German sayings in the text without translating them.

I felt like Mori was also a little too breathily in love with SF books of any stripe. She loves practically everything she reads, with hardly anything critical to say about any of them (with the occasional exception of Philip K. Dick and some questions about character motivation). Just because a book is science fiction, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically “brill.”

Also, if I could descend a little bit myself into the name-dropping foible, I don’t understand Mori’s gushing admiration for certain authors in particular. I mean, yes, I completely agree that Lord of the Rings is head and shoulders above almost everything else. And I agree with how obnoxious it is when other books compare themselves to Tolkien on their jackets. And I’m in complete agreement with her assessment of Zelazny as a brilliant stylist and idea man. But Delany and Heinlein are two of her absolute favorites. A couple people do call Mori on her passion for Heinlein and how contradictory it is with her passion for Zelazny and LeGuin. She defends herself by saying that Heinlein is not about fascism or authoritarianism, but about loyalty, and duty, and revolution against authority, and taking care of yourself. Which is true in some cases, but certainly not all, and I don’t know how she, of all people, could overlook his misogyny.

Sci-fi knowledge showing-off aside, though, I really enjoyed this book. Walton’s writing is clean and smart and accessible. She uses some parenthetical asides and side stories unrelated to the main plot, but they add color and are not distracting or annoying the way they were in Mr. Norrell.

And Mori is a very appealing main character. Her relationship with her boyfriend does get a little lovey-dovey, but in general she is very independent-minded and realistic (even about the faeries). She deals impressively well with her distant father and her terrifying, controlling witch mother even though she gets very little support from either peers or adults. The lesson she learns, in the end, is that none of us is perfect and handles everything right all the time, but you only grow by facing your fears and dealing with them head on as well as you can.

Book Review: Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein
1959
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I was surprised that I liked this book as much as I did, given all the controversy about it.

It is set in the future, at a time when Earth is at war with an alien race, the hive-minded Bugs. The overly-idealistic citizen governments of Earth collapsed sometime back in the late twentieth century and the world is now governed by a (some would say fascist) military Federation. Becoming a soldier is very difficult, and only a small number of people even try, much less make it – but it alone earns you the right to vote.

You ride along with one of the tiny pawns in the Bug war, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, as he changes from a green recruit into a hard, professional soldier. Johnnie is in the Mobile Infantry, the grunts, the front line of combat against the Bugs. He is part of an epic war that will determine the fate of the human race, but he has no time to worry about higher levels of politics and strategy – his life revolves completely around getting enough sack time, not getting in trouble with the lieutenant, and keeping himself and the other members of his platoon alive.

Johnnie isn’t someone I would necessarily want to be, or even be friends with, but he is colorful and an appropriate guide to his time. Heinlein also creates a creative and consistent, if scary and hostile, world around his main character – both on the large scale (the Bugs, the state of Earth and its colonies, military and government structure) and on the small scale (boot camp, combat drops, everyday details of military life both in and out of battle).

For example - the mantra of the soldiers is to always be “on the bounce!” This comes from the heavily armored suits they wear in combat on other planets, which allow them to jump long distances and perform several tasks while in midair.

Yes, this book does glorify the military. And Heinlein does inject his tiresome personal-responsibility philosophy into the story, chiefly through Johnnie’s high school History and Moral Philosophy teacher Mr. Dubois. But the libertarian preaching wasn't as intertwined with the plot as in some of his other books, so I could skim those sections without losing much of the story. Plus, Johnnie doesn’t have an opportunity to have a lot of interaction with women, so Heinlein’s misogynistic tendencies stay mostly under cover (or, when they come out, at least they fit his rough-and-ready warrior characters).

The book was much better than Paul Verhoeven's movie, which was more war-action-oriented and didn’t go into much of the detail of the preparation and hardening of the soldiers, which was what about three-quarters of the book was about. The movie also invented characters that didn’t exist in the book and drastically altered the roles of others, to its detriment.

I think it is important to stress that I appreciated this book as a character study. I do not recommend it as a guide to attitudes about the military and government. Two excellent books already reviewed here and on Cheeze Blog were written at least partly in reaction to Troopers, and both would help in maintaining some perspective on war after reading it:

* Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
* The Forever War by Joe Haldeman 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: No Enemy but Time

Michael Bishop
1982
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I do so love a good time-travel story.

In this one, a top-secret 1980s U.S. Air Force experiment sends the main character, Joshua Kampa, back to Paleolithic East Africa – the time and place of his lifelong recurring dreams.

The book is told in two alternating streams. One stream is Joshua’s back story, which fills you in on his birth in Spain, abandonment by his birth mother, adoption by USAF personnel, and education in the United States, right up to the point where he gets chosen for his time-traveling mission. The other stream is the story of Joshua’s present, in which he is sent two million years back in time, meets up with a group of Homo habilis and lives with them for almost two years.

To get the negatives out of the way first: I did find the last part of the novel a little unsatisfying (from the time Joshua decides he wants to leave the Paleolithic on through to the end of the book). It suddenly picks up tremendous speed and then stops with a whump. I was expecting either more resolution of outstanding issues or fewer new outstanding issues raised so close to the end. But this end section is a very small portion of the book.

The ending also has a little bit of deus ex machina to it. But, to Bishop’s credit, he comes right out and admits as much to the reader.

I also had a little bit of a problem buying Bishop’s mechanism for time travel. The idea is that a tiny number of people in the world have the gift (or curse) of extremely visceral recurring dreams about a single particular place and time, like pre-Columbian South Dakota or Dachau in the 1940s. Often they have had this dream “attunement” since childhood. A scientist in the Air Force has developed a machine that will tap into the unconscious of these dreamers and allow them to physically appear in the place and time of their vision. I realize that time travelling is thin in and of itself, but having the vehicle be driven by the chrononaut's dreaming ability seemed a bit thinner than thin.

If you can get over these drawbacks, which really are minor, you’re in for a very good read. The way Bishop writes it, life in the African savannah two million years ago was scary and brutal but also beautiful. The details of early hominid group behavior were completely believable to me. I liked how Joshua changed as he learned more about the individual "habilines" in his group, was accepted by them, and grew to love them. As with the characters in The Doomsday Book, I grew to have a lot of respect for Joshua’s Paleolithic friends and the way they dealt with the world without 21st-century knowledge and technology. By the end I felt like his present-day family and co-workers were less sympathetic, less sensitive, and less interesting than the prehistoric ones (which I think Joshua would have agreed with).

And the aforementioned dreamer-as-pilot setup did provide an excellent way around the Grandfather Paradox – the chance that you could change something in the past that would royally screw up the present. Because the Earth moves around the sun, and our solar system moves within its galaxy, and our galaxy moves within the universe, the location of Earth as it was in the past is somewhere far, far away in space. With Bishop’s mode of time-travel, the chrononaut is sent back to the time and geographical location of his attunement, but not back to its spatial location. So Joshua is sent back in time to the paleolithic but remains in the same spatial location as his present Earth – making it technically a different past, a “simulacrum” of the actual Paleolithic. That way, there is no danger of him going back in time and stepping on a butterfly or killing his own grandfather or any of the other innumerable paradoxes one could imagine.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

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Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Susanna Clark

2004

Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

In the ever-expanding pantheon of novels about English magicians, this book stands somewhere just below the tolerable middle.

Its characters, settings, and central plot are good. But it is dragged down by self-conscious, tiresome drollery and by uninteresting, irrelevant footnotes and side stories. If a strong editorial hand had just removed even half of the non-contributing chatter from its nearly 800 pages, what a tighter, more fun reading experience it would have been.

The book is an alternate history that takes place in the early 1800s. Dr. Gilbert Norrell and his student, Jonathan Strange, are English magicians whose goal is to bring magic back to their country.

Yes, back to England. Because, you see, a long time ago, in the eleventh century or so, a wizard king named John Uskglass, a.k.a. The Raven King, came to power in the north of England. He was human but had been raised in the magical land of Faerie, and the very rocks and trees and rivers were his allies and servants. It was a time of magic and wonder. The Raven King ruled for about 300 years and then disappeared, but the people and the land are still hoping for his return.

Dr. Norrell is the first real magician to practice in England since the Raven King’s reign. He is a stuffy, almost sociophobic academic. He repudiates the Raven King’s legacy, saying his traditions are unnecessary for modern magicians and it is better not to invoke him. 

Norrell is also extremely possessive of his magical knowledge. He says that he wants to bring magic back to England, but he seems to think that no one is fit to practice it but him. He buys up any books on magic he finds and keeps them in his own library so no one else can read them. He is urged to write books and take on more students, and says he will, but he never does.

                                                                   

Jonathan Strange is the only pupil Norrell is willing to have. Strange admires Norrell’s ability but becomes increasingly frustrated by his reclusiveness. Strange really does want to spread magic to all of England, feeling that everyone and anyone who wants to practice magic should do so.

Early in the story, the young wife of one of Dr. Norrell’s associates falls ill and dies. Norrell is persuaded to bring her back to life. To do so, however, Norrell secretly has to stoop to using black magic, invoking a faerie to help him. This malicious faerie continues to exact painful tributes from Norrell's friends far after the magic has been performed, growing more and more dangerous and lethal over the years.

At the same time, Norrell and Strange are enlisted by the English government to assist (magically) in the Napoleonic wars. Norrell wages his war behind the lines, in England, cloistered with government ministers. Strange, instead, goes to Spain to fight alongside the front-line soldiers, working his way up and eventually becoming a trusted advisor to the Duke of Wellington.

Strange’s wartime experiences give him the boost of status and self-confidence he needs to start breaking his ties of dependency with Norrell. He begins practicing his own expansive and generous brand of magic, becoming more and more estranged from his tutor and taking on students of his own.

Eventually, however, Strange and Norrell have to try to reconcile their differences and unite to destroy the malicious faerie—if they can.

Strange, Norrell, and their immediate associates are quirky, interesting characters. And their primary challenges—Napoleon’s armies, the malicious faerie, the Raven King’s legacy—have great entertainment potential. But these positive elements are diluted by page upon page of semi-relevant asides, tangents, and secondary stories that contribute nothing to the main plot. It is as if the author’s prodigious ideaphoria was completely unfettered by editorial discipline.

The longest side stories usually came in the form of footnotes. If a specific parable about the Raven King was mentioned in passing by one of the characters, for example, there was sure to be an extensive footnote telling the entire parable. These footnotes themselves often sprang off into still other, even more tangential stories. It would have been fine if the footnotes had added to the story, or at least been clever and fun. But instead they felt like a disruptive waste of time, leaving me a bit frustrated when the footnote ended and I had to remind myself where I was and what was happening in the main story. 

Sometimes these footnotes took up more room on the page than did the actual text of the story, and they occasionally spilled over onto subsequent pages. Picking my way through the distractions to get through to the central story line began to get exhausting. I began to dread the appearance of each new footnote. By the time the story finally really kicked into gear around page 600, I was too tired to care much what happened.

A lesser, but contributory, problem is Clarke’s often clunky efforts to achieve a Jane-Austen-like droll wittiness in her writing. She tried very hard, with her descriptions of overly fussy aristocratic women and befuddled, head-in-the-clouds society gentlemen who mess up situations with their indecision and their focus on irrelevant details, but it fell flat for me. This kind of humor can be hilarious in the right hands, but here the overt self-consciousness of it made it unfunny.