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.