I come here not to bury Jemisin

[muckefuck]

I really want to like Nora K. Jemisin's novels. I already love her essays, and her commentary on political issues in general. If nothing else, her role in getting Beale booted would be enough to endear her to me forever. I haven't been all that interested in SF/F for a while, but anything which helps make it less of an old boys' club is sure to get my attention, at least momentarily. Oh, and monshu likes her, too, so at long last we could begin sharing books and discussing them again.

He recommended starting with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms so I did. I had a few problems with it (mostly related to the 'Renfaire effect'), but overall it was a satisfying spin on the Chosen One plot. Then I moved on to the sequel. I wasn't as captured by the premise, but I soon got caught up in the writing. Unfortunately, it eventually became clear that she was revisiting the previous trope but with diminishing effect. By the last hundred pages, I was reading it more out of doggedness than out of any real interest in how she tied it up--something aggravated by an anti-climactic showdown introduced in possibly the most annoying way possible.

I may yet read The kingdom of the gods because it's not in my nature to leave trilogies unfinished (though I managed to with His Dark Materials when everyone warned me that the novels decline in quality rapidly after the first). But first I need to forget what I disliked about The broken kingdoms. (Reading something completely different--a Bildungsroman told from the point of view of a Turkish Gastarbeiterin--is helping.) Before I do, though, I should probably talk that out a bit.

First there's the worldbuilding. I know that this is far too easily festishised, particularly by neckbearded gatekeepers, but to be honest it's what drew me to the series in the first place. I was looking for some fresh inspiration for my own sound attempts. And in a way, I did find it--but mostly negatively. That is, time and time again I would find myself thinking I wouldn't do that in my world.

Despite that, there's a lot I feel she gets right. It feels reasonably lived in. There's a sense of interconnected but distinct cultures. She's given some real thought to differences in folkways, but avoids heaping on the unnecessary detail ("Let me tell about my connation!" is almost as flight-inducing as "Let me tell you about my character!"); a brief reference to someone's manner of speaking or favourite foods is enough. She explores the notion of a world without war without making it either too utopian or too dystopic.

In the end, though, the flaws kept leaping out at me. A lot of the material culture doesn't make much sense. I mean, there's no real reason why another planet couldn't've developed ubiquitous indoor plumbing, windowpanes, and frequent bathing without having gunpowder or machinery, but the downside of her sketchy approach is that it leaves no room for explaining how this might happen. Overall it still feels way too much like middle-class contemporary American culture in quasi-mediaeval drag (the aforementioned 'Renfaire effect'). Much of this is also the sensibilities of the characters. The way they relate seems far too familiar; I shouldn't get more a sense of alienation from reading a fifty year-old Turkish novel than from reading something set in a reality where gods and magic are real and supreme political power rests with a family that makes the Borgias look well-adjusted.

Then there are some issues specific to the narrative style. The novels are very talky. The second includes some action sequences (for lack of a better term), but it's still mainly lengthy conversation between characters which moves the story forward. (I guess that shouldn't bother me as much as it does given my taste for 19th- and 20th-century novels of bourgeois life, but it does.) The protagonists feel very similar. The chief distinguishing feature of the heroine of Broken kingdoms is that she's blind. And while Jemisin avoids several of the pitfalls of having a visually-impaired first-person narrator, she still pulls the occasional disbelief-encouraging boner. (Again, it may be legitimately possible for a blind person to discern whether someone is shrugging or wearing a smug expression, but Jemisin narration didn't convince me of this.)

But probably my biggest issue is with her characterisation of the gods--which is a major problem, because they're prominent figures in both books. Put bluntly, they don't feel like gods to me. The focus is squarely on their human qualities to the point where they come off less like supremely powerful ancient beings than like ordinary superheroes. (Emphasis on the "ordinary"--Moore's Dr Manhattan strikes me as much truer to how a god would actually think and act.) A decade feels like far too little time for Itempas to complete the kind of emotional arc he does in the second book; the narrator has to keep on telling us how out-of-character his actions are because we never see much of him acting in character to judge for ourselves. The choice of Madding's sphere of influence seems arbitrary, like it could've been half a dozen others without significantly affecting his role in the story.

In sum, it's more than the usual Elf of Destiny nonsense, but much less than I was hoping it would be. Back to the real world, then, at least for a while.

Comments

[sliv-1.livejournal.com]

They've probably already been recommended to you, but the Chalion series by Lois McMaster Bujold might fit what you're hankering for. There are three books so far, the first 2 set in more or less the same area, the 3rd in a noticeably different culture. (A magic/practice seen as a borderline obscenity in the first area is not uncommon in the other.) First book is "The Curse of Chalion". She also manages to set up a "lived-in" fantasy theology that really feels like its something that people touch frequently.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Though other than the religious/magic system, the first book takes place in what's essentially a fantasy reimagining of 15th century Spain. (I like it quite a bit, I just don't know whether it's as alien as what muckefuck is looking for.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

LMB has been recommended to me a couple times already, so it would be worth giving this series a try. If it's a reasonably good reimagining (i.e. better than Lions of al-Rassan), then it will fit the bill nicely. (I've read 15th-century Spanish literature, so I've got a decent idea how different the culture was from our own.)