The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia McKillip

The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. McKillip

Ace, 2010

329 pages

So, here is the review of the book I read in its entirety on bedrest. I have owned this book since it came out last year, McKillip being one of two authors on my autobuy list. Ondaatje is the other; I suspect it will take me as long to get to The Cat's Table, though it's sitting here beside me right now. As with all authors I love, I often resist reading the newest thing. It's an odd psychological block. What if it's not as good as the other stuff she's written? What if she doesn't publish anything ever again and this is the last new McKillip I will ever get to read? (Ignore the fact that there's still some McKillip backlist I have yet to get to.) Generally neither of these are particularly good reasons for not reading a book. It should go without saying that this review is unlikely to be particularly objective...

I'm happy to report that this was an excellent choice for reading, and it was also excellent good fortune that I had it in my purse when I was whisked off to the hospital, otherwise I would have been bored to tears before fishy was able to come home and pick reading material up for me (which, to his credit, he did; the latest Garden Making magazine, another gardening magazine, the Kobo and Wilkie Collins all came along after I was safely ensconced in bed).

It was also exactly what I have come to expect from McKillip: a gentle, beautiful story of wild, unpredictable and beautiful magic, and the people that magic touches, tinged with a sweet melancholy. I think, overall, this is a better book than The Bell at Sealey Head, her last release, which I quite enjoyed but seemed a little... forgettable? Good excuse to read it again, I guess. But The Bards of Bone Plain is a solid story, interestingly and carefully told.

The plot is twofold: the first plot involves three characters revolving around each other. Zoe and Phelan are senior students at the bardic school; Beatrice is the youngest daughter of the king, and an aspiring archaeologist working with Phelan's mercurial father Jonah. There isn't a lot more to this plot than watching Phelan unravel the mystery of his father, really, and the answer comes to us much faster than it comes to Phelan; if there is a flaw with this book that I can point to easily, it would be that. I knew what Phelan didn't in the first few chapters, and I'm not sure whether or not it took away an element of ... curiosity, maybe, that might have made for more engaged reading. That said, as with my favourite McKillips, it's not the end itself that makes this story worth reading; it's the journey.

The second plot revolves around another bard, the legendary (in Phelan's day) Nairn. We see his story through snippets of historical documents, ballads and poems, and then we read the true story, what really happened, in chapters that alternate with the first plot's chapters. It's an interesting, if not original, exercise in recognizing that real human beings lie behind legends. And then, of course, the two plots cross in a surprisingly tense confrontation at the end -- surprisingly, I think, because there's not really a true villain, and the stakes are only really high for a few of the characters, not for the fate of many or the world. And yet I was invested in what happened.

What can I say? I loved this book in the same way I've loved everything else I've read by McKillip over the years (Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Song for the Basilisk notwithstanding; I liked them both well enough, but didn't get sucked into their world in the same way. I'll be trying Song again, though, because I think that was more a mood thing than a book thing.) It had some familiar elements; I hesitate to say it, because the characters were interesting as individuals, but some of them might be viewed as extremely similar other characters she's written... but I like that in her work, for some reason, where it might really irritate me in another author's. And the world was a new one for her: elements of historical medieval-type fantasy, with elements of technology slipped in. The princess drives a car, a relatively new technology to her world, and there are steam-powered trams, and gaslights. This book is also about change, and history, and the progression of society over years. It's a little light on the examination of that, but it's a theme slipped in nonetheless.

And the writing. The writing, of course, is the key to my love of McKillips' work. It is beautiful, lyrical, leaving enough unexplained to give the whole story a hint of mystery and wonder, but detailed enough to paint the whole scene vividly in my mind. As a slight aside, I should mention that I think the marriage of McKillip's novels with Kinuko Craft's cover images is sheer brilliance; they compliment each other perfectly, and both the writing and the cover images give me the same gleeful, floaty, fairy-tale feeling.

I of course recommend this book to fans of McKillip; I'm not sure it's the best place to start with her writing if you haven't read anything by her before (I'd suggest Riddle-Master or The Changeling Sea for that) but it's a lovely gentle fantasy tale about a father and a son, and magic and the past, worth reading and worth reading again.

The Native Star by M. K. Hobson, and a new addition

**I started this review the day I went into hospital with smallfry complications, but before there was any inkling of what was about to happen. Kobo couldn't have come at a better time. I have since grown extremely attached to it, as it functions as two books in one: one that I am reading, and one that fishy is reading. We can switch off -- one interacts with smallfry, the other reads.**

So, yes. I have crossed the line: I now own an e-reader. It was a birthday present from fishy, and a perfect one; I have been curious and attracted for a while now, perhaps not enough to buy one myself but more than enough to make it an excellent gift. It is a Kobo Touch, black and smooth and not at all shiny. It makes me feel like Jean-Luc Picard, sitting at my desk, drinking my tea, and reading documents on a little black pad.

Of course, upon receiving it, the first thing I had to do (after setting it up) was see if it really is as easy as I keep telling patrons it is to download library books. I am happy to report that with a minimal amount of effort and know-how, it is. Now, I realize my definition of "minimal" and the actual experience of "minimal" for many of our patrons may be worlds apart. However, it was so simple to do that walking people through it on the phone, as I have been doing, is not the challenging proposition it might have been. (For the record: iPads are easiest to help people setup for library e-book capacity, and thus far Sony Reader takes the cake for being the more challenging of the popular brands, if we discount Kindle which is impossible. Kobo is somewhere in the middle -- pretty easy, but not without its small, usually fixable quirks and problems.)

So what did I download? Here is the challenge: I have three books on hold now, three things I have wanted to read -- but a lot (read: the vast, vast majority) of the stuff I'm interested in and most of the stuff I'm not interested in was already checked out. I think our download system may be a victim of its own popularity. So I kept browsing until I saw something that tweaked a memory... The Native Star was nominated for a Nebula some time ago, I believe, and something lead me to believe it was an alternate history fantasy with a strong romance component. Just the sort of thing I might quite enjoy as an e-read.

The experience of reading on the e-reader itself is going to take some getting used to; I still have the same problems I mentioned before, though certainly not as pronounced and very easy to overcome on a dedicated e-reader versus my laptop. I miss the ability to flip back and forth through the book quickly and easily, is the big thing, and the dimensionality of a paper book. And the attractiveness of it. Kobo has its own kind of attraction, but it is not the same sort of attraction that a beautiful hardcover or trade paperback might have. Overall, though, so far I am growing rapidly quite fond of the thing; I may even resort to giving it a name. The idea of having multiple books at my fingertips for travelling and sitting in waiting rooms (a favourite occupation lately) without giving myself back problems from carrying the weight is really extremely attractive.

Technology aside, let us move on to the meat of the thing.

The Native Star
by M. K. Hobson
Dial, 2010
326 pages

I'd blame the fact that I was up too late reading this, couldn't sleep after stopping for the night for thinking about it, and woke up at an ungodly hour to finish the damn thing on the fact that I was reading it on my new toy, but... I think anyone who knows my reading habits would sniff out the lie immediately. It has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with my own inability to let an exciting plot be.

And this is a very exciting plot. It's a travel story, an adventure story, a quest really: Emily Edwards, small-town frontier witch in California, comes into possession of a strange magical stone after a series of questionable choices. Very shortly she becomes the target of some of the most powerful men in magic, all of whom want the stone for their own aims and don't seem to care to much about what happens to Emily in the process. One disgraced warlock, the improbably-named Dreadnought Stanton, makes it his mission to get Emily to New York to the one person who may be able to help her. But the journey is perilous -- pursued by government agents, bounty hunters, and mysterious factions that Emily has never heard of, Emily and Dreadnought are in for a very dangerous, very challenging cross-country trip.

One of the things that stood out for me from the beginning was how strangely unlikeable I found some of the characters, even the protagonists. Both Emily and Dreadnought (okay, that's it, I'm calling him Stanton from now on -- you will be glad to know that his name doesn't go without comment in the book, either) are prickly, unpleasant, and mulish to begin with; Stanton is insufferable, and Emily makes some really questionable decisions straight off the bat, and then continues to be stubborn and off-putting for chapters after. This is a brave choice, to have your protagonists be difficult right at the beginning of the book. But it works here, because gradually I found myself coming to enjoy and then really like both of them. Other characters have their own quirks; while many of them only show up briefly, they are all well-described. The villain, mind you, is thoroughly despicable and irredeemable, possibly to the extreme; I found nothing to recommend him, and he was a bit of a mouthpiece for a point Hobson wanted to make. I often like my villains with a bit of ambiguity, but it didn't take away from the story here -- the complexity of the other characters made up for it.

I didn't find the writing to be spectacular; the phrase "workmanlike" occurs to me. It's not inspired, but it's also not boring or lacklustre. It's just there, and it serves its masters Plot and Character well enough. The only thing that occasionally bothered me was that Hobson can be a little unsubtle in her Messages. You know, the ones where we're looking at "racism is bad" or "rabid patriotism is bad" or "greed is bad" -- that sort of thing. There are parallels drawn with oil, natural gas, and other non-renewable resources that are pretty blatant. It got a little heavy-handed at times, but again, frankly, the plotting can carry it; or at least it can for me, because I generally agree with Hobson's views on these issues.

The world-building, on the other hand, is excellent, and worthy of notice. I would love to find more alternate history fantasy set in the Wild West if it's done as well as Hobson has done here (Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child comes to mind, though they're completely different worlds; I have enjoyed the setting of both.) There are vague steampunky elements, but they're not terribly prevalent; really, I can only point to one section with a flying machine that I would think of as straight steampunk at all. The system of magic is interesting, if slightly predictable (can anyone recommend a good fantasy where blood magic is not automatically evil? I've seen a few where necromancy gets a fair shake, but nothing with blood) and well-integrated into society as a whole. There are even anti-magic factions, a religion that struck me as particularly recognizeable and realistic. These little details were nice touches as well as plot drivers.

Overall, I think Hobson's attention to detail is what makes the book as good as it is, giving it a ring of gritty veracity. Her realistic characters and settings mean it's a much simpler task for the reader to suspend disbelief and enter the book wholesale. I would recommend this to fans of fantasy and alternate histories; I would also recommend to fans of romance, though be aware that the romance isn't a central point of the story, more of a pleasing sidenote, despite the book jacket copy. It would be a good jumping-off place for fans of paranormal romance to slide into an adventure-based fantasy, for example. There will be a sequel, I believe it's possibly already published, but the book stands on its own -- it's just the epilogue that sets up the next tale.

unexpected August arrival

Well. So, this is an entry I didn't really expect to write for some time, which will tell you what the past two weeks of my life has been like. You may have noticed that my productivity on this blog has dropped somewhat in the past year. Apparently pregnancy will do this to one, particularly a pregnancy as odd in some ways as mine has been; the first trimester was weird, the second trimester was great, and the third trimester started off perfectly fine and went rapidly wonky.

The productivity around here has dropped to zero in the past three weeks; something about having a baby multiple weeks earlier than one expects to have a baby will make reading anything more than a heart rate monitor really, really challenging. Luckily (for a whole suite of reasons) I had five days of bedrest before said baby made her appearance, which meant I finished two books and started a third and fourth. I even have most of a review typed up for the first of the two. We'll see if I ever get to the second review, or the rest of the third or fourth book. Right now I don't think I have the follow-through required for Wilkie Collins. So expect a review or two on the way, but until I have my brain on straight again there might be more silence from this corner. With reviews of awesome board books to follow. Blogging is a normal, adult-focused activity for me, and I could use some normality right now.

I think, for blog purposes, I will call her smallfry, with her father being fishy. She is indeed tremendously small, though growing more every day. And despite everything, she is feisty, active, and charming; she has outstripped expectations as far as growth and health. Doctors and nurses tell us how cute she is, and how impressive, both of which are very nice to hear. We can see for ourselves how well she is doing; she is growing, and she is perfect. Perhaps I am a bit biased, though.

The whole experience, aside from being hella stressful, has been surreal and full of wonderful and terrifying moments. The C-section was a surreal one, with my mind-shatteringly amazing husband giving me topics and me attempting to rhyme off which Dewey Decimal Number the topic might fit in to (I could remember that Sailing was under Sports, but I couldn't remember what number Sports might be, for some reason...) and the moment afterwards when I got to see my tiny baby for the first time (she looked like a miniature Walter Matthau.) I suspect surreality and wonder and terror are what are in store for us over the next months too, and probably beyond.

Alas, I am afraid she will have to remain cute in your imaginations, dear readers; I am going to continue with my policy of not posting photos of recognizeable faces online. But in the traditions of this blog, a photo of her feet seems appropriate.

The Bafut Beagles by Gerald Durrell

The Bafut Beagles
by Gerald Durrell
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954
232 pages

I find this book a little hard to review. It is third in my quest to read all of Gerald Durrell's autobiographical animal stories, and I am glad I read it; it had moments in it I would have been sorry to miss. The man writes beautifully. He has a great turn of phrase, a beautiful knack for description, and a dry, self-skewering sense of humour. These early books of his, at least, are a rich tapestry of love of place, love of animals, and deep curiousity about the world around him.

The Bafut Beagles, though, is a product of its historical moment; published in the early 1950s, the edition I have from the library is a first printing. He spends a lot more time here documenting the people around him than in the previous two, and not always to his credit in a contemporary light. As stated before, I do think that Durrell was likely extremely progressive given his station (a well-enough-off white British male) and I do think he had a healthy dose of respect and affection for the people he met and worked with in the British Cameroons; one realizes this as one reads, and it is quite clear. One also gets vaguely uncomfortable as one identifies a very faint paternalistic colonialism and a definite streak of sexism that rears its head every once in a while. I found it particularly jarring in The Bafut Beagles, thanks largely, I think, to one rather ugly incident that Durrell relates and plays a bit for laughs (though he is laughing at himself, mostly, and his own romantic colonialism, I think). I think also it's because he did spend less time talking about the animals, which is what I read for anyways. That said, as before, I was reading it knowing that it is a snapshot of a fascinating profession in a particular time, and so I was able to enjoy the best parts of the book, and move past the parts that occasionally made me cringe.

It does make me wonder if, when I was reading some of these books for the first time (this was not one of them; of the three I've read so far, only Three Singles to Adventure was a reread) some of the historical tenor of them was present but I missed it, or whether it was removed for political correctness in later editions (I am not sure how I feel about this), or whether his underlying, and (I suspect strongly) unconscious, attitudes changed as the times did -- most of the others of his that I've read were from the late 60s and 70s.

Anyway! As always, my favourite parts of this book were to do with the animals, and particularly the parts in which he is describing a behaviour or a proclivity that a particular animal has, rather than a capture. The simple pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany the text are actually quite helpful in showing the physical characteristics of the animals Durrell describes. He is clearly fascinated -- enamoured, really -- by animals in all of their forms, from the tiniest insects to the largest predators, and it shows. I think part of the reason I didn't like this book quite as well as the first two is that there was less of the animals than there had been previously. He is at his strongest, writing-wise, when he is talking about them, too.

I won't recommend this book, even in Durrell's canon, but I'm not sad to have read it, if that makes any sense. I think it could have been skipped comfortably and I wouldn't have missed too terribly much. It's an interesting read both for the intended subject matter and as an historical exercise, but reader beware, that's all. Aside from my squirming, politically correct caveats, I just don't think it's as strong a book as the previous two in the chronology.

The next book in the chronology is The New Noah, a book I can find very little about. I'm not even sure if I can find it, period, but I'll do what I can and I'm interested to see where -- and when -- Durrell takes me this time.

Other Durrell books reviewed here so far:
1. The Overloaded Ark
2. Three Singles to Adventure

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
by Maryanne Wolf
Harper Perennial, 2007
306 pages

How miraculous it is that the brain can go beyond itself, enlarging both its functions and our intellectual capacities in the process.

I confess: I am intellectually lazy. I like things easy-to-understand, gentle on my mind. A little, tiny bit of work is fun, but generally I want spoon-feeding. I don't say this as a mark of pride, and I know I have a tendency to laugh it off -- "oh, it's just one of those things about me, you know? I'm lazy." But frankly, it's something, when I do stare it in the face, that I regret -- not a source of embarrassment, but a source of wistfulness. One of the reasons I think this blog is good for me is because it forces me to think sometimes. And when I do think deeply, I enjoy it. Thinking deeply, critically, analytically about things is what I miss so much about being in school. The wider world does not call on me to think the way school does; it doesn't (necessarily) prevent it, but it rarely encourages incisive thinking from me. So one has rather fallen out of practice.

As with this book. Reading the first section was a combination of small problems for me: I am out of practice with reading more challenging things, and I think that perhaps the first section of Proust and the Squid is a bit drier than some of the rest of the book. It's hard to say exactly how much of each was a problem, but I had to work hard to read the first bit, and to understand it. I am fairly sure that I didn't understand pieces of it, and will likely go back and try again.

Do not take this as a criticism of the book. This is an excellent book. It's challenging not just in its subject, but also to its reader. It does not force the reader to become a deep thinker, but it invites it. The second section is a fascinating dissection of the individual process of learning to read, one that I think I will find quite handy in my work, and the third section is a comparison of the unusual differences between a "regular" reading brain and the brain of dyslexics, as well as some more recent research and a little bit of speculation (Wolf is eminently qualified to speculate) on what exactly dyslexia is. Hint: we don't quite know, but we do know that it's not exactly the same in every individual. Also, we know it definitively exists, and there is evidence directly in the structure of the brain, despite the fact that some people will insist on telling you it's one of those things that the medical/educational establishment has made up.

Another thing I enjoyed about this book is how playful Wolf can be. Her section headings in Chapter 5 amused me, and often referred back to things that I'd read in earlier chapters or sections. She picks very apt quotes and even recites, in its entirety, a rather amusing poem on the quirks of English language spellings. While I did find the first section -- with its discussion of the history of writing, reading, and the neurological changes that happened to allow the above innovations, somewhat tedious -- dry, and I think in many cases simply beyond me, there were parts of it that were extremely interesting. With more practice, I might be able to understand more of it. Moving into the second section, in which Wolf discusses the development of the reading brain in individual children, felt like a relief and one wonders if it was a bit of a relief to Wolf as well.

She uses examples exceedingly well to illustrate her points, which otherwise might be challenging to grasp; one of my favourites is from page 123:

Vocabulary contributes to the ease and speed of decoding. Here's an experiment to illustrate the same principle for adults. Try to read the following terms aloud: "periventricular nodular heterotopia"; "pedagogy"; "fiduciary"; "micron spectroscopy." How fast you read each of these words depends not only on your "decoding" ability but also on your background knowledge.

What a simple, yet effective way to demonstrate the point she is trying to make to adults, who have (as we are reading this book) long since learned to read and read well, and forgotten the challenges we might have had as beginning readers.

This blog entry is going to be rather long, so in case you want the short version and not the version in which I attempt to enshrine in memory particular aspects or facts: this book is about how reading, and in particular about how the changes reading has made in the human brain, have allowed us to become what we are today. It is about how the biological processes in the reading brain have allowed the intellectual leaps we were able to make as individuals and as a species. Wolf is curious, engaging, and in awe of the incredible plasticity and adaptability of the human brain, and she is in love with writing and reading. This makes for a fascinating, involved, and ultimately inspiring read, and I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in neuroscience, literacy, how reading develops in children, and how reading has come about and changed our societies. Work your way through the dry parts because the payoff is absolutely there.

***

One of the things that strikes me about this book is how both ambivalent and curious Wolf seems to be about the changes that are happening in the way we receive information, and particularly in the way the brain works as we navigate an increasingly visual medium, the internet, to glean information. One can hear her concern clearly, that we are losing integral neural connections in the brain, losing the ability to think deeply and engage with written material, as we become more accustomed to instant information and a visually-based digital world. It turns out I am not the only intellectually lazy person out there. As humans, we tend to like shortcuts in which we are fed the analysis, rather than come up with it on our own. This is not necessarily good for our brains.

But one can also hear her curiosity about what comes next; she compares those of us who are alarmed by these changes to Socrates and his vehement distrust of the written word and the Greek alphabet. Clearly, despite Socrates' concerns, writing has been a good thing. We have the luxury of centuries to know this. But Wolf cautions that we shouldn't dismiss Socrates' concerns, either -- his alarm was valid. We lost something in the transition from an oral culture to a written culture, just as we gained something else. The reader gets the feeling that Wolf sees us losing something as we move from written culture to visual culture, but that she also sees the possibility of gain. What that gain is we have yet to figure out, but Wolf wants to know what it is.

Another interesting moment: Wolf is redefining the meaning of "fluency." It does not necessarily mean speed, exactly, so much as it means reading fast enough to provide the reader with time to think about, internalize, and examine what one is reading. Page 131:

Fluency does not ensure better comprehension; rather, fluency gives enough extra time to the executive system [of the brain] to direct attention where it is most needed -- to infer, to understand, to predict, or sometimes to repair discordant understanding and to interpret meaning afresh.

It appears, for example, that I may have to revise my vehement disagreement with the phrase "this book changed my life." Previously, I have been of the opinion that books don't change lives, that people change their own lives perhaps in response to a book. But Wolf makes a reasonable argument that reading (a book or otherwise) actually does cause measurable, physical changes in the brain -- which then, necessarily, does change one's life even if in minute ways we don't fully recognize day to day.

This book will have practical implications for the work I do with the very young at the library, and has re-fired my interest in pre-literacy, early literacy, and literacy in general. I am extremely glad I have read it, and will certainly be reading it again at some point in the future. I ordered my own copy so I can make margin notes and highlight things. Because I am going to try to think a little more deeply about it the second time through.