Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war

[starlady]

Except, of course, it was the dogs who were shot first. I just saw Ari Folman's animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir" with my friend Stacey and it was as excellent as I've heard. The animation is gorgeous, first of all, but the story itself (about the filmmaker trying to piece together what he did as an Israeli soldier in the first Lebanon War) is incredible. Folman doesn't pull any punches, and he doesn't particularly spare anyone; I for one agreed with his choice to end the film with documentary video footage as opposed to animation, since I think that too many people still think animation = fantasy, and what happened in Lebanon (including the massacres in the refugee camps) is all too real, if all too familiar.

I just read two books each by Sarah Monette (aka truepenny ) and Robin McKinley. By Monette I read Mélusine and The Virtu, and by McKinley I read Chalice and Sunshine. Monette first, since I have more of a bone to pick with her (yes, and not just because of that whole race/privelege/non-white characters brouhaha that went down last week, which is extremely interesting [some people would rightly filet me for using that adjective] and dare I say important for everyone to read; I'd recommend metafandom ). To summarize bare-bones, the books are set in and around the eponymous city of the first book's title (every city in fantasy after China Miéville owes so much to New Crobuzon) and follow the travails of the gay wizard Felix Harrowgate and his half-brother Mildmay (the) Foxe. Monette has said that she wrote the books to explore the figure of the Byronic hero (Felix); well, as a reader of Byron (and a lover of Manfred in all its obsessive silly despair), I find it extremely interesting that Monette's Byronic hero is a) gay and b) a victim of severe childhood trauma and abuse in just about every form. And a mostly former drug addict. I find it very interesting, and perhaps a bit disturbing, that this is how Monette feels she can wrestle with the Byronic type, by giving him this sort of absoultely wretched past. Manfred by contrast has had the world on a plate, and I can't help but feel that Felix's black rages are just a bit odd given everything. That said, Mildmay is amazing; his parts of the story literally had me in tears at times. I would read about Mildmay forever. A final thing that gave me pause in these books was Monette saying that she wanted to gesture towards American-izing fantasy; well, I think that takes more than mentioning buffalo and alligators in passing, particularly since all the worldbuilding is bits of Greek and Roman and ancient Near Eastern whatnot. I'm a classicist too; I can track what she's doing, and while Monette is fairly inventive up to a point, I don't buy it as anything more than a gesture. That said, the character of Mehitabel Parr is pretty awesome, and I hope she features more in The Mirador and Corambis, which come next.

As I said, by McKinley I read Chalice and Sunshine. I realized after finishing Sunshine that they're essentially the same story--a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" in which the female hero uses her affinity with an unusual element (honey in Chalice, sunlight in Sunshine) to win her Other-ish lover and the day. Sunshine involves vampires, while Chalice is set in a completely other world; I would say Sunshine is the better book, but Chalice is perhaps more intriguing. I recommend both of them highly.

Comments

[hisui-ryoshi.livejournal.com]

I enjoy Robin McKinley's work especially Sunshine. Especially Sunshine in a world filled with Twilight. Plus in case you're not sick of the Beauty and the Beast stuff I believe Robin McKinley has actually written a Beauty and the Beast retelling called Beauty.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the heroine in Sunshine says "Beauty and the Beast" is her favorite fairy tale, and I have to think she's speaking for McKinley at that point--hasn't she written another version besides "Beauty"? I shall have to read it at some point; god knows I just about wore out my copies of The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown back in the day.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I love those Sarah Monette books. I buy them in hardcover. Judge as you will. I love Bear and Sarah, too.

Tabby is all over Mirador; Corambis hasn't come out yet.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I've been reading her LJ, and I don't think Tabby is in Corambis. :-( I really like her books myself, as books, not least because they do make me think about things beyond the actual books themselves; I haven't read any of Bear, but my local library is well-stocked, and I at least want to read A Companion to Wolves, because I too read way too much Anne McCaffrey back in the day.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I find it very interesting, and perhaps a bit disturbing, that this is how Monette feels she can wrestle with the Byronic type, by giving him this sort of absoultely wretched past.

I'm still bothered by this sentence several weeks later.

I don't think that is how she feels she "can" wrestle with the type any more than I feel that's how I can wrestle with the type because of Thomas Endymion Fairlight Wilkes-Dashwood, whose past is only a little more palatable. I suspect that in both cases it's just that that's how that character presented himself and there was little she/I could do about it. I know that's what happened to ME.

(Mind you, I'm still pissed off about the way that she and Bear were treated, and am more sure than ever that 90% of Metafandom is full of shite; YMMV, and clearly does, but if they'd have done to me what they did to them, I'd have told them all to frak off a lot sooner. A kelpie is a shapeshifter and can pretend to be anything, and that's what it was doing; if whatsherface had finished the book she'd have known that. You can throw books at walls and never touch them again if they don't entertain you, and it's your right to have any opinion you like, but if you expect an author to take you seriously you'd better finish the book imnsho and have some idea what you are talking about, and I don't care if you're BLUE. I am against racism, but also against the brand of anti-racism that refuses to recognise that a more sensitive detector of anything, racism included, will occasionally return a few fucking false positives!)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I agree that they've been dragged through the mud unfairly, though I haven't read the book in question--but it does seem to be a question of false positives from what I can tell at such a remove. It's the reaction to the original discussion where all the crazy wankery started happening.

Re: Felix (or re: Endymion for that matter), I don't mean to suggest that there's something wrong in any sense with the authors or the characters in question; terrible things happen to all manner of people in fiction and in life, and I wouldn't want fiction to not reflect that. :-) I just do think it's interesting that Monette describes Felix as a Byronic character, since I don't think that description would have occurred to me independently. But after re-reading The Mirador (which I have to say is probably my favorite of the three, though they're all great), I think I was able to understand better how Felix's past has influenced who he is in the present, in a way that made me believe his characterization that much more. And I do think that comparing Felix and Manfred (or for that matter, Felix and Lord Byron) sheds some interesting light on Manfred/Byron, in a way that hints that they may have been less sanguine about their pasts than they tried to portray themselves. Did that make sense?