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War for the Oaks and Territory.
Bull, Emma (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeem). War for the Oaks. New York: Tor Books, 2001 and 2009. (1987.)
Territory. New York: Tor Books, 2007.
I can't really pretend to have come to these books with a completely open mind, but I have to admit that I enjoyed them both very much, so much so that I was slightly surprised.
War for the Oaks is arguably the text that established the "metropolitan fantasy" subgenre which people such as China Miéville and Charles de Lint have made so famous. Properly, of course, this subgenre really should be known as "urban fantasy," since it is explicitly fantasy of (an) urban space and place, whether that city is real, unreal, or somewhere in between, but "urban fantasy" is what paranormal urban romance has taken as its own label, so "metropolitan fantasy" it is, at least as far as I'm concerned (and yes, I did just make that name up, I think).
The story takes place in Minneapolis (not the Twin Cities), and I have to say, having lived near Minneapolis for four years, that Bull captures Minneapolis brilliantly. Things have changed in the intervening twenty-two years, of course, but not so much that the book feels very dated. Our protagonist Eddi, guitarist and singer in her own band, would probably be wearing hipster clothes and singing slightly different songs these days, but the essence of the city and of Bull's story would be the same.
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coffeeandink has argued that War for the Oaks is also a "fantasy of manners," and I have to say that on the whole I agree with her interpretation. Eddi is recruited by the Queen of Faerie to be her Court's champion, the mortal who brings mortality to its battles against the Unseelie Court for territory in the city, and is assigned as her bodyguard the phouka who selected her for the job in the first place. Romance and rock'n'roll ensue, but while the story is not without action, what determines whether Eddi succeeds or fails is partly her learning to adopt (and then to manipulate for her own ends) the protocol of Faerie.
Bull is not insensitive to the different inhabitants of the Cities; black and Native characters do appear, although the Native character only briefly, and there are moments when race, and racial difference, are addressed, though mostly implicitly. I have to say, though, that Faerie appears to be a very racially hierarchical place--the Sidhe are all pale and fair, and they rule the Court, while lesser fey such as the phouka, or the brownie Hairy Meg, have brown skin (to the point where several humans refer think the phouka is black)--and that this does add a troubling note to the story, especially since it goes unremarked.
I enjoyed Territory very much too. It takes place in Tombstone, Arizona, starting several months before the famous shoot-out at the O.K. Corrall, in a world in which magicians run around for the most part ignorant of their power, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation by other magicians. All the main characters in the story--Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bull's heroes Jesse Fox and Mildred Benjamin--have magic, and knowledge of it, to varying degrees.
I like fantasy that is explicitly, unapologetically American, and I like very much that Bull's Arizona territory is very visibly shared between the Chinese and the (almost exclusively) white "Americans," and that they are all very much settlers in a strange land. Jesse Fox, a partially Columbia-educated Easterner turned something-or-other, in denial about his magic, in particular has a close relationship with the Chinese community in the person of his doctor/geomancer friend Chow Lung, and later in his stableboy Chu, and even speaks some Chinese (FTW). Mildred Benjamin is a young woman recently widowed who slowly metamorphoses from typesetter to lady reporter. Their fates intertwine with those of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and those who oppose the Earps in Tombstone. It's going to be a long summer, and I look forward to Claim.
That said, though, I have some problems with aspects of this book too, perhaps most obviously that, while the Apache are mentioned several times, we never see any Natives (and honestly I don't know whether there were any Natives to be seen at this particular time and place in "settled" areas, but I'd think the answer was yes). The same goes, but double, for the black (or, as the language of the time has it, "Negro") characters. There are a few random black people, and Mildred, who moonlights as a story writer for an Eastern ladies' magazine, a couple of times thinks about stories with beautiful "quadroons," but Bull has definitely erased racism entirely, and actual black people more or less completely, from her story. And again, I don't know how many black people were actually in the Arizona territory in 1881, but I'm willing to bet that it was not an anti-racist paradise.
More insidiously, while it's clear that Mildred is Jewish, at least culturally, I find it very, very odd that no one, not even Mildred herself, ever remarks on this fact. I don't know what the "frontier" was like in terms of anti-Semitism, but it seemed very unusual that no one would ever even mention Mildred's religion/ethnicity/race, particularly in the context of the nationalizing, imperialist late 19th century in America, and indeed, there were several points in the text where I thought a reference could easily have been slipped in, even if only to be dismissed as unimportant. It's doubly odd that Jesse Fox, with whom Mildred definitely has a thing, has never once even mentioned her religion either--I find it impossible to believe that an Easterner, from a wealthy family, would never even think about it to himself, no matter how much he liked her. The book may be a fantasy, but there is such a thing as straining credulity, even in genre fiction.
I can understand why Bull would choose to downplay to the point of erasure racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular: lots of nice modern liberal white women like to pretend it doesn't exist now (as I think RaceFail pounded into everyone's head, whether they knew that already or not), and it's unpleasant as a writer to write it, especially out of the mouths of one's viewpoint characters. And I do think that most historical novels essentially feature modern characters in un-modern settings, which is a whole 'nother discussion in and of itself, but I don't think that authors should actively try to pretend such things were not part and parcel of the period in question, because they were, and pretending that the past was just like the present, but with different clothes and less advanced technology, is its own form of colonialism. Ultimately, I think confronting the past in all its glory and squalor, in its reality, only provides a richer and more nuanced narrative. Bull, with her foregrounding of the Chinese settlers in the Old West, succeeds partially in this respect, but in others she clearly fails.
coffeeem). War for the Oaks. New York: Tor Books, 2001 and 2009. (1987.)Territory. New York: Tor Books, 2007.
I can't really pretend to have come to these books with a completely open mind, but I have to admit that I enjoyed them both very much, so much so that I was slightly surprised.
War for the Oaks is arguably the text that established the "metropolitan fantasy" subgenre which people such as China Miéville and Charles de Lint have made so famous. Properly, of course, this subgenre really should be known as "urban fantasy," since it is explicitly fantasy of (an) urban space and place, whether that city is real, unreal, or somewhere in between, but "urban fantasy" is what paranormal urban romance has taken as its own label, so "metropolitan fantasy" it is, at least as far as I'm concerned (and yes, I did just make that name up, I think).
The story takes place in Minneapolis (not the Twin Cities), and I have to say, having lived near Minneapolis for four years, that Bull captures Minneapolis brilliantly. Things have changed in the intervening twenty-two years, of course, but not so much that the book feels very dated. Our protagonist Eddi, guitarist and singer in her own band, would probably be wearing hipster clothes and singing slightly different songs these days, but the essence of the city and of Bull's story would be the same.
coffeeandink has argued that War for the Oaks is also a "fantasy of manners," and I have to say that on the whole I agree with her interpretation. Eddi is recruited by the Queen of Faerie to be her Court's champion, the mortal who brings mortality to its battles against the Unseelie Court for territory in the city, and is assigned as her bodyguard the phouka who selected her for the job in the first place. Romance and rock'n'roll ensue, but while the story is not without action, what determines whether Eddi succeeds or fails is partly her learning to adopt (and then to manipulate for her own ends) the protocol of Faerie. Bull is not insensitive to the different inhabitants of the Cities; black and Native characters do appear, although the Native character only briefly, and there are moments when race, and racial difference, are addressed, though mostly implicitly. I have to say, though, that Faerie appears to be a very racially hierarchical place--the Sidhe are all pale and fair, and they rule the Court, while lesser fey such as the phouka, or the brownie Hairy Meg, have brown skin (to the point where several humans refer think the phouka is black)--and that this does add a troubling note to the story, especially since it goes unremarked.
I enjoyed Territory very much too. It takes place in Tombstone, Arizona, starting several months before the famous shoot-out at the O.K. Corrall, in a world in which magicians run around for the most part ignorant of their power, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation by other magicians. All the main characters in the story--Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bull's heroes Jesse Fox and Mildred Benjamin--have magic, and knowledge of it, to varying degrees.
I like fantasy that is explicitly, unapologetically American, and I like very much that Bull's Arizona territory is very visibly shared between the Chinese and the (almost exclusively) white "Americans," and that they are all very much settlers in a strange land. Jesse Fox, a partially Columbia-educated Easterner turned something-or-other, in denial about his magic, in particular has a close relationship with the Chinese community in the person of his doctor/geomancer friend Chow Lung, and later in his stableboy Chu, and even speaks some Chinese (FTW). Mildred Benjamin is a young woman recently widowed who slowly metamorphoses from typesetter to lady reporter. Their fates intertwine with those of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and those who oppose the Earps in Tombstone. It's going to be a long summer, and I look forward to Claim.
That said, though, I have some problems with aspects of this book too, perhaps most obviously that, while the Apache are mentioned several times, we never see any Natives (and honestly I don't know whether there were any Natives to be seen at this particular time and place in "settled" areas, but I'd think the answer was yes). The same goes, but double, for the black (or, as the language of the time has it, "Negro") characters. There are a few random black people, and Mildred, who moonlights as a story writer for an Eastern ladies' magazine, a couple of times thinks about stories with beautiful "quadroons," but Bull has definitely erased racism entirely, and actual black people more or less completely, from her story. And again, I don't know how many black people were actually in the Arizona territory in 1881, but I'm willing to bet that it was not an anti-racist paradise.
More insidiously, while it's clear that Mildred is Jewish, at least culturally, I find it very, very odd that no one, not even Mildred herself, ever remarks on this fact. I don't know what the "frontier" was like in terms of anti-Semitism, but it seemed very unusual that no one would ever even mention Mildred's religion/ethnicity/race, particularly in the context of the nationalizing, imperialist late 19th century in America, and indeed, there were several points in the text where I thought a reference could easily have been slipped in, even if only to be dismissed as unimportant. It's doubly odd that Jesse Fox, with whom Mildred definitely has a thing, has never once even mentioned her religion either--I find it impossible to believe that an Easterner, from a wealthy family, would never even think about it to himself, no matter how much he liked her. The book may be a fantasy, but there is such a thing as straining credulity, even in genre fiction.
I can understand why Bull would choose to downplay to the point of erasure racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular: lots of nice modern liberal white women like to pretend it doesn't exist now (as I think RaceFail pounded into everyone's head, whether they knew that already or not), and it's unpleasant as a writer to write it, especially out of the mouths of one's viewpoint characters. And I do think that most historical novels essentially feature modern characters in un-modern settings, which is a whole 'nother discussion in and of itself, but I don't think that authors should actively try to pretend such things were not part and parcel of the period in question, because they were, and pretending that the past was just like the present, but with different clothes and less advanced technology, is its own form of colonialism. Ultimately, I think confronting the past in all its glory and squalor, in its reality, only provides a richer and more nuanced narrative. Bull, with her foregrounding of the Chinese settlers in the Old West, succeeds partially in this respect, but in others she clearly fails.