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starladyHappy New Year (Rabbit or Cat) to all those who celebrate!
新年快乐！新年快樂！
(I fail at greetings in other languages.)
Brennan, Marie. In Ashes Lie. New York: Orbit, 2009.
Disclaimer: The author is a friend of mine.
I was originally going to read some other books before I read the sequel to Midnight Never Come, but I had this one on my bookshelf and it called to me and I couldn't resist.
If the Elizabethan period is one of the most overdone in fantasy, the Jacobean period and the War of the Three Kingdoms is one of the most overlooked--I can think of only one other book, Neal Stephenson's excellent Quicksilver, that is set in this time period, and while Brennan's book starts in 1639 and ends in 1666, Stephenson's starts not long before that and goes much farther forward in time. This genre oversight is a real shame, because what used to be called the English Civil War or the Puritan Revolution is a fascinating welter of simultaneous things happening at once, as near to the total breakdown of the foundations of a society as many societies have ever come without collapsing entirely, and the divided loyalties and excruciatingly detailed and fought positions that were endemic in the period make for great human--or faerie--drama.
Brennan does a nice job of capturing the complexities of this period on the page, as well as making a woefully complicated story fairly clear, despite the somewhat baroque narrative structure that she adopts; though many things are theoretically robbed of their suspense by the jumping back and forth in time, the character drama still manages to keep the reader's attention, which is no mean feat. And indeed, in this book Lune, having claimed a throne at the end of the last one, must struggle to figure out who she is as a ruler and what is and isn't worth sacrificing, and for what. At the same time as she fights to keep her throne, the Prince of the Stone, Sir Anthony Ware, Bart., tries and mostly fails to keep his beloved London and England from tearing themselves apart. Their struggles are linked, as are their positions in the Onyx Court, and in Ware's increasing embitteredness and desperation I think the slow, grinding horror of any protracted period of civil war is well reflected. In particular, while I liked Brennan's writing the last time around, I thought it was even better this time.
it's only in comparison with Stephenson, whose narrative and characters are almost all resolutely anti-monarchicial (even when the exigencies of fate drive them into cahoots with various crowned heads), that I notice the more ambivalent portrayal of monarchy in Brennan's book, and I think that ambivalence reflects well the tortured politics that ran through the period and that created clevages and schisms between families and formerly bosom friends: if the human characters in the end accept monarchy again, it's as much out of exhaustion and resignation as anything else, and that acceptance having meaning is the cardinal sign of the irrevocable changes that the War wrought, which the narrative makes a point of acknowledging.
Anyway. It's fitting that Ware's successor as Prince of the Stone, Dr. Jack Ellin, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and I look forward to reading the next book, A Star Shall Fall, which deals with the appearance of Halley's comet in 1736. In the meantime, the story "Two Pretenders" is an Onyx Court story set before the Onyx Court began, and I quite enjoyed that one, too.
新年快乐！新年快樂！
(I fail at greetings in other languages.)
Brennan, Marie. In Ashes Lie. New York: Orbit, 2009.
Disclaimer: The author is a friend of mine.
I was originally going to read some other books before I read the sequel to Midnight Never Come, but I had this one on my bookshelf and it called to me and I couldn't resist.
If the Elizabethan period is one of the most overdone in fantasy, the Jacobean period and the War of the Three Kingdoms is one of the most overlooked--I can think of only one other book, Neal Stephenson's excellent Quicksilver, that is set in this time period, and while Brennan's book starts in 1639 and ends in 1666, Stephenson's starts not long before that and goes much farther forward in time. This genre oversight is a real shame, because what used to be called the English Civil War or the Puritan Revolution is a fascinating welter of simultaneous things happening at once, as near to the total breakdown of the foundations of a society as many societies have ever come without collapsing entirely, and the divided loyalties and excruciatingly detailed and fought positions that were endemic in the period make for great human--or faerie--drama.
Brennan does a nice job of capturing the complexities of this period on the page, as well as making a woefully complicated story fairly clear, despite the somewhat baroque narrative structure that she adopts; though many things are theoretically robbed of their suspense by the jumping back and forth in time, the character drama still manages to keep the reader's attention, which is no mean feat. And indeed, in this book Lune, having claimed a throne at the end of the last one, must struggle to figure out who she is as a ruler and what is and isn't worth sacrificing, and for what. At the same time as she fights to keep her throne, the Prince of the Stone, Sir Anthony Ware, Bart., tries and mostly fails to keep his beloved London and England from tearing themselves apart. Their struggles are linked, as are their positions in the Onyx Court, and in Ware's increasing embitteredness and desperation I think the slow, grinding horror of any protracted period of civil war is well reflected. In particular, while I liked Brennan's writing the last time around, I thought it was even better this time.
it's only in comparison with Stephenson, whose narrative and characters are almost all resolutely anti-monarchicial (even when the exigencies of fate drive them into cahoots with various crowned heads), that I notice the more ambivalent portrayal of monarchy in Brennan's book, and I think that ambivalence reflects well the tortured politics that ran through the period and that created clevages and schisms between families and formerly bosom friends: if the human characters in the end accept monarchy again, it's as much out of exhaustion and resignation as anything else, and that acceptance having meaning is the cardinal sign of the irrevocable changes that the War wrought, which the narrative makes a point of acknowledging.
Anyway. It's fitting that Ware's successor as Prince of the Stone, Dr. Jack Ellin, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and I look forward to reading the next book, A Star Shall Fall, which deals with the appearance of Halley's comet in 1736. In the meantime, the story "Two Pretenders" is an Onyx Court story set before the Onyx Court began, and I quite enjoyed that one, too.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-03 02:23 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-02 21:45 (UTC)I must check out In Ashes Lie (I enjoyed Midnight Never Come, but then time elapsed and I forgot about the other books).
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-03 19:30 (UTC)Yeah, I liked it, in some ways better than Midnight.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-03 01:45 (UTC)---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-03 19:32 (UTC)I suspect that "once upon a time" coincided with the age in which it was called the Civil War and the whole narrative was those damned uppity Puritans slaying the rightful King, ohnoes!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-04 14:37 (UTC)Puritancause and the abuses they were fighting against. American writers aware of what the lack of attention paid to the Colonies meant to our history also tend to be sympathetic. And Sir Walter Scott, of all people, is startlingly nuanced in A Legend of Montrose and Old Mortality. (I haven't read his later Woodstock so don't know how he is there.)---L.
Edited to replace brainfart wrong word.