Among Others, Jo Walton (365 Books, Day 220)

[rushthatspeaks]

Yesterday's review.

This is where I would ordinarily put a disclaimer, saying that the author is a dear friend of mine, and also that she sent me a copy, and thus you may not wish to trust my critical objectivity. But I refuse to disclaim anything. Of course the review I am writing here would not be the same if she weren't a friend. However could it be? This is a book that is a present from a dear friend on both an existential and a practical level, and how often does that happen? The hell with objectivity anyway.

Another thing: when I was quite young, there was a house in our neighborhood which I had the freedom of, because its owners were friends of my parents. It had a separate basement entrance, which I used frequently; this would be the house in which I once found, wrapped in an old African fishing net, among other books nineweaving's Moonwise, and read it by candlelight in the autumn leaves blowing from the open door. This house had a very large yard, larger than any other for miles, one hillside and part of another with a stream at the bottom, and its own tract of forest. And for years I knew, I was absolutely positive, that that forest was dangerous because it was filled with giant spiders, which had emigrated from Mirkwood after the fall of Sauron. I had seen black squirrels there, and the water of the stream was undrinkable and foamed and was also black, but my main evidence was simply looking at the wood. I went all through it, of course, when I could muster the nerve, but there were also many times I got up one hill and down the other as fast as possible. Because I knew. If I went back there now, I might well still know. You ought to keep this in mind, when you are considering what I have to say about this book; and if you ever knew anything like that, and remember knowing it, you should read this immediately.

Mori Phelps is in England, having spent her childhood in Wales; and is with her father's family after having escaped her mother's, because her mother is a witch; and is in boarding school for the first time, and it is worse than she'd imagined. And there are things in the past that keep coming to chase her, involving her mother's witchery and ambitions, and the death of her beloved twin sister, and of course the fairies.

There is a way in which this is an odd book if you know the author, because some of it is autobiographical, and a lot isn't, and I cannot swear either way about the fairies. But all the books Mori reads are real, and Mori reads, Mori reads the way you do when you have no friends and no trustworthy family and you have realized that the library was designed by the loving Fates to be your best home in the universe. And of course all of it, the reading and the magic and the wanting friends and the not having family, comes together, is all of a piece, is a flowing graceful thing that may not seem initially as though it has plot, but does.

I don't know how this will be if you haven't read the books involved, at least the ones that are most influential on Mori. There is one that seemed important that I haven't read, John Fowles' The Magus, and that worked fine, but I don't know how things would be if you haven't read any. (I haven't read a great many of the less influential.) You could certainly use this as a recommendation list, because it is very good at telling you why you ought to read these other things, and I intend to do that-- I very badly need to reread The Lathe of Heaven now, which I haven't in a few years. I think everything in the book explains itself, has enough context, if you need it. There's a point at which Mori finds a secondhand copy of I Capture the Castle, and thinks to herself that she'll try it the next time she's in the mood for a good historical, and if that makes you smile, to know that she has that ahead of her and what it will actually be, you should read this: and if not, the book will tell you why to read I Capture the Castle. So you see.

Apart from that, I can't tell you how good the book actually is. It has too much of my childhood in it. The books and the libraries, and I went to a girl's school that was modeling itself as hard as possible after a British boarding school, and there are similar things between Mori's family situation and mine. And I had the same incredulous curiosity about the British university system that Mori has about the American one (you didn't want to go to an American university, Mori, they'd have made you take four more years of math), and I also at fifteen got all my rules about sex from Heinlein and then realized that theory and practice are not, on occasion, similar. This is in addition a book that not only has my childhood in it but the ways I survived-- I remember spending my teenage years carrying a go-bag-- I have no idea how this will be for anyone else, this is my book for me and I am keeping it and I will love it forever. Besides which, as I said, it is in multiple ways a present from a friend I love.

So there's my review.

Comments

[jmtorres]

I just spent all day facefirst in this book! I'd bought it off a rec from Cory Doctorow on boing boing a while back and hadn't had any time to read. In the last week or so I've been grabbing old comfort books from my childhood off the shelf because I wanted to read and didn't have the brain for new things. But last night I went looking for another old comfort book and picked this one up instead and was completely unable to put it down, and I feel as if I just read about fifty of my favorite comfort books from my childhood, along with Mori.

[rushthatspeaks]

It does have that effect, doesn't it! It has gone straight onto my comfort reading shelf.

[dorothean]

This finally came in at the library (I have been trying not to spend money on books lately) and I just finished it. Thank you so, so, so, so much for writing about it. I probably wouldn't have found it otherwise and oh, I needed this book. I loved it so, so much. I'm going to buy it after all.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, /that/ was what I should be buying. Thank you for reminding me before I finished.

[sorenlundi.livejournal.com]

I am so glad I skipped over Heinlein and got my rules about sex from Delany instead.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I replaced the ones from Heinlein with the ones from Delany, It was a good idea.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I loved the book too, though I've read relatively few of the titles Mori does - at least amongst the science fiction. I did read and enjoy The Magus at about her age though. I'm not sure if I would today, and am afraid to try: I haven't been able to get on with other John Fowles since, but want to carry on liking The Magus because it is an Island Book, and Fowles was involved in turning Steep Holm into a nature reserve. That's the level of my lit crit!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I liked The Collector, which I read around Mori's age, but only made it a third of the way through The Magus before storming away from it in a fury. I thought the author was playing games with the reader, only to show how smart the author was: which is not a privilege of fiction. (I was quite pompous, as a teenager.) Haven't gone back to Fowles since.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

No, you're right, he actually is doing that, sort of.

I still like it, but it would be a much better book if he hadn't cheated and had allowed it to be fantasy and therefore make sense.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Fowles after The French Lieutenant's Woman because he was so obviously having me on. Not in a sharing the joke way, either. I take it this was a tendency of his?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Have you read the short story "The Ebony Tower", in the collection of the same name?

I think he thought he wasn't allowed to care seriously, and yet he was naturally a passionately serious person, and it harmed his sincerity. I think he's an excellent but flawed writer, and I think The French Lieutenant's Woman is the closest he came to actually doing something.

He wouldn't have got the attention or the money if he'd written in genre, but he would have been allowed to commit, and it would have been much better for him. This is not just my fifteen-years-old opinion, it's my considered adult opinion.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That is a totally fair reason to like The Magus.

Mori reads a lot more hard sf than I do, though almost all of my gaps are on the list of things I've been meaning to read one of these years.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I am halfway through Among Others, a copy lent by a friend, and am already regretting the fact that I will have to give it back.

I have read most if not all of the books she's talked about so far, but mostly back when I was a teenager myself. At some point I think I might like to reread in parallel, to have the books as fresh in my mind as they are in Mori's...

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have been considering doing that! There are things in there I haven't read, but nothing I am aware of actively disliking.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

We are probably not the only two. It might become a Thing, over time: not quite a meme, but a sort of known challenge. (For me the Plato would be a challenge - as Peter says, philosophy is a closed book to me - but hey, I can rise to that. And I haven't had that sort of saturation in golden-age SF since my own '70s teenagerdom, and it'd just be so interesting to revisit: not just the books, but my own experience of the conversation between the books. Or something.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

(Uh, for clarity - my golden-age SF. Fifties, sixties, seventies.)

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Your review has me teary. I am almost afraid to read this book -- from what I hear most people saying, it is one of those books, that will sink hooks into my soulmarrow and tug. But that is a great deal of expectation to bring to a book, and I would rather try to forget all that I've heard said, and come across it just as I came across I Capture the Castle, knowing nothing of its contents.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That is indeed a good way to approach it. If it helps, none of the other reviews I've read have adequately reflected my experience.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

How interesting to know where those spiders ended up!

(I'm glad you like it.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I never saw any, but you could hear them rustling, behind you, on grey days in midwinter, and then run for it.

(I love it. Thank you.)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

So Moonwise and Among Others are portals to that same wood? I am honored. It's a book that's a box of books: just wonderful.

Nine

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It is indeed a book that's a box of books, that's the best description of it I've heard yet.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed this book very much and thought it was beautifully-written and, just generally, very good indeed.

I read it having read very few of the books Mori read. The end effect was that the book as a whole makes perfect sense, but large chunks of it (the discussions at the book club, mostly) are almost completely opaque. The one thing that did confuse me was what the heck a karass was (and I have read Cat's Cradle, but the term had slipped my mind), but I looked it up and then it made sense.

What did confuse me was not the book but the other reviews of it I read, which described it as a paen to SF fandom. I didn't get that at all—thought it was a book about family and fairies and books—and was glad I preordered it before I saw those reviews, because I would not have nearly as much looked forward to a book about SF fandom as I did a book about books, family and fairies. (That isn't to say that they were wrong in describing the book like that; I'm sure, to them, it was. But my reading didn't get that at all.)

[janni.livejournal.com]

I'd been wondering what someone who was just like a half-generation or so younger than me would make of this book, because it did feel a little dependent on knowing the books (which I was at the very edge of sort-of doing), but I wasn't sure how much, so it's cool to know maybe not very much at all.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's possible that, had I had less patience, I would have gotten bored during the SF book club scenes... but they're far enough into the book that I don't really think so. (It helps that the most SF-heavy scenes are far enough in that, even if I can't follow, I'm at least already invested.)

The interesting thing is that I quite enjoyed Among Others myself, but many (not all) of the other reviews I read felt like reviews of an entirely different book!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

None of the reviews I've read have reflected my experience remotely.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I probably fit that age cohort but I was raised by a (very introverted private hobbyist) Golden Age SF fan who Did Not Approve of the New Wave and the seventies in general but had all those books around. I have no idea what fan-types of my generation usually grew up reading.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Do you remember how the film of Lathe of Heaven was? I keep wondering whether I should put in the work to track it down.

It sounds as though your parents and my father would have gotten into a serious snob-off in opposite directions at each other-- my father is still all 'why are you reading these senseless postmodernist ideological tracts that don't focus on scientific ideas and the Glorious Future of Tomorrow?' I used to read Dick in front of him just to annoy him.

There is nothing to be done with a person whose favorite is Palmer Eldritch. I can't finish that one. My favorite is either A Maze of Death or Galactic Pot-Healer, and I have a sneaking half-annoyed fondness for VALIS.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It did not strike me as a book about SF fandom, much, unless I am doing fandom wrong in some way, which is entirely possible.

I am glad to hear it makes sense without a lot of the supplementary reading. I have read slightly more than half of what Mori has, and can cheerfully recommend any of the ones I've read, though of course I have no idea what I think of the other half.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who was much more a fantasy reader than an SF reader, and about 10 years younger then Jo, it is entirely comprehensible without the book references. (I mean, I've read Heinlein and so on, but not things like Dick or Brunner.)

So yeah. Book about an outsider, struggling with that outsiderness. (And yet cultivating it, and only the fact that it's so English didn't have me overidentifying like whoa.) About family, how it sometimes breaks, and sometimes (can be) unreliable. About intellect and emotion. About magic. Yeah. Damn good book, and I really think most people are mistaking the forest for the trees, in reviewing it.

(I had a swamp, not a forest.)