The Kindly Ones, by Melissa Scott
On the planets of Orestes and Electra, certain social crimes are punishable by "death" - the criminals are declared ghosts, and the "living" cannot speak to them or even acknowledge their existence. Only specially-licensed mediums can speak to both the living and the dead.
Trey Maturin is a medium from off-planet, a former actor occasionally undone by a penchant for the dramatic, working for the most powerful family on Orestes - who hate actors. Trey is simultaneously drawn to the beauty of Orestes' theatre and disgusted by the brutality of its customs. The "disgusted by" side gets kind of a boost when the family in question goes to war with two others over a pointless duel fought by two spoiled twenty-somethings. When things go too far, Trey is forced to pick up the pieces with the help of two space pilots - Leith, a former soldier from off-world, and Guil, an Oresteian woman who has declared herself "para'anin," or neutral and without family - and Rehur, former heir to Trey's employer, who chose to become a ghost to dedicate his life to acting.
This is an interesting concept and cast of characters trapped in a bog of unnecessary exposition. It's not a long book, but probably thirty to forty percent of the text consists of explanations of one aspect or another of Oresteian society or of piloting spaceships. This wouldn't be such a terrible thing if most of these details weren't irrelevant to the story. In the first chapter, Leith asks a number of questions about Guil's past. By the end of the book, none of them have been answered - but we are extremely well-informed about the Oresteian equivalent of dogsled racing. (They use alien polar bears in heat, and sometimes people die.)
Scott's book Shadow Man, about a society with five genders trying desperately to pretend there are only two, is very explicitly about sexuality and its social construction. Her strategy with The Kindly Ones is the opposite. If you weren't alert to the possibility, you could easily miss the fact that Leith and Guil are lovers until the last chapter. You could make it through the whole book without realizing that Trey - I'm hiding this, though it's a spoiler-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder - is never explicitly identified as male or female. In fact, this reviewer did so!
It's interesting that she was able to do that so smoothly, and I appreciate that this book came out in '87, when standards were different. But since it doesn't serve much narrative purpose, I'd have preferred that Scott be less coy about this stuff.
Fair Play, by Tove Jansson
Conversation with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thegeekgene, from whom I kind of stole the book:
thegeekgene: I just read this book by Tove Jansson.
Me: Is it about being moody lesbians by the sea?
thegeekgene: They're on an island.
This book is about how art is tortuous and sometimes it's an exercise in futility and it drives the people around you crazy. And how relationships are basically the same. Also, islands, old age, and boats. It's pretty funny. It's partially autobiographical - Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä did, indeed, create a little artists' colony for themselves on an island.
Jansson is best known for the Moomins books, a series of children's books about a little hippo-looking creature called Moomintroll. The books are astonishingly sweet and poignant, focused on the changing of the seasons, loss, disaster, and the all-powerful nature of mothers. The funny thing about this book is that it's so much like the Moomins books. You kind of get the feeling that they were also somehow autobiographical.
Though the book feels light for the most part, there are dark depths to it. But interestingly, it doesn't feel anywhere near as heavy as the two last Moomins books chronologically, Moominpapa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. The former of these was about death and despair, and the latter was a self-critical examination of Jansson's relationship with her fans, her characters, and her mother. MiN is possibly the most metatextual narrative I've ever encountered. Jansson'd had twenty-five years of writing about Moomins to build up a cosmology, and she clearly felt the weight of it on her, and chose to make use of it as she ended the series. Fair Play, written another twenty years later, long after Jansson had shed the burden of all that context, is gentler and less disturbing.
On the planets of Orestes and Electra, certain social crimes are punishable by "death" - the criminals are declared ghosts, and the "living" cannot speak to them or even acknowledge their existence. Only specially-licensed mediums can speak to both the living and the dead.
Trey Maturin is a medium from off-planet, a former actor occasionally undone by a penchant for the dramatic, working for the most powerful family on Orestes - who hate actors. Trey is simultaneously drawn to the beauty of Orestes' theatre and disgusted by the brutality of its customs. The "disgusted by" side gets kind of a boost when the family in question goes to war with two others over a pointless duel fought by two spoiled twenty-somethings. When things go too far, Trey is forced to pick up the pieces with the help of two space pilots - Leith, a former soldier from off-world, and Guil, an Oresteian woman who has declared herself "para'anin," or neutral and without family - and Rehur, former heir to Trey's employer, who chose to become a ghost to dedicate his life to acting.
This is an interesting concept and cast of characters trapped in a bog of unnecessary exposition. It's not a long book, but probably thirty to forty percent of the text consists of explanations of one aspect or another of Oresteian society or of piloting spaceships. This wouldn't be such a terrible thing if most of these details weren't irrelevant to the story. In the first chapter, Leith asks a number of questions about Guil's past. By the end of the book, none of them have been answered - but we are extremely well-informed about the Oresteian equivalent of dogsled racing. (They use alien polar bears in heat, and sometimes people die.)
Scott's book Shadow Man, about a society with five genders trying desperately to pretend there are only two, is very explicitly about sexuality and its social construction. Her strategy with The Kindly Ones is the opposite. If you weren't alert to the possibility, you could easily miss the fact that Leith and Guil are lovers until the last chapter. You could make it through the whole book without realizing that Trey - I'm hiding this, though it's a spoiler-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder - is never explicitly identified as male or female. In fact, this reviewer did so!
It's interesting that she was able to do that so smoothly, and I appreciate that this book came out in '87, when standards were different. But since it doesn't serve much narrative purpose, I'd have preferred that Scott be less coy about this stuff.
Fair Play, by Tove Jansson
Conversation with
thegeekgene, from whom I kind of stole the book:thegeekgene: I just read this book by Tove Jansson.Me: Is it about being moody lesbians by the sea?
thegeekgene: They're on an island.This book is about how art is tortuous and sometimes it's an exercise in futility and it drives the people around you crazy. And how relationships are basically the same. Also, islands, old age, and boats. It's pretty funny. It's partially autobiographical - Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä did, indeed, create a little artists' colony for themselves on an island.
Jansson is best known for the Moomins books, a series of children's books about a little hippo-looking creature called Moomintroll. The books are astonishingly sweet and poignant, focused on the changing of the seasons, loss, disaster, and the all-powerful nature of mothers. The funny thing about this book is that it's so much like the Moomins books. You kind of get the feeling that they were also somehow autobiographical.
Though the book feels light for the most part, there are dark depths to it. But interestingly, it doesn't feel anywhere near as heavy as the two last Moomins books chronologically, Moominpapa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. The former of these was about death and despair, and the latter was a self-critical examination of Jansson's relationship with her fans, her characters, and her mother. MiN is possibly the most metatextual narrative I've ever encountered. Jansson'd had twenty-five years of writing about Moomins to build up a cosmology, and she clearly felt the weight of it on her, and chose to make use of it as she ended the series. Fair Play, written another twenty years later, long after Jansson had shed the burden of all that context, is gentler and less disturbing.
