If I didn’t have Christmas carols stuck in my head, I would have been singing Les Mis to myself for half this book. 🙂

The Dalemark Quartet continues, with a book that takes on more directly the issue of oppression in the South Dales. Mitt’s family is driven from their farm to the city of Holand by oppressive rents, and his father gets involved with a revolutionary society called the Free Holanders, which in turn ends up recruiting Mitt and his mother Milda, too. But when the Free Holanders decide to finally do something other than sit around and talk, things start to go very wrong very quickly.

That’s half the story; the other half belongs to Hildy and Ynen, the grandchildren of the Earl of Holand. (70% of the names in this book begin with H. Hildrida and Hadd and Harl and Harchad and Holand and Hobin and hell if I can remember the rest.) As much as it sucks to be a commoner outside the palace, it isn’t all sunshine and roses being a noble inside it, either; you never wonder where your next meal is coming from, but you do get sold off into political marriages and watch as your grandfather hangs Northerners whose only real crime was to be driven into harbor by a storm.

This book is stronger on both of the fronts that I felt were lacking in Cart and Cwidder; the plot has a lot more momentum, and the emotions are much more strongly laid out. Sure, I wanted to kick the Free Holanders in the teeth for being so blind they couldn’t stage a revolution with both hands and a map — and sometimes I wanted to kick Hobin, too, for failing to more effectively point out why joining them was a bad idea — but it’s entirely realistic stupidity, which means it frustrates me, but doesn’t make for a bad story.

Other things I liked, before we LJ-cut for spoilers: Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer. Which is to say, the tradition of making those two figures and throwing them in the harbor is fabulous. Like the word “cwidder,” it feels very plausibly real, and ends up (as the title suggests) being very relevant to the story. I also liked the largely Ruritanian feel of the story; what with the revolutionaries and all, I half-believe that if you set sail across that ocean, you’ll wash up in Westmark. 🙂

The rest goes behind the cut.

Motifs I like, done right.

This is the first book of the Dalemark Quartet, which I know I read many years ago, but out of order and sufficiently spaced out that I don’t think I realized at the time the books made up a set.

In part, this is because — although I’ve afterwards thought of them as a Proper Series — these books are no more closely linked than, say, Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. They take place in the same setting, and maybe once I get further on (I’m in the process of re-reading Drowned Ammet right now) there will be more immediate linkages, but so far there’s no sense in which any of these books is a direct sequel to one before. (The exception may come in The Crown of Dalemark, which I want to say builds on all three of its predecessors. Then again, I haven’t read the thing in probably twenty years, so my instinct is not what you’d call reliable.)

The other reason I didn’t notice, the first (and I think only) time I read these books, that they belonged together, was because . . . they never really made an impression on me. I know some people love the Dalemark series; there are a number of Yuletide requests for it this year. Glancing at them, though, they all seem to be for later books: I didn’t see a single one for Cart and Cwidder, though I might have overlooked it. I think it’s entirely possible I’ll like the later ones better — Drowned Ammet is already off to a better start — but yeah, this one didn’t do a lot for me. It’s one of the earlier books, published in 1975, and it feels like it never quite hit its stride.

Before I get to unpacking that, though, a plot summary. The title refers to the fact that the protagonist, Moril, belongs to a family of traveling singers; they travel in a cart, and he and his father both play the cwidder, which is (as near as I can tell) a made-up stringed instrument, or maybe just a made-up name for a stringed instrument. (“Cwidder” is a reasonably plausible morph of “guitar,” to my eye, though the image on my book cover looks more like a lute.) They’re traveling in the South Dales, which suffer under a repressive set of earls, and trying to make their way to the North Dales, where Moril and the other children were born, and people can live free.

Now we can move on to the spoilers.

And the LJ-cut to hide them.

This is the third book in the “Fantasyland” set, following on Dark Lord of Derkholm, about eight years after the end of that book. It is less closely linked to Tough Guide to Fantasyland, though; the tours are done, and the world is sorting itself back into some kind of order, when Derk’s youngest griffin daughter Elda goes off to wizard college.

As I said before, I’m a sucker for the younger generation finding out just what they’re capable of. As a result, I really like Year of the Griffin, just for watching the protagonists deal with each other’s problems — Claudia’s jinx, the assassins after Felim, the dwarven rebellion that sent Ruskin, and so on. It’s amazing what you can do with a card catalogue and a bit of intellectual curiosity . . . .

I kind of want to kick Corkoran in the head for being so obsessed with his moonshot, even if I totally believe in that dynamic, academically speaking — the professor who’s more concerned with his pet project than with teaching. Wehrmacht I want to kick even more, for sheer incompetence. But they aren’t generally malevolent (not like Mr. Chesney in Dark Lord), and I’m not expected to sympathize with them as protagonists, so I can deal with that impulse. I quite Elda and Lukin and Olga and Claudia and Felim and Ruskin, and that’s the part that matters.

I’ve fallen behind on these, I’m afraid — the posting more than the reading. So, without further ado:

Dark Lord of Derkholm is the playing-out of the ideas treated encyclopedically in Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Derk and his family live in a fantasy world that has, for the last forty years or so, been playing host to Tours from another dimension, sending them hither and yon across the landscape in quest of clues to overthrow the Dark Lord. But the Tours are bankrupting their world; they’re sacking cities, trampling crops, laying waste to the countryside, and forcing everybody to fulfill the expectations (read: conform to the stereotypes) of these otherworldly visitors. The people in charge of setting things up for the Tours want to bring them to an end once and for all, so they appoint a wizard named Derk to play the role of this year’s Dark Lord, and his untrained, fourteen-year-old son Blade to be the Wizard Guide for the final Tour.

This is a fairly sprawling book. At 517 pages in my (mass-market) edition, it may well be her longest; I think only A Sudden Wild Magic comes close to challenging that. Dark Lord reminds me of that one a bit, just in terms of narrative scope. There’s a lot of stuff going on in here, as Querida, the High Chancellor of the wizard’s college, tries to manipulate things into going badly enough to end the Tours, and Derk and Blade (along with the rest of their family) run themselves to the point of ragged and beyond trying to do their jobs right.

I think my favorite stuff in here involves Derk’s family. There are so many neglected and abused children in her books, it’s refreshing to get something like this or the Montanas in The Magicians of Caprona, where there are a lot of people who may squabble, but ultimately love each other quite a lot. I did want to smack Derk sometimes; his tendency to retreat from unpleasant things into fantasies of new creatures reminded me a bit of Erg in “Four Grannies,” though he had much better reason for it. But I like his kids a lot, both the human ones and the griffins.

I suppose I should put the rest of this behind a cut.

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