Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Crossroads of Twilight

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

This is the book that killed me.

Prior to the publication of Crossroads of Twilight, I was willing (if not happy) to wait two or three years for each Wheel of Time book, slowly plodding my way toward the conclusion. After this one, I was done. I would not pick the series up again until the end was in sight — as indeed has been the case. All the way through this re-read, I’ve been bagging on CoT, dreading its arrival . . . but wondering, subconsciously, if maybe I had mis-remembered; maybe it was just the disappointment of having waited more than two years, or the disconnect caused by not re-reading previous books, and it wasn’t really as bad as I thought.

Reader, I did not mis-remember.

This book is, from beginning to end, the Catastrophic Failure Mode of Epic Fantasy Pacing. It is everything I’ve been critiquing since The Fires of Heaven, writ extra large, with underlining. Hell — to the best of my knowledge, it is the one book about which Jordan ever publicly admitted, “you know, maybe that wasn’t a good idea.” Given the flaws I’ve been pointing out along the way, that admission should tell you something.

Going into it, I wondered how I should approach analyzing this book. What could I say that I hadn’t already said before? I suppose this post could consist of me tearing out my hair and going “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH,” but that’s not too helpful. Instead I decided to approach this systematically: reading the book, I noted down the number of pages in each chapter, the point of view character(s), and, in no more than one sentence, what important events take place. What changes in the chapter? What new thing do the characters (or the readers) learn? What fresh problem starts, or old problem concludes? Having done that, I now have a wealth of evidence to back me up when I tell you:

NOTHING BLOODY HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK.

And I don't just mean in the hyperbolic way people usually accuse this series of.

brain bunnies

So last night I write a little over 2300 words on A Natural History of Dragons, and then it’s Very Late, so I go to bed, and lie there for a little while, and then get up and go back to the computer and type in this:

I’m one of those people who, soon as you tell me not to do something, I turn around and do it. Because fuck you, even if you are a friend. And Tia wasn’t that much of a friend.

So I’m talking about how I’m bored with the Meltdown and there’s this old club over on Hall I might check out, and she says I shouldn’t, and we argue about it a bit until she says — only half-joking — “J, I forbid you to go,” and that’s it: to hell with her. Which I say. So she storms off, and I pin up my favorite skirt with some giant safety pins, braid gold LEDs into my hair, and go off to see what this old club is like. Because fuck Tia, and anybody else who tells me what to do.

I’m not sure why my brain decided that 4:30 in the morning after 2300 words of novel was the ideal time to mug me with a framework and two opening paragraphs for a “Tam Lin” retelling that could possibly cruise all the way through without having any fantastical content whatsoever (only then where would I sell it?) . . . but that’s how it goes, sometimes.

The funny thing is, I’ve had the opening page and a half for a “Tam Lin” sequel story hanging out in my “unfinished” folder for years now. And now I’m wondering if what I need to do is throw out everything but the first line (“Faerie trouble never really goes away.”), splice a bit of fantastical content into the story up above, and then link these two together.

Well, no need to decide right away. I have several deadlines breathing down my neck which take first priority. But it’s a thought for the future.

The DWJ Project: Conrad’s Fate

The people up at Stallery Manor keep “pulling the probabilities” — manipulating chance to change the world into one that’s more favorable to them. The problem is, this causes all kinds of spillover changes, most of which go unnoticed by people elsewhere in the world (things have always been that way, right?), but which are readily apparent to people living in the town of Stallchester. Conrad, a boy of twelve, gets sent up there to become a servant and sniff around for the cause of these problems . . . and also to kill somebody. You see, Conrad has an evil fate: some kind of bad karma hanging around from a past life, when he failed to take out somebody he was supposed to. If he doesn’t make good on that now, he’ll die before the year is out.

And then things get more complicated when an older boy named Christopher shows up, from another world, looking for his missing friend Millie.

Yes, this is another Chrestomanci book (and I think the only other story that shows us Christopher in his pre-Chrestomanci days). I bore it a bit of a grudge the first time I read it because I wanted MOAR CHRISTOPHER DANGIT, and that isn’t this book; I liked it better now that I was reading the book it actually was. Really, what it is could be described as “the Chrestomanci series meets Gosford Park / Downton Abbey;” a lot of the story revolves around the servants-eye view of a grand household, first as vast amounts of effort are spent on keeping three people in style, then as a bunch of guests show up.

The rest of the details go behind the cut.

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a glimpse inside my mind

So I’m watching the last Harry Potter movie — don’t worry; no spoilers — and at one point there’s a shot which completely distracts me from the movie. This has happened before with the films.

But as I leaned over and said to my husband a moment later: this time I was distracted by contemplating dragon anatomy, and not by trying to ID the slice of London flying by in the background.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new series has clearly moved in and set up house.

The DWJ Project: Charmed Life

Since I got a request for Witch Week, I postponed the Dalemark books in favor of doing the Chrestomanci ones instead. But never fear, I’ll get to them all. 🙂

After Eric Chant (nicknamed Cat) and his older sister Gwendolen are orphaned in a steamboat accident, Gwendolen, who is a powerful witch, schemes to have them taken in by Chrestomanci as his wards. But Chrestomanci refuses to let Gwendolen go on learning magic — Cat, for his own part, doesn’t seem to have any — and so she begins causing trouble, and plotting with some rather unsavory magical types to boot. When Gwendolen pulls off her most spectacular trick, Cat finds himself saddled with the resulting mess.

This is actually the first Chrestomanci book, though it’s third chronologically, and decidedly not the first one I read. (That was Lives, and then maybe one or both of Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona; I can’t remember precisely.) I never quite read it with the right eye, though, since I came to it as a Christopher fangirl, and accordingly process Chrestomanci through a lens that didn’t actually exist when the story was written. Also, many of the things going on in the story were from the start entirely obvious to me, since I already knew the setting.

Despite me having that odd perspective on it, this is a delightful book. It has all the hallmarks of DWJ’s writing, from the whimsy to the interesting world to the deft handling of some really, really unpleasant elements. But saying more involves spoilers, so behind the cut we go.

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tonight’s random internet question

Abseiling/rappelling without mechanical aid (i.e. by wrapping the rope around your body): I’m guessing there is a high likelihood of bruises around your ribs or waist? Especially if you aren’t experienced?

Any other tidbits of information on that sort of thing are equally appreciated. Rope burns on the hands? Etc.

(Yes, I just sent Isabella over a cliff. It’s not the meanest thing I’ve done to her — but that will surprise no one.)

Fifty days!

The countdown continues. Today, I share with you my research photos from last year.

It is, as usual, only a tiny selection from the whole: 39 pictures, when I took somewhere between five hundred and a thousand. But a lot of those are blurry, terrible reference shots from inside dimly-lit museums, or placards reminding me what the next photo in the sequence is, or things that wouldn’t mean much to anybody but me. I chose these to give you a sense of some of the things, places, and people that are important in the novel, with a few tossed in for sheer aesthetic pleasure, and a couple more for nostalgia.

Plus a whole wodge of shots from the Natural History Museum, because the decoration in there really has to be seen to be believed.

The rest of my photos, including those from previous Onyx Court research trips, are here.

Books read, June 2011

In which it will be obvious that I am now working on a novel.

Dreaming of Wolves: Adventures in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, Alan E. Sparks. I don’t actually remember how much of this book I got through — not all of it, certainly — but whatever, we’ll count it as read. I picked it up for environmental detail on the aforementioned Carpathian Mountains, as it is the account of a man who went there as part of some wolf-studying project. It’s not very well executed, but I got what I needed from it, more or less.

The Land Beyond the Forest: facts, figures, and fancies from Transylvania, E. Gerard. More research, and again I didn’t read the whole thing; just the section on Romanians. This was written in the late nineteenth century, and wow, the racism. I have to quote:

Briefly to sum up the respective merits of these three races, it may be allowable to define them as representing manhood in the past, present, and future tenses. The Saxons [of that region; not of England] have been men, and right good men too, in their day; but that day has gone by, and they are now rapidly degenerating into mere fossil antiquities […] The Hungarians are men in the full sense of the word, perhaps all the more so that they are a nation of soldiers rather than men of science and letters. The Roumanians will be men a few generations hence, when they have had time to shake off the habits of slavery and have learned to recognize their own value.

Yeeeeeeeah. But, well, I’m writing a nineteenth-century-ish novel set in a Romania-like region, so I don’t regret picking this up from the library. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be copying from it all that closely: there is merit to Isabella being obsessed with dragons and really quite careless of human notions like racial superiority.

Eight Days of Luke, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

The Snow Queen’s Shadow, Jim C. Hines. If I’d gotten around to posting this sooner, I could have said, ha-ha, I have this book and you don’t, nyah nyah. But the book is out now, so I’ll skip that part and go straight to the bit where I say that Hines has done a remarkable job wrapping up this series. He’s said elsewhere that it took him a while to figure out that the fairy tale books have been about questioning and complicating the notion of “happily ever after,” and this delivers on that theme, in very excellent ways. (Also, to echo Mris: this series is now done. So if you’re one of those people who prefers to wait until you can get all the books, you’re now cleared for take-off.)

Deep Secret, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

So far, July is shaping up to be the Month of Much Manga. (And comics, but that doesn’t alliterate, so.) But we’ll see how it goes.

The DWJ Project: Warlock at the Wheel

Another short-story collection, and more successful than Stopping for a Spell — but that’s largely because it includes a few stories I think are better than anything in that collection; some of the others here are just as forgettable. In other words, the quality is very uneven.

“A Plague of Peacocks,” “The Fluffy Pink Toadstool,” and “Auntie Bea’s Day Out” all feel a lot like the pieces in Stopping for a Spell, being of the “person is unreasonably awful and then gets their comeuppance via magic” type that I really just don’t enjoy. I wasn’t much of a fan of “Carruthers” either, which feels much the same even though its structure is different, and “No One” was a less-than-confident foray into science fiction.

The three I liked better:

“Warlock at the Wheel” is (loosely) a Chrestomanci story, and benefits from that by having more plot momentum than the ones I mentioned above. After Charmed Life he goes on the lam, but very incompetently, and hijinks ensue. It isn’t up to the standards of her novels, and Jemima Jane is rather like the Izzies in The Merlin Conspiracy (by which I mean she sets my teeth on edge), but it did entertain me by confirming the speculation I made when I posted about The Homeward Bounders: Chrestomanci’s agent Kathusa has a Kathayack Demon Dog, which is either a hell of a naming coincidence or a direct pointer toward Joris’ Home world.

“Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” was the best of the lot for me. It sets up far more complete of a world than any of the others, and ditto characters; in fact, it almost feels like it’s connected to something else, but to the best of my knowledge that isn’t the case. (Please do mention in comments if I’m wrong.) I would definitely have read more about Siglin and the Dragonate and the Thrallers and the whole heg business.

“The Sage of Theare” is also good, and also a Chrestomanci story. It’s more conceptually complicated than “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight,” but less successful for me on a character and worldbuilding front (which is why I prefer the other). If it could have married its philosophical ideas about questioning and doubt and order and chaos to a firmer narrative framework, I would love it.

I think I’ll do the Dalemark Quartet next, but I’m still open for requests for things people would like to see me tackle sooner rather than later.

The DWJ Project: The Merlin Conspiracy

At the request of elaine_th.

This is, as mentioned before, a sequel of sorts to Deep Secret, albeit a loose one. The only significant connection is the re-use of Nick Mallory as a character; Magids also appear, but this book has much less to do with the Upper Room and other Magid affairs, being mostly about the world Blest.

Like Deep Secret, though, it divides itself between two protagonists: Nick, who gets flung out of our world and has to help three people before he’ll be able to come home, and Roddy (Arianrhod), a Blest girl who’s trying to stop the titular conspiracy. She, of course, is one of the three people Nick helps (or rather, promises to). And then there’s Romanov, a very powerful magician who starts out seeming like an enemy, but ends up being more interesting than that.

In one structural respect, I think this one works a bit more smoothly than Deep Secret did: the alternation between Nick’s pov and Roddy’s jerks around much less than the Rupert/Maree equivalent. This may partly be because the narration is less explicitly framed as taking place at a specific point in time; aside from the opening couple of lines, that drops away until nearly the end of the book. (Contrast Maree’s entries, which were being written more in realtime, which caused unfortunate difficulties.) The flip side is that Nick and Roddy spend much less time on the page together; they’re off on near-separate tracks until about page 360.

Which got me thinking: of the DWJ books I know well, nearly all of them are either written from a single pov (third limited or first), or the omniscient perspective of a narrator. The exceptions are all later books: these two and Enchanted Glass; maybe others I’m not remembering. So I’ll put it to the LJ hive mind and ask, is this impression correct? Are pov shifts something she started doing later in her career? Because they don’t feel like something she was entirely comfortable with on a technical level.

As for details of the plot, we go behind a cut for that.

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this one’s for all the gamer geeks

Tonight’s Random Game Concept that sprang up in my head:

(Old) World of Darkness game, cross-genre. Let the players make any kind of PCs they like — Kindred, mages, changelings, mummies, whatever, and you play a short prologue.

Then the barriers get torn down. All of them. The walls between this world and the Umbra, Shadowlands, Dreaming, Yin and Yang Worlds, all the rest of it.

And you run the rest of the chronicle as a post-apocalyptic Exalted game.

It’s a new Mythic Age, not the one from the Exalted books. You’re throwing out all the setting information, so you don’t have to worry about why your ex-mummy Solar Exalted is cooperating with an ex-mage Sidereal, etc. You get all the fun of apocalyptic world destruction, with GIANT MAGIC POWERS, a legitimate reason why the PCs might be able to really reshape all of reality. It would be EPIC BEYOND WORDS.

. . . I think I want to run this.

And sixty thousand words!

So, after a very difficult decision (in which I had to convince myself that buying extra icon space on LJ would only lead go overload in the long run), I have settled on not one but two winners for the A Natural History of Dragons icon contest. First, scottakennedy, for something wonderfully period (though I may ask you to switch the text just as soon as I make up my mind what I want!), and second, pathseeker42 for hitting a target she didn’t even know she was aiming at. From the book:

When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away. With much excitement, I brought it for my mother to see, but by the time I reached her it had mostly collapsed into ash in my hands. Mama exclaimed in distaste and sent me to wash.

Our cook, a tall and gangly woman who nonetheless produced the most amazing soups and souffles (thus putting the lie to the notion that one cannot trust a slender cook) was the one who showed me the secret of preserving sparklings after death. She kept one on her dresser-top, which she brought out for me to see when I arrived in her kitchen, much cast down from the loss of the sparkling and from my mother’s chastisement. “However did you keep it?” I asked her, wiping away my tears. “Mine fell all to pieces.”

“Vinegar,” she said, and that one word set me upon the path that led to where I stand today.

If found soon enough after death, a sparkling (as many of the readers of this volume no doubt know) may be preserved by embalming it in vinegar. I sailed forth into our gardens in determined search, a jar of vinegar crammed into one of my dress pockets so the skirt hung all askew. The first one I found lost its right wing in the process of preservation, but before the week was out I had an intact specimen: a sparkling an inch and a half in length, his scales a deep emerald in color. With the boundless ingenuity of a child, I named him Greenie, and he sits on a shelf in my study to this day, tiny wings outspread.

Compare that to this:

Yeah, you see why I had to take both.

So congrats to you two! E-mail me your mailing addresses (send them to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com) and I’ll get ARCs of Fate on their way toward you shortly.

Sixty days!

I will send everyone off into the weekend, and the month of July, with a nice big chunk of With Fate Conspire, in which we meet Eliza and Dead Rick both.

New material begins here, or you can start back at the prologue if you prefer. Be sure to keep clicking through; I’ve posted several scenes!

Now also seems a suitable time to mention that Marissa Lingen has beaten Harriet Klausner to the punch, posting the first review of With Fate Conspire. No spoilers, so you can read it without fear!

Results of the icon contest for A Natural History of Dragons will go in a separate post, because you’ll be getting a little treat there, too . . . .

On Women and Fighting

wshaffer linked to an interesting column over on McSweeney’s titled Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting. The posts range around quite a bit, from actual combat-related thoughts like A Short and Potentially Hazardous Guide to Sparring Strategy (which might be of interest to the “writing fight scenes” crowd — I promise, I haven’t forgotten about that) to more philosophical things like “On Impact” to pretty good social commentary like “Dressing Up, Looking Down.”

Some of the things she says bother me, because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that she acknowledges herself to be a woman with a shitty temper, and that her behavior is not necessarily a model you should follow. But it makes for interesting reading regardless.

Listening Through

Does anybody else do this?

I’ll be listening to a piece of music, something I’ve heard plenty of times before — frequently it’s a track from some film score, though other kinds of music can do it, too. Then suddenly, my ears shift focus, in much the same way I imagine those “magic eye” pictures resolve from meaningless noise into meaningful shapes (I actually can’t see those worth a damn). I find myself listening through the music to a layer I never noticed before.

I don’t know if that makes any sense. It would be easier to explain in person; I would put a piece of music on and wave a hand in the air to illustrate which harmonic line I’ve switched focus to. (It’s always a harmony; the melody is what I’m listening past.) Not infrequently it’s something the bass elements are doing, because they more often provide the foundation or embroidery to the melody in the treble — but sometimes it’s a high counterpoint I never really noticed before, or something in the middle registers that was somehow tucked away inside all the other things I’d heard before.

(I sometimes wonder if the way my brain processes music qualifies as synaesthesia. I often conceive of it in spatial or kinetic terms, and I was annoyed when I found out that “texture” didn’t mean what I wanted it to, musically speaking. Individual sounds have texture, goddammit, although it isn’t the same as the texture I feel with my fingertips. I guess I mean “timbre,” but my brain insists that no, if it mean timbre it would say timbre, and what it said was texture.)

In other words, I shift my attention to an instrument or line I hadn’t noticed before — but it really feels like I’m listening through to it. As if the rest of the instrumentation was the reflection on a glass window, and I just now managed to look past that into what lies behind the glass. It just happened to me a moment ago, sparking this post — “Pageant,” from the Cirque du Soleil show Kà, for anybody who’s curious; there’s a bass counterpoint that suddenly leapt out at me — and if you can do the trick, Michael Kamen’s score for Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves is a lovely, lovely thing to listen to, especially the track “The Abduction and Final Battle at the Gallows.” That’s the first piece that ever refocused for me, and I still love to close my eyes and follow all the different layers as they come in and out.

But yeah. I’m almost certainly not the only one who does this, but I sometimes wonder, and isn’t that what the internets are made for? I’d love to hear how other people experience music in general, whether you process it in terms of other senses or whatever. Tell me I’m not alone in being weird. 🙂

The DWJ Project: Deep Secret

I was about to read The Merlin Conspiracy when I remembered that it’s technically part of a series, of which this book is first. I have no idea whether it’s necessary to take them in order — I’ve only read The Merlin Conspiracy once, years ago — but I figured I might as well.

Deep Secret is the first of two Magid books, which take place in a multiverse setting that isn’t the Chrestomanci one (though you could probably find a way to graft them together). The worlds exist in a Mobius loop/infinity symbol configuration, one half of which is “Ayewards” and magically positive, the other half of which is “Naywards” and magically negative. In the middle is the Koryfonic Empire, straddling eleven worlds and going downhill fast. The entire thing is supervised in a fashion by Magids, who serve a collection of entities referred to as the Upper Room, who are sort of godlike, to the extent that their nature is ever made clear.

Rupert Venables, the most junior Magid, is having to deal with two problems at once. First, he has to find a replacement for a more senior Magid who just died (though Stan hangs around as a disembodied voice to help him out). Second, as junior Magid he’s in charge of the Koryfonic Empire, even though he lives on Earth, and the Empire is having some rather serious problems. His efforts to pick a replacement keep being interrupted as he gets dragged away from Earth to deal with problems on Koryfon — but, as the laws of narrative efficiency would lead you to expect, it turns out those two problems aren’t as unrelated as they seem.

Much of the pleasure of this book comes from its setting. You see, Rupert decides to simplify his Magid search by pulling all his candidates together in one place. The requirements of a magical node, the balancing of fatelines, and a mundane excuse to lure the people there mean that everybody winds up at a science fiction convention in Wantchester. And so the book is filled with lovingly-observed details about con culture: all the weirdness and friendliness and administrative drama that such events bring. (I seem to recall hearing once that the hotel — where, thanks to magical disturbances, one can make endless right-angle turns without ever coming back around to the elevator — was inspired by an actual hotel used by some con in Britain, probably one DWJ had been to. All I can say is, we’ve got one of those here in the States, too.)

I also quite like both Rupert and Maree Mallory, the other major protagonist in the story. Rupert takes a while to warm up — the first few pages aren’t as immediately engaging as in most of DWJ’s books — but Maree has a strong narrative voice. And this is a more adult book than most of hers; I think Rupert is twenty-six and Maree is twenty, and certainly there’s more in the way of swearing, sexual overtones, and explicit violence than I recall in the others. (Certainly it’s on the long side, compared to most.) All in all, I quite like it.

But I do have a couple of quibbles, plus some more spoilery things I like, which will go behind the cut.

Spoilers ahoy!

The DWJ Project: Eight Days of Luke

This book is the reason I can never quite believe that Loki is evil.

See, it was my very first introduction to Norse mythology. I’d long adored D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, but had not yet encountered its northern counterpart. (I think the edition of this novel I read back then had an afterword explaining who the gods were, or all the reveals at the end would have flown totally over my head.) Thanks to Diana Wynne Jones, I’m subconsciously convinced Loki’s a sweetie who never really meant to hurt anybody.

It’s also the last of my top tier of favorites, which means I did a book recommendation for it yonks ago; read that for a plot summary.

This was her fourth book published (third fantasy), and as fjm said in the comments to Witch’s Business, it’s the first one to really feel like a DWJ novel. Not just because of the neglected kid protagonist, but because the fantasy isn’t random; it’s a meaningful layer to the story, and not entirely shiny. Luke may not be a villain, but he isn’t quite what you’d call good, either. He’s far too pleased with his own cleverness and power, and not inclined to think about the cost to others unless somebody reminds him.

As I stray into specifics…