rymenhild

Camilla was born into the Comyn, or nobility of Darkover. She was assaulted by bandits at the age of thirteen. After this she decided she no longer wished to be a woman, so the head sorceress of the planet (who was, not coincidentally, Camilla's aunt) secretly performed the neutering operation on her. Camilla trained as a soldier. Eventually she joined the Renunciates or Free Amazons, an order of women who eschew male protection and reclaim their own lives. When we meet her she's a hard-bitten, scarred veteran who very rarely smiles. She's old and ugly and grim and not precisely female. For reasons I have never been able to understand, Magda (the main character in this trilogy, a Terran/Darkovan woman who has also joined the Renunciates) takes Camilla as a lover. This wouldn't annoy me nearly as much, I think, if Magda didn't also have a brilliant, beautiful, bisexual best friend named Jaelle. (Magda and Jaelle actually got married, to each other, in canon, for legal reasons. But nooooo, Magda still slept with Camilla. What a waste.)

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sovay

. . . That spork comment was quite unnecessary, thank you very much.

*goes off to apply beefsteak to her blackened mind's eye*

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I apologize. Should I get you an ice pack?

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sovay

I don't think it'll do much good. How about a new inner vision? One that preferably does not contain sporks, please?

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kleio-the-muse.livejournal.com

Ooh, entirely agree with you about Pamela. Its morals are high enough to make you air sick!

Those 'improving' books of the 1700s really took it a bit too far, promoting the virtues of chastity and marriage at every possible turn. Naturally they served a function in their own time and were immensely popular, but to us reading this 300-page heroic struggle that ends up in rather a twisted marriage is simply pure pain. This is precisely why I prefer Sterne and Fielding, and lately also Smollett. Sure, they're all part of the same time and values, but at least they approach the objective from the opposite side and hence have a few good laughs while they're at it:)

Ever read Fielding's 'Shamela'? (http://departments.mwc.edu/~wkemp/engl381/18century/shamela.htm)

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Yes, actually, in the same class in which I read Pamela. Shamela was a breath of refreshingly manure-scented air after Pamela, I must say.

The most fascinating thing I realized in that class was that Shamela is fanfiction. So is Joseph Andrews, and so are the dozens of unauthorized continuations of Pamela that flooded the market soon after Pamela's success. Fanfiction is not a new concept at all.

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I still think Mendenbar is wonderful combination of superpowers and random thought processes. He strikes me as being extremely competent, except when he's being too befuddled by Cimorene (and we all do silly things when falling for someone; heck, she starts being potentially embarrassed by her political education, which is about as unlike herself as she can get), in everything except his weird assumption that he needs to do everything himself, personally, including reinvention of the wheel. Both of these weaknesses are pretty consistent with most twenty-year-olds I've known. (Whoa, when did these characters get so YOUNG?)

Daystar is certainly more subdued than his parents, though I kind of figure anyone raised in the middle of nowhere by Cimorene might be a little bit like that. The benign influence of strong parents is frequently overwhelming, particularly without any real access to the outside world. (Interesting question: if Cimorene's parents had been more of her mindset, would she ever have led such an interesting life, or just gone on being a Latin-reading princess of some local notoriety?) I would be curious to see what he would turn into as he grows up and has a chance to incoporate his adventurers and come into his own as something other than his parents' plot device. If he doesn't take the chance, of course, I would be inclined to reassess.

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Wait a sec- Mendenbar is 20? That's my age. Eeep. I mean, I adjusted with the majority of Madeleine L'Engle's books (conveniently my favorite is about an old lady: won't have to worry about that one for a while)- but Mendanbar still feels at least 3 years older than me. Oh well.

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I know. That makes Mendenbar four years younger than me. Bizarre.

Which L'Engle book is your favorite? Is it possibly the brilliant and extremely undervalued A Severed Wasp?

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It is indeed. I'm not even sure how I got my hands on it any more- but it's one of the very few books I actually take to school with me- everything else I snab from the BORG library, of which I am conveniently the custodian. But yeah- I like it that much. I take it you're rather fond of A Severed Wasp as well?

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I am indeed rather fond of A Severed Wasp; I tend to reread it once each time I go home for a visit, but when I came back from winter break I decided I really wanted to have it around oftener than that, so I brought it to California.

It's not unflawed. The present-day plot devices, especially the ones involving Yolande Undercroft, are much less interesting and creative than the flashbacks, in my opinion. I do think it's one of L'Engle's strongest works, though. Katherine is a very powerful protagonist, and the supporting cast, especially Felix, Mimi and Justin, work around her very well.

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"The king of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain."

(Frighteningly, I just sort of automatically pulled that from memory.)

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sovay

*boggles slightly, adjusts mental perceptions of one's own age*

Talking to Dragons was the first Enchanted Forest book I ever read, back when it still existed only in a MagicQuest paperback and I'm not sure she'd written any of the others yet. Then in elementary school sometime I encountered Dealing with Dragons and, although the chronology of writing confused me, immediately realized: whoa. This must be Daystar's mom. So my impressions of Cimorene were for a little while tangled up with the earlier book, although I quickly sorted out that there must be plot in between that I simply hadn't seen yet; and promptly pestered my parents to teach me how to make cherries jubilee. (Is it illegal to teach nine-year-olds how to make alcoholic desserts in hopes of attracting dragon?) Did this happen to anyone else? Or did you all read the books in plot order?

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I read Dealing With Dragons in a library hardcover copy at a fairly young age, then spent years remembering it fondly but vaguely, unable to remember the title (but for some reason distinctly remembering the line, "he can't talk about anything but tourneys, and half of what he does say he gets wrong" -- except that I didn't believe tourney was a word, so I figured I must have gotten it wrong). Then I received it for a birthday and pounced on it and read it about a gazillion times. One day when at the library, I went to see if Wrede had written anything else, and discovered that, to my amazement, there was a sequel -- Searching for Dragons. I was totally obsessed with the two books (this was in seventh grade, I think) and eventually had to do a sort of self-intervention. Then my mother brought home Talking to Dragons, which was sort of intriguingly disorienting because whoa, how did we get here? I think I always felt that Daystar was more of a vehicle for the plot than the other way around, and I found the delivery of the plot quite absorbing, probably the moreso based on what I knew of the past. Then I of course had to scrounge up Calling on Dragons (well, or have my mother order it) to find out the intervening story. It was less captivating than the other three, at least to me, but at least it was an excuse to spend more time in the world and with the characters.

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sovay

Unless I am grievously mistaken, I read Calling on Dragons in sixth grade, in Nova Scotia. I borrowed a copy from one of the other girls in my class, having run through all of my own books quite early on in the trip. Mostly what I remembered was the Trina Schart Hyman cover—I love how she renders the characters—and the click of "Ah, this is how we got here." Morwen's cats. Killer, very blue and levitating. I still think the earlier books don't mesh as seamlessly with Talking to Dragons as they might, but this may be the danger of writing the last book first. Fortunately, we have "Utensile Strength" in her Book of Enchantments to provide a somewhat more consistent closure for the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (at least as far as I can tell). Also that ubiquitous appellation ". . . of Doom." Applied to a frying man. How can you lose?

Entirely off-topic: have you read Mairelon the Magician and Magician's Ward? If not, you might like these very much. They are Regency romances in a slightly alternate England—the same setting as Sorcery and Cecelia and The Grand Tour (although I have not read the latter) which she wrote with Caroline Stevermer. With all the usual complications of Regency romances, of course, made only slightly more complicated by the addition of magic. Good stuff.

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I never thought of Daystar as hampered by his education - very interesting. My general reading was that Talking to Dragons is just early work of Wrede's, and Daystar was the kind of main character that demonstrated that Wrede didn't know how to write main characters yet.

I really like that description of Mendenbar.

And yes, I would also like to know how these characters got young. I'm feeling old today.

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As I read it, Daystar has a perpetual bafflement and sort of confused but adamant disciplinedness that I admit to being fond of. It gets sort of repetitive, but to me it made sense for a sixteen-year-old whose entire life has been spent gearing him to go stick a sword through a magical barrier without knowing what he's doing or why. And what sort of healthy rebellious stage can you go through when you have a mother who responds to whining by telling you strictly that if you're going to be rude, do it for a reason and get something from it, can't be argued down, and is as far as you've seen always right?

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And I haven't read Pamela, but eesh, that sounds intolerable. Why do people still read it anymore? Does it have anything besides historicness to reccommend it?

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It was the first really widely popular novel, assuming a novel is defined as a work of "realist" prose literature at or above a certain formless length. ("Realist" in quotes, because the style of writing commonly called realism adheres to only one of the many ways to represent reality, and it does not actually represent reality very well.) People who study novels like that kind of thing.

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Daystar floated right out of my head, honestly.

I see your point on Camilla, although I'd never thought about it- I almost liked her best as Marco in that short story. Dunno- I was just glad Jaelle got herself away from Peter, myself.

I never noticed that about Joshua, I'm just not cynical and aware enough of my reading, darn it.

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I don't think I know the short story. Where is it?

Also, yes, Peter was an utter waste of space. I didn't think hard enough about him to want to put him on the list.

Joshua is just one of a number of I-Am-Allegory-Hear-Me-Roar characters in Starfish, I think. All of the new characters in that book have frightfully obvious names like Arcangelo or Typhon Cutter, and they play their parts just as one would expect. Joshua annoys me most, though, because his presence is not actually necessary for any kind of plot development. He is there simply to die for everyone's sins. He's like Aslan, minus the awesome lion powers.

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I forget where it is originally, but I'm pretty sure it's reprinted in the pink book of her short stories- it mostly just says Darkover in big letters, I think there's something else to the title. I'll check tomorrow- now I'm too lazy to start up the catalog server.

Fair enough. That one was rather short on actual character development. Maybe That's why it was never one of my favorites... Although I do remember giving my mother a copy as one of my first attempts at uncoached gift giving, circa age 10.

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Aslan also has the impressive quality of being the only instance I know of in which someone has written an omnipotent, benevolent God as a really effective and convincing literary character. And depending on one's inclination and mood, you could count the Bible in that.

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Are you sure he's benevolent? I'm not. Note separation of sheep and goats in The Last Battle.

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I tended to put that down more to the difficulty of writing a benevolent Last Judgment than to anything about how Lewis generally drew the character. I did think (though I've only read half the books) that he managed the synthesis pretty well up until that point -- there are a lot of baffling questions raised in The Last Battle, but they seem to be straight from the source material.

There's also something problematic about a God who oversees everything except when he's attending to something else and just sort of isn't there, but no one's really come up with a better explanation on that one, theologically.

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...Why is it plotworthy that someone would lose here virginity to her husband? Or do I not even want to know?

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She was an upper housemaid and he was her master. He had no intention of marrying her. The first two hundred fifty pages of Pamela consist of all sorts of nefarious schemes by which Mr. B attempts to steal Pamela's virtue. Eventually, having failed in all of the schemes, Mr. B discovers he truly loves Pamela and wants to marry her, and she discovers she's been in love with him for quite a while.

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That sounds like that could be an interesting story, written rather differently than I gather it is, with some independently intriguing characters and with a sense of humor. Maybe a good comic opera.

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