The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovich
Dec. 11th, 2016 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Hanging Tree
4/5. Book six, delayed but worth the wait. First because it's good, second because it might actually have gotten me into these books as a fandom. It's been coming, but I wasn't quite there before.
Anyway, about the book. It's thematically expanding on familiar ground in that its concerned with faces, real and metaphorical. The Faceless Man's mask comes off, and in a most satisfying way, too. If he had to be an unknown, humanizing him first – his grief was clearly real, if homicidal – was a great way to do it. And Lesley has a face (several faces?) And we have a face nailed to a tree (yes book thank you, I get it) and, in a more abstract sense, Olivia's coming out to her mother, another kind of revealing oneself. And Tyburn herself, with a detour to the former Tyburn and all that implies in the changing of the river, the change in its embodiment. I could go on at length, since the whole book is variation on the same theme.
This is not as much a Tyburn book as the title might leave one to hope, but she is there. I continue to really enjoy what she and Peter are textually and subtextually arguing about. On the surface it's purely political. Underneath…it reads to me like an argument on the different modes of being black and being a force for change in a white institution. Because there are different modes of doing that, and I don't think either of them actively dislike the ways the other has chosen. They're just orthogonal and, sometimes, at cross-purposes.
Anyway, predictions. I've said it before and I still think that we're heading towards something semi-apocalyptic, at least on a local level. If the Folly is still physically standing at the end of this, I will be shocked. Also, Peter, thank you for finally stopping to follow the same chain of speculative logic thatgnomad and I did after, like, book four.
4/5. Book six, delayed but worth the wait. First because it's good, second because it might actually have gotten me into these books as a fandom. It's been coming, but I wasn't quite there before.
Anyway, about the book. It's thematically expanding on familiar ground in that its concerned with faces, real and metaphorical. The Faceless Man's mask comes off, and in a most satisfying way, too. If he had to be an unknown, humanizing him first – his grief was clearly real, if homicidal – was a great way to do it. And Lesley has a face (several faces?) And we have a face nailed to a tree (yes book thank you, I get it) and, in a more abstract sense, Olivia's coming out to her mother, another kind of revealing oneself. And Tyburn herself, with a detour to the former Tyburn and all that implies in the changing of the river, the change in its embodiment. I could go on at length, since the whole book is variation on the same theme.
This is not as much a Tyburn book as the title might leave one to hope, but she is there. I continue to really enjoy what she and Peter are textually and subtextually arguing about. On the surface it's purely political. Underneath…it reads to me like an argument on the different modes of being black and being a force for change in a white institution. Because there are different modes of doing that, and I don't think either of them actively dislike the ways the other has chosen. They're just orthogonal and, sometimes, at cross-purposes.
Anyway, predictions. I've said it before and I still think that we're heading towards something semi-apocalyptic, at least on a local level. If the Folly is still physically standing at the end of this, I will be shocked. Also, Peter, thank you for finally stopping to follow the same chain of speculative logic that
gnomad and I did after, like, book four.