lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2007-08-11 02:52 pm
lightreads) wrote2007-08-11 02:52 pm
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Odd Magic by Patricia McKillip (2005)
Centuries ago, the mysterious giantess Odd founded a school of magic in the heart of the king’s city. Wizards learn there, magic ruled and regulated by the state. And once in a while Odd shows herself again, sending someone of her choosing down to the school as she does Brenden, the wild and untrained gardener of enormous natural power. Brenden is just one of many magicians in this book – the frustrated teacher tired of ruling his magic and his tongue, the king’s daughter secreting away her tiny illegal magicks, the people’s magician come to amuse the city with his illusions – and they all converge as the ancient seat of magic calls from the North.
Huh. You know how I used to complain about how McKillip’s imagery overtook her story? How she sometimes let the metaphors embedded in her scenery get so heavy they could nearly topple the whole book? How I wished she would be just a tiny bit less abstruse and a tiny bit more attentive to her characters as people, rather than walking, talking symbols?
Well she did, and I didn’t much like it.
Odd Magic is a book about the metered, precisely controlled magic of the school and the untaught, wordless magic of the wild. It’s about the damage people can do when they fear power. It’s about illusions, the magic trick kind that redirect the eye, and the real magic kind when you learn to really see something for how it is. It’s a book about the first quick look, and then that second look, and the power there.
All of which sounds like it should have lots of potential, and it’s a perfectly acceptable story, but I didn’t ever actually care, and McKillip wasn’t quite her focused, pithy self to carry me through. And the end left me surprised at its flat, happily ever after quality. I mean, I read McKillip for the way she tells fairy tales about roses, but always keeps the thorns in. And this book didn’t have any thorns at all.
I do have to say that I’ve collected yet another sharp McKillip definition of magic. She’s good at these, and at her very best mucking about in magic that comes straight from the brainstem and the heart, all instinct and the scored bedrock of hard experience.
Huh. You know how I used to complain about how McKillip’s imagery overtook her story? How she sometimes let the metaphors embedded in her scenery get so heavy they could nearly topple the whole book? How I wished she would be just a tiny bit less abstruse and a tiny bit more attentive to her characters as people, rather than walking, talking symbols?
Well she did, and I didn’t much like it.
Odd Magic is a book about the metered, precisely controlled magic of the school and the untaught, wordless magic of the wild. It’s about the damage people can do when they fear power. It’s about illusions, the magic trick kind that redirect the eye, and the real magic kind when you learn to really see something for how it is. It’s a book about the first quick look, and then that second look, and the power there.
All of which sounds like it should have lots of potential, and it’s a perfectly acceptable story, but I didn’t ever actually care, and McKillip wasn’t quite her focused, pithy self to carry me through. And the end left me surprised at its flat, happily ever after quality. I mean, I read McKillip for the way she tells fairy tales about roses, but always keeps the thorns in. And this book didn’t have any thorns at all.
I do have to say that I’ve collected yet another sharp McKillip definition of magic. She’s good at these, and at her very best mucking about in magic that comes straight from the brainstem and the heart, all instinct and the scored bedrock of hard experience.
“Magic,” he answered wryly, “is how you use what, in spite of all your good intentions, you learn.”