lightreads

3/5. Later written but chronologically long ago prequel to the Old Kingdom books. So the usual – a teenager flung into magic and court politics.

This book fooled me nearly to the end. I assumed I had it figured out from page 1. Our protagonist was immature and self-centered, willfully disinterested in the justice or injustice of the struggle she is dropped into. But she'd grow up quick enough and take up the responsibilities thrust upon her, and blah blah blah, I thought. And then I was kind of bored, because she wasn't doing that, and she wasn't doing that, and the whole book was sort of shallow and blinkered and angry, and not what I've come to expect from Nix. Did he lose his form, I wondered?

And then around the 85% mark I sat up and said oh quite loudly, because I'd suddenly realized what book I was actually reading. And that book uses its shallowness to fool you – under the surface, it is sad and frightening. And – not compassionate. But kind, in a clinical 'this, too, shall be told' kind of way.

Not the story I thought it was at all. Did I enjoy it? Sort of. But I wasn't supposed to, not exactly. Or my unthinking enjoyment was supposed to have the rug yanked out from under it in favor of something much more complicated.

Abhorsen by Garth Nix

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Talking about Lirael and Abhorsen together as they are in reality one book cut in half, probably to keep the length down for young adult readers (remember when we did that?). Two young people – an introverted and depressed magical librarian, and a prince trapped in familial expectations – find each other in order to battle an ancient evil.

These books reminded me of Fullmetal Alchemist (can't quite put my finger on it, but a similar sense of eerie morbidity around young people exercising power) and more strongly of Diana Wynne Jones (an unflinching, genuinely frightening story leavened with talking animal humor). Needless to say, I liked these books. They have a richness to them, which is a funny thing to say when I point out that they are incredibly economical with worldbuilding. Characters frequently pass back and forth over an ancient wall – staffed by military forces – which divides a magical kingdom from a nonmagical country (well, except when the north wind blows strongly). The book leans heavily on the wall and the divide, thematically, and the history of the wall is intimately tied up with the ultimate climax. But do we learn more than a few scraps about its construction? Nope. Nix has mastered that trick of creating magic and mystery in the blank spaces.

But mostly, I wanted to say that I will be thinking about the role of death in these books for a while. It's one of those universes where the true horror of death is not dying, but that you might come back. That changes the entire shape of the thing in complicated ways. Some of them remove drama from the story – at a certain point, various protagonists' miraculous survival or resurrection becomes expected – but it also adds a bit of strange mystery, a sense of the truly alien in the fantastic.




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