Jan’s Place

When menacing dark shapes run through a moonlit wood, a kind of ur-storytelling is at work. Wolves! Bones and a blood-streaked shawl begin this tale of revenge and poisonous jealousy, but a cool stream runs through these woods and healing and forgiveness are carried in its slow-moving waters.

A mystery frames the story — a part-Ojibwe antique dealer feels a strange connection to an old native American drum and uncharacteristically steals it, then begins a search for its history. Told as a completely separate vignette, the central story of the drum revolves around a lovetorn woman who leaves her husband to live with her lover, taking her young daughter and a newborn baby on a ride on the moonlit night of wolves. The daughter will die, torn to pieces. Has a soul-shaking murder taken place, with the mother throwing her daughter to the wolves to save herself, or has a great soul sacrificed herself for her family? The act will reverberate through centuries on the bitterly drained and beaten Ojibwe reservation, surfacing in the story of a young girl who struggles to save her siblings from cold on another freezing winter night mirrored in time.

Erdrich is a master storyteller with a cool, lyrical delivery. Her stories seem told through an antique glass, perfectly sharp, but distanced by time and art into something beautiful and rare, even when she writes of the present. Suffering and hard endurance are everywhere in these tales of native Americans destroyed by love or by alcohol, bound with the thinnest threads to some hope of salvation in their traditions. But sorrow is burnished and silvered with long handling, and the deep love of a mother for lost and wayward children oversees it all.

There are false steps in this novel. The antique dealer’s story never quite focuses, and her personal search for the drum’s history is totally elided. Anaquot’s forgetting of her daughter’s death does not seem believable in an otherwise sane and canny woman. The three central tales are separated and abrupt; some attempt at binding might have been wise. But these things hardly matter in the face of the dark, bitter, loving, and sometimes even funny tales she tells.

Magical events fill the story, and you could fault this book for a fuzzy Native American mysticism, but that would miss the point that the true magic here is storytelling - weaving the past into the present with meaning and vitality - and the universal lure of a ghost story on an unquiet night. The buried heart of the story - a young girl with transformative powers to help her troubled people - beats true. I have no particular belief in Native American magic, but this book affirms that a storyteller’s magic is an ancient and powerful thing.

Miles Vorkosigan has one of my favorite lines in space opera - “Miles, what have you done with your baby brother?” Okay, you had to be there, but if you’ve gone all the way there through the previous five or so novels, this stealthy question cracks open the door to adulthood. Miles, the hyperactive kid genius, really does grow up. Bujold takes him believably from lunatic adolescence to maimed middle age, where he beaches and slowly stands.

I recently reread the whole series and found it held up better than I expected, even though the plot lines are noticeably thinner on second reading, with the typical problem of genius novels - it doesn’t make much of a story if the genius figures the whole thing out at once, but if he doesn’t, what kind of genius is he? With a full reading, the panoramic view of a wounded, hyperactive boy-wonder reaching middle age held my interest more than the plots. My favorites are still the middle novels, particularly Mirror Dance (home of the baby brother Miles has misplaced), since these mark the change Miles undergoes in his twenties as he faces the end of his strength as the renegade admiral and has to remake himself.

I also liked the last novel (Diplomat Immunity) considerably better this time through. I felt earlier that the self-pity that soaks the Curse of Chalion novels was beginning to show up, and I thought Bujold had been right to bury the series. Miles (known as the Mutant Lord in a world where mutants are killed) always walked a fine line with self-pity. Bujold keeps it in check with his manic edge when Miles is young, but in the late novels this is gone. Reading straight through the novels this time, I found that the reverberating question of Mirror Dance - will you take on adult responsibilities when your only defense against pain has been adolescent energy? - is worth the glimpses of self-pity, and I was not so glad that the series ended.

I have short-changed Terry Pratchett in my reviews, but it’s mainly because I don’t pause to write a review, I pick up the next book and keep reading. I think he is a true gem of fantasy and the best comic writer I am aware of working in any field. He writes in loose series in his fantastical Discworld: the witches, Rincewind and the wizards, vampires, Death and his daughter, and the City Watch. My favorites tend to be the City Watch books, because I think Pratchett uses them to present his humanistic views on religion, racism, parenthood, and civilization in the Century of the Fruitbat. “Thud!” is the latest in the City Watch series. I suspect that the understory here is the explosion of British racism, because Pratchett has laced his book with dwarves and trolls in an escalating storm of racist violence. Memories of an ancient battle fuel the fires, but perhaps someone is playing fast and loose with history to keep things hot.

As with all the City Watch books, Commander Vimes is the heart of this story. He faces a ridiculous excess of clues, a vampire recruit who drives his werewolf detective mad, a mysterious troll leader named Mr. Shine, and a coven of insane religious dwarves, while struggling to meet his vow to make it home every night in time to read “Where’s My Cow” to Young Sam at six o’clock sharp. “Where’s My Cow” figures largely in one of the wildest battles in fantasy, and frames the great and vulnerable love Sam has for his son. One of the best passages in the book describes his discovery that he has become hostage to fortune by having a child: “And then, one day, his son had turned and looked directly at Vimes, with eyes that for his father outshone the lamps of the world, and fear had poured into Sam Vimes’ life in a terrible wave. All this good fortune, all this fierce joy… it was wrong. Surely the universe could not allow this amount of happiness in one man, not without presenting a bill.” The bill is presented, but Vimes is not a hostage fortune will find easy to take.

Vimes is one of my favorite characters in fantasy: a decent, tough man with a wry sense of humor and a love of the hard streets. He is kin to some of Phillip K. Dick’s hard-beaten men, and perhaps most closely to Jonathan Carroll’s police chief in the Wooden Sea. These are men who persevere and remain honest and decent by their own lights, without falling to religious certainty or self-righteousness. They sigh and go to work, becoming some kind of giants in the process.

I have emphasized the serious aspects of this book, but it is also extremely funny. My favorite new character must be the Mark Five Gooseberry Disorganizer, who has to address the Commander as “Mr. Insert Name Here” because Vimes refuses to set up its menus. There are always strange joys and sudden laughs in a Pratchett book, and this is one of his best.