The Tortallan Greek Chorus

One of the things I find most off-putting when rereading Tortall is the way that the world warps itself to confirm the awesomeness of the main characters. Oftentimes secondary characters act as a sort of Greek chorus, laughing whenever the main character says something witty and admiring whenever she does something admirable. (It's not just the main characters who get this treatment; in the Alanna books, Jon is treated much the same.)

Take this scene from Wild Magic:

The glass-crowned one was finally the only monster alive. She hovered just out of Onua's range, one of the K'Mir's arrows lodged in her shoulder.

"Pink pigs!" she snarled. "How dare you defy me, maggots! You filth!"

"Look who's talking," Daine shouted, sliding an arrow onto her string. She lowered her bow, wanting the creature to think she was done. "Your ma was a leech with bad teeth," she taunted. Onua laughed in spite of herself. "You da was a peahen. I know chickens with more brains than you!"

The queen screamed and dropped, claws extended. Daine brought the bow up, loosing as she reached the best point in her swing. Her arrow buried itself in the queen's eye as Onua cheered.

It's really an odd scene. Onua's standing there, bow trained on the Stormwing. But when the Stormwing dives into her range, she doesn't shoot, even though Daine isn't aiming at the Stormwing. She just stands back and cheers as Daine shoots. Did Daine's witticisms make Onua laugh so hard that she lowered her bow?

Onua's laughter is strange here, anyway. It's presented as if Daine's just so funny Onua can't help herself, but that doesn't make sense. Daine's mild witticisms might make Onua laugh after the battle, as a release of tension. But when Daine starts cracking wise they're staring down a murderous Stormwing, and Onua knows that her friend Numair may be lying dead in the bog somewhere close by.

And why doesn't the Stormwing finish her attack? Daine's shot isn't fatal, and the Stormwing has good reason to keep fighting: Daine and Onua have just killed all the Stormwing's comrades in arms. Why doesn't the Stormwing finish them both off in vengeance? Especially given that Onua's too busy cheering for Daine to shoot?

It's like the characters - including the bad guys! - are conspiring to make Daine look amazing. At eleven I bought it hook, line, and sinker, but reading it now, it just strikes me as poor writing. For goodness' sake, Daine talks to animals! She doesn't need any extra help to be awesome!

More Elephants

More elephants! I’ve got kind of an elephant thing going here. Most recently I’ve been reading Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, which is good but frustrating.

On the one hand, there’s a lot of interesting information here - elephants can coordinate their movements with other elephant groups from over four miles away, for instance, communicating through sounds too low for humans to hear. (Humans can feel the sounds, though, like the deep reverberations of a church organ.) And much that’s horrifying: when hunters cull elephant herds, they always take care to kill all the elephants they find in one place. Out of kindness. So the elephants left behind aren’t traumatized.

I suppose from a certain point of view that is kind. Which makes it horrifying.

What I find frustrating - and I realize this is as much a result of my own rationalist biases as anything else - is that the book is sprinkled with dreams and general mysticism. A lot of animal writing has this streak of mysticism, which is one thing in a memoir about a pet cockatiel or whatever. But this memoir is supposed to be more or less scientific, so what are the dreams doing there?

Especially given that Payne doesn’t seem to take them entirely seriously. One of the earliest dreams, just after Payne realizes that elephants communicate through infrasound, features the elephants telling her that they didn’t tell her about their secret communication method so she could tell just anybody.

And then Payne...proceeds to tell everybody about the elephants’ secret communication method, and never refers to the dream again. No sense of guilt for breaking faith with the dream elephants? Why even bring the dream up if she didn’t think it mattered? Her forward suggests that she included these dreams out of a desire for completeness, but the book would have been stronger without them. Good books are created as much by leaving things out as by putting things in.