In The Hand of the Goddess
Apr. 28th, 2012 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe great Tortall reread continues! I've finished In the Hand of the Goddess, and naturally enough, I've been thinking about Pierce's handling of the gods. Her gods peaked in Alanna: The First Adventure: there's a sense that of the gods are distant, unknowable, powerful and perhaps benevolent but still terrifying.
Whereas In the Hand of the Goddess begins with the Goddess showing up to act as Alanna's life coach, which rather drains the mystery and the terror from her. And the gods only become more knowable from here on out; by the Trickster books, they simply seem like extremely powerful, but ultimately petty and fallible humans.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that - the Greek gods are much like that in myths - except that, 1) Pierce doesn't seem to want to take this to its logical conclusion - she seems to have these fuzzy ideas about these gods being just and benevolent and wise that she can't quite shake, even though they don't really play out in practice; and 2) the characters don't find the gods nearly as terrifying as they should, given that the gods are just petty humans who happen to have the ability to toss around thunderbolts.
...my thoughts on this issue are still fuzzy. I think I'll have more to say once I've reread In the Realms of the Gods, which I barely remember, because I never reread it, because I was so displeased by the (to my eyes) utter out-of-left-fieldness of Daine/Numair.
A:TFA also has the best sense of the Gift as something powerful but precarious. In the later Tortall books - indeed, in a lot of fantasy books - people talk a lot about magic going wrong and backfiring spectacularly, but we never see it happen. Magic seems about as dangerous as electricity.
And electricity can be very dangerous, I know, but no one worries that they're going to set their house on fire every time they flip a light switch. I suppose for magic to be really useful, it would need to be pretty reliable...but that makes it seem much less, well, magical.
(A lot of worldbuilding advice suggests that a good fantasy world needs to have strict rules for magic, which I don't agree with. I think it's important for magic to have limits - and for authors to stick to those limits - but for magic to have specific rules, like laws of physics, that it follows every time, makes it so much less numinous or mysterious or interesting.)
On a completely different note, Pierce's take on romance is skeevier than I remembered it being, and I was never really big on her romances. There's this line, about George's pursuit of Alanna: “He hadn’t kissed her since Jon’s birthday almost a year ago; but he let her know - with little touches, with softness in his eyes when he looked at her - that he was stalking her.”
Stalking her? Maybe that word didn't have all the negative connotations in the 1980s as it does today? But...even without extra negative baggage, a hunter stalking a deer is not really an attractive image.
And this isn't even getting into Jon. (I'm going to discuss Jon more after reading Woman Who Rides Like a Man.) What strikes me about Jon, in this book, is how perfunctory his characterization is: he's more of a character space on which readers can project their fantasies about princes, than a fully realized character in his own right.
Whereas In the Hand of the Goddess begins with the Goddess showing up to act as Alanna's life coach, which rather drains the mystery and the terror from her. And the gods only become more knowable from here on out; by the Trickster books, they simply seem like extremely powerful, but ultimately petty and fallible humans.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that - the Greek gods are much like that in myths - except that, 1) Pierce doesn't seem to want to take this to its logical conclusion - she seems to have these fuzzy ideas about these gods being just and benevolent and wise that she can't quite shake, even though they don't really play out in practice; and 2) the characters don't find the gods nearly as terrifying as they should, given that the gods are just petty humans who happen to have the ability to toss around thunderbolts.
...my thoughts on this issue are still fuzzy. I think I'll have more to say once I've reread In the Realms of the Gods, which I barely remember, because I never reread it, because I was so displeased by the (to my eyes) utter out-of-left-fieldness of Daine/Numair.
A:TFA also has the best sense of the Gift as something powerful but precarious. In the later Tortall books - indeed, in a lot of fantasy books - people talk a lot about magic going wrong and backfiring spectacularly, but we never see it happen. Magic seems about as dangerous as electricity.
And electricity can be very dangerous, I know, but no one worries that they're going to set their house on fire every time they flip a light switch. I suppose for magic to be really useful, it would need to be pretty reliable...but that makes it seem much less, well, magical.
(A lot of worldbuilding advice suggests that a good fantasy world needs to have strict rules for magic, which I don't agree with. I think it's important for magic to have limits - and for authors to stick to those limits - but for magic to have specific rules, like laws of physics, that it follows every time, makes it so much less numinous or mysterious or interesting.)
On a completely different note, Pierce's take on romance is skeevier than I remembered it being, and I was never really big on her romances. There's this line, about George's pursuit of Alanna: “He hadn’t kissed her since Jon’s birthday almost a year ago; but he let her know - with little touches, with softness in his eyes when he looked at her - that he was stalking her.”
Stalking her? Maybe that word didn't have all the negative connotations in the 1980s as it does today? But...even without extra negative baggage, a hunter stalking a deer is not really an attractive image.
And this isn't even getting into Jon. (I'm going to discuss Jon more after reading Woman Who Rides Like a Man.) What strikes me about Jon, in this book, is how perfunctory his characterization is: he's more of a character space on which readers can project their fantasies about princes, than a fully realized character in his own right.
