Fic: Reunion

[osprey_archer]

Oh! I wrote a fic! asakiyume asked for a fic about Martha and Ivy from The Changeling, a wonderful book by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - possibly my favorite book by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, although I've loved an awful lot of her books. The book is centered around best friends Martha and Ivy and their imaginative games and it is one of the best renderings of imaginative childhood that I've ever read, ever, so as you might expect it's taken me a while to write the fic about it because I wanted to do the source material justice.

But at last I've finished it! And here it is.

Title: Reunion
Fandom: The Changeling, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Rating: G
Summary: After years apart, Martha and Ivy reunite in New York City.

Comments

[asakiyume]

And it's so, so good ♥ ♥

[osprey_archer]

It's just so nice to imagine Martha & Ivy meeting again!

[kore]

OMG I LOVED that book. Took me years and years and years to find again, in the pre-internet days.

[osprey_archer]

It is truly a cult phenomenon. Not many people have read it, but when you find someone who has, the general response is "I LOVED THAT BOOK."

[kore]

It took FOREVER to find, partly because I had mashed it up in my memory with Naylor's Witch Water. //facepalm

[conuly]

Wasn't their fantasy world eventually written up as the Green Sky Trilogy?

[osprey_archer]

Yes! It changed a bit in the movement from one book to another - I don't think Martha & Ivy's Green Sky was ever a utopian experiment - but the bones are still there.

[asakiyume]

And I found the books in backward order! I read Green Sky first, then saw The Changeling, which--the edition I read, anyway--had a quote from Ivy pretending to be from Green Sky, on the cover, and I was like, "heeeeeeyyyyyy.... " I realized right away that the game in The Changeling had to have been the seed for the trilogy and was fascinated to realize I was seeing into the author's mind, seeing that she couldn't let go of this game, had to write not one but THREE novels about Green Sky. ... I loved the Green Sky books as a kid too.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! I loved the fact that you could sort of trace the evolution of this idea from one book into another - the fact that it started out in one place, but grew into a very different thing, although still with some marked similarities: the power of friendship saves the world or at least keeps it from going down a very dark path at the end of book two.

The Green Sky trilogy also does the thing I often want books to do, in that it follows up that grand climactic moment with an entire other book about the aftermath of this big earth-shattering event... although I also thought the trilogy kind of exemplified why people often don't follow up like that, because the third book did feel anticlimactic to me.

[asakiyume]

For whatever reason, I didn't find the third book anti climactic--I think possibly because the stories had already sort of stopped being stories for me and were mainly detail-adding items for my own life of the imagination. I spent so much time imagining life in Green Sky. I was kind of interested in what the problems would be, too. But I do remember thinking that the Big Death that happens in the story--the one that supposedly brings all the people together to find a peaceful way forward and abjure violence forever--was unlikely to have the intended effect. I probably read the book when it came out, which--the internet tells me--was 1976, so I was 12 or 13. Already at that age I thought, "Hmmm, this sounds like wish fulfillment." ... Or possibly that's later-me imposing my later judgement on past-me. We **wish** a sacrifice like that would have that effect ... maybe it does, but only for a while. But maybe a while is all it takes, in some cases.

.... Sorry, I'm thinking out loud in a comment box.

[osprey_archer]

In my case I think it was partly that I had too much time to built it up in my head: the library only had the first two books so I had to wait ages till I could read the third, and of course it's hard for any book to live up to that kind of build up. (Although I think in any case I would have been disappointed that there's less Teera & Pomma in the third book. I liked everyone in those books, but they were my favorites!)

And yes, I agree with you about the Big Death. (I don't think anyone else is reading this, but just in case: Spoilers hereafter!)

It might tide them over in the short term, and they don't seem to have the technology to manufacture guns (or whatever the weapon Raamo carried into the abyss was: IIRC it burned the woman who was carrying it somehow, as if it held some corrosive chemical, which doesn't sound very gunlike). But that doesn't mean that they're not going to start beating each other with sticks at some point in the future.

I think there's meant to be some Christ-figure symbolism in Raamo's death, but it doesn't really come together. Slipping and falling into an abyss just isn't a martyrdom in the same way as a violent death at human hands, you know? (Even if he's sort of killed by the malevolent strength of the tool-of-violence itself: "Its power still lived and took strength from the minds and Spirits behind him that had not yet denied it. A numbing indecision gripped him, making the urn seem to cling to his hands. He struggled to release it; and in the struggle, he slipped forward and plunged over the precipice.")

But then the theological underpinnings (or maybe "the underlying beliefs about human nature" expresses it better?) in Greensky are quite different from traditional Christianity: the whole experiment was an attempt to escape original sin, to show that our natures are truly good, at least in the right environment.

I go back and forth about what I think ZKS's conclusions were in that trilogy, and whether I think she was right. The books are good material for thinking with. And who could read them and not want to fly with a shuba?

[asakiyume]

My impression was that the main thematic conflict was between the notion that innocence/lack of knowledge is the only way to achieve a peaceful state on the one hand, and, contrariwise, knowledge/remembrance being the only way to prevent the mistakes of the past. The ones in favor of innocence were so committed to that view point that they were willing to separate out people and imprison them--and that caused the spirit waning.

She seems to be arguing against the old Blake-ian Innocence v. Experience thing, which I appreciate.

But a person might argue that the problem was that they retained a secret privileged class who knew about the evils of their forebears. Maybe if all that knowledge had truly died, things would have been different. ... I doubt she herself felt that, though. And, that wouldn't solve the problem of irreconcilable differences of opinion about fundamental matters.

[osprey_archer]

I always liked the fact that Raamo's people were called the Kindar - like in kindergarten: children. It's not exactly subtle but sometimes subtlety is overrated, anyway.

But actually one of the things that I like about Greensky is that it is pretty subtle, especially compared to many modern-day teen dystopias. Of course, it's not a full-blown dystopia; it's a utopia that's slowly rotting because of the secrecy and privilege of the Ol-zhaan, but there are also parts of the society worth saving.