Bedframes and Bayern

Here is a snapshot of our new raised garden bed. Earlier this week I planted fava beans and Austrian winter peas for ground cover. As I write, the frame of the bed is being leveled—probably not the ideal order of things. We will see what occurs next.

Let me now proceed with the first of a long backlog of book reviews.

Not much of one to pay full price for books, I salvaged Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl out of my parents’ garage and was charmed enough to check the next book out of the library, and the next, and the next. I expected the books to get worse as the series continued, but I actually really enjoyed the third and fourth books.

The Goose Girl draws its inspiration from one of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. While the two stories share many events and characters, they are not nearly close enough for it to qualify as a retelling. One striking difference is that the main character in the original tale is completely passive, while Hale’s heroine takes decisive action throughout the book. Princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee is of course beautiful and blonde, but still plenty admirable, and I found myself captivated by the story. Don’t let her ridiculous name turn you off; the whole book is teasing conventions all the while that it profits from the power of a good old fairy tale.

The original editions of the Books of Bayern came dressed in playful illustrations with a medieval Italian feel, but they seem to have been later repackaged as teen romances with front cover photos of mysterious, full-bosomed young girls peering out at ruined castles from the shadows of the forest. It occurred to me to be embarrassed as I checked them out of the young adult section of the library, but obviously that didn’t stop me.

The second book features one of the princess’s friends, and it deals skillfully with her maturing through a period of self-deception and alienation from her friends. The third book is about another of their crowd, a boy this time. I really enjoyed it because it made me laugh a lot and it showed convincing character development. In the fourth book, the main character harbors serious confusion about her identity. I found this story deeper than many young adult novels. It is not her image that troubles her, as it does so many of these type of fictional characters, but her very soul. It is a unique, poignant story.

These summaries sound rather psychological, but the stories are full-fleshed and concrete with entertaining plots. My main disappointment with the books is the use of a real place name, Bayern, when all the other place names are made up. I also disapprove of the lack of suffixes for demonyms and for adjectival forms of place names. But these are minor beefs.

If you’re looking for some good clean escapist young adult fantasy fiction with interesting characters, and written with a great sense of humor, I recommend these books.

Sword Song

Sword Song is a marvelous tour of northern Great Britain during the Viking age, prior to the coming of the Normans. The main character, Bjarni Sigurdson, is expelled from his home settlement for manslaughter at the age of 16 and sells his service as a bodyguard and warrior to a series of seafaring captains, seeing the world as far south as Ireland, along the coasts of Scotland, and up to the far northern Orkney Islands. He encounters not only other Scandinavian expats, but such diverse characters as wild Pictish warriors, Welsh farmers, Irish thralls, and Ionian monks.

Rosemary Sutcliff is, as far as I know, the preeminent author of British historical fiction for young adults. I have only read one other of her books, The Shining Company, but it made a profound impression on me and it remains one of my favorite books.

Sutcliff was disabled, beginning in early childhood, with severe arthritis. Some of her thoughts about the condition are quoted on the August 21, 2005, entry of a lapsed blog devoted to her. She did not learn to read until she was nine years old, partly because of this disease and partly because her family moved a lot; her father was in the British Navy. She died in 1992. Sword Song was in its second draft and posthumously became her last published book.

Biographer Margaret Meek described the author’s writing process: Once she had the idea for a book, she began with the encyclopedia and checked out all the works cited in an entry from the library. She continued likewise with these books’ bibliographies and wrote down all the information she collected in red notebooks. According to the Historical Novel Society’s Sandra Garside-Neville, “Then Sutcliff would start to create a picture of the daily life of the era her idea was set in. This was the most enjoyable part for her. Not much of the plot would find its way into the notebooks.”

Her painstaking research is clear in passages like this, where a simple walk through the village en route to the next action scene is a detailed tableau:

Men were at work in the wood-wright’s yard and the smithy, someone was driving a pig up the stony street, women with their cloaks huddled about them against the thin rain were moving between house and byre and gathered bucket in hand around the spring head, children and dogs were busy about their own affairs.

The book is alive with sights, sounds, smells, and unobtrusive facts that tell the contemporary reader what that world was like.

No mother is mentioned in Bjarni’s narrative, and it is interesting to watch his understanding of women develop as he slowly encounters them one by one. I appreciate that Sutcliff doesn’t present them as exotic objects of desire for a starved male appetite, but instead as people he sympathizes with. Their situations as well as Bjarni’s are presented matter-of-factly. His saga of exile is different from those usually proceeding from the Viking age, showing how the greatest virtue for these land-poor people was not glory in warfare but the ability to adapt.

Bjarni is a stubborn young man, more critical than accepting of other people, especially those in authority. This is apparently typical of Sutcliff’s heroes; she described one of her own favorite characters as “difficult and prickly.” The world she draws is thus not idealized but natural and human.

The portrait of religious attachment in Sword Song is interesting in this light. Sutcliff said in an interview:

The Middle Ages I am not at home in. I am interested in them and love to read about them, but I can’t write about them, or practically not at all. I think it is because I can’t take the all-pervasiveness of religion which has a stranglehold on life. The more level-headed viewpoint of the Romans is nearer to our own way of looking at things.

Some of the Christian believers Bjarni meets, like the great lady Aud the Deep-Minded, are extremely attractive characters. His experience on Iona appears to stir his soul more than anything else in his life’s travels. There are also the monks sprinkled throughout who bring more inconvenience than blessing. Indeed, it is a monk who drowns a little too easily in the first chapter, providing the occasion for Bjarni’s five-year exile. But the pagan priest portrayed in the story is by far the most unpleasant religious figure.

Eventually, Bjarni takes the mark of the White Christ in a ceremony called “prime-signing”: a pre-baptismal step involving little to no religious commitment but offering one slight advantages over complete pagans when trading with Christians.

And eventually Bjarni finds a bride, in developments that are both romantic and pragmatic. Towards the end of the book Bjarni is called upon to entertain two young girls with the harp, and he hesitantly recognizes the potential of embellishing his life story, making a dramatic song from it. His story in Sutcliff’s hands is a fascinating thing, with plenty of excitement for the young reader and also plenty to reflect upon, since it is presented in a thoughtful and historically sensitive way.

A Times review of The Shining Company in June 1990 expresses her ability to evoke feelings of honor and tragedy along with her admirable realism:

[Sutcliff] is moved by simple concepts of loyalty and integrity that may be as foreign to today’s children’s literature as they were to the no-baby-talk Gododdin. But by admitting their possibility, while not shirking the real facts of ferocious woundings and pragmatic betrayals, she still persuades us that a bardic reading of the past is sustainable alongside an awareness of its squalor and its indifferent, but unpolluted, landscapes.