Post Five: Landscapes in Fantasy... and Reality.

     More than in any other book I've ever written, its landscapes are important to The Sharing Knife. Patricia McKillip says she regularly starts with landscape -- they're like the emotional music of the book for her -- but for me, that was a bit of a departure (as are many other aspects of TSK.)  Because with TSK, I'm mining down to some of the deepest layers of my own experience: the farms, woods, lakes, rivers, animals, plants, insects, people, and weather of my Ohio childhood.

     Tolkien and Pratchett are two other writers who, notably, have come the long way around to get home: the landscapes of Tolkien's own late 19th Century childhood informing aspects of his tales, Pratchett most recently with the Chalk, home turf of Tiffany Aching and himself.  And not just home ground: it's the lost place, the refuge of distant memory.

     Like so many other Americans, for me that vanished landscape is engulfed by various sorts of change or urban sprawl, and is now recoverable only in the mind, as inaccessible to daylight reach as any faerie realm.  My childhood has been paved.  Many of its people are dead.  The land has gone to the use of other more present lives, and no ghosts dwell there for them, nor even guesses of what went before.  It's not an American experience only, to be sure, but it's an immensely common one for us.  And the world of The Sharing Knife is a deliberately American landscape, not only physically but socially: no kings, no lords, no gods, no state religion, bottom-up rather than top-down political structures, all very much under local control.

     One of the members of my chat list, Ohio librarian Mary Piero Carey, is from my home region, and she wrote in response to Beguilement:

     "I have this landscape in my bones, and Lois, you NAILED it.  The heat, the trees, the critters, the way the roads run, the Amish/German influenced farming community food.  For those of you who don't live around here, yes, indeedy, this is what our neck of the woods feels like.  Lots of Indiana & Illinois is very like this as well.  The pride & delight in early industrial achievements amongst the glass & brick makers in S.E. Ohio.  (You just can't imagine the utter GLEE involved unless you read some of the early glass & brick industry history, especially once they figured out how to do it with natural gas.)  The deep preoccupation of the farming mindset with LAND.  The nearly simultaneous stupidity & brilliance of horses . . ."

     This is not to encourage a sort of Easter-egg hunt for one-to-one correspondences between Oleana and Raintree and some road map of Midwestern states so beloved of a certain type of mind.  (Well, unless you find it a fun party game, in which case, go ahead, but don't look to me to keep score.)  The correspondences run to a different fit, because the geography of the book is ultimately an internal one.

     Welcome to my world.

-- Lois McMaster Bujold

Comments

[Carol Gray-Ricci]

This landscape seems familiar to me, too, although I grew up in California's Central Valley. My grandfather told me once that many mid-westerners came to that part of the central valley because it seemed homelike to them, and your writing in this book shows me why.

[Victoria L'Ecuyer]

I like how there were cleared spaces around the farms and towns and mature woods/forests everywhere else. That along with the locals-only government, gave the story an early American frontier feel you find in westerns.

My frontier and personal landscapes are made up of prairies, so my woods are weedy after thoughts or abandonded orchards and wind breaks. I've read enough westerns and seen enough photos of your landscapes to get an idea of what your landscapes used to be like.

Victoria

[Tracy]

One thing I did enjoy about the book is its situation in the landscape. I do like reading about trees. :-)

However, it also made me realise how much fantasy - where it does talk about the land - is situated in areas that feel very "foreign" to me.

For example, the only fantasies in NZ that I recall that make reference to the landscape are children's ones, like Margaret Mahy's books and Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee. But I suppose with 1/60th of the US population, it's no wonder there aren't too many fantasy authors writing about that particular landscape.

[Elizabeth McCoy]

I may have mentioned this on the list... But, oh well.

My daughter's class was doing a "section" on butterflies. In particular, monarchs. Their caterpillars will *only* eat milkweed, apparently, and part of the project was to bring in a caterpillar or two and some milkweed for them. It's an unprepossessing plant, but when she found some pods, with the seeds ready to come out...

They're so silky! They're what dandelion puffs want to be when they grow up. They shine and glisten. My daughter wanted to spin the stuff into thread, but it didn't seem to have enough "catch" to it, and just slipped out of my fingers.

And then I read TSK, and that bit, the milkweed seed-puffs... Woah. So... vivid for me.

[Carbonelle]

Landscape is very much an important part of the reading experience for this reader (as I assume it might be for others), but that can work against a book as well as for: If one has strong likes and dislikes for certain 'scapes.

I do not enjoy Westerns at all, for that the American desert west of scrub and dust, heat and stinging things is so very unpleasant. The wide-open skies (an upside down landscape) are the only redeeming feature and for one, they aren't cloudy enough, and for two, authors never seem to spend any time looking up.

[Kristen Blount]

I used to spend a week each summer at my Grandma's house in north-central Illinois. It was always a magical time and place. TSK has that same feeling... especially lightning bugs (as we called them). I remember staying out late in the park catching them. I think those memories add to the magic of TSK.

(My mother has slightly more grisly memories from her childhood of making jewelry from the lit-bulbs. eeww)

KB

[John McCarthy]

I was surprised and disappointed that the reviews of Beguilement I have read ignored the American geographical and human landscape and simple-mindedly classified the book as adventure or romance or 40 percent one and 60 percent the other. I hope and trust that LMB will continue with the American themes about which she has been so informative. What are leatherpod trees? Somewhat like wisteria but different? I couldn't find the name.

I suppose this is "treasure hunting', but I see a lot of events in Begulement as preparation for Legacy and beyond. Examples: (1) As in Anne McCaffrey's Pern, the farmers are dependent on the lakewalkers for protection, but the more successful the protection, the less the need for it is perceived. (2) Mutual contempt and hostilities are also shown by both kinds of people. Maybe avoiding war will be a future theme. (3) The string binding suggests that Nattie's ground sense will tell Fawn that Dag is alive although said to be dead. (4) Fawn has a knife that can kill a malice, although she would not be recognized as a lakewalker. (5) The provision for Fawn coming home as a widow suggests she will think herself to be one.

LMB has never left so many clues about what happens in the next book.

Next July I'll find out all my conjectures are false.