Prester John, what's that flower you have on?

[alexandraerin]

Salt and sand sprayed against the hull, which the roasting wind had peeled of scarlet paint and bared of gilt. The horizon was a golden margin, the sea a spectral page. Caps of dusty foam tipped the waves of depthless sand, swelling and sinking, little siroccos opening their dry and desultory mouths. Whirlpools of dead branches snapped and lashed the bulging sides of the listing qarib; sand scoured her planks, grinding off crenellations and erasing the faces of a row of bronze lions meant to spray fire into the sails of enemies. The name of the ship was once Christokos, but the all-effacing golden waves had scraped it to Tokos, and thus new-baptized, the little ship crested and fell with the whim of the inland sea.

I huddled against the wretched mast. A few days previously, a night-storm had visited this poor vessel, and its boiling clouds littered the deck with small dun mice. They tasted the mast, found it good, and stripped it to a spindly stick. In the morning, they leapt overboard as one creature, and I, lone inhabitant of the wretched Tokos, watched as they bounded away on the surface of the sand, buffeted by little licking waves, unconcerned, their bellies full of mast. I captained this thin remnant of naval prowess as best I could: shuddering, blister-lipped, no sailor, no oarsman, not even a particularly strong swimmer. My teeth hurt in my jaw, and my hands would not stop shaking—the true captain had leapt overboard in despair—a month past, now? Two?—and the navigator followed, then the cook, and finally the oarsmen. One by one as the sand snapped off their instruments they leapt overboard into the dust like mast-fed mice. But the sea did not bear them up, and they drowned screaming. They each watched the others sink into the glitter and grime, but believed in their final wild moments that theirs would be that lucky leap that found solid land. That they would be blessed above the others. Each by each, I watched the sand fill up their surprised and gaping mouths.

I ate the sail one night and dreamed of honey. The stars overhead hissed at me like cats.

-From The Habitation of the Blessed, by Catherynne Valente. Excerpted here for purposes that will come clear further down.

...

I have the perfect phrase to describe what sort of a story The Habitation of the Blessed is.

Unfortunately, it's already taken.

I mean, if I told you that Catherynne Valente has written a wonderful work of "medieval fantasy", you'd probably think I was talking about something like a book with an elf, a dwarf, and a thief, and a wizard who meet in a tavern and go on a quest. Maybe not quite that cliched, but you'd probably be picturing something that bears the same sort of resemblance to the medieval world as Tales of MU resembles the modern one: a sort of post-Tolkien Disneyland version of the past that is not so much the medieval era as the classical era through the renaissance blended in the same fashion that dinosaur movies take anything that appeared from the Triassic period through the Cretaceous, with the occasional random insertion of modern man.

And while I enjoy that genre, it's a shame, because really "medieval fantasy" really sums up what she's done. Can we just agree to call that other stuff something else? Post-Tolkien? Gygaxian? Swords and dungeons? Dragons and sorcery? Well, it's probably too late to change it, so I'm going to grab a contrast term and call the first book of A Dirge For Prester John a work of authentically Pre-Tolkien fantasy.

Writing a Pre-Tolkien fantasy is an impressive feat given that it was written three decades after Tolkien's death. She clearly goes to the same well that John Ronald Reul and his friend Clive Staples and their predecessor Lyman Frank drew from, but it's equally clear that she's gone back to the well rather than siphoning off from their troughs.

If you're the sort of person who loved reading tidbits from medieval bestiaries (like the ones on this site, which lissa_quon serendipitously linked to while I was contemplating this review) and then later enjoyed spotting when something from one of those books turned up in a D&D manual or with a pseudoscientific explanation in Shadowrun or in some other game or bit of pop culture, this book will almost certainly speak to you.

If among your favorite part of the Chronicles of Narnia books were the recitations of all the various kinds of creatures that were found on one side of a battlefield or another and you wish there had been more detail, more examination of their cultures and their ways, then this book will almost certainly interest you.

If you've never had much exposure to mythical beasts outside of their pop culture interpretations, but you enjoy a good tale of a traveler who stumbles off the edge of the map and ends up somewhere fantastic in every sense of the word... be it Oz, Narnia, Pelucidar, Barsoom, the Land of the Lost, or anywhere else, this book would be worth your while.

And if you're not particularly interested in any of those things, but you enjoy a good tale that is well told?

Yeah. That this is.

If you already know who Prester John is... or who he was... or maybe who he was not... then there's a good chance your curiosity is already piqued at least a little bit. For everybody else... well, the wiki link will cover the basics for you.

The story of Prester John as laid out in the canonical letter is a fascinating one, but it's compelling in part because there's so little to it. We are given the bare bones. They are big bones. They are impressive bones. They spark the imagination, but it takes a powerful and skilled imagination to flesh them out in a manner that is equally compelling to the sight of the bones laying bare in the earth.

And one need only look at how our understanding of the dinosaurs has evolved over the years to know that how bones are arranged and how the meat is hung around them can make quite a difference. This would be little more than fan faction if Cat had simply taken the letter and used it as a checklist. There is a story here, an original story... well, this is a Catherynne Valente novel, isn't it? It would be uncharacteristically mean of her to give us one story. (And yet it could be argued that she does exactly this, depending upon where one falls on the question of the Trinity.) And in the process she piles living flesh around those dormant bones in such a compelling fashion that it's possible to forget the bones are there. She's not playing connect-the-dots by dropping in references here and there. She's giving us the sort of breathtaking world... the sort of breathtaking lived experience... that could have prompted someone to write the letter that inspired her story.

For example: the letter of Prester John gives account of a waveless sea of sand dunes. What does the letter say on the subject? Compare these lines to what I copied out at the beginning of this post:

There is also in our territory a sandy sea without water. For the sand moves and swells into waves like the sea and is never still.

This is how the letter describes the sandy sea. I confess, the geography detailed in the letter never interested me as much as the zoology, or anthropology if you like. And from these few lines, and an equally scant account of the fish that the sandy sea produces, Cat has produced the scene that I excerpted the beginning of above. It is a scene of exquisite and majestic wonder and terror that is our introduction to the pilgrim in her strange land. Her sea of sand is awful and awesome, terrible and terrific, and all those other word pairs that tricks of etymology have taught us cannot possibly mean the same thing as each other.

When I spoke to Cat a few weeks after having finished her novel, the vision of the sand sea... her sand sea... was so vividly lodged in my mind that I asked her where it had come from. The answer, of course, was that it was straight out of the letter. Oh. I was a little embarrassed to realize that, because of course the source material is even excerpted at the points in the book where it becomes relevant, but... well, her writing makes those few lines come to life with a vividness that I imagine they must have already possessed for her.

In fact, one gets the impression that there isn't a single line or even a word of the letter that did not excite the author's imagination. When telling the story behind the letter, Cat doesn't assume that every line in it is the unvarnished truth, but that every word is there for a reason. There are both white and red lions, John says. Does that mean lions come in two colors? No, it means lions come in two kinds, and the difference must be significant enough to be worth spending an extra three words in an era far less given to effortless expansion than our own electronic age.

Now, there are one or two aspects of the book that I felt were lacking, but long-time readers of this blog will already know that the bulk of my criticism for anything I enjoy comes down to "I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it could have been longer." I'm going to take mind of the fact that this is book one of a trilogy and wait to see the sum of the parts before I presume to point to any deficiencies. Until then, it could be that the heart and substance of my complaints are nothing more than a matter of wanting more. But even if the series ended here and now and another book were never written (note: this is purely hypothetical, as I believe the second book is either at or nearing completion), the harshest characterization I could give this work is "not my favorite Catherynne M. Valente novel."

...

As a side note, Cat has two other novels that will be out in coming months. One is the hard copy of her much-celebrated The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own, Et Cetera (a book I will never get tired of abbreviating), and the other is Deathless, a book that I'm really looking forward to but that seems to occupy a space in the center of my personal Dead Zone. I can't seem to remember that it exists. This is a quirk of my brain, not a statement on her writing. While I was composing this review, I got an email notification about a pending charge on my account for Amazon Kindle services. I had downloaded my copy of Habitation to this computer so I could reference it without going upstairs for my Kindle and because I absolutely could not think of any pending purchases I spent a few panicky moments thinking I'd accidentally bought a second copy of Habitation. But of course it's just renewing the authorization I made when I pre-ordered Deathless.

You can read an excerpt from Deathless and view the awesome retro/aged cover here.

Comments

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for this.