War for the Oaks

[sawyl]

Another book from the 1980s in the shape of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, one of the first novels to be classified as urban fantasy. The action is set in contemporary Minneapolis and mixes a faerie war with the main character's attempts to set up and run a successful band.

Eddie McCandry is on her way home from a catastrophic gig — so bad the band decided to split — when she is accosted by a stranger who seems to be able to transform himself into a dog. He tells her that she has been selected to fight for the Seelie Court in their upcoming war with the Unseelies and that from now on her life is at great risk. Eddie is sceptical and, even after she eventually accepts that the mysterious man — the phouka — really is some sort of faerie, she refuses to believe that might be in danger and finds the man's offers of protection extremely annoying.

Instead of worrying about the war, Eddie decides to set up a new band and get her life back on track. With the help of her best friend Carla and a couple of adverts, she quickly manages to recruit a great new keyboard player, a monosyllabic but brilliant bassist and a dangerously charming lead guitarist called Willy Silver, who seems determined to tangle his life up with Eddie's. But the two worlds start to overlap, firstly when Eddie is attacked in the street by a monster from the other side, and then later when she sees the first battle between the two faerie courts.

War for the Oaks works well on a number of levels. Firstly, it manages to combine the fantastical and the mundane in a way that feels realistic. The human characters don't spend too much time in denial about faerie, probably because they're shown some pretty persuasive evidence, even if Eddie is sceptical about the whole war thing. But this scepticism is of a piece with her acceptance of the fantastic elements: she isn't convinced until presented with the evidence of her own peril, at which point she starts to change her mind.

Bull also takes the trouble to make the faerie characters genuinely alien. They aren't just humans with magic, nor are they simply rule followers who can be tricked into revealing something that renders them powerless. Instead, they're almost uniformly truthful, but so sophisitical that they might as well be lying. They also have a complex problem with accepting thanks because they refuse to believe that any debt can be written off with a handful of words, instead choosing to tie themselves to their creditors in some involved way.

Secondly, the music sections were all particularly well done and well integrated with the main story, rather than being an ajunct, a way to idle away the hours until the next big battle. Although I didn't get most of the music references — rather before my time — I really enjoyed the way that the characters talked about music as though it really mattered to them and I really loved descriptions of the moments in rehearsal where the band suddenly snapped together and really started to work as an ensemble. Not surprising given that Emma Bull worked as seriously musician but, as she says in her foreword to my copy, she wrote the book before she'd had any real experience as a professional muso

Thirdly, I thought that all characters — but most especially Eddie and the phouka — worked particularly well. Of the main cast, the phouka probably has the hardest job. As the faerie that Eddie and, by extention the reader, spends most time with, he manages to be both winning and infuriating in equal measure. He's a perfect example of one of those people who, while usually charming and urbane occasionally comes out with something so outrageous that you spend all your time holding your breath, waiting for the next disaster to happen. But at least the phouka has the excuse of his quicksilver faerie nature; something frequently leaves Eddie both baffled and irritated in equal measure.

Eddie too, is a strong character, but then she has to be to balance the phouka and the hosts of the Seelie and Unseelie courts. Although she's described as being determined rather than brilliant, it's her force of will and strength of vision that pulls her band together into a focused ensemble. She's a good foil to the phouka, initially refusing to trust him because of his tendency to give circuitous answers, but gradually over time coming to an understanding of what makes him tick. Eddie also shares the phouka's strong sense of honesty, particularly when it concerns her own feelings. She's the one who realises that her original band isn't working and that her relationship with the lead singer has gone bad, she's also the one who takes a hard look at her relationship with Willy and decides how it is going to be, and she's the one who finally realises how the things she has seen have changed her view of those around her. It's really rather beautifully done.

And as if that wasn't enough, it's written with great style and clarity, especially so given that it was Emma Bull's first novel. War for the Oaks is worth reading because it's a great fantasy novel, because it's a excellent music novel, because it's interesting to see what triggered the current enthusiasm for urban fantasy, and because it's interesting to see just how high the bar was set in the first attempt.