Among Others
May. 23rd, 2011 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylLong and involved discussion of Jo Walton's Among Others with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
doctor_squale over coffee this morning, with a particular focus on the reliability of the narrator. While we both really liked it, especially as a memoir of what it is like to grow up as a book obsessive, Dr S had doubts about the tone of some of the more teenage sections whereas I was more convinced by the way that the style jumped from a precocious comments about books to more casual, throwaway remarks about the tribulations of growing up.
Although the book features faeries and magic — things that Mori describes just as realistically as her horrible school dinners or her thoughts on Delany — our entire understanding of the world is mediated through Mori's diary, it's not possible to form any sort of objective view on whether the world really is teeming with a strange, liminal magic or whether she is simply guilty of wishful thinking and unreliability. And there are good reasons to doubt Morwenna's reliability. In her diary she spends a lot of time talking about her dead twin sister Morganna, but none of the other characters — especially her large, garrulous, extended family — makes any mention of a sister. Likewise Mori suggests that, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, she may have changed places with her twin, again suggesting that her sister was a changeling, imaginary thing.
Perhaps I'm being far too post-modern but it's my instinct, whenever I'm presented with something that purports to be a first person account, to assume that I'm may be being led astray by the narrator's own prejudices and desires. I think this is one of things that makes Among Others such an intriguing book. It can be read either as a straight fantasy novel set in a world very like our own, but full of faeries and liminal magic that can alter the chances of a particular thing happening; it can be read as a diary novel featuring an unreliable narrator who, having been brought up by a mother suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness, has retreated into a fantasy world coloured by her passion for SF and her mother's delusions; it can be read as some combination of the two; or it can be read as an elegant guide to some of the most intriguing SF of the 1960-70s.
doctor_squale over coffee this morning, with a particular focus on the reliability of the narrator. While we both really liked it, especially as a memoir of what it is like to grow up as a book obsessive, Dr S had doubts about the tone of some of the more teenage sections whereas I was more convinced by the way that the style jumped from a precocious comments about books to more casual, throwaway remarks about the tribulations of growing up.Although the book features faeries and magic — things that Mori describes just as realistically as her horrible school dinners or her thoughts on Delany — our entire understanding of the world is mediated through Mori's diary, it's not possible to form any sort of objective view on whether the world really is teeming with a strange, liminal magic or whether she is simply guilty of wishful thinking and unreliability. And there are good reasons to doubt Morwenna's reliability. In her diary she spends a lot of time talking about her dead twin sister Morganna, but none of the other characters — especially her large, garrulous, extended family — makes any mention of a sister. Likewise Mori suggests that, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, she may have changed places with her twin, again suggesting that her sister was a changeling, imaginary thing.
Perhaps I'm being far too post-modern but it's my instinct, whenever I'm presented with something that purports to be a first person account, to assume that I'm may be being led astray by the narrator's own prejudices and desires. I think this is one of things that makes Among Others such an intriguing book. It can be read either as a straight fantasy novel set in a world very like our own, but full of faeries and liminal magic that can alter the chances of a particular thing happening; it can be read as a diary novel featuring an unreliable narrator who, having been brought up by a mother suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness, has retreated into a fantasy world coloured by her passion for SF and her mother's delusions; it can be read as some combination of the two; or it can be read as an elegant guide to some of the most intriguing SF of the 1960-70s.
