Review: Steven Brust: Brokedown Palace

Another Epinions orphan; another review of this book is at Green Man Review:

Brokedown Palace is another one of Steven Brust’s romps – I have to admit, the man astonishes me: from the highly individual noir detective cast of the Vlad Taltos novels to the delightful and affectionate take-off on Dumas in The Phoenix Guard and Five Hundred Years After, he has an amazing range and an astonishing amount of creativity. In this one, he’s done it with the traditional folk tale – not that this story owes much to any any particular tale, but Brust has taken the idea of folklore and the means and methods of folklore to make an engaging and fabulous – in the strict sense – novel

The universe is the same as that of the Vlad Taltos novels, in a different time and with a very different tone. Structurally, the story follows a more-or-less traditional narrative form, broken by interludes that may describe events that are important but of which the characters are unaware, or may simply be folktales (of the “tall tales” variety) within the larger folktale. The story is quite simple: it is the story of László, King of Fenario, who is not particularly sane, and his brothers, Andor, who is shallow and perhaps overly religious – at least sometimes; Vilmos, who is the archetypal giant, large, strong, gentle, and perhaps with a little more on the ball than others realize; and Miklós, the youngest, who is a little – well, more than a little stubborn, and more than a little outspoken. It is tempting to say that the Palace is another major character, but it’s not; it is, however a potent symbol that Brust uses to great effect. László has a tendency to try to beat Miklós to death, or nearly so, and is extremely sensitive about the condition of the Palace, which is tottering on its foundations – in this case, it’s called denial. After one nearly-fatal beating, Miklós exiles himself to the land of Faerie – in the Taltos cycle, Dragaera – where he learns Dragaeran sorcery (pre-Empire, needless to say) before his return to Fenario. We meet the táltos horse Bölk, a magical steed who is much more than he seems and always answers questions with more questions; the Countess Mariska, destined to wed László – or perhaps one should say resigned to the fact – and Brigitta, László’s mistress. There is a hidden villain, and a magical tree, and the Demon Goddess Varra, who has her own agenda.

And the whole thing is permeated by magic – not only the fantasy-world magic of spells and incantations, but the fairy-tale magic that says the unbelievable is real and is walking right next to you. In this novel, Brust displays a remarkable gift in combining irony, wit, and the innocence of childhood, in which the Palace, the River, a horse, a tree, all have their own purposes and their own ways of effecting their goals. As in folklore, the characters are broadly drawn, but this is a novel, and they accumulate the telling details that belong to real people as the story progresses – they are well-developed, but always hover in the realm of the archetype.

A word about the narrator, who encapsulates Brust’s various gifts in a highly entertaining way. The narrator is indeed a storyteller, who digresses (another of Brust’s many talents) to fill in the story, bring us details about the history of Fenario, the people and the land, and who provides a commentary that is sometime wry, sometimes matter-of-fact, but always lively and good-humored. But make no mistake – there are dark and terrible events in this story, as is necessarily the case if we are to be engaged at all, and as is very much the basis of folklore as it is of literature. Whether Brust’s stance makes them more terrible or more distanced is something that each reader, I think, will have to decide.

A final note: those who are more familiar with Eastern European folklore than I may derive an additional layer of enjoyment from this book. The vocabulary and I suspect the general tenor of the narrative seem solidly based in Hungarian language and Hungarian traditions (alright, Fenarian is Hungarian, or damned close), which brings an element of the exotic to the tale that just adds to the fun.

(Orb Books, 2006)

It's Sunday Again

And of course there's all sorts of goodies at Green Man Review -- and just to whet your appetite:

Red Clay Ramblers offer up Halloween Music, Black cat awareness month, Philip Glass’ “portraits”, the folklore and folkways of American Indians, Ursula le Guin on Coyote, and her Buffalo Gals fantasy

So click on over to see what you should be reading, hearing, eating, whatever.

It's Sunday at Green Man Review

Lots of reviews, but not the one I had hoped to finish. But click on over -- there's still lots of good stuff.

Saturay Science: Oral Histories

Did you ever stop to think about how much of what we know about the past comes from oral tradition? Because, of course, most people, until quite recently, couldn't write. Just think about how long things like the Iliad, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, all those epics, not to mention the myths, legends, and teaching stories, must have been around before anyone wrote them down.

It turns out some people were really, really good at remembering their stories:

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist — and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories — many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar — that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

I suspect the accuracy of the collective memory of the Australian natives in this case has a lot to do with their highly refined sense of place:

“Dreamings” are a particularly Australian thing that finds parallels in other cultures but has a distinctly unique flavor. Marett discusses Dreamings quite clearly as a phenomenon that has to do with the spiritual and the eternal, most commonly expressed in the Daly region, the focus of this study, as “that which derives from the eternal, uncreated, springing out of itself.” This is pretty much in direct opposition to Western thought, which has difficulty dealing with the idea that something just is, and has been. It is symptomatic of the unified conceptual framework of the Aborigines that the meaning can be danced as easily as verbalized, and the dance will probably carry that meaning more clearly than the words.

Aboriginal ritual springs from the need to acknowledge and clarify the relationship of the group to the land, which includes origins, traditions, and the relationship of the living to the dead, the dead having gone back into the land with the potential of being reborn.

So think twice before you dismiss legends and folk tales as mere fictions. Because they're probably not.