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The Spellcoats
Jul. 3rd, 2020 01:11 pmBefore I go into this book in particular, a little background on the Dalemark series:
'Dalemark' is the name of a land which, in the first two books, is controlled by a patchwork of Earls and split into North and South – the South being rather authoritarian and the North touted as 'free' – and there is tension between the two though not outright war, however much the South may be building itself up to such a thing. Northerners and Southerners also differ in appearance, enough that someone can tell at first glance whether you're Northern or Southern, though this isn't played up overmuch. It is, as per fantasy tropes, a vaguely medieval, vaguely British country (though placenames often follow Scandinavian patterns), with subtle but effective magic – in the first book, there is a magical instrument, and in the second, some entities like minor gods which are commemorated in folk ritual but actually turn up towards the end, to everyone's surprise. In the first book, the musician who owns the magical instrument makes an adventurous escape to the North overland; in the second, an Angry Young Man joins a secret insurrection plotting in a port town that is definitely not King's Lynn, then has to flee North by boat via an enchanted archipelago that is definitely not Lindisfarne. They are light and fun yarns with a savoury folkish feel to the magic, but they don't shy away from the darker side of politics, either – they are clearly written by someone who has read a lot of history, and been through a war herself.
The Spellcoats is the third in the series. While the first two are freestanding stories they share enough references to show they are taking place at roughly the same time; The Spellcoats however feels very different and, aside from being in approximately the same country, has no apparent connection to the other two. There is a war going on here, too, of sorts – settlers arriving from over the sea, who claim the land as their ancestral home, while the people already living there would really rather they not.
The story follows one family as they are driven out of their village and drift down the flooded river which has always been the centre of their lives, meeting a band of these settlers, discovering who the real villain is, then going back and confronting the evil. The gods and magic play a bigger role in this book, at first in the role of idols which the family carry with them, and later in person; the quantity of magic was a little high for my preference, but it's handled in such an otherworldly way that it kind of slips under the skin instead of dazzling you. A clearer way of describing that aspect may be thus: by about 2/3 through, I began to get rather resentful that Miyazaki had adapted Howl's Moving Castle instead of The Spellcoats, because this felt like SUCH a Miyazaki movie. A little dreamlike, more than a little weird, and a strong political statement about shades of grey.
Now, this may sound like a positive review. And it is, because I have finished the book. But boy oh boy did I have a hard time with it. For one thing, it is written in first person by one of the family, and she is very internal-monologuey, in a strange style that somehow renders the internal monologue distancing rather than intimate. On top of this, the conceit is that she is writing this in the pattern she is weaving; having done a tiny bit of weaving myself I cannot imagine a textile-based writing system inviting anything but the sparsest prose, but that is definitely not what we get here. It might not have been so annoying if so much of the book hadn't been given over to worldbuilding, which made this small but significant logic gap glare. I fact, I can't say I really enjoyed the book until the last fifty pages or so: it's not my sort of fantasy, there seemed to be too many characters occupying the same tier of importance, and none of them grabbed me enough to care what happened to them.
But then I finished it, and then finished the series, and weirdly it's The Spellcoats that has stuck with me most. It's the least entertaining book but the one I would most like to see made into a movie. Its dreamlike tone and powerful imagery give it an almost mystic feeling. While it excited almost no emotions in me, narratively, the narrator's strong emotional connection to her landscape did communicate. I am all about character being the most important thing in a story, but here I thought it got in the way – the world and the weird can stand on their own. Was the whole book saved by its awesome closing image? Was it the 'scholar's note' at the end, from a historian in 'modern' Dalemark, about the discovery of the cloth that told the story? Was it just a book I couldn't appreciate in parts but could as a whole? I don't know. I keep trying to figure it out. Maybe that's part of its magic.
Anyway, if you read it, listen to Johnny Flynn's 'The Water' after you finish, and let me know if you think it could have been written for anything other than The Spellcoats.
'Dalemark' is the name of a land which, in the first two books, is controlled by a patchwork of Earls and split into North and South – the South being rather authoritarian and the North touted as 'free' – and there is tension between the two though not outright war, however much the South may be building itself up to such a thing. Northerners and Southerners also differ in appearance, enough that someone can tell at first glance whether you're Northern or Southern, though this isn't played up overmuch. It is, as per fantasy tropes, a vaguely medieval, vaguely British country (though placenames often follow Scandinavian patterns), with subtle but effective magic – in the first book, there is a magical instrument, and in the second, some entities like minor gods which are commemorated in folk ritual but actually turn up towards the end, to everyone's surprise. In the first book, the musician who owns the magical instrument makes an adventurous escape to the North overland; in the second, an Angry Young Man joins a secret insurrection plotting in a port town that is definitely not King's Lynn, then has to flee North by boat via an enchanted archipelago that is definitely not Lindisfarne. They are light and fun yarns with a savoury folkish feel to the magic, but they don't shy away from the darker side of politics, either – they are clearly written by someone who has read a lot of history, and been through a war herself.
The Spellcoats is the third in the series. While the first two are freestanding stories they share enough references to show they are taking place at roughly the same time; The Spellcoats however feels very different and, aside from being in approximately the same country, has no apparent connection to the other two. There is a war going on here, too, of sorts – settlers arriving from over the sea, who claim the land as their ancestral home, while the people already living there would really rather they not.
The story follows one family as they are driven out of their village and drift down the flooded river which has always been the centre of their lives, meeting a band of these settlers, discovering who the real villain is, then going back and confronting the evil. The gods and magic play a bigger role in this book, at first in the role of idols which the family carry with them, and later in person; the quantity of magic was a little high for my preference, but it's handled in such an otherworldly way that it kind of slips under the skin instead of dazzling you. A clearer way of describing that aspect may be thus: by about 2/3 through, I began to get rather resentful that Miyazaki had adapted Howl's Moving Castle instead of The Spellcoats, because this felt like SUCH a Miyazaki movie. A little dreamlike, more than a little weird, and a strong political statement about shades of grey.
Now, this may sound like a positive review. And it is, because I have finished the book. But boy oh boy did I have a hard time with it. For one thing, it is written in first person by one of the family, and she is very internal-monologuey, in a strange style that somehow renders the internal monologue distancing rather than intimate. On top of this, the conceit is that she is writing this in the pattern she is weaving; having done a tiny bit of weaving myself I cannot imagine a textile-based writing system inviting anything but the sparsest prose, but that is definitely not what we get here. It might not have been so annoying if so much of the book hadn't been given over to worldbuilding, which made this small but significant logic gap glare. I fact, I can't say I really enjoyed the book until the last fifty pages or so: it's not my sort of fantasy, there seemed to be too many characters occupying the same tier of importance, and none of them grabbed me enough to care what happened to them.
But then I finished it, and then finished the series, and weirdly it's The Spellcoats that has stuck with me most. It's the least entertaining book but the one I would most like to see made into a movie. Its dreamlike tone and powerful imagery give it an almost mystic feeling. While it excited almost no emotions in me, narratively, the narrator's strong emotional connection to her landscape did communicate. I am all about character being the most important thing in a story, but here I thought it got in the way – the world and the weird can stand on their own. Was the whole book saved by its awesome closing image? Was it the 'scholar's note' at the end, from a historian in 'modern' Dalemark, about the discovery of the cloth that told the story? Was it just a book I couldn't appreciate in parts but could as a whole? I don't know. I keep trying to figure it out. Maybe that's part of its magic.
Anyway, if you read it, listen to Johnny Flynn's 'The Water' after you finish, and let me know if you think it could have been written for anything other than The Spellcoats.
