More Shameless Promotion

[tealin]

I have the good fortune to share a house with someone who works for a book distributor. She gets all sorts of advance readers' copies (ARCs) of the books that she's distributing, usually long before they appear in the store. Unfortunately, she doesn't distribute HarperCollins, which publishes most of my favourite books, but I do get to read the Artemis Fowl and Bartimaeus books in advance. Every so often there'll be a brand new one that catches my attention, and the most recent of these was Fly By Night, by Frances Hardinge.
    It's certainly something. The world it creates is intricately detailed and well-organized, and once you learn how things work (it doesn't take very long) it feels like it could be completely real. It's been described as a 'fictionalized 18th-century England' but the only things that tie it to that reality are the costumes, the idea of coffee houses, and the authorities' fondness for capital punishment. If you take 18th-century England, make it polytheistic, add a long-running multi-candidate debate on royal succession, and throw in some very powerful guilds, then you might get close to the world in this book.
    The star is Mosca Mye, a 12-year-old orphan who, thanks to her late father's tutelage, loves to collect words. Aside from this idiosyncracy, she's pretty much like every plucky and resourceful orphan in literature, except that the story she's a part of does not follow the same narrative rules as Plucky Orphan stories usually do. The central character may be 12 but she lives in a very adult world equipped with more than its fair share of politics, and she gets inextricably entwined in them. There's all sorts of action and suspense and humour and all that, but the most riveting thing about the book is that you never know who the 'bad guy' is. As soon as you think you've got it figured out, the tables turn – sometimes 90°, sometimes 180°, sometimes upside down – and you have to approach the story from a whole different perspective.
    It's mostly about the power of words. You can tell it's a book written by someone who loves language, and I can see it being greedily devoured by aspiring young writers for the imaginative and illustrative way in which it is written, something you don't find much in modern straightforward, cut-and-dry fiction. Beyond the power the words have in telling the story, however, there is the power of propaganda, the power a few carefully-chosen words have to influence popular opinion, the power that comes from control of the press, the power of words that sneak out from under this control – and the powerful effect of flowery words on a compulsive collector thereof, which starts the whole thing rolling in the first place. It's also got a bit of a theological (or, hm, anti-theological) bent to it, though it stops short of being a sermon on secular humanism the way Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is, and instead promotes independent investigation into what is true ... so I suppose it's more agnostic than atheist.
    Anyway, it's about time I explain the drawings. The strikingly white lady is Lady Tamarind, sister to the duke of the principal location of the book, a city-state called Mandelion.* Being spotlessly, impeccably white is her trademark. Below are Hopewood Pertellis and Mosca Mye. Mosca, as I have mentioned, is the main character, and is often described as 'the ferrety-looking girl with unconvincing eyebrows' – the place where she grew up has some sort of calcareous rain that bleaches uncovered hair and gradually turns things to stone, so she draws on eyebrows with charcoal. Mr Pertellis is (without giving too much away) a teacher, and by far my favourite character, as you may be able to tell. Hopelessly idealistic and naive, he's also the sort of character that female writers seem to be very good at creating... I fear he may have a limited life expectancy.

Colouring things is addictive.
For those who are curious, Fly By Night is being published by Macmillan UK in Great Britain and Canada in October, and by HarperCollins (of course) in the States ... I don't know when they plan to release it, though.

*A sign that I have been reading Too Much Discworld: Mandelion has a river running through it. At one point, something drops in it (I believe it may be a shoe, but that's unimportant). In my mind, I did not picture it sinking right away. Help.

Comments

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Okay, you're right, I don't live in England, and I don't have the deeply ingrained understanding of the land or the people that I would if I lived there, but I do believe I know a little more about English history than the average North American – enough for me to feel justified in saying this book is not historically and geographically realistic.

Elements of real 18th-century English history the book does not contain:
- Anything relating to the Hanoverian Dynasty
- Conflict with France
- Conflict and/or Union with Scotland
- Colonies anywhere: there is no mention of India, America, Canada, Ireland, the Carribbean, etc
- Actual places (no London, Manchester, Portsmouth, Lake District, Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Wales, Brighton, Thames, Wye, Chilterns, etc)
- Actual people (no mention of Pitt, Walpole, Rousseau, George I, II, or III, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Swift, or anyone else)
- Actual religions, and nothing even close to Christianity
- Anything to do with Parliament
- Naval expansion and Britain's presence as a world power
- The beginnings of the Industrial Revolution
- Land reform
- Slavery
- Workhouses
- Jacobite Rebellions
- English law
Fly By Night is as much Georgian England as Redwall is Medieval or as Ankh-Morpork is Victorian London. It's got the furniture, but none of the actual historical ties. At best it is vaguely European, as there is an established class system and a European-style city, but you could just as easily claim it's France or Germany or the Netherlands. What it does have are tricorn hats and periwigs, coffee houses as headquarters for different ideological camps (though to the best of my knowledge, most 18th-century coffee houses were not built as barges on rivers to escape the law), highwaymen, and other less fundamental accoutrements.

I have a profound respect for British history and it is from this respect that I object to this novel's setting being described in such concrete terms.

As for descriptive language, it is not the passing descriptions of the characters that are so flowery. For a better example, here's a passage from near the beginning:

The path was a troublesome, fretful thing. It worried that it was missing a view of the opposite hills and insisted on climbing for a better look. Then it found the breeze uncommonly chill and ducked back among the trees. It suddenly thought it had forgotten something and doubled back, then realized that it hadn't and turned about again. At last it struggled free of the pines, plumped itself down by the riverside, complained of its aching stones and refused to go any further. A sensible, well-trodden track took over.

... which is a far more interesting way of saying "The path went over a hill, through a forest, and down to a river." It's not the epitome of English-language literature but there is a love of language and imagery one does not find much in contemporary YA books. The attention to detail is often not of a visual nature – I was referring rather to the intricacy with which the world was created, with it politics and guilds and history.

Oh, and by the way – I never claimed to have the IQ of a twelve-year old. I said I had the mental age of one, by which I meant a youthful sense of wonder at the world, an uncomplicated sense of humour, an often naive optimism, and a repulsion to kissy stuff. It's what makes me enjoy J.K. Rowling more than John Grisham or Danielle Steele. I realise now that this is probably not a very objective description because it refers to how I was when I was twelve, and no one in the vast world of the Internet knew me then. I am, at the same time, about 82 in general frumpiness. IQ never factors into this, as it is a measure of intelligence and not smarts, of problem-solving and pattern-making ability. It's entirely possible for a 12-year-old to have a higher IQ than a 35-year-old, or an uneducated pig farmer in Arkansas to have a higher IQ than a dentist in Boston.

second reply

[(Anonymous)]

thanks for your reply. I expected you to be angered by my advance, and I feared the ridicule and righteous anger of your fellow North Americans, but instead I got a very nice letter.
I cannot take back anything I say - after all, all of it has been pinned onto your wall for the world to see - but I think you are a truly good, honest person, with the right temper and self-respect, enough to make you give a long reply to an annoying anonymous letter.
If the book is not detailed, your letter certainly is. What you say about the uneducated pig-farmer in Arkansas and dentist in Boston intrigues me. You might remember that I had said nothing about education till now, and at this point I agree whole-heartedly with you about how a farmer might be smarter than the dentist. Assuredly it was so, and even now there can be some exceptional farmers, wherever they live, Arkansas or in Scaled Valley. I might add that the latter is more in favour in my eye.
Real intelligence is never troubled by education, and from what I have seen of education over here [I don't live in England, so I can finish this sentence with perfect willing] I do not doubt, I know perfectly well that it cannot possibly be any good.
Certainly educated by pigs, weather, hard-work on a good farm, the beauty of sunrises over olive hills and the wisdom of animals, you might have an excellent chance of turning out better than a dentist who had finished his school yawning, and entered the dentist's room to touch others' teeth never awaken; and certainly there are thousands of cases in which the farmer have been proven that they are above and over dentists in every way, even on the subject of teeth.
By the way, IQ IS a measure of smarts, of problem-solving and pattern-making ability. See the way the doctor check the IQ of a child, and look at the faces of those pronounced young geniuses. We call intelligence by its true name. No other name will suit it, and it is measured, looked on, judged only by other intelligences, at a distance.
So - you can tell that I see no connection of your IQ, which I respect highly, whatever its age and stage, with the differences between rural workers and teeth professionals.

Re: second reply

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

...I feared the ridicule and righteous anger of your fellow North Americans, but instead I got a very nice letter.

Um ... [raises hand] Canadian? Ridicule and Righteous Anger are not really our style. I'll promise not to make generalizations about British history if you promise not to make generalizations about the temperament of this continent's population – or at least limit it to our friends south of the border, haha.

By the way, IQ IS a measure of smarts, of problem-solving and pattern-making ability.

I fear you've misread me again. IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is a measure of intelligence; intelligence meaning problem-solving and pattern-making abilities. 'Smarts' as I have used it here is in reference to 'book smarts,' in other words, things you are taught in school. IQ tests have become much more objective in recent years as psychologists have weeded out questions that rely on certain cultural norms and vocabulary skills ('smarts' - whether taught in society or in school) in favour of simpler, clearer questions that measure problem-solving and pattern-making abilities. This is how they can test the IQ of children who may not know the vocabulary necessary to complete the vocabulary-dependent analogy questions so common in early versions of the test.

second part of second reply

[(Anonymous)]

The path was a troublesome, fretful thing. It worried that it was missing a view of the opposite hills and insisted on climbing for a better look. Then it found the breeze uncommonly chill and ducked back among the trees. It suddenly thought it had forgotten something and doubled back, then realized that it hadn't and turned about again. At last it struggled free of the pines, plumped itself down by the riverside, complained of its aching stones and refused to go any further. A sensible, well-trodden track took over ...


Living in England and being English the self-same thing as your aged experience and your intelligence and wisdom. My mind whispered vengence, for the insult this passage of clumsy expressions has done my mother tongue.
Read this confounded book, from which you have taken this passage, compare with other recognized classics and note the difference. No, my dear, it is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of common sense and fortune. I trust you have plenty of both.

Re: second part of second reply

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I never said this book was a classic, or destined to be one. In many ways it is obvious that it's a debut novel, and there are times that Ms Hardinge takes a little too much pleasure in her very decorative language. It doesn't stand up to many of the Greats in literature, but – and this is the basis for my mentioning it at all – it is a fair sight better than most of the swill cluttering up the YA bookshelves at the library. I know there are a number of aspiring writers who visit my webpage – and, by inference, my journal – and I thought they might appreciate a heads-up in regards to an upcoming book that actually uses some imaginative writing. I enjoyed it, whatever its literary merit, and I thought others would too. If you don't like Ms Hardinge's use of the language, you are perfectly welcome to avoid reading the book. I avoid Hemingway for the same reason, and he definitely has more 'literary merit' than some first-time novelist writing for 9- to 14-year-olds ... at least, according to people with degrees on the subject.