(sound of howling husky)

By sheer coincidence, I ended up reading Alix Harrow's The Everlasting almost immediately after The Isle in the Silver Sea. Both books are ringing changes on the same big themes -- the narratives of nationalism, fate and tragedy, Spenser and Malory, depressed lady knights and evil girlbosses -- and from what I had previously read of both Harrow and Suri's work I was tbh quite surprised to find myself liking The Everlasting a bit better.

The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.

Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!

Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.

This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.

However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."

Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...

Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.

Festivids reveals have SNUCK up on me they are happening TOMORROW and I have NOT had time to watch all the things I wanted to watch but! here are some things I very much liked anyway!

First, my own three (3!!!) beautiful vids:

Sharp Dressed Man, for Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, a glorious celebration of Theatrical Fashion

Touch, for the film Phantom, tense & wistful lesbian tragic romance!

and Ready to Fight, also for Phantom, TRIUMPHANT KINETIC ACTION

I did not expect to receive vids for either of these sources and they are all beautiful and perfect to me!!

And now, an incomplete list of other vids I really really liked and/or was impressed by and/or laughed my ass off at:

who wants to live forever (17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future)

Congratulations, You Survived Your Suicide (Disco Elysium)

Everything I Need and PC Dyke (Dykes To Watch Out For)

nothing and everything (Hamlet) (the SONG CHOICE)

The Man I Knew (Jesus Christ Superstar)

Here (Labyrinth) (THE SONG CHOICE!!!)

ASSHOLE (Looney Tunes)

Let's Get This Over With (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

Ya Ya (Sinners)

There Is No Ship (Steerswoman)

man (Victor/Victoria)

I hope some of you enjoy some of these as much as I did!

I finished Tasha Suri's The Isle in the Silver Sea yesterday and I am wrestling with profoundly conflicted feelings about it. It's an interesting book, it's an ambitious book; it's a book with a great deal to say, sometimes with a sledgehammer; it went in places I didn't expect, and appreciated, and also I think it maybe fails at the central task it needed to succeed at in order to make it actually work for me as a book.

The premise: we're on an island, and this island is composed of Stories About Britain. London is there, constantly caught between Victorian London and Elizabethan London and Merrie Olde England depending on what sort of narrative you're in. The Glorious Eternal Queen reigns forever with her giant ruffs and bright red hair. Each bit of the island is tied to a bit of story, and that story attaches itself to particular people, Incarnates, who are blessed/cursed to live out the narrative and keep the landscape alive with it. At this point this has been going on for so long that incarnates are usually identified pretty early and brought to live safely at the Queen's court where they kick their heels resignedly waiting for their fate to come upon them.

Sometimes immigrants come to the island. When they come, they forget their language and their own stories in the process. They are not supposed to get caught up in incarnation situations, though -- in theory, that's reserved for True Born Englishmen -- but unfortunately for our heroine Simran, she appears to be an exception and immediately upon sighting the shores of the isle as a child also started seeing the ghost of her past incarnation, indicating that she is the latest round of the tragic tale of the Witch and the Knight, who are doomed to fall in love and then die in a murder-suicide situation For The Realm.

Simran's knight is Vina, the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy noble, who is happy to be a hot and charming lesbian knight-at-arms but does not really want to be the murderous Knight any more than Simran wants to be the Witch. However, the plot begins, Simran is targeted by an Incarnation Murderer who kidnaps her best friend and challenges her to meet him on her Fated Mountain, and they of course have to go on a quest where they of course fall in love despite themselves and also learn more about why the current order must be overthrown because trying to preserve static, perfect versions of old stories is not only dooming a lot of people to extremely depressing fates but also slowly killing the Isle. This quest makes up the first part of the book.

I am very interested in the conversation that Tasha Suri is using this book to have about national narratives and national identities and the various stories, both old and new, that they attempt to simplify and erase. Her points, as I said, aren't subtle, but given Our Current Landscape there is a fair argument to be made that this is not the time for subtlety. I also think there's also some really good and sharp jokes and commentary about the National Narratives of Britain, specifically (evil ever-ruling Gloriana is SUCH a funny choice and the way this ends up being a mirror image for Arthuriana I think is quite fun as well).

On the other hand, the conversation is so big and the Themes so Thematic that they do end up entirely overshadowing the characters for me, which I do think is also a thematic failure. The first part of the book is about Vina and Simran's struggle to interact with each other and their lives as individuals, rather than the archetypes that overshadow them, but as Vina and Simran they also never quite felt like they transcended their own archetypes of Cranky Immigrant Witch and Charming Lesbian Knight With A Hero Complex. Which startled me, tbh, because I've liked several of Tasha Suri's previous books quite a lot and this hasn't struck me as a problem before. But I think here it's really highlighted for me by the struggle with Fate; I kept, perhaps unfairly, compare-contrasting with Princess Tutu, a work I love that's also about fighting with narrative archetypes, and how extremely specific Duck and Fakir and Rue feel as characters. I finished part one feeling like I still had no idea whether Vina and Simran had fallen in love as Fated Entities or as human beings distinct from their fate, and I think given the book this is it really needs to commit hard on that score one way or another.

Part two, I think, is much more interesting than part one, and changes up the status quo in unexpected ways. If I pretend that part one landed for me then I'm much happier to roll with the ride on part two, though there is an instance of Gay Found Family Syndrome that I found really funny; you can fix any concerning man with a sweet trans husband and a cottage and a baby! genarti will argue with me that she thinks it was more complicated than that, to which I will argue, I think it could have been more complicated IF part two had had room to breathe and lean into any of those complexities. Making part one half its length and part two double its length would I think fix several of my problems with the book. "but you just said that Vina and Simran don't feel specific enough" yes that's true AND they take three hundred pages to do it! I'd be less annoyed about them feeling kind of flat if we were moving on more quickly to other things ...

Anyway. I didn't find this book satisfying but I did find it interesting; others may find it to be both. Curious to talk about it with anyone else who's read it!

Sidenote: the Tales and Incarnations are maintained by archivists, who keep the island and the stories it contains static and weed out any narratives they think don't belong. This of course is evil. I went and complained about the evil archivist propaganda to genarti, who read this book first, and she said 'read further.' So I did! It turns out that in contrast to the evil archivists, the woods are populated by good and righteous librarians!! who secretly collect oral histories and discarded tales that have been deemed subversive by the archivists but which of course the island needs to thrive. I do appreciate that not all institutional memory workers are Evil in this book and I understand the need in fiction to have a clear and easy distinguishing term between your good guys and your bad guys, but Tasha Suri, may I politely protest that this is in fact also archivist work --

Sidenote two: v. interesting to me that of the two big high-profile recent Arthurianas I've read the thing I've found most interesting about both of them is their use of the Questing Beast. we simply love a beast!!