rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-16 11:56 am
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-16 11:56 am
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So THAT'S what was going on!
There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
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And then I reread the books later throughout my childhood, with a much greater understanding of how symbolism and allegory work and realized that they were Christian as hell (if you'll pardon the pun) but it was too late - C S Lewis had already made me a pagan.
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they would have told me in Sunday School if Jesus was a big fuckoff lion
I didn't have a Christian upbringing as such, but I feel as if this would have likely improved the experience.
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+1.
(At the time when I first read the Chronicles of Narnia, I knew far more about numerous other mythologies than I did about Christianity, so the concept of Aslan as Christ analogue did not occur to me when the sacrifice and return of Aslan as solstitial ritual—it happens at midwinter! in the darkest part of the night! he comes back with the sun!—was right there.)
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My upbringing wasn't quite as thoroughly Christian as yours, but enough--the missing piece was symbolism/allegory, not religion!
"Aslan is clearly a god, and he's obviously not Jesus because he's a big talking lion and they would have told me in Sunday School if Jesus was a big fuckoff lion, so there could be gods that aren't Jesus.
*nod* This probably wasn't my exact chain of reasoning, but something like it. I knew God wasn't a lion, and that fantasy worlds had other gods, so this was just more of same. Monotheism, what's that?
The Death Gate Cycle *also* leans subtly monotheistic, and I missed that too. More polytheism!
Young me: What do you mean, "Our mistake was in thinking we were gods?" Clearly you're gods! Look at you!
Lol forever.
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When the first Sovereign Stone book came out when I was in high school, I really liked that one, but I didn't like the sequels.
What other books of theirs did you like?
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I've gotten rid of most of my Dragonlance collection now, but I still have the Legends trilogy. I haven't read it (or Death Gate) in years, though - I'm too afraid the Suck Fairy has visited them - but I can't get rid of them due to sentiment.
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The bookstore was Hastings, which was a really nice store because they put lots of chairs throughout the books section and basically encouraged you to read without buying. You can imagine that made my 10-13-year-old allowance-less bookworm self happy as a clam. I think it was good marketing on their part, as any money I did acquire promptly went to them.
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I have a fairly high tolerance for authorial BS, so take this with a grain of salt, but Death Gate has definitely held up for me! As Rachel says, fun and inventive within genre boundaries. I still reread it periodically.
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That is truly awesome.