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beccastareyesThis book hits a few loves with me. First off, the narration structure. The book is based around the legend of Prester John, a medieval European legend of a priest-king who ruled over a land of legend off somewhere in the east. In 1699, a group, lead by a Brother Hiob, sets out to find traces of his kingdom, and come across a hamlet with a strange woman, who tells them that Prester John is gone, and shows them to a tree with books for fruit, and tells the head of the expedition he can pick three. The narrative is interwoven from those three books and Hiob's comments as he fights the decay of the books -- which, being fruit, don't last long once picked -- to record them and send them back to Europe.
The three interwoven narratives are John's own accounts of his travels, a memoir of Hagia, one of the locals who eventually ends up as John's queen, and a book of stories, which do a lot to explain how the country of Pentexore came into being and fill in the history that Hagia knows and John never asks about. It's a really cool device for a story like this, which is based on medieval legends rather than modern fantasy, even if the peoples of Pentexore are just as fantastic as elves and dwarves and vampires and werewolves.
Which is another point in its favor. A friend of mine (hi,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mirisa_ardruna is a fan of reading ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the wider world (and completely made-up ones, such as Lucian of Samosata's True History) and telling me what happens, and a lot of the legends have similar qualities. It's a welcome change from the current staple of fantasy, and Valente draws some damn good stuff from legends (not just of Prester John, but Thomas the Apostle, Alexander the Great and Herodotus), but gives a modern fantasy author's worldbuilding spin on it.
Valente, in a guest column for John Scalzi's blog, described it as writing a first contact novel, in that John is taken from a world where he fundamentally knows that everyone believes the same basic thing and looks, roughly, like him, and thrown into a place -- alone -- without other humans and without the shared cultural references that everyone takes for granted. Which can be frustrating for the reader, since, from Hagia's point of view, we are already invested in her people and that really makes John seem like kind of an asshole for taking so long to fit this into his worldview. Then again, John is a medieval priest, who doesn't even have the reference a Western reader would have for things like aliens or elves -- in his world, there are men, beasts, angels and demons, and he's not sure what is what or how this fits in with God's plan.
I did really enjoy the book. Valente can turn a phrase like nothing else -- at least, based on reading Palimpsest and parts of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making -- and this is the kind of story that calls for it. Plus, I did really like a lot of the characters, and the old-school legends made the book feel young again. I'd like to see the sequels -- from the bridging story and Hagia's own reflections as she writes, we know Shit Went Down, but there is always a story in telling how.
The three interwoven narratives are John's own accounts of his travels, a memoir of Hagia, one of the locals who eventually ends up as John's queen, and a book of stories, which do a lot to explain how the country of Pentexore came into being and fill in the history that Hagia knows and John never asks about. It's a really cool device for a story like this, which is based on medieval legends rather than modern fantasy, even if the peoples of Pentexore are just as fantastic as elves and dwarves and vampires and werewolves.
Which is another point in its favor. A friend of mine (hi,
mirisa_ardruna is a fan of reading ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the wider world (and completely made-up ones, such as Lucian of Samosata's True History) and telling me what happens, and a lot of the legends have similar qualities. It's a welcome change from the current staple of fantasy, and Valente draws some damn good stuff from legends (not just of Prester John, but Thomas the Apostle, Alexander the Great and Herodotus), but gives a modern fantasy author's worldbuilding spin on it. Valente, in a guest column for John Scalzi's blog, described it as writing a first contact novel, in that John is taken from a world where he fundamentally knows that everyone believes the same basic thing and looks, roughly, like him, and thrown into a place -- alone -- without other humans and without the shared cultural references that everyone takes for granted. Which can be frustrating for the reader, since, from Hagia's point of view, we are already invested in her people and that really makes John seem like kind of an asshole for taking so long to fit this into his worldview. Then again, John is a medieval priest, who doesn't even have the reference a Western reader would have for things like aliens or elves -- in his world, there are men, beasts, angels and demons, and he's not sure what is what or how this fits in with God's plan.
I did really enjoy the book. Valente can turn a phrase like nothing else -- at least, based on reading Palimpsest and parts of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making -- and this is the kind of story that calls for it. Plus, I did really like a lot of the characters, and the old-school legends made the book feel young again. I'd like to see the sequels -- from the bridging story and Hagia's own reflections as she writes, we know Shit Went Down, but there is always a story in telling how.
