July 15, 2004
2:31 PM, Thursday, July 15, 2004
Hannah Wolf Bowen nails several of my issues with the de Lint School:
I've been reading the Green Man anthology. I'm almost exactly halfway done. And — it's interesting. This book is letting me pinpoint exactly why I'm lukewarm about lot of fiction about nature, and fiction about artists, and this whole mythic fantasy idea.
The stories have all been fine examples of the form. (The poems, too, as far as I can tell, but I'm not a poetry person, so I won't be commenting on those.) Solid plots. Pretty good characters. Some really excellent writing. And the ones that I'm most interested in — the Kathe Koja, the Jeffrey Ford, the Emma Bull — are in the second half of the book, and so are some other big names and the Nebula story, so I may feel very differently after reading those.
They're fine. They're good-enough. And they feel to me a little phoned-in, because they're too — not simple, because a simple story can be tremendously powerful. Surface-y, I guess. Warm and fuzzy. A little self-congratulatory. It's not just this book; it's a lot of books and a lot of stories. It's why I can't read Charles de Lint anymore even though I love and admire his older writing and even though he was one of the reasons that I seriously considered applying to Clarion West this year.
The book has all these stories about this idea of a green man and about nature. But — they're all focused on the same couple of ways to approach nature. Nature as refuge. Nature as a wonderful, loving place that, even when it's exacting revenge, is entirely just, rewarding the good and the brave. Nature as fairyland, but not the scary sort of fairies. The Tanith Lee story may be the exception, if you cross your eyes and squint real hard. Not exception enough to make me love it, but to be fair, I've never been a huge fan of Lee's writing, so that may be my fault more than the story's.
Same thing happens with a lot of the 'mythic' stuff that I've read on other subjects. Celia and I sometimes wonder why there aren't any magic lawyers, say, or plumbers — why is always painters and singers? (eBear recommends the wonderfully-titled "Stealing the Elf-King's Roses"; I just haven't been able to get my hands on a copy yet.) It has this feel that puts me off. A little too pleased with itself. A little too conscious of what it's doing. A little too certain that it's seeing what others overlook.
The trouble is, it can focus on that one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and then it ends up feeling thin and not so much insightful as differently blind. And I'm knee-jerking so hard on this Green Man book because to me, this picture of nature as good and just and welcoming is as much a misunderstanding as a picture of nature as a horrible place or a worthless one would be. Because nature has a sort of justice, but it's a brutal sort. Because it strikes me as disrespectful not to recognize that this is a place that can kill you, if you aren't careful. Because these celebrations of wild places seem to be intent on making them tame.
This is why these days I like Mythago Wood more than War for the Oaks and King Rat (Mieville, not Clavell) more than Neverwhere. Not that there's anything wrong with a little wish-fulfillment, but too much is bad for my digestion.
