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lethargic_man(All spoilers rot13ed.)
For a bibliophile, I'm not very good at reviewing books, and it's not going to be easy to make an original review after having read other people's reviews, particularly when I've left it a few weeks to do so; so I have no idea of how much of the below I've have unconsciously taken from other people.
Anyhow,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky complains in the FAQ at the end of this book that people don't like standalone novels, but I personally think she does well in them: her earlier novels The Prize in the Game and Ha'penny felt like they were suffering a bit from sequelitis compared to the highly original books they followed on from; whereas by contrast her standalones Tooth and Claw, Farthing and Lifelode all came across as refreshingly different from her previous material.
Lifelode tells the story of how the scholar Jankin came to meet Hanethe, who has fled the vengeance of a goddess. Jankin is from the Westmarch, where yeya doesn't work, "yeya" being to "magic" as "armiger" was to "knight" in The King's Peace, i.e. a term that conveys the meaning but without the associations of the term we're used to. Hanethe by contrast, has come back from the east, where "people run together and separate as fast as rainbows on oil, and only the gods can keep themselves whole" (and if that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what will). The novel takes place in Applekirk, the village of which Hanethe had walked away from being lord sixty years earlier (time running slower the further east you travel). (This whole east/west conceit I learned in the FAQ is an attempt to do <rot13>Ivatr'f Mbarf bs Gubhtug</rot13> in a fantasy setting, which, frankly, I am ashamed of myself for not spotting as I read.)
The novel is told largely (though far from exclusively) from the viewpoint of Taveth, the housekeeper of the Applekirk manor, and in a strange omniscient style that refuses to recognise tenses—appropriate enough for Taveth, who can see echoes of the past and future; perhaps less appropriate when in other people's heads. In this style, bits of speech are reported in advance of when you get to hear them in context, which means they resonate for you when they do, nicely paralleling how Taveth perceives the world.
papersky talks about the novel being influenced by Rumer Godden's China Court, a book I haven't read. I had got the idea, from what I heard her talk of it on rasf.c many years ago, that that book told its story completely out of sequence, like (to cite a book I have read) Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island, with the plot nevertheless still managing to emerge from what might sound chaos; but the narrative style in Lifelode is nothing like that (so maybe I should read China Court to find out).
Along with all of the above comes an exploration of a societal structure which takes polyamory for granted, and one which reacts to the possibility of <rot13>puvyqera bayl orvat pbaprvinoyr jvguva zneevntr</rot13> the opposite way to that in The King's Peace; also one in which no one (bar one teenage PoV character) bats an eyelid at the fact all priests are naked all the time. As with all good fiction, the reader is drawn sufficiently into the world being portrayed that none of this seems at all strange.
I was originally going to wait until the trade paperback came out before reading the book; having concluded that with the crop of awardspapersky had received and been nominated for, she had passed some years ago the stage of needing her hardbacks bought to make sure the paperback came out. Well, papersky put me right about that, and as it turned out no trade paperback ever appeared. I read somewhere that publishers were wary of the content, thinking it would be a hard sell, so did not market it strongly, as a result of which only part of the limited edition print run has sold.
I think this is a terrible shame, as this is, IMNSHO, a top-class, if slightly unconventional, fantasy novel and ought to be better known. Trying to put a better light on it, I'm reminded of the story of how a few hundred of the Velvet Underground's first album sold. So maybe if you get a copy of the novel now, you can look back whenpapersky is rich and famous and the book is a bestseller and say "I have a copy of the first edition!" :o)
For a bibliophile, I'm not very good at reviewing books, and it's not going to be easy to make an original review after having read other people's reviews, particularly when I've left it a few weeks to do so; so I have no idea of how much of the below I've have unconsciously taken from other people.
Anyhow,
papersky complains in the FAQ at the end of this book that people don't like standalone novels, but I personally think she does well in them: her earlier novels The Prize in the Game and Ha'penny felt like they were suffering a bit from sequelitis compared to the highly original books they followed on from; whereas by contrast her standalones Tooth and Claw, Farthing and Lifelode all came across as refreshingly different from her previous material.Lifelode tells the story of how the scholar Jankin came to meet Hanethe, who has fled the vengeance of a goddess. Jankin is from the Westmarch, where yeya doesn't work, "yeya" being to "magic" as "armiger" was to "knight" in The King's Peace, i.e. a term that conveys the meaning but without the associations of the term we're used to. Hanethe by contrast, has come back from the east, where "people run together and separate as fast as rainbows on oil, and only the gods can keep themselves whole" (and if that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what will). The novel takes place in Applekirk, the village of which Hanethe had walked away from being lord sixty years earlier (time running slower the further east you travel). (This whole east/west conceit I learned in the FAQ is an attempt to do <rot13>Ivatr'f Mbarf bs Gubhtug</rot13> in a fantasy setting, which, frankly, I am ashamed of myself for not spotting as I read.)
The novel is told largely (though far from exclusively) from the viewpoint of Taveth, the housekeeper of the Applekirk manor, and in a strange omniscient style that refuses to recognise tenses—appropriate enough for Taveth, who can see echoes of the past and future; perhaps less appropriate when in other people's heads. In this style, bits of speech are reported in advance of when you get to hear them in context, which means they resonate for you when they do, nicely paralleling how Taveth perceives the world.
papersky talks about the novel being influenced by Rumer Godden's China Court, a book I haven't read. I had got the idea, from what I heard her talk of it on rasf.c many years ago, that that book told its story completely out of sequence, like (to cite a book I have read) Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island, with the plot nevertheless still managing to emerge from what might sound chaos; but the narrative style in Lifelode is nothing like that (so maybe I should read China Court to find out).Along with all of the above comes an exploration of a societal structure which takes polyamory for granted, and one which reacts to the possibility of <rot13>puvyqera bayl orvat pbaprvinoyr jvguva zneevntr</rot13> the opposite way to that in The King's Peace; also one in which no one (bar one teenage PoV character) bats an eyelid at the fact all priests are naked all the time. As with all good fiction, the reader is drawn sufficiently into the world being portrayed that none of this seems at all strange.
I was originally going to wait until the trade paperback came out before reading the book; having concluded that with the crop of awards
papersky had received and been nominated for, she had passed some years ago the stage of needing her hardbacks bought to make sure the paperback came out. Well, papersky put me right about that, and as it turned out no trade paperback ever appeared. I read somewhere that publishers were wary of the content, thinking it would be a hard sell, so did not market it strongly, as a result of which only part of the limited edition print run has sold.I think this is a terrible shame, as this is, IMNSHO, a top-class, if slightly unconventional, fantasy novel and ought to be better known. Trying to put a better light on it, I'm reminded of the story of how a few hundred of the Velvet Underground's first album sold. So maybe if you get a copy of the novel now, you can look back when
papersky is rich and famous and the book is a bestseller and say "I have a copy of the first edition!" :o)
