![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSeptember JMF reread is The Dragon Waiting. I consider TDW to be the most complex and rich of John M. Ford's books; it's trying to do all kinds of things, historically and otherwise. Because there is so much going on in it, it has become clear to me that I have to split this into several posts. In this post I will talk about what I think several of the general themes are, and in subsequent posts I will address specific questions and thoughts I have about specific parts of the text. Right now I think I will do one post for Ch 1-8 (which are relatively easier to follow) and another post for Ch 9-13.
First note: This is the first time I have read TDW closely following Andrew Plotkin's Draco Concordans at the same time, which I highly highly recommend as it made sense of quite a few things I hadn't quite been able to parse, and pointed out some of Ford's jokes that I hadn't even realized were there. (I also disagree with or have additional commentary about some of his points, which will go in the later posts.) Andrew Plotkin, you are a hero.
Second note: there will be general spoilers in this post, though this book is one of those where the fun is in seeing how things are done rather than what happens, so I don't think most of them will actually really spoil the book for a new reader. The one exception is the "Chapter" one-sentence synopses, which I've put under a separate cut.
On the most surface level, JMF is writing an AU about Richard III in which (spoiler) the AU plots a path for Richard to live at the end; and in addition the text is very concerned with making sense of the whole Problem of Richard III and finding a narrative (sometimes meaning total AU, as in what happens to the Princes) in which Richard can be someone whose motivations are understandable by and sympathetic to a late-twentieth-century audience. This is something that I understand a lot better now, as a result of watching a lot of operas/musicals and trying very hard to make sense of their nonsensical plots :P No, seriously, history is clearly much less well documented and full of odd personalities than one might ideally like for good storytelling, and I feel like in real life / history, often the reasons that something happens are "everyone involved was being STUPID" and that doesn't make for a good narrative, so Ford is basically, well, taking history and making a novel-with-a-properly-hanging-together-plot-and-characters out of it by way of AU.
That AU, though! The AU, as JMF makes clear in the afterword, is one where Julian the Apostate (in our universe) / Julian the Wise (in AU) brought back paganism. Additionally, the Emperor Justinian made Byzantium into a world power by virtue of becoming vampire after the time at which he died in our universe. (Why yes: this AU has magic and vampirism.)
On an overall plot level, JMF is writing about how four (author-created) characters keep this evil Byzantium from taking over England -- by way of, in fact, having Richard III survive and win the Battle of Bosworth Field. It took me a rather embarrassing number of reads to actually understand that very simple plot, although in this reading I noticed that it is carefully set up explicitly in the first several chapters, I'm just a terribly non-detail-oriented reader.
On a more granular plot level -- well, the plot actually does advance in a granular fashion. There are conspiracies and plots like a little self-contained mystery each chapter or two, all of which feed into either character development or the larger Byzantium-antiByzantium plot, or both.
I'll talk about these more when I do the more in-depth posts, but just briefly:
Ch 1: Standalone plot: Hywel saves the wizard Ptolemy and becomes his magic apprentice (...this sounds much less fraught than what actually happens)
Ch 2: Standalone plot: Byzantium takes steps to exterminate Dimi's family; Dimi makes a charge
Ch 3: What is happening to Lorenzo / Cynthia's family / Will Florence be saved? (spoiler: no)
Ch 4-5: Who killed the banker? These two chapters are fun for being a locked room murder mystery. (I gotta confess that until this reading I never actually read it super carefully to really get all the ins and outs of the murder mystery.)
Ch 6: Can we get/destroy George's Exemplification?
Ch 7: Everyone hangs out with Duchess Cecily!
Ch 8: Dimi rescues Albany (who is then abruptly murdered)
Ch 9: Hywel goes to Wales with Cynthia for Mary to cure her. (Though it's only the first part of the chapter that's relatively self-contained -- in the second half, she sees Prince Edward and they interact with Morton as he kills Edward IV and they get captured -- so very much running into Ch 10-12.)
Ch 10-12: Morton's plot/conspiracy.
Ch 13: The Battle of Bosworth Field.
Another thing which I haven't seen elsewhere (or in Draco Concordans) is that JMF is also clearly riffing off Charles Williams' conception of Byzantium, which forms an epigraph to the book. So: JMF had read Charles Williams' totally wacko and awesome Arthurian poetry. (*) (BTW, this poetry is now in public domain in Canada. I am just saying.) Charles Williams was an Inkling, and one of the wacko and awesome things about his Arthurian poetry is that it is totally chock full of Christian-religious symbolism (one of the things I adore about it). I could go on about this all day, but suffice it to say for these purposes that the Empire of Byzantium, in Williams' poetry, is analogous to the City/Empire of God/Christ, the highest good. So what does JMF do? He borrows the Byzantine Empire and makes it the Big Bad Evil in an AU where Christianity is relegated to a minor subsect of Judaism. Well played, sir.
landingtree referred in a post to a certain tendency to male gaze in Ford's work (not that there's a lot of discussion of breasts or anything, but there is a certain male POV that sometimes can relegate female characters to little more than love interests / plot points), and I do think that can be a thing (and when we get to Web of Angels, let's discuss fridging in a big way, wheeeee) but this book is the one where I feel he is working against that, and male gaze exists at least partially to be pushed back upon by the female characters. There are still a lot of guys in this book, but Cynthia as one of the four main characters is awesome (interestingly, women in Byzantium!AU seem to be at least incrementally more equal -- almost no one gives Cynthia any crap for being a doctor, though part of that is that her family is famous for doctoring), and there are enough female characters that I am happy with all the roles they're filling. This book passes Bechdel easily, which is not something I can say for... most... of his books. (Growing Up Weightless, and I guess that Liavek story where they're putting on a play, because both of those have ensemble scenes. But everything else I'm coming up blank, although we'll see once I reread. Pretty sure Final Reflection doesn't.)
Also, random thing about this reread: I liked Gregory a lot, even more than on previous readings. Poor Gregory :P
There are probably a whole bunch of other things he's doing that I don't yet know, and other things I've noticed but am forgetting to talk about :P
(*) Which I have now also read literally because Williams shows up as an epigraph in this book and I'm pretty sure in one other of Ford's books (though I don't remember which one) (**). So when K and I were in that bookstore during college and she picked up the Arthurian Torso from the used book shelf and said, "Hey, this has notes by C.S. Lewis, are you interested?" I said, "OMG IT'S CHARLES WILLIAMS! YES. YES I AM."
(**) A list of things I have read because of TDW:
-Charles Williams, most of his work
-A Short History of Byzantium (John Julius Norwich)
-The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
-The Princes in the Tower (Alison Weir) (Weir clearly Does Not Approve of Daughter of Time, lol)
First note: This is the first time I have read TDW closely following Andrew Plotkin's Draco Concordans at the same time, which I highly highly recommend as it made sense of quite a few things I hadn't quite been able to parse, and pointed out some of Ford's jokes that I hadn't even realized were there. (I also disagree with or have additional commentary about some of his points, which will go in the later posts.) Andrew Plotkin, you are a hero.
Second note: there will be general spoilers in this post, though this book is one of those where the fun is in seeing how things are done rather than what happens, so I don't think most of them will actually really spoil the book for a new reader. The one exception is the "Chapter" one-sentence synopses, which I've put under a separate cut.
On the most surface level, JMF is writing an AU about Richard III in which (spoiler) the AU plots a path for Richard to live at the end; and in addition the text is very concerned with making sense of the whole Problem of Richard III and finding a narrative (sometimes meaning total AU, as in what happens to the Princes) in which Richard can be someone whose motivations are understandable by and sympathetic to a late-twentieth-century audience. This is something that I understand a lot better now, as a result of watching a lot of operas/musicals and trying very hard to make sense of their nonsensical plots :P No, seriously, history is clearly much less well documented and full of odd personalities than one might ideally like for good storytelling, and I feel like in real life / history, often the reasons that something happens are "everyone involved was being STUPID" and that doesn't make for a good narrative, so Ford is basically, well, taking history and making a novel-with-a-properly-hanging-together-plot-and-characters out of it by way of AU.
That AU, though! The AU, as JMF makes clear in the afterword, is one where Julian the Apostate (in our universe) / Julian the Wise (in AU) brought back paganism. Additionally, the Emperor Justinian made Byzantium into a world power by virtue of becoming vampire after the time at which he died in our universe. (Why yes: this AU has magic and vampirism.)
On an overall plot level, JMF is writing about how four (author-created) characters keep this evil Byzantium from taking over England -- by way of, in fact, having Richard III survive and win the Battle of Bosworth Field. It took me a rather embarrassing number of reads to actually understand that very simple plot, although in this reading I noticed that it is carefully set up explicitly in the first several chapters, I'm just a terribly non-detail-oriented reader.
On a more granular plot level -- well, the plot actually does advance in a granular fashion. There are conspiracies and plots like a little self-contained mystery each chapter or two, all of which feed into either character development or the larger Byzantium-antiByzantium plot, or both.
I'll talk about these more when I do the more in-depth posts, but just briefly:
Ch 1: Standalone plot: Hywel saves the wizard Ptolemy and becomes his magic apprentice (...this sounds much less fraught than what actually happens)
Ch 2: Standalone plot: Byzantium takes steps to exterminate Dimi's family; Dimi makes a charge
Ch 3: What is happening to Lorenzo / Cynthia's family / Will Florence be saved? (spoiler: no)
Ch 4-5: Who killed the banker? These two chapters are fun for being a locked room murder mystery. (I gotta confess that until this reading I never actually read it super carefully to really get all the ins and outs of the murder mystery.)
Ch 6: Can we get/destroy George's Exemplification?
Ch 7: Everyone hangs out with Duchess Cecily!
Ch 8: Dimi rescues Albany (who is then abruptly murdered)
Ch 9: Hywel goes to Wales with Cynthia for Mary to cure her. (Though it's only the first part of the chapter that's relatively self-contained -- in the second half, she sees Prince Edward and they interact with Morton as he kills Edward IV and they get captured -- so very much running into Ch 10-12.)
Ch 10-12: Morton's plot/conspiracy.
Ch 13: The Battle of Bosworth Field.
Another thing which I haven't seen elsewhere (or in Draco Concordans) is that JMF is also clearly riffing off Charles Williams' conception of Byzantium, which forms an epigraph to the book. So: JMF had read Charles Williams' totally wacko and awesome Arthurian poetry. (*) (BTW, this poetry is now in public domain in Canada. I am just saying.) Charles Williams was an Inkling, and one of the wacko and awesome things about his Arthurian poetry is that it is totally chock full of Christian-religious symbolism (one of the things I adore about it). I could go on about this all day, but suffice it to say for these purposes that the Empire of Byzantium, in Williams' poetry, is analogous to the City/Empire of God/Christ, the highest good. So what does JMF do? He borrows the Byzantine Empire and makes it the Big Bad Evil in an AU where Christianity is relegated to a minor subsect of Judaism. Well played, sir.
landingtree referred in a post to a certain tendency to male gaze in Ford's work (not that there's a lot of discussion of breasts or anything, but there is a certain male POV that sometimes can relegate female characters to little more than love interests / plot points), and I do think that can be a thing (and when we get to Web of Angels, let's discuss fridging in a big way, wheeeee) but this book is the one where I feel he is working against that, and male gaze exists at least partially to be pushed back upon by the female characters. There are still a lot of guys in this book, but Cynthia as one of the four main characters is awesome (interestingly, women in Byzantium!AU seem to be at least incrementally more equal -- almost no one gives Cynthia any crap for being a doctor, though part of that is that her family is famous for doctoring), and there are enough female characters that I am happy with all the roles they're filling. This book passes Bechdel easily, which is not something I can say for... most... of his books. (Growing Up Weightless, and I guess that Liavek story where they're putting on a play, because both of those have ensemble scenes. But everything else I'm coming up blank, although we'll see once I reread. Pretty sure Final Reflection doesn't.)Also, random thing about this reread: I liked Gregory a lot, even more than on previous readings. Poor Gregory :P
There are probably a whole bunch of other things he's doing that I don't yet know, and other things I've noticed but am forgetting to talk about :P
(*) Which I have now also read literally because Williams shows up as an epigraph in this book and I'm pretty sure in one other of Ford's books (though I don't remember which one) (**). So when K and I were in that bookstore during college and she picked up the Arthurian Torso from the used book shelf and said, "Hey, this has notes by C.S. Lewis, are you interested?" I said, "OMG IT'S CHARLES WILLIAMS! YES. YES I AM."
(**) A list of things I have read because of TDW:
-Charles Williams, most of his work
-A Short History of Byzantium (John Julius Norwich)
-The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
-The Princes in the Tower (Alison Weir) (Weir clearly Does Not Approve of Daughter of Time, lol)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 03:13 am (UTC)Same, although in my case a large part of the problem was that I knew almost nothing about the history he was riffing on. I also found people's motivations very opaque.
Would the next post be a good place to talk in-depth about magic? I think the magic in this book is really interesting.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 03:47 am (UTC)I also found people's motivations very opaque.
In a John M. Ford book?! Say it's not so! /sarcasm Yeah, I still don't understand why people did what they did half the time (I'll get into that in the next posts).
I think the next post makes sense for talking about magic -- Chs 1-9 have a lot of the stuff about Hywel and (I think) the bit about faith, which I remember finding really striking even on first reading.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-25 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-25 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 10:19 am (UTC)Ooh! Ooh!
I have reached the point with Dreamwidth where I can no longer say, whenever anyone mentions a cool thing, "I will now go read that thing," because there are too many, but Charles Williams is definitely now on my list, and this is very nifty.
I will reread The Dragon Waiting when my mother returns my copy. I will also send my mother a link to this post, because she loved The Dragon Waiting.
There are conspiracies and plots like a little self-contained mystery each chapter or two
Knowing this going in is going to make it much easier the second time, I think, because a large part of my confusion was never knowing at what point I ought to stop putting pieces together, how big the structure of the thing I was reading was.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 04:15 am (UTC)Eeeee, I am excited for your rereading and your mom! Tell her to feel free to comment!!
Knowing this going in is going to make it much easier the second time, I think, because a large part of my confusion was never knowing at what point I ought to stop putting pieces together, how big the structure of the thing I was reading was.
I was honestly a little surprised by how many things... never really showed up again, except as limited mentions. Like, there's this whole murder mystery in the middle of the book that as far as I can tell seems to only be there because Ford wanted to plot a locked room murder mystery! (Well, it has consequences for e.g. Cynthia's state of mind and getting Our Heroes together and on Hywel's side, but not very much for the overall plot. I think.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 03:18 am (UTC)I just feel like I never know what's happening or why and you'd think this would make me hate it but I am just like NO, GIVE ME MORE.
(The only other JMF I have read are his Trek books and I feel pretty much the same way about them.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 04:25 am (UTC)I just feel like I never know what's happening or why and you'd think this would make me hate it but I am just like NO, GIVE ME MORE.
omg HARD SAME. And I don't quite understand this because I have bounced off of other books that do this! But Ford, just like you say, I WANT MORE!
Did you see my Final Reflection post? Unfortunately I didn't write that one in a way that it would actually make any sense to someone who wasn't actively reading the book at the time, I think. I'm going to try to make these posts at least a little more sensible.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 04:39 am (UTC)(The nice part about rebuying TDW is that the copy I got was apparently some kind of promotional copy and came with a photocopied blurb from the publisher tucked inside the front cover; reading it made me appreciate how difficult this book is to describe in a way that makes it sound like... a normal SF/F book, if that makes any sense.)
Have you ever read Avram Davidson's Vergil Magus series? It's sort of similar to TDW in that it takes these really straightforward sounding premises and then ends up with extremely trippy historical SF/F with a lot of allusions worked in. The premise in this case is -- okay, well, you know the medieval belief that Vergil, the author of the Aeneid, was really a magician/sorcerer and therefore that was why everyone used the Aeneid for bibliomancy etc etc? The premise of the trilogy is that they were right and Vergil was, in fact, a magician. Anyway, if you like TDW for these reasons you might like this.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 04:57 am (UTC)Wow, I have not read that and it sounds kind of super cool, actually!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 05:11 am (UTC)I have looked up my Goodreads reviews of the Vergil Magus series (I would like to thank my past self for being so diligent) and apparently my opinion was that the first one (The Phoenix and the Mirror) was worth reading if trippy alt-history Rome with magic was your thing but after that they just got progressively weirder and more hard to follow.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-25 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 07:57 pm (UTC)Yes, I think you might like this one, and you are both a more careful reader and know more English history than I do, so you probably would be able to follow it better :) Though no slash :( In fact it was written in the 80's, so, you know, usual warnings about all hetero, and also for attitudes towards homosexuality, etc., from certain characters (though not, I think, from Ford himself). Though it has some good women characters (rather better than many of his books). And a spot of body horror in the first chapter (implied not shown, and quickly over, but it's the one page I almost never reread).
(All that being said, I love it -- obviously so, writing all these posts about it :) )