September 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: ( Spoilers here. )
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.
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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: ( Spoilers here. )
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)
