Friday, June 29, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar




  The Winged Histories marks a return to the world of Sofia Samatar's "A Stranger in Olondria," dealing with the stories of four women leading up to, during, and after the war described near the end of that novel.  That said, it is entirely a stand-alone novel with very few direct references to the prior book and as such there's no need to read A Stranger in Olondria first.  And in fact, I found it a stronger work than its predecessor, despite it being even further than that book from the type of book I normally read.

  What I mean by that is that well, if you like book with straight prose, you're going to not enjoy The Winged Histories, which often borders on poetry rather than prose and frequently jumps between at least three time periods in each character's story with barely any notice of a time jump whatsoever.  I admit to missing quite a bit in my first read through and only realizing this fact after a reread after my first completion of this book as a result.  It's also not a happy book in any way, all four of our main characters have endings that at best can be considered bittersweet.  But it is a fascinating tale(s) of a group of women who chafe at the roles and lives others have assigned for them.


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
The Winged Histories tells the stories of four women, from each of their perspectives, in chronological order.  The women are:

Tavis (aka Tav): A young woman in an offshoot to the ruling line of Olondria, but whose father is selling off all of their possessions to fund his own bad habits - Tav goes against her family's wishes and joins the military and becomes a soldier.  But what she secretly desires is to free her grandfather's nomad country of Kestenya from Olondrian rule.  To accomplish this, Tav seeks to convince the nomad men of Kestenya to join the forces of her cousin, the crown prince Andasya in a revolution, but in the tents of Kestenya she finds a love that she never expected.

Tialon: A young woman who was the daughter of the head of a religious cult - the Priest of the Stone - which had taken in the ruler of Olondria and forced underground the religion of the ancient goddess of Avalei.  Tialon has lived a life of isolation, as her father became more and more engrossed in his work, driving away virtually all others....until he is killed and Tialon taken prisoner by Andasya's revolution.  As she reflects and writes about her life, she discovers her father may have been keeping more from her than she could ever have thought.

Seren: A nomad young woman of the Feredhai, the nomads of Kestenya, who loves women rather than men, and wonders why that is considered a childish feeling among her people.  As her lover, a young woman soldier, comes back from the revolution that devastated her people, she dictates to her lover her thoughts as an epic song that dares to be something other than what songs are traditionally among her people: it is a song not about mourning, but of laughter and love.

Siski: Tav's sister, whose aunt had hoped to marry to their cousin Andasya in order to place her on the throne, but who ran instead from him after a confrontation that remains a mystery to all others.  Now, after the revolution has failed, Siski and Andasya are alone in a ruined temple, as he suffers from a mysterious disease.  There, Siski reflects upon her life after she left Andasya for the first time and makes a decision as to what she will do with Andasya in the future....
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I tried to not spoil as much as possible in the above plot summary, but honestly it doesn't really matter - like with A Stranger in Olondria, so much of The Winged Histories is in Samatar's writing (the  word "prose" seems incredibly inapt to use here, but it's not quite poetry either) rather than the plot.  In fact, each of the first three parts of the book conclude with a small chapter titled "From Our Common History" where a supposedly neutral narrator describes what actually has been happening in the world during and immediately following each of those parts - in essence the background plot.*  Instead, the four stories in question are more about the feelings and desires of their protagonists, rather than their actions upon the greater world.

*I say supposedly, because the last one of these segments concludes with a brief interlude into the thoughts of an ancillary character who stands in clear contrast to the four protagonists, rather than dealing with the background plot at all, abandoning all pretense of neutrality.*

 Three of these four stories are kind of interconnected - that of Tav, Seren, and Siski and each of these is incredibly strong and works arguably even better upon a reread as a result of it.  Tav's story is a fascinating subversion of the common in the genre trope of "woman runs away to become a soldier in a gender segregated society" - the typical version of the trope features the woman enduring hardship and discrimination and triumphing as a warrior - the typical subversion features the woman realizing the hardships and horrors of war and finding some other path.  Tav definitely encounters the horrors of war - the book jumps right to them from her enlistment - but doesn't turn away from this path and only finds herself more committed toward fighting toward a cause she more believes in, to the point where she makes a decision to follow this path at the end of her story that even she knows she is going to regret forever.

Seren's story follows from Tav's, and is essentially one long song or poem as Seren reflects on her life, the lives of her people, her family, and her lover after the events Tav set in motion.  Seren is an outcast amongst her people to some extent for her love of women (which is thought of as acceptable in children and young women, but not at her own age), but at the same time she still feels a belonging to her people.  Her song is one of contradiction - she rants against her people's past thinking but struggles against going otherwise against it - for example in how their songs are not meant for joy, but for sorrow and revenge - or how the che, a language her people have is only to be used by women.  She is singing both against and with her lover, and the contradiction carries her song to a beautiful and bittersweet conclusion, as she also tells of the remains of her people after Tav's war.

Siski's story also follows from Tav's, jumping (as do the other stories) back and forth between three time periods - Siski's early childhood up through her confrontation with Dasya that changed everything, her actions since then being a lively woman, and her life now after the revolution in the ruined Temple with the sickening Dasya.  It's the most plot heavy of all four stories, as it finally reveals the truth behind the actions hinted out in the first 3/4 of the book, and like the other two stories I note above, it is very much a story of love, broken hearts, and a final commitment.  It's rather heartbreaking in a way that I will not spoil here.

Tialon's story is the odd one out.  Tialon is a character we saw a bit of in A Stranger of Olondria to a decent extent, and her story is the only one of the four that alludes to that novel's story, to any extent.  It's the most completely miserable story of the four, and....well, it didn't work for me - owing in large part to how separate it felt and how it just got more and more into misery, as Tialon describes her life with her father who goes more and more mad in his obsessions and Tialon becomes more and more alone.  (It doesn't help that the book oddly elides over the romance between Tialon and her father's companion Lunre which is a plot point in Stranger, which seemed to me like it should have been more significant).  The ending was such that I felt like half of the content of this story could have been skipped, as all it added was more of the same misery, which was not needed.  And other than to add more background, it doesn't tie into the rest of the story at all. 

Really the only connection of Tialon's story to the other 3 (4) stories is that she, like Tav, Siski, and Seren, is a woman whose life's path was seemingly chosen for her by others (in her case like by her father).  But whereas the other three are able to make their own choices early enough to deviate from those paths - often to their own detriment - Tialon never is able to till her very end, and it just feels off as a result.

Still the other three quarters of this book are tremendous, and again, the writing is incredibly well done.  These tales are not happy, although one can hope for the main characters to find some greater happiness in the future as these stories are not nearly their ends.   But the stories are.....beautiful in their tragedies, in their sadnesses, in their joys, and there's no other way to say it, and I would definitely recommend The Winged Histories for others to read.

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