Wednesday, August 29, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley




Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr is a genuinely strange book.  The book is ostensibly the stories of an immortal (maybe?) crow over thousands of years, as it and its fellow crows first encounter the humans of Europe and then later America and modernization.  The single theme that recurs in these stories is that crow's - the eponymous Dar Oakley - frequent journeys to what seems to be a strange other realm, seemingly inhabited by the dead.  All of these stories are told by Dar Oakley to an old man in the modern day world who is mourning the recent death of his wife to disease.

The result is....well, uneven would be the wrong word.  Many of the stories told in this book are interesting, often heartbreaking, and yet they're kind of all over the place.  Some of these stories include the journeys to the realm of the dead which seems to be the constant theme throughout the book, while others are just Dar Oakley and the crows learning to adapt to more modern humans coming around them, and the result is less than the sum of its parts, leaving me feeling like I'm not sure what the overall point of the story was.

More after the Jump:

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
After the narrator's wife dies of an illness, he finds a very sick Crow in his backyard.  Over time, he discovers that the Crow can understand his speech and he learns to understand the Crow's.  That Crow, named Dar Oakley, has lived many lives over the past two thousand years, ranging from early European civilization to the Middle Ages in Europe to North America during the first European Colonization to more modern times.  Dar Oakley may hail from the world of Crows - Ka - but he has explored for ages the world of Ymr, the human world.

And multiple times throughout these lives, Dar Oakley has found himself in the realm of the Dead, as he has followed many members of the People (what he calls humanity) over the ages.  It is this first encounter that has left him immortal - dying time and time again only to be reborn years later.  This realm is of clear interest to the narrator - for does it still exist and can one truly enter it and return?  As Dar Oakley tells the tales of his life, over the ages, he begins to wonder.
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My plot summary above makes this book seem a lot more cohesive than it is.  The story of the narrator is largely a framing device, although the last few chapters of the book - as well as the occasional interludes, build enough depth for it to be part of the story itself rather than just superfluous framing, I guess.  But the bulk of the book is Dar Oakley's journeys through time, which can essentially be separated into two types:

Dar Oakley, following another person, finds his way into another Realm, seemingly the Realm of the Dead, and manages to return alive, with each visit to the Realm revealing something completely different inside.  This is mainly the human Realm of the Dead, although Dar Oakley does visit a Realm that seems to be the Crow version once in an uninspired version of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth.  Still, these stories are at least interesting, even if it's not particularly clear what the author is trying to say through them.

The other stories involve Dar Oakley's encounters with the growing in technology and heritage versions of humanity, and his helping the other Crows adapt.  These stories range from "huh" to "okay that's interesting" but even at best they never are special, and it's never really clear why these stories are being told alongside the other ones.  I was very much left feeling: "what's the point?" with these stories, which is never a good sign.

They're not really the same type of books but I'd like to compare this book to one I really enjoyed, Indra Das' The Devourers (Review Here), which is similar in its plot setup, with a modern story taking place as a frame mostly around a series of stories being told about a set of characters throughout.  In that book, the past stories were connected quite clearly to the themes of the present, and all felt very relevant to the protagonist's feeling of identity and love (the themes of the book).  In this book, not only was it not ever clear where many of these stories (particularly the ones not related to the Realm of the Dead) connected to the narrator, it's not particularly clear what the theme here really was.

The result is a book that I cannot recommend - the prose is solid, and there are some interesting ideas there, but it just feels like a hodgepodge of stories that never form a coherent whole...or even the semblance of one.
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