Tuesday, October 15, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland




A Choir of Lies is the follow up to Alexandra Rowland's 2018 novel, A Conspiracy of Truths, but it's very much a stand alone novel.  That said, it's very much a follow up to the first novel, a response to how that book treated the power of storytelling.  For those who missed Conspiracy, it's the tale of a traveling storyteller who only goes by the title "Chant", who finds himself accused of false charges and responds by using stories told to political leaders to change the situation in the country to great - and powerful - effect.  It was somewhat a satire of the silliness of people in power and somewhat a tale of the power of how the right words can change everything.  I liked it a bit, although I found the book itself let down by having the stories themselves not be particularly interesting.

A Choir of Lies responds to that first book by asking questions of the responsibilities of those telling stories, especially given the devastation they can cause.  Two Chants appear - Ylfing, the first Chant's apprentice from the last book and who narrates this tale, and a woman who goes by Madame Chant, who provides footnotes and responses to his comments.  Their dialogue and overall story provides a fascinating look at not only the different arts of storytelling, but also a pretty interesting look at the responsibilities and codes that can come with those arts.  The result is probably better than the first book - although the use of a real world event as a clear inspiration for much of the plot of this book didn't work for me, as it was really distracting as I was always waiting for the implications of that even to drop, as they inevitably had to.  Still, well worth a read.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
The Chant formerly known as Yfling comes to the city-state of Heyrland a broken man, still devastated from being abandoned by his master Chant, as well as from seeing the devastation his master chant wreaked in the land of Nuryevet with his storytelling.  Chant/Yfling no longer feels the desire to tell or learn stories and so he tries to hide his gifts and calling as much as he can, to the point of taking a job as a translator.  But he can only hide his gift for so long, and soon finds himself employed by a businesswoman in the City telling the stories about the values of an imported flower - a flower which soon becomes all the rage in Heyrland, and whose value keeps rising and rising.

Yet to Chant/Yfling's surprise, he soon comes into contact with another Chant - a Madame Chant - whose ways are both similar to the ones he was taught and very different.  And Madame Chant keeps trying to suggest that what Chant/Yfling is doing is wrong, and that he is misusing the powers of his stories.  And so Chant/Yfling begins to wonder: is he really following the same destructive path of his master?  And what can he do to stop himself from going down that same path and to prevent his own stories from ruining everything else?

And even aside from that, in all of this mess, Chant/Yfling begins to wonder who exactly he himself is, and whether there is any happy story for him at all in the world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This book's predecessor, A Conspiracy of Truths, followed a narrator (Chant) who was supremely confident in his storytelling abilities - even when he absolutely shouldn't be - and in what a Chant was supposed to do and how his stories could be used (to save his own life).  A Choir of Lies on the other hand, follows a narrator in Chant's successor (who for sanity I'm just going to refer to as Yfling)
who is insecure in his own self completely - traumatized by the consequences of Chant's actions in the last book.  To complement Yfling, the book features footnotes from another chant who shows up in the story, Mistress Chant, commenting not just on her own opinions of things that happened throughout the story, but also on the role of a chant and storytelling itself.  And as is not uncommon for books like this, the footnotes in their outrage can be a little funny too (Mistress Chant is not afraid to swear).

I called the first book a satire of politics and of dictatorial leaders (see my review), with the power of stories being the vehicle to engineer the satire, as Chant manipulated various leaders of political factions who kept coming up to him and putting him in their power, as he tried to survive.  This book leaves that idea aside to focus instead upon the power of storytelling to manipulate others and to cause both good and harm when used in different ways, as well as the power of internal storytelling to satisfy one's own life.

This works because of Yfling, who in Conspiracy was portrayed - albeit through his master's incredibly unreliable viewpoint - as a flighty boy who often overlooked the big picture results of actions around him and was almost more interested in constant flings with other boys.  Here, the Yfling we see is very different, having been broken by seeing the consequences of his master's actions as well what he sees as his master's callous disappearance.  Much of this book is about Yfling learning to find himself again, to find what he likes in telling stories, what he wants in other people - including in romance - while not forgetting the lessons of his mater's actions at the same time.  And Rowland writes Yfling excellently so he's incredibly easy to understand and empathize with (even as Madame Chant doesn't quite do so in her footnotes).

The result is a story again, as I've noted repeatedly in this review, about the powers and uses of storytelling,and the responsibilities those uses entail.  Whereas Yfling's master basically didn't care about the wreck he was causing with his stories behind him, Yfling does, and it colors his actions far differently.  And the reader should see the potential ruin Yfling's own stories are causing here far before Yfling does - as Yfling is a bit naive due to his age and isn't very good at seeing things going forward throughout the book (even romantically, which is played for a lot of humor), which keeps the momentum of the story moving without.

I should note that like its predecessor, Choir isn't anything special in the telling of these stories within the story (One Thousand and One Nights this is not), which is even more made clear by the fact that many of these stories are in fact simply summarized more often than not.   The book makes a little bit about the debate of the merits of writing stories down vs an oral tradition where stories can shift and be changed, and it's more about that than about actual short stories themselves.

Anyhow, I enjoyed A Choir of Lies a good bit, but I did have one complaint.  The crisis Yfling winds up causing with his voice is clearly based upon the Dutch Tulip Bubble (Tulipmania), which is commonly held up as the first major financial bubble in real world history.  And while that provides a believable structure to what is happening throughout, it also means that any reader who is familiar with that bubble (or honestly is familiar with the concept of bubbles in general) will know what exactly is coming in terms of the consequences for Yfling's actions from rather early on in the book, and so the long time it takes for those consequences to actually occur is kind of frustrating.  There are some plot twists the book is still able to pull off, and the end result is still satisfying, but I feel like using such a clear direct historical parallel ruined some of the intrigue of the plot - at least for me, who is very familiar with that event and the concept in general.  Perhaps those who have no economics background won't have such problems, but for me it was a bit distracting and an intrigue-killer.



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)