Monday, June 8, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Or What You Will by Jo Walton




Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 7, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Or What You Will is the next book by prolific award wining science fiction and fantasy author, Jo Walton.  I have.....loved some of Walton's work (The Just City, Necessity) and disliked others (The Philosopher Kings, Tooth and Claw).  Her most awarded novel, Among Others is one of the first books I reviewed for this blog, and I merely enjoyed it but didn't love it.  Still, Of What You Will has drawn comparisons already to Among Others for good reasons - like that book, it's often incredibly explicitly referential to the genre itself, and features a story (in part) of a person trying to escape past trauma that changed her life.

Unfortunately, I don't think it works nearly as well as it did in Among Others.  Whereas that novel featured a clear plot progression for its character that was the core of the story, Of What You Will essentially tries to work in two or three plots - a meta one about a SF/F author and her imaginary friend/muse trying desperately to find a way to keep her alive and a related fantasy plot told by the author and friend using characters from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (from which this book's title comes) and The Tempest.  And then there's frequent asides about the beauty and wonder of renaissance Italy.  It's a testament to Walton's craft that all of these individual elements work on their own, but the combination of them just didn't seem to work for me and felt more confusing than anything.

The above is kind of a bad explanation but I'll try to explain better after the jump:

Trigger Warning: Physical/Spousal Abuse, Parental Neglect.

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Sylvia Harrison is a renowned science fiction and fantasy writer, with 30 novels to her name as well as several of the major awards.  Now alone, after the death of her beloved husband, Sylvia vacations to live in Italy to gain inspiration for her newest novel - a return to her Renaissance and Shakespearean inspired setting that formed the basis of her first trilogy of novels.  All seems well for Sylvia as she returns to the world perpetually stuck in the renaissance, filled with famous characters like Miranda and Orsino.

But Sylvia's life was not so easy for the first part of her life, from the time she grew up under a neglectful mother to the time she married a controlling husband - both of whom were abusive.  The one thing that saved her was....."him" - her secret for her entire life.  "He" has no name, but has been in the background of her mind for much of her life, only showing himself to the world when she puts him into her novels as various an often significant characters.  But when Sylvia, now age 73, dies, he obviously must die too.

Or must he?  And so begins his plan to try and use her own storytelling, her own life, and the art of the renaissance to find a way to survive - for both himself and Sylvia - forever.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Or What You Will is a weird novel because it contains multiple layers of narrative and switches between them sometimes at a moment, with it often being a bit confusing how exactly the narrator's plan is supposed to work - and honestly it never gets less confusing.  The layers of narrative are basically as follows:

Layer 1.  Narrator telling the background and history of Science Fiction/Fantasy writer Sylvia Harrison, the woman in whose head he resides, and who comments back against parts of his narrative (since she can hear it).
Layer 1.5?  Narrator describes wonders of the renaissance and stories from it, some of which forms the basis for the setting of several of Sylvia's fictional books.
Layer 2:  A story in Sylvia's pseudo-renaissance setting, featuring characters from Twelfth Night and The Tempest as well as a pair of brand new characters brought into this world from 19th century Europe.

Layer 1.5 is just sort of there, I guess as a way for Walton to infodump fun stories about the Renaissance, but honestly adds practically nothing to this book, with the main focus of this book being the interaction between layers 1 and 2 - as the nameless Narrator is attempting to use a combination of the two layers to ensure Sylvia's survival somehow....and thus his own survival.  As such Layer 2 is only important really to that end - or to the extent it leads to Sylvia coming to some revelations about her views on life and the renaissance - a revelation that can best be summed up as "stasis in utopia isn't a utopia, as without progress it's no longer special."

The result is that all of the characters and conflicts in Layer 2 really don't matter - and while they're interesting to read, it's pretty clear that's the case from early on in this book, so you either care about events the book doesn't - in which case you'll be disappointed as the book's resolution of them is hilarious - or you will eventually wonder why those events really exist.

By contrast Layer 1 is very much the Among Others-esque plot you might expect from the plot summary and other reviews, in which the narrator through a non-linear narrative describes Sylvia's childhood and early life of struggling with abuse, and how she eventually managed to get through it all.  Like in Among Others, this Layer starts out very referential to the genre although that goes away for the most part as the story moves on, and features a character in Sylvia trying to get through events of the past, events she has largely put behind her.  There is some strong work in this layer and some strong themes, as Walton uses this narrative to reject the idea that an abused person cannot get through those experiences and come out okay on the other side - injured perhaps but not broken.  Moreover, Walton doesn't fall into the trap of accidentally arguing that those horrible experiences may have had a positive result in the end (and thus had some value) - in fact this concept is explicitly rejected by Sylvia in the text.  But Watson is making the case here that there is a path to a happier life for people with such experiences and they should not be given up on, and should be helped if at all possible.

This is the strongest theme and part of this novel, and it's tough to read but it works.  But the way Walton tries to merge it with Sylvia's attempts to go on after the death of her second husband and Layer 2 just seems confusing at best - with Sylvia attempting to explain to the narrator for most of the book why it can't work to actually give her immortality, only for her to then later....accept it and then it....works (this is not really a spoiler so I don't mind describing it)?  Again, all of this is done with excellent craft, and when parts in layers are dropped like a stone just to ensure we can get on with the ending Walton wants, she manages to make that work (like I said, it's hilarious) somehow, but like....when I look back at it, I just keep asking: What was the point?  And honestly, I don't know.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)