100 Books #46 - Catherynne Valente's THE FOLDED WORLD

"Stew is better than war, for only one has nice carrots in it."

It should say something that, just days after devouring the first book in this series, I've done the same with the second (I actually finished this on May 23, but was out in the land of little bandwidth with no time to blog). Which is to say that, series title aside, so far the Dirge for Prester John is pretty enjoyable reading.

The Folded World both is and is not a sequel, its conceit being that parts of it were written long before parts of the first book even though the events of the story all take place after The Habitation of the Blessed. Thus we have one of the narrators from the previous book, the blemmye Hagia, writing after she became Prester John's wife and gave birth to their daughter, Sefalet but before the writing she did for the previous book. Further confusing matters, for this book she is serving mostly as scribe for Prester John's other daughter, Anglitora whom he fathered on a crane long before meeting Hagia, and the narration swerves dizzyingly between Anglitora's and Hagia's own without warning, sometimes trading paragraphs as the two of them struggle for control over the story and its telling. It's a real testament to Catherynne Valente's talent that it is always perfectly lucid which of the two is speaking in Hagia's parts of this book.

This time around, Hagia is sharing narrating duties with several others, including a lioness, Vyala, mother of Hagia's lover Hadulph (yes, another lion), whose devotion to Hagia extends to her daughter by Prester John to such a degree that, seeing her unhappy and about to be abandoned by the royal couple's march to war, Hadulph sends the girl to Vyala  for care, company, and instruction in love, for Vyala is universally acknowledged to be the best at love (not at sex: at love) and the wisest about it. Her passages are full of lovely and lively explorations and wisdom on that subject, including an inversion of St. Paul's famous homily on love that emphasizes love's cruelty and selfishness and feels just as true as Paul's words.

Poor Sefalet needs Vyala's instruction, for she is deeply afflicted by congenital uniqueness that's a heavy burden for a little girl: her head is entirely featureless, with her eyes on the backs of her hands, and on her palms, both of them, are her two mouths, one of which speaks sweetly and one of which is monstrously cruel. In addition, through the mean mouth, Sefalet makes prophecies that have a habit of coming true. As she observes early in the story, Cassandra had it easy.

But it's Anglitora, Prester John's daughter by the crane, a girl who looks mostly human but who sports a wing where one of her arms should be, who is the real catalyst for this second story. Her arrival in John's kingdom is dramatic: she carries a helmet containing a letter from the emperor in Constantinople, who received Prester John's famous letter (which is mostly a pack of lies even in this world where John's kingdom really exists) and has written him back, begging him to help defend his city from the invading Muslims.

Further complicating the book is its third narrator, John Mandeville -- yes, that John -- another famous liar, whose bullshit accounts of his explorations nonetheless, in our world, inspired the likes of Christopher Columbus. In the world of the Dirge for Prester John, he comes to John's world, but he lands among the peoples who dwell on the other side of the great diamond wall built by Alexander the Great to protect what would one day become John's kingdom from all the demons out there. Said demons being, of course, the peoples who meet John Mandeville and tell him horror stories of those other demons on the other side of the wall. Of course.

And yet further complicating matters is that once again all of this is framed in the account of a monk copying these stories out of another book-fruit, but it's a different monk because the monk who raced against rot in The Habitation of the Blessed wound up eating one of his rotten books and is now incapacitated.

Got all that? And I haven't even gotten to the war. For of course there is war, and of course it does not have nice carrots in it.

Too, these books would argue that stew is also better than organized religion, which comes in for a lot of questioning, disputing and gentle satire as the fabulous creatures of Pentexore follow their lottery-annointed king into a holy war they really don't understand. A scene amidst a great hedge of Christian and Muslim knights that grew from a bunch of corpses that washed up on a beach comes to mind. They are planted firmly in Pentexore's magical soil, these soldier-trees, but they still want to fight each other over points of doctrine.

The war itself is full of surprises and sadness even as the story builds to a wholly different and only sort of foreshadowed conclusion that has nothing to do with that war and everything to do with the ancient history of Pentexore.

There is a whole lot of bang for my bucks in Ms. Valente's books. I see from her blog that she and her publisher have parted ways. Here's hoping she gets a move on and joins the brave new world of self-publishing. She's certainly talented enough.

More soon, please!

100 Books #45 - Catherynne M. Valente's THE HABITATION OF THE BLESSED

Blemmyes! Panotti! Skiapods! Cametenna! Astomi!* Bookfruit trees! If these words do not excite you, or you just don't know what the hell they mean, then you are likely not a fan of the mythical kingdom of Prester John, a legendary priest-king who supposedly had a powerful and flourishing Christian kingdom in the far east somewhere, whose aid many crusaders were deluded into hoping for based on a fanciful letter said king was said to have sent to Constantinople in the middle ages. His kingdom was populated, in imagination, by pretty much every kind of fanciful beast that had yet to be found in the lands actually explored by Europeans, including those whom it was pretty well understood by that point had probably been made up by Herodotus. Even after Prester John's letter was discredited as complete fakery, some people still believed in his kingdom, where also was supposedly located the Fountain of Youth.

Hooray!

I might have thought that my lust for all things Prester John had finally been sated by Umberto Eco's Baudolino, many years ago, but I would have been wrong, wrong, wrong. Enter Catherynne M. Valente, a fantasy author of some repute (though heretofore unknown to me), who took the idea of "what if Prester John's kingdom had actually existed just as imagined" and ran a freaking marathon with it.

It's kind of a melancholy marathon, though, because, among other things, Prester John emerges as pretty much the villain, bumming everyone out with his insistence that everybody needed to convert to Christianity and stop making each other happy. "I will remake the world, more perfect, more pure," he says. Sound like every super-villain you've ever heard declaiming?

Despite this, this is a truly lovely book, even as it breaks the reader's heart in pretty much every way a book can.

The Habitation of the Blessed is divided up into several related narratives: that of John himself, detailing his discovery of and rise to power within this fabulous land, that of his immortal blemmye wife Hagia, that of a Panotti nanny who raised the children of the queen who invented the lottery that changes everyone's fates (see below), and that of an aging, ordinary human monk who is frantically reading and copying these other three stories before the books containing them, books he plucked from a bookfruit tree rot into illegibility. "My eyes raced my brain and both of them panted, exhausted. Fat globs of soft, furry mold swarmed up and took a great swath of words, and I felt tears prick my heart." Bookfruits must be taken fresh or not at all.

The tone of all four narratives is like that, incredibly wistful, mournful, full of love and regret (hence the title for the series of which this is the first novel A Dirge for Prester John). But the love the Pentexorans have for one another relieves the gloom and makes it beautiful, even as the strangeness and absurdity of their world makes it amusing.

Of them all, I loved Hagia best. She is neither defined by being a blemmye nor by being Prester John's eventual wife, spending most of the novel enjoying many ordinary human lifetimes' worth of experiences of every kind available to her because that's her culture's rule: immortality would get stale and unbearable if the immortal don't deliberately shake things up every once in a while, so every three hundred years a lottery is called that breaks up families and marriages and forces individuals to pursue new careers, a bittersweet idea softened by the knowledge that the next lottery might reunite a pair of spouses, a parent and child or close friends or colleagues. And hey, someone will draw a chit that makes him or her the ruler of Pentexore, the country where Hagia and her people dwell. It's a bittersweet existence, immortality...**

Not there aren't delights to be had in the other narratives, as when Prester John, just come from the most godawful of deserts, finally finds something sort of like food and eats of the fruit of the cannon tree (preferring that to the horse tree, where the fruit consists of whinnying horses' heads; at least the cannon tree just offers up edible, peppery-flavored shot) and is chewed out as a thief and worse by the fruits of yet another tree, those fruits, of course, being talking sheep heads, who tell him he is "baaaad." Well no, okay, they don't prolong the vowel sound, but they totally should.

A pity Prester John is such a prig in that scene, though. But that is his nature, for which he is ultimately and always forgiven, for that is how people are in Pentexore. That is how they have to be. They're stuck with each other forever, after all. Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.

If only.

Now, pardon me: I'm off to the bookfruit tree to hunt up the sequel.

*Blemmyes are headless people, whose faces are in their chests; Skiapods are dwarfs with one giant foot; Cametenna have hands so large they can hide their entire bodies in them much as Panotti can hide in their own giant dumbo ears. Astomi are people who need neither to eat nor drink and survive by smelling stuff.

**"Among the immortal, good manners are as important as bread and water. When we cannot forget anything, courtesy behooves  us all." The inhabitants of Hagia's homeland mostly come to regret their courtesy to John, who does not return it, who demands that they adopt his religion and beliefs and reject any source of eternal life that is not Jesus and in general is a bit of a jerk for a long time, but courtesy is what they know, courtesy and pity that John cannot see that he is already in Paradise as he harangues them about one they'll only reach if they're sorry enough.