Pennies crash down from the sky

[sovay]

I did not sleep at all last night. This is much less entertaining than it sounds. I am hoping not to repeat the trick tonight.

I know the last time I read Watership Down (1972) was in seventh grade, two years before I started Latin, but I still have no excuse for realizing only this afternoon that it is completely the Aeneid if someone had listened to Kassandra. The book's first epigraph is even some stichomythia from Agamemnon: φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ (line 1309). Hey, Dawn, how're the wife and kids? Marblehead says hello.

Comments

[chomiji]

XD

The Young Lady is currently 16. She was, IIRC, 12 or 13 when she had to read Watership Down for school. And therein lies, I suspect, part of the problem. It's rather unfortunate that kids tend to hate the assigned literature at school - even when the schools have tried to make the subject more enticing by including contemporary works with literary merit.

At that age, she was reading LOTR with enthusiam (as I imagine many of us did as young adolescents). I think that making the jump to rabbits - no shiny swords, no cozy Hobbit-cooking and clothes, no lovely ethereal elves - plus the fact that it was a school assignment are what doomed any good opinions she might have had. And right now, of course, her reaction is "I already read that - why should I read it again when there's new Pratchett and Gaiman and so on coming out?" (She's also fond of P.C. Hodgell and Kingsbury's Courtship Rite.)

Adams' Shardik and Maia are both richly detailed fantasy novels with very little, if any, magic: there are some examples of scenes where god-powers many be involved, but it's not clear. The emphasis is on the characters and how they are affected by religious fervor, war, political scheming, and so on.

Maia comes chronologically before Shardik, and recounts the life of a good-hearted, beautiful country bumpkin of a girl who ends up as a courtesan in the leading city of the region - which is beautifully detailed. The sexual nature of Maia's situation is explored explicitly, both for good and ill. She becomes involved at city politics in a very high level, and her naive viewpoint is the lens through which we view revolution, a siege of the city, and other unpleasant realities of a change in regime, as well as some very grotty bits of human nature.

Shardik concerns another naive rural character, the slightly simple hunter Keldarek, who encounters an enormous bear and believes it to be the avatar of his people's god. Ambitious men in his tribe seize on this sign as impetus to start a war of conquest. After their own traditional religious leaders (a group of priestesses) show a lack of enthusiasm for this idea, they manipulate Keldarek into becoming their priest on the basis of his relationship with the bear, who travels with them as a living sign of their holy mandate. Once again, war and its grim aftereffects are important themes.

I enjoy these books, but a lots of pain and angst occurs and is vividly detailed during the course of the stories. Adams' style is grandiloquent and loquacious, as in Watership Down, and one either likes it or loathes it.

I have not read The Plague Dogs out of a sort of cowardice: I'm pretty sure it would upset me a great deal.