book review: A Companion to Wolves
Aug. 31st, 2011 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo awhile ago I read Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear's _A Companion to Wolves_ and started writing a review of it, and then I got distracted, and then I heard there was a sequel coming out and it got me thinking about it again. So I decided to turn my review into an attempt to predict things about the sequel. I guess the sequel is now out but I've managed to completely avoid reading anything whatsoever about it, except for learning its title, so these are clean, honest, ignorant, possibly hilariously wrong predictions, no cheating. (That said, I don't mind sequel-spoilers in comments.)
SPOILERS behind the cut for _A Companion to Wolves_ (obviously), plus general ones for the _His Dark Materials_ trilogy and _Ender's Game_ and sequels.
Four Ways of Reading _A Companion to Wolves_.
I. (Anti-)Pern.
So this is the most obvious one, right? It's a commentary/critique of the whole bonded-companion-animal genre. Well, of half of it: we can divide companion animal stories into two sub-genres, call them "institutional" and "transitional". In an institutional companion animal fantasy, there's a whole sub-society of people who have the animal companions, although the protagonist's will be special even in that society (a queen, a mutant, nine of them and they sing, Groveborn, etc). The plot resolves with the protagonist establishing and settling into their role in the society, with bonus sorting out of their romantic plot, retaining the animal companion. In a transitional companion animal fantasy, the animal or the bond is exceptional, outside of any established social norm, and for the protagonist to come of age (or at least move on to the next step of growing up) the animal companion must ultimately return to the wild or sacrifice itself to save the protagonist. (I'd be very interested to hear suggestions of works that don't fit either pattern - _Golden Compass_ comes to mind, in that there's no Choosing, Pan isn't particularly special (he does later develop daemon superpowers, but as a direct result of actions taken by Lyra; he's not innately special). However I would argue that the trilogy works as a transitional companion animal fantasy if we read the companion animal as the alethiometer rather than the daemon...)
_A Companion to Wolves_ is obviously of the first type, being pretty much directly written against the Pern books. Maybe it wouldn't be so hot to be psychically bonded to an animal with animal needs and drives. Maybe your animal wouldn't always magically want to mate with the animal of someone you have the hots for. Etc. Isolfr being settled at the end, in this analysis we're going to need a new viewpoint character whose wolf is extraspecial in some different way - we could backtrack in time a bit and do Kari, who has bonded with a wild wolf out in the wilderness without any of the social supports Isolfr had. He ends up joining Isolfr's hall so once we've gotten there we could get a new perspective on the _CtW_ characters and see how they're doing further down the road.
II. (Anti-)Slash.
Ever since Spock got into the habit of going into pon farr while stranded with Kirk on a variety of inhospitable planets, the mating crisis has been a popular device to initiate a slash pairing. The irresistable, overpowering necessity to have sex with _somebody, anybody_, neatly sweeps away any questions of canonical non-attraction or reluctance. Call it the inflammation theory: an external irritant induces swelling, heat, and redness, and though the burning fades, feelings of tenderness persist. In slash, the desperate measures of the mating crisis always seem to lead characters where we most like to see them go, to the realization of deeper feelings.
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette will not be writing curtainfic in their sequel to _CtW_. (Curtainfic - fanfic scenes of domesticity in a relationship established prior to the start of the story.) Isolfr has lots of inflammatory sex - lots and lots, they could have called the book "Gangbangs With Wolves" if Costner didn't have the whole "With Wolves" construction locked up - and by the end, there's obviously affection and working partnership in his threesome. But it's not at all clear that there's more there. I feel like the mating crisis has truly resolved when it becomes apparent that even if the crisis-urge can be redirected or reversed, the desire now persists in spite of that, or they'll fight to keep it, rather than fighting against it. Isolfr thinks Vethulf and Skjaldwulf are good guys who will be good leaders and comes to be okay with them being into him, but it seems to me that if Viradechtis picked someone else the next time around, we wouldn't be reading a story about Isolfr struggling to maintain his relationship with V and S despite that, we'd be reading a story about Isolfr shrugging and figuring that the pack must need someone else in charge and okay then. And so maybe that's what we'll get, to further drive home the notion that made-them-do-it sex isn't actually sufficient for love.
III. Sci-Fi in Viking Suits.
As a science fiction reader, the most important scene in the book is surely the one near the end in which we find out that the bug-eyed monsters can talk.
Questions are suddenly raised: maybe this isn't _Longship Wolftroopers_, maybe it's _Isolfr's Game_, and in the next two sequels, _Speaker To The Elves_ and _Ragnarok_ (we'll pretend _Puppies of the Mind_ never happens), we'll see the development of a cooperative society between these three very alien races that frightens and threatens nearby human nations. Isolfr is not such a terrible parallel to Ender: one of Ender's great tasks in the war is to learn the strengths and weaknesses of his commanders and how they can be used, just as Isolfr learns to manage the wolfpack; Isolfr, like Ender, enables the end of a devastating war through the complete destruction of the monster threat but also the preservation of the last of the race once a contact has been established in which both sides learn for the first time that the others are people. The shifting of the focus of conflict from Humans vs Others to Humans-and-Others vs Other Humans could easily fill another book (or two) - or maybe it's not only other humans who will object to this unprecedented collaboration between races, but also the liosalfar, the so-far invisible counterparts to the svartalfar?
IV. Feminist
I can't give _CtW_ a proper scholarly feminist analysis, but off the top of my head, I'm reading Bear and Monette as saying some things like "women's work is important" and "the womanly role is not weak", making their argument by making "the woman" a dude. Maaaaybe they're going to drive it home by giving us some more actual ladies? We could next-gen and get Isolfr's daughter and her apprenticeship with Tin (which would play nicely with a type-III sequel). We could get (shock! horror!) an actual lady bonding with a wolf, which would be a splendid type-I sequel - wait, holy shit, is Kari a girl? No beard, shy, living in the wild until the wolf insisted they come in, refuses to take an ulf name, often says things "softly" or "pitched low"... hmmm. But the wolves would be able to smell the difference, and they never say anything, and Isolfr is *sleeping* with Kari (possibly just in a bed-sharing way, although possibly in a mutual-masturbation way, as I got the impression that was the norm for "shieldmates".) So probably not, but I would read the hell out of that fic. Anyways, a good feminist sequel should probably take on some other bit of sexism, showing us some other way traditionally-feminine things can be tough/brave/heroic. Maybe we'll get some stuff about parenting, as Isolfr's kid and Viradechtis' puppies grow up?
SPOILERS behind the cut for _A Companion to Wolves_ (obviously), plus general ones for the _His Dark Materials_ trilogy and _Ender's Game_ and sequels.
Four Ways of Reading _A Companion to Wolves_.
I. (Anti-)Pern.
So this is the most obvious one, right? It's a commentary/critique of the whole bonded-companion-animal genre. Well, of half of it: we can divide companion animal stories into two sub-genres, call them "institutional" and "transitional". In an institutional companion animal fantasy, there's a whole sub-society of people who have the animal companions, although the protagonist's will be special even in that society (a queen, a mutant, nine of them and they sing, Groveborn, etc). The plot resolves with the protagonist establishing and settling into their role in the society, with bonus sorting out of their romantic plot, retaining the animal companion. In a transitional companion animal fantasy, the animal or the bond is exceptional, outside of any established social norm, and for the protagonist to come of age (or at least move on to the next step of growing up) the animal companion must ultimately return to the wild or sacrifice itself to save the protagonist. (I'd be very interested to hear suggestions of works that don't fit either pattern - _Golden Compass_ comes to mind, in that there's no Choosing, Pan isn't particularly special (he does later develop daemon superpowers, but as a direct result of actions taken by Lyra; he's not innately special). However I would argue that the trilogy works as a transitional companion animal fantasy if we read the companion animal as the alethiometer rather than the daemon...)
_A Companion to Wolves_ is obviously of the first type, being pretty much directly written against the Pern books. Maybe it wouldn't be so hot to be psychically bonded to an animal with animal needs and drives. Maybe your animal wouldn't always magically want to mate with the animal of someone you have the hots for. Etc. Isolfr being settled at the end, in this analysis we're going to need a new viewpoint character whose wolf is extraspecial in some different way - we could backtrack in time a bit and do Kari, who has bonded with a wild wolf out in the wilderness without any of the social supports Isolfr had. He ends up joining Isolfr's hall so once we've gotten there we could get a new perspective on the _CtW_ characters and see how they're doing further down the road.
II. (Anti-)Slash.
Ever since Spock got into the habit of going into pon farr while stranded with Kirk on a variety of inhospitable planets, the mating crisis has been a popular device to initiate a slash pairing. The irresistable, overpowering necessity to have sex with _somebody, anybody_, neatly sweeps away any questions of canonical non-attraction or reluctance. Call it the inflammation theory: an external irritant induces swelling, heat, and redness, and though the burning fades, feelings of tenderness persist. In slash, the desperate measures of the mating crisis always seem to lead characters where we most like to see them go, to the realization of deeper feelings.
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette will not be writing curtainfic in their sequel to _CtW_. (Curtainfic - fanfic scenes of domesticity in a relationship established prior to the start of the story.) Isolfr has lots of inflammatory sex - lots and lots, they could have called the book "Gangbangs With Wolves" if Costner didn't have the whole "With Wolves" construction locked up - and by the end, there's obviously affection and working partnership in his threesome. But it's not at all clear that there's more there. I feel like the mating crisis has truly resolved when it becomes apparent that even if the crisis-urge can be redirected or reversed, the desire now persists in spite of that, or they'll fight to keep it, rather than fighting against it. Isolfr thinks Vethulf and Skjaldwulf are good guys who will be good leaders and comes to be okay with them being into him, but it seems to me that if Viradechtis picked someone else the next time around, we wouldn't be reading a story about Isolfr struggling to maintain his relationship with V and S despite that, we'd be reading a story about Isolfr shrugging and figuring that the pack must need someone else in charge and okay then. And so maybe that's what we'll get, to further drive home the notion that made-them-do-it sex isn't actually sufficient for love.
III. Sci-Fi in Viking Suits.
As a science fiction reader, the most important scene in the book is surely the one near the end in which we find out that the bug-eyed monsters can talk.
Questions are suddenly raised: maybe this isn't _Longship Wolftroopers_, maybe it's _Isolfr's Game_, and in the next two sequels, _Speaker To The Elves_ and _Ragnarok_ (we'll pretend _Puppies of the Mind_ never happens), we'll see the development of a cooperative society between these three very alien races that frightens and threatens nearby human nations. Isolfr is not such a terrible parallel to Ender: one of Ender's great tasks in the war is to learn the strengths and weaknesses of his commanders and how they can be used, just as Isolfr learns to manage the wolfpack; Isolfr, like Ender, enables the end of a devastating war through the complete destruction of the monster threat but also the preservation of the last of the race once a contact has been established in which both sides learn for the first time that the others are people. The shifting of the focus of conflict from Humans vs Others to Humans-and-Others vs Other Humans could easily fill another book (or two) - or maybe it's not only other humans who will object to this unprecedented collaboration between races, but also the liosalfar, the so-far invisible counterparts to the svartalfar?
IV. Feminist
I can't give _CtW_ a proper scholarly feminist analysis, but off the top of my head, I'm reading Bear and Monette as saying some things like "women's work is important" and "the womanly role is not weak", making their argument by making "the woman" a dude. Maaaaybe they're going to drive it home by giving us some more actual ladies? We could next-gen and get Isolfr's daughter and her apprenticeship with Tin (which would play nicely with a type-III sequel). We could get (shock! horror!) an actual lady bonding with a wolf, which would be a splendid type-I sequel - wait, holy shit, is Kari a girl? No beard, shy, living in the wild until the wolf insisted they come in, refuses to take an ulf name, often says things "softly" or "pitched low"... hmmm. But the wolves would be able to smell the difference, and they never say anything, and Isolfr is *sleeping* with Kari (possibly just in a bed-sharing way, although possibly in a mutual-masturbation way, as I got the impression that was the norm for "shieldmates".) So probably not, but I would read the hell out of that fic. Anyways, a good feminist sequel should probably take on some other bit of sexism, showing us some other way traditionally-feminine things can be tough/brave/heroic. Maybe we'll get some stuff about parenting, as Isolfr's kid and Viradechtis' puppies grow up?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-31 12:38 pm (UTC)