book: Clariel

[psocoptera]

Finally pushed my way through Clariel, Garth Nix's recent prequel to the Sabriel trilogy about the backstory of a minor villain from Lirael/Abhorsen. And basically I don't think it was a good premise for a book: knowing it can't end well, and it just being a matter of how, exactly. Maybe I just don't like tragedy. Or maybe this wasn't a very good tragedy - there's a certain grandeur to someone's arrogance or revenge-thirst or whatever dragging things doom-ward, but Clariel is pretty much just a victim of a) no one taking her seriously and b) getting duped, and, meh, how is that satisfying to read? Maybe if it got us riled up against a bigger villain - I'm not arguing the Star Wars prequels are a great tragedy, but I do think there's some good stuff in there with Palpatine's seduction of Anakin to the Dark Side. Just think about how chilling Palpatine's "watching your career with great interest" was. Part of the problem in Clariel is that the Palpatine role is being played by *Mogget*, and it felt weird to be seeing them be outright evil knowing they get redeemed at the end of book 3? I couldn't hate them enough to make them a good villain, and yet it sort of taints them in the previous books retroactively.

There are some other problems here - the first half has a *lot* of forced-conformity business which we have to suffer through with Clariel, and worldbuilding of the culture in decline (no one takes magic seriously, etc) which is frustrating because we-the-reader know perfectly well from the previous books to take this stuff seriously. It takes until the second half to get anything that brings the "ooh, wow" factor in the locations-and-items line, and by that point we're well on the downslope of "Clariel, nooooo".

I did like what Nix did with the imagery of the mask and how Clariel's hated heavy face makeup of the first half foreshadows the "of the Mask" mask at the end. And Bel giving it back to her when he spares her life, ::shudders::. I was also interested in Clariel as an explicit asexual (I feel like there haven't been so many aces in YA fantasy yet that that's not interesting) although it maybe veered a little close to some sort of "tragic asexual" trope when she doesn't hug Bel at the very end and is thinking something about a "long-repressed impulse", which implied to me that if she *had* reached out and made that connection with him, that was her last chance not to fall into necromancy. But for the most part I liked that she was just sort of calmly certain about it and it would have been a completely fine facet of her character if she had just ever been allowed to be herself.

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Clariel, but I have tried reading a few other things by Nix, and they were ok, but they really gave me the sense that the Abhorsen Trilogy was the highlight of his career. (Although to be fair, the first thing I ever read by him was a manuscript which may or may not have been the final version of The Fall--we were a household of four kids ranging in age from early elementary school to mid-teens, and three of us were avid fantasy readers, and my aunt was a friend of either Nix's or his publisher's, so we were supposed to age-test the book... but then we forgot about it for a couple years, so that didn't really happen. But it still sort of colored how I read the book, in that usually I don't read so critically.)

[gannet.livejournal.com]

I generally agree with you about the Abhorsen trilogy being a step above the other work of his I've read. However, my 10 yo has loved One Beastly Beast for several years now, and I think it's pretty good. Very silly, and good for younger kids.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Agree. I really liked the initial worldbuilding of the Keys to the Kingdom series, both the near future real world and the fantasy world, but then it just got weird. And I got the distinct impression that it was intended to get weird from the beginning rather than him going off the rails or not having figured out what he was doing with the overall plot, but I wish he'd just stuck with the general feel of the first couple books.

He has a book of short stories -- "Across the Wall", I think? -- which have a couple of vignettes set in the Abhorsen series that are very good, so I'm a big disappointed that Clariel seems sub-awesome.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I felt like Keys to the Kingdom could maybe have been one long good novel, or *maybe* a trilogy, but we certainly didn't need seven of them, there was just way too much random stuff in there.

People who aren't me might get more out of Clariel? I don't know, I really do like the analogy of "how would you feel about Star Wars (prequels included) if Palpatine got redeemed and Vader got destroyed", Clariel-as-Vader actually has a lot of resonance for me. Maybe it's the masks.