The Bird King
Oct. 3rd, 2019 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI had mixed feelings about G. Willow Wilson's new novel The Bird King. Some beautiful writing, and great characters - it was like she had taken my criticism of Alif the Unseen to heart and made the woman the POV character and her relationship with her dude sidekick much less annoying. (This time he's gay, and their mutual love is very deep but not romantic.) And the setting and premise are neat - she's a concubine of the last sultan of Granada, who's about to surrender to Ferdinand and Isabella, he's the sultan's cartographer, who can draw places into existence, and now he has to flee from the Inquisition coming with the Spanish. Spanish-class history was pretty biased towards the Spanish perspective on the Reconquista so I enjoyed this look from the "other side".
But. I had two problems with it, which I will spoiler-hide. One was that once we got to the final and most fantastical section, where they've successfully escaped to a mythical island, I had no idea what was going on. Now, I (sometimes) actively seek out and enjoy fiction written from a religious perspective, which I find fascinatingly and profoundly Other, but here it seemed like there was maybe a whole layer of religious allegory that was just going completely over my head. Why is Fatima the king of the birds, and what does it actually mean to be the king of the birds, and what is the leviathan and why does it decide to fight on her side at the end. Like, her speech to it at the end of chapter 24 felt like the thesis statement, the moral of the parable, but... why does that apply to the leviathan and not the mote? And why, if everyone is the king of the birds, did she have to come to the island to be the king of the birds? I mean, I don't know, maybe Fatima has had a mystical revelation we're not entirely meant to get, but we're in her POV, so when we get something like "she knew what the boot meant" but then no actual explanation of what the boot meant, it just felt frustrating.
And secondly was that for me, the decision to close their sanctuary off from further refugees to keep themselves safe from further attacks was a really uncomfortable way to end the story. I'm not saying you can draw a straight line between that fictional situation and the current rejection of refugees in the US - in the US the attackers with the cannons are very much already on the island, with their badges and ICE jackets, and there's no scenario where denying further refugees keeps them out. But it still resonated poorly, or, I don't know, maybe it resonated exactly how Wilson wanted it to and she wanted it to feel uncomfortable, who can know. But it wasn't *enjoyable*, for me. As someone who believes that the moral response to the climate crisis is to open our borders to all billion climate refugees, or whatever it's supposed to be - and no, I'm not kidding, I think if humanity is going down we should give as many people as possible a shot at making it into whatever communities might possibly survive in higher-latitude areas - "welp, maybe this handful of us can at least live out our lives even though we're denying anyone else that chance" just wasn't satisfying and didn't speak to the kind of stories I want to be reading. (Or, setting aside the climate collapse, there's maybe a weird similarity here with the end of Alif the Unseen, which was kind of dark and queasy in retrospect in light of what actually happened to Syria, and now can we be talking about refugees without thinking about six million Syrians? Except this time it's not in retrospect? Bleah.)
Anyways, I think this one is literary enough that it's not going to end up on any SFF award ballots, so if anyone is wondering if they might want to read it for that I think you're off the hook.
But. I had two problems with it, which I will spoiler-hide. One was that once we got to the final and most fantastical section, where they've successfully escaped to a mythical island, I had no idea what was going on. Now, I (sometimes) actively seek out and enjoy fiction written from a religious perspective, which I find fascinatingly and profoundly Other, but here it seemed like there was maybe a whole layer of religious allegory that was just going completely over my head. Why is Fatima the king of the birds, and what does it actually mean to be the king of the birds, and what is the leviathan and why does it decide to fight on her side at the end. Like, her speech to it at the end of chapter 24 felt like the thesis statement, the moral of the parable, but... why does that apply to the leviathan and not the mote? And why, if everyone is the king of the birds, did she have to come to the island to be the king of the birds? I mean, I don't know, maybe Fatima has had a mystical revelation we're not entirely meant to get, but we're in her POV, so when we get something like "she knew what the boot meant" but then no actual explanation of what the boot meant, it just felt frustrating.
And secondly was that for me, the decision to close their sanctuary off from further refugees to keep themselves safe from further attacks was a really uncomfortable way to end the story. I'm not saying you can draw a straight line between that fictional situation and the current rejection of refugees in the US - in the US the attackers with the cannons are very much already on the island, with their badges and ICE jackets, and there's no scenario where denying further refugees keeps them out. But it still resonated poorly, or, I don't know, maybe it resonated exactly how Wilson wanted it to and she wanted it to feel uncomfortable, who can know. But it wasn't *enjoyable*, for me. As someone who believes that the moral response to the climate crisis is to open our borders to all billion climate refugees, or whatever it's supposed to be - and no, I'm not kidding, I think if humanity is going down we should give as many people as possible a shot at making it into whatever communities might possibly survive in higher-latitude areas - "welp, maybe this handful of us can at least live out our lives even though we're denying anyone else that chance" just wasn't satisfying and didn't speak to the kind of stories I want to be reading. (Or, setting aside the climate collapse, there's maybe a weird similarity here with the end of Alif the Unseen, which was kind of dark and queasy in retrospect in light of what actually happened to Syria, and now can we be talking about refugees without thinking about six million Syrians? Except this time it's not in retrospect? Bleah.)
Anyways, I think this one is literary enough that it's not going to end up on any SFF award ballots, so if anyone is wondering if they might want to read it for that I think you're off the hook.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-04 12:29 pm (UTC)