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x_los***
- As with Ombria, McKillip seems allergic to engaging with the social infrastructure of the medieval and renaissance concepts she organises stories around. This book concept of knighthood is entirely divorced from class and serfdom. (They’re what, cops now? A position which itself seems to have been stripped of its contexts and associated tensions?) I see what McKillip’s doing with that omission, but by running the magic eraser over all the connective tissue of power, class and infrastructure, you do lose a lot. Similarly, Ombria was About The Renaissance, but not The Renaissance as an intellectual or cultural, historical, lived-emotional or political set-up—more as a series of costumes. ‘But where did you get that silk?’ / ‘Shhhhh.’
McKillip doesn’t give a fuck about worldbuilding: this is the ‘oops, all vibes’ bit of Captain Crunch. It’s pointless to ask ‘right, what went on here and how does this place work?’ She just seems to shrug. ‘Ionno, want some urban fantasy?’
It’s not like I’m making some purist demand for historical accuracy: just a bid for stories with cohesive internal logic. This sort of omission is so common, too. What interests people drawn to steampunk about Victoriana? It's mostly not the language (which steampunk mostly butchers, in a way that indicates the authors don’t even read period novels). It’s not the mental attitudes (which are often replaced by a new-minted, thin, superior and insipid Girl Power complacency that annoys me as a historian and a left-feminist alike). It’s not the period’s intellectual (which such projects tend to dismiss), or even really the material culture (which these books tend to mostly omit). Actually, as far as I can tell, none of this rich material is the draw. People just want a vague sense of pastness, and maybe to write bad copies of outfits they saw in films, rendered ever-more anachronistically sepia-toned.
- Kingfisher is staged somewhat at the margins and in the aftermath of Arthuriana, making it feel a little like Buried Giant (or that landmark film, Quest for Camelot—) (no).
- The publisher’s choice of reader for this audiobook is slightly confusing. She sounds American, despite discissing pickle relish here in faux Britania. The book does have a kind of trans-Atlantic energy to it—a vagueness that feels bundled in with McKillip’s disinterest in history, as though the barrenness of her fuck-field has spread so far that it’s extended into out geography as well. (The reader also pronounces comely like ‘comb-lee’, rather than like ‘cum-lee’. I’d always assumed the later was correct, and Forvo seems to agree with me.)
- Except that I don’t think this trans-Atlantic vagueness is exactly accidental, so much as a product of the American fantasy industry’s reliance on, and deeply entwined lack of knowledge about, Europe. Kingfisher serves up a modernity and an Arthuriana innocent of empire—which Geraldine Heng’s Empires of Magic will tell you actual Romance certainly was never. Kingfisher tries something colonised fae, but this instantiation of the always-dodgy Oppressed Celtic Peoples trope gets messier the longer you look at it. Race never comes up, and everyone in this country (and no others are ever mentioned) is aggressively Presumed White. Even Arthur had Moorish knights. Yet we’re certainly in a world where these contacts occurred: tomato this, potato and chocolate that. (How did the Colombian Exchange go in this universe, that’s what I want to know—)
In a way, this story offers a fantasy of a culture and governance that’s more stable over time, and possessed of a greater continuity, than our own: a culture where you can quote thousand-year-old poetry and have that mean anything. Arguably Victorians could do with with Greek or Latin, but in the story’s enunciation of more home-grown and less imagined political continuities, it almost feels like McKillip is transplanting the self-image of imperial China onto AngloAmerica. The vibe she’s after does exist, or did in fairly recent historical memory, just not for white people—for a culture that seems to have been omitted from existence, in Kingfisher. Again, I don’t think this is any overt racial project, but these are very significant choices of focus and omissions. You have to unsee a lot for this book not to jar. It’s odd to find the project so decorated when, in many senses, its founding assumptions presume quite a narrow audience—one unconcerned with anything beyond the hazy boundaries the novel draws.
The aforementioned post-colonial treatment of the fae is something of a filtration, which the novel ultimately backs away from. We hardly touch on what this colonisation has actually done to the citizens of the fae world. The resolution is that ‘maybe the fae can just Not want their artefact and land back, maybe that would work? Maybe chill out about the Benin Bronzes, they’re fine in the British Museum, probably.’ Wow, give this sucker another Mythopoeic Award—
Ultimately, why can’t the fae have the cauldron? It’s theirs, and no obvious harm would come of their having it? No one on the human side even seems to truly need it, whereas the Fae say they do.
Kingfisher also feels somewhat influenced by Mists of Avalon, because part of the problem is: monotheist boys.
- McKillip’s dialogue isn’t bad as all, but every character shares pretty much the same formal, clever, cool, bemused register. Very little distinguishes anyone from anyone else.
- McKillip is not untalented, but the dreamy quality of her prose and characters slides past me. I had similar trouble connecting to Ombria.
McKillip’s characters have Goals in this book, or at least two of them nominally do. Yet even these characters blessed with ‘I Want’ songs experience these driving desires in a diffuse, floaty fashion. People in Kingfisher often do things As a Scholar, or As a Calluna-Priestess. These roles, and the actions they drive characters to take, also feel disembodied. They seemed to think ‘ah yes, I am a Scholar, this is the role I will play now’, which sat oddly with how modern and psychological McKillip’s general approach was. At no point did I get the sense that the central characters, whose thoughts we had access to, placed a lot of importance on their jobs or their religious beliefs. Sometimes I was told a less-focal character had such a conviction, but I was never allowed to touch that, and the resultant conflict always played out like Brenda from HR was miffed that Steve from Accounting wanted to claim an outsize portion of the year’s pencil budget.
Pseudo-Arthur organised a Pesudo-Grail Quest to quell some idle rumblings about succession which might otherwise grow into a full separatist movement, and might thence result in civil war. Did Princess Perdita know about these stakes? I couldn’t be sure. Perdita seemed willing to sabotage this quest, and in so doing to potentially fuck over her dad and several old family friends she’d grown up with, to benefit her mom and the Calluna cult. Sabotaging the quest could also potentially be quite inconvenient for her lover, who was going questing, and could bring them into conflict. Was that possibility in Perdita’s mind at all? I wondered what this decision would cost, and exactly why Perdita was making it. Yet I got the feeling McKillip just assigned Perdita this piece of work to move the plot alone, dolling it out to the first comer.
It wasn’t just a question of this character having a personality that didn’t lend itself to forward-thinking. Perdita’s half brother, Prince Daimon, toyed with betraying his father’s side of the family in favour of his mom, (Morg)Ana, and seemed to give little thought to what that could mean for him. Admittedly the plot later revealed that this Mordred character who I thought flighty had been enchanted, which had compromised his judgement. Now, that works as far as it does. Yet Daimon’s cloudy decision-making didn’t vary much from the thought processes of his unenchanted sister, or those of Lancelot’s youngest son (Prince Daimon’s sort-of-step-brother via his adopted mother’s long-running affair with Lancelot). Ultimately, what’s the point of saying Daimon’s muddled because he’s enchanted if you can’t really tell the difference?
I’d like to add that this book took me hours longer to get through than it ought to have done because I kept catching myself not paying attention, sliiiiiiding off the book, and then having to go back and re-listen to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
- Roughly two decades after the event, Arden/Arthur figures out he too was enchanted, and that’s why he cheated on his wife with the woman who conceived Daimon. Arden was left to rationalise that choice, not understanding that he’d made it under the influence of external forces. At this point, should we be understanding that as a consent violation? The book really doesn’t seem to. But aren’t we in that framework, here in the urban fantasy AU? If Arden had been a girl, would we be more willing to acknowledge this as an act of politically-motivated rape?
- The second half of this book does pick up a bit. I enjoyed Lancelot’s two idiot sons’ failure to sit in a car and just be driven maybe five hours up a road due to incessant interruptions from Questing bullshit and their own many dubious choices. It’s like when kids on a road trip keep wanting to stop and pee, but for pointless Encounters.
- Stillwater’s unmasking as something grotesque is well-executed.
- The Princess we spend any time with is called Perdita, which suggests she’s a Lost Thing (a slightly conspicuous name, as it’s unfashionable, not exactly traditional and fairly unattractive). The book didn’t really go anywhere with that.
- Sorceresses truly will create a fake gryphon and steal a fire truck rather than text their son to say that they’re not ready to see their ex husband irl right now, and maybe an email or something would be better. (In the avoidant mom’s defence, this actually turned out to be the work of an entirely different fucked-up sorceress obsessed with Lancelot.)
- Towards the end of the novel, Daimon/Mordred’s mom and her associates suddenly choose to be communicative and above-board about what they want. Why didn’t they attempt any of this earlier? One member of their faction was the king’s aunt (or at least was universally believed to be). With that kind of positioning, and the ability to enchant Arden, couldn’t the fae have expressed their wishes earlier rather than squirrelling themselves away, with Ana never seeing her kid except in odd, snatched moments in disguise, making no move on the political agenda that drove her to have this kid in the first place until now? For all her talk of hanging out with him as he grew in a series of stupid disguises, by the book’s end, Morg-Ana doesn’t seem to care much about Daimon.
- I do quite like another of the book’s dubious mothers asking the son she abandoned to forgive her, and his answering 'what's the alternative?' We could have done more with that relationship.
- In the same way that book wants knights without class, it also wants chivalry without sexism. There are a few microaggressions scattered throughout the book, but institutionally women can be knights, so that power balance has shifted a lot. What does that mean for the Romance? —is another question McKillip doesn’t seem interested in.
- I’m almost certain that McKillip is what happens when you don’t outline: discovery writing is a hell of a drug. The prose level craft is all here, but this plot is grab-bag and shapeless. You could say that’s a nod to the orality of Romance and its attendant loose, associative and accretional plotting, but:
1. Ombria has similar issues, and no such inter-texts, and
2. if this is a deliberate choice, then what does that decision yield, and how is it working within the context of Kingfisher’s genre-switch to urban fantasy?
Discovery writing isn’t my bag, but it’s not necessarily a big issue, so much as just a working-style preference: what the discovery writer saves in planning, she pays back in clean-up. Either approach ends up costing the writer about the same amount of effort. I just don’t think McKillip paid this bill when it came due.
- I find it odd that McKillip “has been called "one of the most accomplished prose stylists in the fantasy genre”. Her prose is fine; it has things to recommend it. Sometimes I think that 'caring about your prose at all’/‘prose that isn’t either outright obnoxious or pure Pillow Princess’ can pass for transcendent, for a genre readership. Prose can be heart-stompingly arresting, and Kingfisher’s is—wholly unobjectionable. Quite fun, at points. Not one line has lingered in me. That’s actually not much to ask, given the quality of the praise attached to this author and this specific work.
- Honestly—and this is incredibly bitchy—I normally do not credit 'fanfic can be better than published works!!' arguments. It’s comparing apples to lug nuts. Fic does different things than original fiction, and fiction is a relational, socioeconomic position. ‘Hannibal is my fanfic!1' up-sucking from a show-runner makes me chunder. But in this particular case, McKillip’s Kingfisher has some of the same structural issues as many an instalment-written fic. Her prose is fine, but not so glorious I'm willing to overlook that the plot and characters don’t really cohere. Yet “McKillip holds the record for the most Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards (four) and nominations (fifteen). She has also won World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, as well as for Life Achievement.” For Ombria and Kingfisher specifically, as well! If this is an Important Writer, then fantasy readers have low standards. Not only do I not love this book, I outright don’t see how someone else could manage it.
- Everyone is really straight in this book, to the point that it got a little weird. I guess you could say it’s so het bc that’s the logic of the Romance! But to manage that, you’d need to not know much about the Romance and all the homoerotic cannibalism that can imply. This is perhaps one of those cases where a tie-in work wants you to bring your investment in this subject, but not too much—a Star Trek (2009) affair.
- It’s not some big problem that Kingfisher is Arthuriana for Casuals, but I don't know what this work gains from being Arthuriana (rather than, for example, just being written in conversation with the Romance generally). This territory invokes so much investment and association: are they fruitfully brought to bear, here? Beyond Marketing Reasons/vague audience familiarity, as with Buried Giant, it’s hard to say what this text would lose if you didn't peg it to this coordinate.
McKillip remediated the Fisher King a bit, but I could have done with a more emotionally rich focus on that story rather than Kingfisher’s broad, fast-track pan-shot view over the mythos. We touched on Mallory’s reputation again and again, and to what end? Ultimately, no one was holding McKillip at gunpoint, demanding that she write Arthuriana. If this didn’t interest her, she could have found something that did. If she was going to cook with such rich and heavily-cathected ingredients, she might as well have done something more with them.
Further, both here and in Ombia McKillip chooses the restoration of a kingdom and the circumstances and personages of politics as her core plot subject. Yet she’s so uninterested in politics as mechanics that these presentations end up being evacuated set-dressing. She clearly doesn’t give a shit about these topics, so why not simply eschew them? It’s urban fantasy! We truly don’t have to sit around in the chambers of power if you don’t have much to say about the place.
