2016 read #73: Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Lindskold.

Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Lindskold
287 pages
Published 1994
Read from September 17 to September 22
Rating: ★★ out of 5

In outline, this book could almost be a parody of certain trends in the speculative fiction of the early '90s. The narrator, Sarah, is a Magical Mentally Ill woman, tossed out on the streets due to (it seems) budget cuts, fitting the novel within a continuum stretching from Wizard of the Pigeons to The Good Fairies of New York and no doubt well beyond. She speaks only in quotations and aphorisms, drawn largely from Shakespeare. For a while Lindskold manages to make it work, but by the fourth or fifth time Sarah repeats the book's title with a knowing look or a shy giggle, it gets real old. Sarah gets adopted into a colorful underground society of adolescent thieves, beggars, drug dealers, and child prostitutes, sort of like if those kids from Beyond Thunderdome got a gritty '90s reboot. Her rescuer is inexplicably half-naked when we meet her, her lips dyed blue, her hair dyed flaming orange; the rest of the "Wolf Pack" is similarly outfitted in the silliest, gaudiest cliches of crustpunk, cyberpunk, and a square sci-fi writer's idea of rave culture -- thereby beating The Matrix Reloaded to the punch by several years.

Sarah's love interest (for a brief interlude) and adored authority figure (for the rest of the book) is the Head Wolf, and in no uncertain terms, he is the pimp of a child prostitution ring. We are shown the effects of the prostitution on the psyches of various minor characters (in both senses of the word), yet the Head Wolf is elevated by the text as just so damn charismatic and beautiful and insane that our narrator and her rescuer and her elderly professor friend all continue to adore him. Plus, he really cares about his Pack and, like, tenderly cuddles his young prostitutes after they've had a bad night on the streets, because he's such a good soul. I believe this is meant to be some inexpert attempt to build a thought-provokingly ambiguous and flawed antihero. It comes across as equal parts misguided and laughable. At best, it seems like '90s-style grittiness for the sake of grittiness -- shock value to really make you think, dude.

Sarah's magical power is an ability to talk to inanimate objects -- provided they've absorbed some essence of importance from their use or significance to other people. There's some absurd technobabble about Sarah resulting from a breeding experiment, but perhaps recognizing its flimsiness, Lindskold only relies on the explanation long enough to sketch in Sarah's early life in the Institute and her relationships among her experimental siblings. Despite the weird icky stuff about child prostitution, the first half of the book isn't necessarily bad -- it's a silly mashup of early '90s cliches and try-hard grittiness, sure, but almost endearing in a bless-your-heart sort of way. It's when Sarah falls back into the clutches of the Institute that the narrative collapses under its own preposterousness. Interminable scenes of Sarah's friend the master hacker technobabbling her way into futuristic fortresses become redundant (well, further redundant) once Sarah masters her own superpowered abilities to get anywhere and do anything just by listening to inanimate objects. And in an obvious but utterly ridiculous twist, it turns out that this tinkering with the genetic basis of magical realism pretty much amounts to some corporate espionage (there's one more '90s cliche for ya).

There is never any sense of danger, no feeling that our heroes might be in trouble. I barely remember Lindskold's The Buried Pyramid (my extra-laconic review, perhaps the shortest I've ever written, certainly doesn't stir any recollections), but her Child of a Rainless Year shares with Brother signs of Lindskold's reluctance to make bad things happen to her characters. Scenes where almost any other author would tighten the screws and complicate matters for our heroes, Lindskold instead makes everything turn out hunky-dory. Yes, Sarah ends up back at the Institute, because of course she does, but it's almost like she's there to check out some family history, see some heirlooms, and learn some backstory -- rather than, you know, because she got captured by her nemesis and is getting experimented upon. It doesn't seem all that far removed from the intrepid narrator of Child grilling chicken dishes for visiting estate lawyers.

Brother to Dragons begins as a mess of cliches before devolving into, well, just a mess, but there's enough charm to the early chapters to make me not totally hate my experience with this book.