Among Others by Jo Walton
302 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 17 to February 20
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead.
I despise the "Is the narrator delusional or not?" cliche. To me, it's every bit as hokey and overused as "It was all a dream," except all sorts of writers still use the ambiguously sane narrator all the time, while "It was all a dream" is so universally ridiculed that it hardly ever shows up outside of jokes about creative writing courses, so in practical terms I hate "Is the narrator crazy or not?" more. I approve of unreliable narrators, and narrators that are unambiguously deranged can be delightful (as in many Peter Ackroyd murder stories, especially Hawksmoor), but playing it for ambiguity raises my hackles. It seems unlikely that yet another story employing that voice will say anything new or interesting.
Or so I believed until I found this book. For roughly the middle third of the narrator's diary, Walton subtly raises doubts about whether Mori's experiences with fairies and magic, her story of defeating her evil mother but losing her twin sister in the process, is what actually happened, or whether Mori has grown up with a worldview skewed by her mother's belief in "witchcraft" and Mori's own obsession with science fiction and fantasy, and is merely interpreting terrible events as they make sense to her. And instead of cheapening the story or lessening my interest, I found myself growing anxious for Mori's well-being, worried with each new "attack" of her mother's magic that Mori was, indeed, delusional. I found my heart breaking for her.
When I was 15 (the narrator's age), I didn't have the benefit of an exhaustive familiarity with quality post-New Wave SF. I grew up reading crap like Crichton, with only a handful of better (but dated) stories by Verne and Wells and Doyle to show me the way. I didn't touch Vonnegut until I was almost 18, and here at 31 I have yet to read a Delany novel. So my SF vocabulary was (and remains) severely stunted. Nonetheless, I related to Mori's worldview with an almost painful intensity. I didn't believe in fairies or magic, but UFOs and little gray aliens filled the gap nicely. When Mori has a series of night terror episodes with her mother malevolently floating above her bed, working evil magic at the poor girl, I got chills both because I had been in that situation (with aliens) and because I realized she could very well be so mentally broken and devastated from the loss of her sister (as well as her mother's nasty style of upbringing) that she had invented this whole mythology of fairy and magic in order to make sense of a cruel world, kind of like I had done with my abductions. Her paranoia about her father's sisters working magic on her (through trying to get her ears pierced, no less) was brilliantly written, as well, and more than anything convinced me that Mori was deranged by grief and her upbringing. It was almost (almost) disappointing when Mori got her new beau to see the fairies, and the ambivalent nature of her sanity kind of fizzled into a non-issue, story-wise.
Mori's narration is the warm, fragile heart driving this book's unexpectedly powerful impact. Echoing the gist of the blurb quotes, I can't think of another writer who so delicately and precisely captures the confusion and seriousness of an SF-steeped adolescence. It's that seriousness with which Mori takes the world and her SF that is easy to forget once adolescence is behind us. When her pathetic and confused father drunkenly tries to paw her up in a hotel room, Mori pushes him off but later expresses confusion in terms of Heinlein -- "I know from Time Enough for Love, which is very explicit on that, that incest isn't inherently wrong" -- in a way that made me want to take her aside and tell her, "Oh, no, you don't understand, Heinlein was a lecherous old creep, and this is very, very wrong." I felt that urge to talk to this fictional(ish) character because I had been there, or at least in that neighborhood -- in the sense of having taken a sci-fi social philosophy very seriously, not in the sense of rationalizing molestation because of Heinlein, thankfully. The same thing happened with her typical nerdish fantasy about wanting a "karass" to belong to. With my more limited and crappier exposure to SF, I called the urge "wanting a pack," as in Raptor Red, but I knew that adolescent nerd need all the same.
I should also mention, while I have space, how much I loved the fact that Among Others is a "Scouring of the Shire" type of story, taking place the year after Mori and her sister had their climactic, fatal bid to stop their evil mother's plot to control the world with magic. It's a brilliant way to construct a novel, in a novel with much brilliance to rave about.
As with all fictionalized memoirs, I can't stop wondering where the memoir ends and the fiction begins. This book is basically what I wanted to do with my own childhood, except with fairies instead of claustrophobic spaceships and cold, unfeeling space. Obviously there was no real magic, no real fairies, but much of this book's emotional weight draws from a real, beating heart close to the story's surface.
Again echoing the cover blurbs, if you grew up a lonely nerd, surrounded and consoled by genre fiction, you must read this book.
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