2016 read #58: The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip.

The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip
247 pages
Published 1995
Read from July 13 to July 26
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

After The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which showed gleams of promise beneath the shabby cliches of its time, I was intrigued to discover more of McKillip's back catalog (which is both extensive and loaded with awards and nominations, which makes me all the more surprised I hadn't really known of her work before). I wanted to see how she grew as an author, how she shook off the dust and formulaic trappings of '70s fantasy and realized her potential (or not) in the more expansive, vital, and creative genre fantasy became over the ensuing decades. The blurb-froth coating her later volumes also helped snare me -- Stephen R. Donaldson (whom I've never read) makes the bold claim that "There are no better writers than Patricia A. McKillip." None. Whatsoever. Throw away the Man Booker Prize, burn the Pulitzer, turn your back on Nobel, here comes McKillip to show you losers how it's done.

I reserved my skepticism, of course, but a claim like that deserves an investigation. I chose Wolfe on the grounds that, well, it was there on the shelf. Also it was a slender volume, something I craved after the growing wordiness of Robin Hobb. And it had something to do with a Queen of the Wood -- my unabashed love of faery is growing more abashed of late, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for that sort of thing.

As it turns out, there is a lot going on in this book -- a lot to unpack, a lot that no doubt went over my head, and a lot I find hard to articulate. Right from the start Wolfe feels in many ways still caught in the '70s fantasy mode: There are warring kingdoms that seem like little more than a single castle surrounded by some fields; there is a school for wizards on the slope of a solitary mountain, as if built on the ruins of Sybel's keep from Beasts of Eld; most damningly, the characters are little more than paper cutouts or archetypes. Other facets of Wolfe derive from the fashions of '80s fantasy: There's the Queen of the Wood and her leafy companions; there's the general tone of Romantic loss and luxurious sorrow; there are the themes of war, of power misused, of survivor's guilt, of trauma, of the loss of identity. What it draws from the trends of the '90s is, perhaps, the attempt to couch the story in highfalutin' literary prose, an emphasis on the esthetics of language -- though that, for all I know, is more of a McKillip thing. This is, after all, only the second book of hers I've read, and the first was a kids' book from 1974.

Two of those aspects -- the flimsy characters and the attempt at serious literary language -- weaken the book considerably. The interweaving narratives and intense emotional outpouring from each central figure would be totally my thing, if I gave a single damn about any of the people involved. I think it took me at least one hundred pages before I felt any kind of connection with any of the characters; it's no coincidence that I read the last three-fifths of the novel in two days, after dawdling and putting it aside for a week and a half. Without that grounding in character, the emotional intensity drifts weightlessly, meaninglessly, an experiment in pure tone that grows repetitive and boring. As for the prose, there's a reason why I keep saying it attempts to feel literary. What McKillip's language here reminds me of, if I may say so with all due modesty, are my own past attempts to knock together graceful sentences from a halting vocabulary. McKillip snags her words with commas, staggered clauses:

Talis, his throat burning again with too many words, tried to twist free; the mage pulled hm back, held him against the wood, held his eyes.

And again:

"Saro," she said, in the voice out of her dreams, and then grew very still, the bowstring pulled taut, her eye and the arrow's blind eye fixed on Atrix's fate.

It certainly shows more polish than, say, what I squeezed out for NaNoWriMo 2008, but it reminds me of my own breathless earnestness, my two-fisted need to wring poetry out of the deeds of mages and bowstrings. It isn't nearly as clumsy as what I have produced, but it shares an unconvincing quality, a sort of amateurishness compared to the prose-poetry of Jo Walton or Catherynne M. Valente. It is, perhaps, as fully literary as anyone could make high fantasy in 1995. It is not by any means the prose of the best writer in the world. Sorry, Stephen R. Donaldson.