2020 read #2: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
323 pages
Published 2017
Read from January 20 to January 24
Rating: 4 out of 5

I can’t seem to resist comparing this book to Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child. Both are novels centered on girls growing up with an uncanny connection to the northern wildwood; both are based on Russian folktales; both make a central character out of the taiga landscape itself. Unlike The Snow Child, which squanders its magic and mystery with mundane explanations in order to preserve its literary fiction credentials, The Bear and the Nightingale is explicitly fantasist in conception and outlook, its magic and mystery rooted in the narrative rather than used as cheap set dressings to discard when no longer needed—and is altogether better for it.

It took a while for Nightingale to click into place for me. Most of that has to do with the attention problems that have hindered my reading pace for the last few years; the novel was lovely and evocative from the first page. What I expected from this book, however, was not the story Arden had set out to tell. Nightingale is largely a domestic drama about a feudal landowning family in northern Rus'. The fantastic elements emerge gradually, little touches here and there, enriching the story without commandeering it until the second half or so. A central theme is the lack of choice facing women in this feudal society—growing up, girls know they're destined to be married off, either literally to some man as a "mare for his pleasure," or figuratively to the church as an inmate in a convent. This would have been a fascinating thread had Arden done more with it. As it is, only our hero Vasilisa (or Vasya) seems aware of the unfairness of this arrangement, and only her stepmother Anna is shown to suffer from it. Once Vasya makes the choice to, well, make sure she always has a choice in her life, the shackles of centuries of misogynistic tradition vanish and she finds herself free. If only things were ever that simple.

The best part of Nightingale was its rich, immersive depiction of the seasonal round of the Land of Forests. Cramped, famished winters lead to springs of eager growth and languid summers of lingering twilight. The magic of Arden's Rus' is in the land itself. The imagery of the Winter-King's domain scarcely matches the pure beauty of the forests around Vasya's village. At times, the more fantastical imagery of the feud between the Winter-King and his brother Medved feels like an intrusion from a less beautiful, less interesting book, though thankfully those moments don't last for long. The climax veers from rousing to corny to heartbreaking, ultimately a fairly satisfying cap on a lovely story.

Without spoiling too much, however, I can say that the coda—in which our hero Vasya, gifted with a mighty supernatural steed and ready to ride to all the corners of the world now that she's free of the expectations of late medieval womanhood—feels like a tacky sequel hook from a forgettable YA fantasy.