Arriving Where We Started
or: "Oh no! My beloved peasant village!" (Meditations on Homecoming in Fantasy)
Hello, friends. Let me kick this off with some time-sensitive orders of business:
If you happen to be in Boston this weekend, I will be on a few panels at Boskone, at the Seaport Westin, and signing books at 11:30am. You can purchase memberships at the con, or through their website.
If you happen to be in the Tampa FL area, I’ll be at Oxford Exchange Tuesday night, 21 Feb, with Veronica Roth, to discuss Arch-Conspirator, her sharp, evocative Antigone riff. Tickets will include a copy of the book, and are available here. You don’t need to have read Antigone to appreciate this book, but if you’re in the market for an Antigone translation, Anne Carson’s version slaps and you can almost read it with your morning coffee.
Dead Country launch day draws ever nearer—but my last newsletter flipped the links for our actual launch events! You can find details about the virtual event hosted by Mysterious Galaxy with Amal El-Mohtar, on March 7, here. And here, you can find details about the Pandemonium Books event on March 9. Thanks to the readers who drew my attention to the error. It’s been a wild month of parenting and launch prep over here—I need all the help I can get.
In the lead-up to Dead Country’s launch, Ruin of Angels is this month’s Kindle Monthly Deal—in an edition with a teaser for Dead Country! Due to online price-matching, that means Ruin should be $2.99 anywhere fine ebooks are sold, so the deal should be as good at Amazon as it is at Barnes and Noble or Apple Books or anywhere else.
And of course, there’s still time to pre-order Dead Country! You can do this through any major retailer (obligatory Amazon and Barnes & Noble links), but if you want a copy signed—well, usually I arrange signed pre-order links with my friendly local indie shop, Porter Square Books, but I haven’t been able to get my act together on that score due to parenting a toddler being a trip, man, let me tell you. However! If you make the order through Porter Square Books and ask for a signed copy in the comments section of the order page, I will be more than happy to dart over to them and sign it for you. They ship all over the place. The fine folks at Pandemonium should be able to ship you a signed copy if you ask for one, as well.
Wow, that was more housekeeping than I expected! Which is, admittedly, the way things work with my actual house. Onward, with the essay!
Dead Country—and don’t run, I don’t plan to spoil anything more than the back cover copy—is a story about coming home. (Among, well, many other things. You’ll see.) Tara left her small town back in Three Parts Dead, and now she’s back, a decade older, and maybe a little wiser. We’ll see how it goes.
Fantasy has a complicated relationship with the concept of home. To go right back to our genre’s Mt. Fuji: every major group in Tolkien roots to a vanished home. Elves yearn for Valinor. Dwarves—the dwarves we meet, I mean—yearn for the Lonely Mountain, and once the Lonely Mountain’s reclaimed, they yearn for Moria. Tolkien’s Men yearn for Numenor, which my autocorrect really wants to be “Numinous.” (Somewhere a theologian punches the air.) And the Hobbits yearn for the Shire: not in a Big Mythical History Feelings sort of way like the elves and so on but in a close, personal, observed way relatable to anyone who’s ever been on a long trip, whether or not there were ringwraiths involved.
That hobbit-yearning, for friends and family and familiar comforts, provides a small, knowable mirror for the Big Feelings of the elves and dwarves and numenorians and ents. The hobbits’ sense of home is close enough to ours that we echo their longing, and their terror of the world in which they have found themselves—which becomes a point of contact, of tangency, for the sorrow of elves and dwarves and even the humans of the text, who are (to put it mildly) a bit further from us, a bit less like people we might meet day-to-day at preschool pickup, than are the hobbits. I might not know what it’s like to be called home to the ringing of silver trumpets—but I know, with Sam, what it’s like to be on the other side a big and scary planet from a nice dish of homestyle roasted potatoes. (Or Waffle House hashbrowns.)
Even if we don’t realize it on a conscious level, as we empathize with Sam we find ourselves seeping into the feelings sometimes buried by the grand mythological sweep of Tolkien’s world and language: what would it be like to not have a nice dish of roasted potatoes for ten thousand years? What if all these elves who seem so graceful and noble and wise from outside, are, on the inside, every bit as tired, as uncertain, as scared, as the hobbits?
We still remember, we who dwell, in this far land beneath the trees, Thy starlight on the Western seas.
The elves and dwarves and humans can’t go home again, even if the war is won and the shadow banished from the land. Numenor has sunk beneath the waves. New cavern cities may be built, but will Moria be resettled? Valinor endures, but the Trees do not. All we have of them is memory. (As breathtaking as the promotional visuals for the Amazon series were, it felt almost sacrilegious, to me, to see the Trees—one of the subtle glories of Tolkien’s works being works of prose is that no matter how vivid the writing, you still have at best a sympathetic, synthetic access to the images conveyed—the Trees really are lost, they are lost forever, they never were, and yet in spite of this we, well… we still remember.)
The hobbits can’t go home either. The Shire is scoured. It can be rebuilt, and what’s rebuilt may be wiser and more beautiful than what was before, and more honest—the mallorn tree rises from richer soil. But it’s not the same.
Home is the place from which we start the journey—or the place from which we are expelled, or torn. You can’t have a quest without a place to leave from. Ged leaves his village because the magic he’s worked is too much for him; he needs guidance. Luke Skywalker wants to be “teleported off this rock” but he comes back, and back again until Rey buries his lightsaber on Tatooine—shades of a George Lucas who seems to have wanted to get out of his hometown more than anything, and yet can’t go two films without ending up back on Tatooine. “Oh no! My adorable peasant village!” wails the archetypical JRPG protagonist. “Oh no! My charming bardic caravan!” weeps Kvothe in the woods.
But the distinction between these ‘homes’ and the ‘outside world’ through which we quest breaks down on examination, and the best fantasies work to break it down. Because our homes exist in the world. To come to know the world is to find ourselves in a new relationship with the home we thought we knew. Will Stanton in The Dark is Rising finds himself initiated into a grand mythological struggle between the Old Ones and the Dark—but it turns out that the Old Ones, and even the Dark, are woven through the history of his small Thames Valley town, that many of his neighbors have always been, and already are, themselves active participants in the struggle. The barrows at the borders of the Shire belong to kings and princes who fought Angmar. Severian returns and returns again to the maze beneath the Tower, and of course Alden Dennis Weir returns again and again to his home, to his childhood, through time and memory—and maybe, someday, he’ll see it clear.
That’s the nature of the quest, I think. We set out to discover the world and maybe we do, but if we’re lucky we discover ourselves on the way. And if we’re really lucky—our eyes are opened, and we discover how much more there is, to us, to our families, to the hometown that once seemed so small. It may not be a comforting realization: if we are in the world, if our families are in the world, if even our childhood was in the world, then they were shaped by it, and they may be transformed by it, ended or changed. (Of course, in any society, that illusion of distance and separation and safety is not evenly distributed—many are denied its false comfort in different ways and to varying degrees, due to racism, sexism, ableism, distinctions of class and background.) Even the past, or our understanding of it, may be altered by discovery, self-knowledge, revelation. Change may disenchant, but it may also open our eyes to a different sort of enchantment, a different sort of possibility: the call of our honest work, to do what we can in the world where we have found ourselves.
Re-reading this before posting, I’m struck by how grateful I am to have the space, and the time, to wander out into thought like this. Thank you so much for being a part of that. Take care of yourselves, and happy reading!
Arriving Where We Started
Love this as always :) The post reminds me of that very visceral, yet small, return home from vacations or school trips, where it was a short enough trip that home was still largely the same, warm, familiar -- and the larger, more difficult (I might almost say traumatic) return home as an adult, to a place that is no longer truly my home even if it is the place I grew up. And the slow realization of the need (and the work) to rediscover this new/old place to keep it part of you.
lovely to hear from you, as always. Looking forward to Dead Country.