#book post

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

what a fascinatingly odd book. i did not come in with any particular expectations, beyond what i'd ambiently absorbed via Being A Modern Person Living In The West, but... wow, those ambient vibes were really misleading?

the narrative is way more ambivalent about war/heroism/violence than i expected. but not at all in a modern way, like—if someone tells me a new film is "ambivalent" about war, i'm expecting, like, tortured pretty men feeling squishy/complicated about In Which Contexts Violence Is Okay, a la Oppenheimer or something, right?

The Iliad is not at all ambivalent in that way—violence is A Fact Of Life, more-or-less immutable, and it's treated as self-evident that there is glory to be found in it—but it's complicated, exactly how much agency any given person has in war (there's lots of gods intervening to deliberately stir up passions, or else, stir up fear to make men flee—and even the gods themselves seem to balk at stirring up war, at times, even when it's clearly the thing they desire), and to what end.

there's also some very crunchy and weird stuff about how fate/the gods/individual agency/skill/sheer dumb luck all interact. i can't unpack all that at the moment, but, tl;dr i found it weirdly moving how much hope and passion and will to live and act there was in so many of these characters even when they knew-for-certain a grimmer fate was in store for them

i also found it interesting how mixed/balanced these characters were allowed to be. like, in the narrative world that i'm frequently marinating in, a world of sitcoms and schlocky video game narratives and superhero stories and the like, you have your Optimistic Hero and your Stoic Quiet Guy and your Witty Raconteur, and they all say The Lines You Expect Based On Their Archetypes. and i was expecting that in The Iliad (we all know Achilles is a diva, and Hector is noble, and etc), but... very often these guys are talking like regular guys! ordinary (albeit emotionally, big-ego'd, etc) dudes having an ordinary dispute at a war council, with no need for every line to be a Whedonesque quip or a hyper-stylized thing. like, yes, Achilles is a diva, but he's also The Leader Of A Big-Ass Group Of Warriors and Exists In A Society yaknow. i've noticed lately that an LLM-generated-prose "smell" is a tendency to flanderize the fuck out of everything—which is also a tendency of any TV serial that runs longer than a few seasons, right, which perhaps suggests things about both LLM training data and certain well-worn paths we tend to try to make narratives go down—but The Iliad stood in stark contrast to that tendency.

(which is not to say The Iliad is free of tropiness or camp, haha. there's PLENTY of that. every time someone was suiting up for battle i was like this could absolutely be a magical girl transformation sequence lol)

you really do feel like you're reading something very ancient, and somewhat alien. but also i had tears running down my face for pretty much the entirety of the final chapter/book because goddamn, that conversation between Priam and Achilles. and it wouldn't land nearly as hard without All That Stuff Before It.

Elm and Elspeth's love hate relationship.

Ravyn and Elspeth's passionate relationship, such that even distance and a king cannot dull it.

Elspeth's father giving her a yarrow every nameday and during the wedding

Elm saying he's better looking than Ravyn

The nightmare constantly thinking everyone is dumb

The nightmare caring for Elspeth like his own child

The nightmare choosing Elspeth over his own descendant

The nightmare saying something and then Ravyn being like "she didn't say that"

The rhymes that are sprinkled throughout the book

The shepherd king's Revenge

Ione's gentle determination and kindness

The shepherd king's kids begging him to come spend time with them

The way the nightmare describes every single character with their respective tree oof.