Wolves

[jazzfish]

Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Sidon

Everything I wrote about the previous two Latro books is still true. This time Latro goes to Egypt, though, so the gods are substantially more opaque. No more gimmes like "the goat-footed man, who says his name is All." Instead we've got a host of animal-headed deities and the occasional long-dead deified Pharaoh.

Latro falls in love briefly in the second book. In one of the more repulsive bits, his "friends" use this later on to exploit him and convince him to stick around. He gets a wife in this volume as well. I'm impressed by his consistency: he's loyal to his wife even when he doesn't remember that she's his wife (must be Twoo Wuv), and he instinctively distrusts the creepy woman who keeps hitting on him, even when he doesn't remember that he's married. Yay for characterization.

I really appreciated that this book opened with the reappearance of the physician who first treated Latro, way back at the beginning of Soldier of the Mist. Seven Lions's return is welcome as well, although we don't see nearly enough of him.

The ending screams "if this one sells well enough there will be a sequel." I'm not sure whether I'm happy about that or not. Mostly because, well, Wolfe is getting on in years, and his /next/ book isn't a Latro book either.

(And what the devil is the invisible baboon that hangs around the priest of Thoth?)

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Gene Wolfe, Pirate Freedom

Gene Wolfe's time-traveling pirate book. Wolfe's non-series books still tend to feel far slighter than his longer works, and this is no exception. It's got great atmosphere and characters (best and truest pirates ever), it's got typically Wolfean musings on the nature of identity and the unreliability of narration, and it's a delight to read. It just . . . didn't inspire the same love in me that the Latro books, or Long/Short Sun, did. I guess someone who's got more of a thing for pirates might feel differently.

The narrator's voice feels an awful lot like Able's, from Wizard Knight. It'd be kind of awesome if he somehow tied this and Wizard Knight and another book or two together . . .

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Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves

Anything that delivers a smackdown to Anne McCaffrey's pioneering work in the field of psychic animal companions is good by me. You know what my favorite part of this book was? The wolves don't talk. They don't think in words, they think in impulses and sensations.

There's not a lot of Intricate Plot here. Coming off of a Gene Wolfe bender that particular lack was even more noticeable than it might have been. In its place there's rock-solid characterization and society-building. (And also cold. This book made me feel the cold in a way that only _Left Hand of Darkness_ has before.)

So, the society. There are trolls, and they eat people. To stop the trolls, there's an army of big psychic wolves and the men who bond with them. The bond goes deep enough that the emotional state of one can affect the other. This causes interesting things to happen with gender, since only men can bond with wolves, and when a female wolf goes into heat, well . . .

What really disturbed me about the wolfcarls' society wasn't the gang-rape, actually. I mean, yes, disturbing, but not in quite the same way. No, what got me was the role that Isolfr (the main character, bonded to a female wolf) was being put in. Specifically, the scenes where he's being actively courted by other wolfcarls. Given useless trinkets. Flirted at (not with, /at/). Generally treated as someone who'd be swayed by such ridiculously insulting behavior. You know. As though he were female in an overtly patriarchal society. My brain snapped after about the second such scene and it took me several days to put it back together. If he'd been female I would have thought "how insulting" and moved on, but because he's male it hit me a lot more viscerally.

I didn't really understand what it was that was getting me until I read this review, and then, bam. I've been trained to reject caretaker work as lesser, as bad, and it took seeing a man first forced into and then actively accepting that role to make me realise it. Yet more work to be done in my head. (Thanks, Bear and Mole. I think.)

Comments

[uilos.livejournal.com]

Do we know that the trellwolves can only bond to males? Or is it just that the situation is set that they are only ever offered males as an option?

[jazzfish]

I'm pretty sure that there's nothing preventing a trellwolf from bonding with a woman, except for the social pressures. (On the woman; I doubt the wolves care.) But since much of the interesting stuff below the surface comes from the social pressures, I'd be surprised if we were to see a female wolfcarl anytime soon.

[uilos.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the wolf caring or not. I get the impression that Isofyr thinks that Kari and his wolf (the wildlings) can do things that normal pairs can't simply because it's never occured to them that they can't. It looks to me like there's a level of socialization for the wolves happening that wouldn't happen outside of the company of the wolfcarls and this may limit them in some manner. It maybe never occurs to the wolves themselves to pair with a female (even though there are females around, just possibly not ones the right age) because no one around them ever has.

[selki.livejournal.com]

The fire-lizards (little dragons, first dragons) didn't talk, either. They 'thought' in images and simple emotions (e.g., fear). People bred them and bred them and bred them until the most advanced of them thought kind of like humans. Look at how different dogs are from wolves. If people bred and bred and bred psychic wolves they might start to think more like humans, too. As long as we're being analytical about psychic animal companions. :-)