Moonwise

[jazzfish]

Greer Gilman[1], Moonwise

I returned from WisCon clutching a copy of Gilman's second book, Cloud & Ashes. C&A is a collection of three "winter's tales" set in a fictitious northern English landscape called Cloud (and surrounding areas, both physical and mythic). The first of the tales, "Jack Daw's Pack," is roughly twenty-five pages of highly concentrated myth, with deep imagery and utterly gorgeous prose. I read it twice and think I got about two-thirds of what was going on, at best. I then found a Michael Swanwick interview with Gilman in which she discusses the story, and realised that I'd missed far more than I'd thought.

The interview noted that her first book, Moonwise, was set in the same mythscape, and sort of set up the situation that came about in "Jack Daw's Pack," so I figured I'd pick that up and read it first.

It's a hard book to write about. It opens with two old college friends, Ariane and Sylvie, meeting again after several years, and playing a world-building storytelling game that they'd used to play... and then Sylvie vanishes in a snowstorm and is replaced by a very strange child, and Ariane goes in search of her, and they wind up in a Cloud which bears very little resemblance to the one they'd told stories about. But things are Wrong, and they have to put them Right. And they do, more or less, and then they go home. The end.

Told like that, I wouldn't want to read it either. And yet, it's pretty much the most amazing thing I've read.

Partly it's amazing because of the atmosphere. I've written before that only a very few books (Companion to Wolves, Left Hand of Darkness) have made me feel genuinely cold while I was reading them. Moonwise made me feel cold, and damp, and greybrown autumn/winter. Malykorne's wood and the Woodfall's house and the ring of stones and cold Law are places, real to me.

Much of that comes from the language. It's not as dense or rich as in "Jack Daw's Pack" but it's deeply lyrical and imagistic and twisty. Gilman does things with words I didn't know one could do. (At her acceptance speech for the Tiptree Award she said 'I just do everything James Joyce ever did, only backwards and in high heels.') At the easiest and most obvious level, there are the multifaceted puns: "a cup of oolong syne," "the Huns of Elfland." "Thy burden's light," the witch Malykorne tells the tinker, and it is: he carries the soul of one of the last of the lightborn. And beyond that, the multilayered meanings of things, the way the prose moves... it's not easy reading but it's rewarding.

It's in the service of a fascinating and original mythos, too. Cloud's two deities are Malykorne, the moon, and Annis, the dark of the moon. A little below (after?) them come the lightborn, who may or not be stars, and whose dance turns the seasons, from Mally to Annis and back again. But Annis refuses to turn, and has caught most of the lightborn in stone, in a circle for her crown: and if she can capture the last two, the world need never turn past Lightfast, past the winter solstice. So Mally calls two unlikely champions from beyond Cloud. This is without even getting into Cloudwood, or the hunting of the wren, or Malykorne's owls and Annis's ravens and huntsmen. Or the nature of the goddesses, witches, whatever they may be. The language supports the myth: the multiplicity of meanings, the imagery, they /are/ the myth. The Imagists' dictum: "Say it, no ideas but in things."

It's by no means perfect. Sylvie's a driving force: in her absence, Ariane tends to flounder. In particular, the section after Sylvie vanishes and before Ariane finds her own way to Cloud dragged on, and the pace picked up only slightly from then until Ariane arrives at Malykorne's hut and starts to understand why she's there. And the pacing for the ending is off as well. Annis is... resolved... with a great deal of book left to go. Some of that's devoted to the fate of the lightborn (and I'm still not sure I fully grasp what happened there, even after rereading that section), but more is simply a last rambling visit with Malykorne, and a wandering back out of Cloud to the prosaic world, and a lengthy wrapping-up.

I wouldn't read Moonwise all the time, or even very much of the time. But I liked it, I'll reread it eventually, and I'm glad it exists. And now I think I shall wait a bit before tacking Cloud & Ashes.

---

[1] The 1991 Roc paperback edition (with Thomas Canty cover) gives the author's name as "Greer Ilene Gilman." The 2006 Prime hardback is credited to "Greer Gilman," as are her other works from this decade.

Comments

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I read this last May and found myself fascinated by the food. (Then I spent several months confusing grauwulf by making stews in the middle of summer...)

I think the slowness of the pacing where Ariane is on her own is very much in character; she seems to have spent a lot of her life in the role of follower, which made the ending work better for me, in that the real end of the story was not so much what happened in Cloud, as how it changed the participants, or didn't.

[jazzfish]

I remember the stews! That makes so much more sense now.

Oh, it was absolutely in character for her. And the ending was where the story needed to end; it's just that the mythic tale was so strong, it convinced me that /it/ was the story. I imagine there are people who read Lord of the Rings that felt the same way about the Scouring of the Shire.