So this book is pretty wild. Something that makes me laugh about this book in general is watching a myriad set of readers try to figure out what to do here. The language is dreamy and complex and rough too. There’s long passages of narration in which a complex thought develops or a conversation happens with a kind of folk wisdom punctuated by aphorism and fable occurs. And then there will be a scene in which graphic and violent sex is described in stark realistic language.
So the wild part for me is that I find a lot of fantasy writing to be relatively (to extremely) chaste. Brandon Sanderson does not know how to write sex into his books, and even books that do have sex, it’s treated a tool or as a given. So books like that rarely explore sex as a concept. This book, despite the more epic quest narrative, still deals a lot with how sex and gender function in this society and how they swirl within the consciousness of the main character. There’s a sense of the ways in which myth stories often employ sex and details about sex without breaking a beat from the main impetus of a narrative. So thinking through how this book functions as a fantasy in relation to other examples from the genre is fascinating.
In addition, having a well-respected literary writer work in the fantasy genre makes me laugh thinking of like, I dunno, James Wood reading this. It makes sense that both Neil Gaiman and Louise Erdrich blurb the back of this one for these reasons.
The story itself is good, and well rendered. I think that there’s some annoying habits happening here and there. The humor doesn’t always land and there’s some repetition of both plot structures — landing in a new town, discovering the weird conceit of this town, eventually moving away to a new town — and then the number of times someone mentions “Tracker is said to have a nose” and its variants gets repeated. And then I am not always convinced the sexuality of the book fits every time it shows up. So there’s that.
It’s a dense and complicated novel and it’s interesting in a lot of ways, and I will keep reading. I do wonder given all this how much I “liked” reading it.
In terms of what this book is like to read….it’s kind of like if Samuel Delany wrote The Name of the Wind? It has a lot of Dhalgren in it, in my opinion.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Leopard-Wolf-Dark-Trilogy/dp/0735220174/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549913971&sr=8-1&keywords=marlon+james+black+leopard+red+wolf)