Peeking into the rock

I took three books out of the library: another of Paul Stametz's mushroom growing books, Tanith Lee's The Dark Lords, and Lisa Goldstein's Tourists.

I'm a bit disappointed in the mushroom book. I thought that since it was promoted as being more for the home grower than the other one, that it might therefore have more information about the kind of garden cultivation I am trying to do, but it doesn't. It has even less information about it than the other one, and quite frankly I am not planning on getting into large-scale cultivation.

I've been warned that it is "too soon" to be very detailed about being appalled at and not enjoying a book of Tanith Lee's, so I'll leave it at that. Well, I'll hint: sexual politics, race politics, class politics, esthetics, and story structure.

Lisa Gildstein's book would have been written a wee bit differently now, I think, but it stands up (publish date 1989, a momentous year). Americans in a fictional Middle-Eatern/Central Asian sort of country for the father's research become embroiled in a complex magical/national/political crisis, where "nothing is as it seems" in an interesting way. I like that while the teenaged girls' presence is catalytical for the history of the country, they aren't the story at all, in the long view. I mean they are not the American Saviors. Magical forces have simply slotted them into the patterns that are being worked out and fought over. Literally, patterns are key here. There are many things I love about this book. The girls have been engaged for years in developing an imaginary landscape with warring countries, including making up their own languages for them and producing stacks of notebooks with mythologies, histories and literature for them. The older girl has withdrawn from the "real world" to escape the pressures of gifted child adolescence, The younger girl has withdrawn from the imaginary world to take on the practical challenges of keeping her dysfunctional family together (a task which is less hers than she imagines it to be). All of this is extremely relevant. The mother, who gave up her career for marriage, drinks to deal with her disappointment and her difficulty dealing with things. The father wants to do nothing but his research and hides as much as he is able from the problems of his family.

I could go on for hours about how the different pieces of the story interlock and move about in different directions, but a lot of you people care about spoilers and I don't really understand well what constitutes a spoiler and what doesn't, so I'm going to leave this here and say it's a yummy book.

Also I finished it in the wee hours of the morning the night before last because I couldn't sleep for reasons that escape me. And then I started a strange duck of a little story which I am now having trouble finishing. Although the story doesn't have any of the same elements except that language does a thing in it, I think the story is inspired by the book.

Next I will go back to the library and find something else to read, I don't know what.

I read The Alchemist's Door by Lisa Goldstein last night. It's not terribly new- twelve years old -- but it's new to me. It showed up when I was searching books about Prague in the library and I said, sure, why not read someone else's Prague-inspired fantasy?

It has a decidedly weird relationship to history. On purpose. It's not a book where you can say "She got it wrong" (except for a little movie geography, which I'll nitpick in a bit: but it's not important) because what she's done is completely sideways on purpose. I will say this: she hasn't violated the space-time continuum with the characters' movements around Europe.

The premise is this: "What if John Dee was totally sincere and of course there's real magic, and he teamed up with Rabbi Loew to fight against Edward Kelley, and also King Rudolf and Elizabeth Bathory and also demons?" The sticking point is "John Dee as a sympathetic hero," but as stuff you have to grant an author to get along with the story, that's not too bad.

Some things I liked: the everyday life parts, the constant worry about money, the personalities of some of the characters. When I set aside the fact that the protagonist was John Dee and forgot about his historical ickiness, I liked him a lot. I liked his wife. I liked Izak the bastard. I was usually annoyed with Rabbi Loew, but I think that was about right. I liked that his status as an oppressed Jew didn't make him into a saint. I like that the fact that he had a bit of magic and was an oppressed minority didn't make him into a Magical One-Dimensional Prop Character. I adored the character of Magdelena, the street-dwelling apparent old lady who wants to learn magic. I liked that when she wrote John Dee as sympathetic and also a product of his times, she didn't feel she had to defend his prejudices. I've always said that if your protagonist has bad ideas or ideology and the reader feels as if the writer is promoting them, it is a failure of craft. So no failure of craft on that front here. No preachy-preachy either. Just clarity.

I am of two minds about the setting. Maybe I'm prejudiced because of my own romantic attachment to Prague. Maybe I'm territorial. I hope not. The movie geography wasn't usually actually important. Though I was thrown right out when there's an emphatic two paragraphs describing the very impressively long walk from Stare Mesto to Faustuv Dum (Faust House, where Kelley was living). I've done that walk, and it's like six blocks. Maybe eight, if you go the long way round. Maybe when Goldstein went there she was tired, or maybe she got lost on the way. It's easy to get temporarily lost in the center of Prague, though if you are patient you will get unlost eventually.

Another set of tiny details that threw me out of the story -- again, this is not really fair because it's a little thing -- was the description of how the spoken languages sounded to John Dee. They didn't read right. They read like descriptions of what the written language looks like, not what the spoken languages sound like. The thing about Czech not having any vowels -- it doesn't sound like that when spoken. The vowels are quite prominent and fluid, the consonant clusters don't stomp all over them at all. And Hungarian dolesn't sound hissy and sibilant, either. It looks sibilant, but it doesn't sound like that.

People call time to tell John Dee stuff about history and geography a lot. Of course they do that in real life. But it reads a little clunky. I actually think it would be a non-problem altogether if it were cut by only a little bit.

I was hoping for a different resolution to the golem part of the story (what, you thought that there could possibly be a story about Rabbi Loew that did not include the golem?), that would involve greater emotional and moral growth for Rabbi Loew, but the resolution here doesn't violate the source material (by the way, I just did a quick check on the dates for these guys, and as I thought, she has them right).

So anyway, if you like alchemist stories and stories with demons and Mad King Rudolf and the Golem, you might enjoy this. I'm going to look for other books by Lisa Goldstein, though I might hope they are set somewhere else so I don't get sidetracked with nitpicks.