At some point — I think in Locus? — I read an interview with Gordon Van Gelder in which he described his reaction to elves as being like lactose intolerance. “I’m elf intolerant,” he said.<\/p>\n
I am also elf intolerant.<\/p>\n
And that extends to fairies. Actually, I don’t bother to distinguish between “under the hill” elf stories and “under the hill” fairy stories; they strike me as basically the same equation.<\/p>\n
So, consequently, I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy the anthology The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm<\/a>, despite its excellent editors and dazzling array of author names. And I didn’t.<\/p>\n In my (biased toward giving low ratings) personal rating system, I gave the stories in this anthology the following splay. I didn’t read the poetry.<\/p>\n Five stars: two There were two stories in this anthology for which I ran out of energy before the author ran out of story, and another that I skimmed heavily.<\/p>\n I certainly can’t blame the authors for this. It was definitely the subject matter. One of the stories I failed to finish reading was “Elvenbrood” by Tanith Lee, who is one of my favorite authors. I devour most of her stories voraciously. Add elves, and I take a nap.<\/p>\n There are problems with writing elf stories — or, rather, there are problems with elves and fairies as those cultural constructs generally appear in modern American fiction. (Western) elves, like vampires, are super-cool. They’re impossibly powerful, impossibly beautiful, impossibly impossible. And also diffident. Worse, the concept of the changeling lends itself too easily to a sort of immature wish-fulfillment, an all-to-easty metaphor for growing up an ugly duckling surrounded by powerful and beautiful swans.<\/p>\n There are intriguing angles from which to approach western-style elves, certainly… but I think it’s fundamentally a challenge. The narratives we draw around them tend to be pretty tired, and I think it’s hard to riff on the concept while still preserving the feel of “elf-ness,” which itself seems to be derived in large part from the tired use of tropes.<\/p>\n The anthology does touch on some non-western creatures that fall into the concept of fairies, such as Japanese kitsune. These stories have a bit more original space in which to work before running into the cloy of elfness.<\/p>\n As with most themed anthologies, I appreciated those stories that went further afield from the subject to draw their material. The most literal and traditional elf stories — like “Elvenbrood” — were significantly less interesting than the riffs that deconstructed and built anew the older tropes.<\/p>\n Although the anthology as a whole left me flat, there are some very nice pieces in it. My favorite was Kelly Link’s The Faery Handbag”<\/a> which deservedly won a bunch of awards. I first read this piece in Kelly Link’s collection Magic for Beginners<\/a>. Even among Link’s generally amazing work, “The Faery Handbag” stands out as particularly good. The narrator’s playful voice is compelling; the detail work gorgeous; the non-linear structure intriguingly woven but still sharp by the end. This story doesn’t stir me emotionally the way some of Link’s other work does (“Magic for Beginners” from which her second collection draws its name is my favorite of her stories — unfortunately, I don’t think it’s still available online), but it’s a delightful and original read.<\/p>\n I also really enjoyed Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “Immersed in Matter” which follows a half-elf boy as he flirts with the edges of human civilization, for subconscious reasons that are only partially clear to him. This story is pretty traditional and the elves in it fit within most of the stereotypes of elves, but the story really worked for me, which I suppose just goes to show that anything can work when done well. I think the keys to this story’s success, at least for me, are the ways in which it slides around the themes of “How do I grow up awkward?” and “What does it mean to be human?” The main character does end up playing out some of the angsty changeling themes, but does so in a way that’s subtle rather than self-pitying. The theme emerges naturally from the story, rather than feeling hammered in or overt. The story benefits greatly from what I felt was nicely rendered and subtle characterization.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Ford’s “The Annals of Eelin-Ok<\/a>” is a fake sort of academic essay in which a scholar describes the lives of fairies who live their lives in sand castles, ending his essay with the translated text of a memoir by one such fairy. This story — with its classification of fairy types, and concentration on how the fairies interact unseen with human children — seems clearly a riff on the idea of fairies at the bottom of the garden, but Ford’s voice is strikingly clear and compelling, and he uses modern storytelling techniques to create a real sense of emotional involvement with the character. By the end of the piece, a naturally evolving theme of ephemerality has appeared, and despite the fact that fairies often lend themselves to a sort of saccharine tone, Ford doesn’t flinch from his ending, instead pushing to a darker and more ambiguous place.<\/p>\n Hiromi Goto’s “Foxwife” is another of the anthology’s particularly interesting pieces. My favorite thing about the piece is that it seems to take on a fictionalized Japan similar to the way most western authors take on a Defaulty McBland fictionalized England. It doesn’t cater to western assumptions about society, or western assumptions about Japan — which disoriented me a bit early on, in all the best ways. The imagery here is vivid, and the scenes unexpected. The piece doesn’t quite tie together for me, and the ending was weak, but I enjoyed taking the journey of reading it.<\/p>\n I also enjoyed Emma Bull’s “De La Tierra” and Bruce Glassco’s “Never, Never,” although neither is the kind of fiction I usually seek on my own. “De La Tierra” is urban fantasy, following a biologically modified sort of private security agent for the fairy population of LA. This story reminds me of Greg Van Eekhout’s “Osteomancer’s Son,” which will be appearing on PodCastle<\/a> next Tuesday: action centered around a very shiny idea with lots of eyeball kicks. There’s also a strong political subtext to “De La Tierra” which I went back and forth about as a reader… I wasn’t sure if the message was a little reductive of the complexities involved, or on the contrary a fairly brilliant way of expressing the political ideas. In the end, I settled on a bit of both, and I liked that the story had room enough for me to sustain that ambiguity.<\/p>\n “Never, Never” is an engagement with Peter Pan, told from the perspective of Captain Hook. The story relies heavily on the reader’s sense of nostalgia for the Peter Pan books… which I have to say I don’t have nostalgia for. Still. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it, and I like the way the piece stretched my imagination. And the tender, slightly melancholic scene between Captain Hook and Tiger Lily enchanted me. Besides, there’s something all too true about the idea that an omnipotent, ever-young Peter Pan would act like an enfant terrible, filling his island at turns with vicious pirates, gigantic war robots, ninjas, and aliens.<\/p>\n I’ll also give a shout out to another story: “The Night Market” by Holly Black is a sort of feminist fantasy short for a YA audience that doesn’t break a lot of ground plot-wise, but has some strikingly cool imagery in the night market scene itself. I thought this story was online, but I’m not finding it at a glance. If someone else knows the link, toss it to me, would you?<\/p>\n A number of the stories in this anthology attempt to come up with some original elf feul by using elf and fairy creatures as direct analogues for environmental damage. For me, this ranged from the moderately successful as in Gregory Maguire’s “The Oak Thing” which has an intriguing enough main character that the piece doesn’t feel heavy-handed, to the unsuccessful “Undine” by Patricia McKillip which took its metaphor too seriously and directly. In general, these weren’t pieces that worked for me (except for Emma Bull’s, which had a lot of other political stuff going on as well).<\/p>\n Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for environmentalist messages in fiction or otherwise, but I think it’s too easy to make all-perfect all-beautiful elves and fairies a metaphor for voiceless, abused, innocent nature, without really having to examine either the politics of the message or the basis for the metaphor. The prettily written “The Shooter at Heart Rock Waterhole” by Bill Congreve exemplifies this problem for me; the elf who symbollizes nature starts out dead and voiceless. It’s all too unidirectional and easy, all too unconflicted. I’m inclined to support an environmentalist message, but I need more than the metaphorical destruction of a beautiful fairy or elven body to care more than I already do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At some point — I think in Locus? — I read an interview with Gordon Van Gelder in which he described his reaction to elves as being like lactose intolerance. “I’m elf intolerant,” he said. I am also elf intolerant. … Continue reading
\nFour stars: two
\nThree stars: three
\nTwo stars: two
\nOne star: eight<\/p>\n