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language: English
country: USA
year: 1991
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Children of the Triad, #3
dates read: 26.9.25-6.10.25
Laurie J. Marks’s Ara’s Field is the third and final book in her Children of the Triad series. it picks up five years after The Moonbane Mage and follows — among others — one of its protagonists, the Walker mage Ysbet (Bet for short), as she leaves her winged Aeyrie lover in order to figure out who she wants to be and what she wants to do with her life.
unfortunately for Bet and, indeed, for the world, someone or something has assassinated almost all of the world’s political leaders, apparently in an effort to foment war, first between Walkers and Aeyries and then between Walkers and other Walkers. Bet and a cast of other characters, in particular the young Aeyrie cartographer Tsal and the telepathic, aquatic “Mer” Ara, must figure out who has done this and how to stop them and prevent the Walkers from slaughtering the few remaining Aeyries.
I’ll start by saying that I did definitely enjoy this — the characterization is particularly good, especially Bet as she searches for herself. many things about the novel’s politics and, indeed, plot are clearly things Marks remained interested in, because they show up again in her Elemental Logic series. I was particularly struck by the affirmation early in the novel that the reason for the rapid decline of Aeyrie society in recent decades is that “they have forgotten how to imagine” — specifically, how to imagine a future. this could have been another tedious We Must Imagine Otherwise avant la lettre (indeed, I feared it would be precisely that), but Marks ultimately contradicts this position, first by suggesting that the Aeyries’ problem isn’t an inability to imagine a future but an ignorance (willful at times) of their past (“But was it really the future they were missing?” — a question I suspect felt particularly pressing in 1991, on the eve of 1492 commemorations) and second, during the frankly rather deus ex machina conclusion, deemphasizing either future or past and affirming the importance of the here and now. this was refreshing, particularly just coming out of The Riddle-Master of Hed.
the book does, however, meander — it’s definitely the weakest of the series, structurally, even if conceptually it’s perhaps the best. in some ways this is interesting: one thing that especially struck me is the book’s treatment of time, as it jumps over sometimes quite long periods. basically all travel (and there’s a lot of it) is skipped over, which for a book that begins with the development of a kind of hang glider that allows Bet to travel like Aeyries do and ends with her affirming that what she loves most is the wind seemed like an odd choice.
more of a problem, though, is the handling of perspective: after a prologue from Ara’s perspective (which at the time felt self-contained) and a few chapters from Bet’s perspective, we are suddenly introduced to a new point of view, which has — when introduced — no apparent relation to the rest of the plot, the journals of the Aeyrie cartographer Tsal. Tsal goes on to be a major character, but it takes a while for the connection between ids story (and ids relationship with Ara) to become apparent. this left me wondering why Tsal was introduced so early, creating an expectation that we’d be moving back and forth between perspectives when in fact the first half-ish of the novel is mostly just Bet (and a little bit of Ara), with Tsal only coming to the fore later. the conclusion, too, is a bit jumpy: a number of scenes that feel like they should have been important are skipped completely. ultimately, it felt like perhaps Marks had overreached herself and was trying to squeeze what was really two books’ worth of material into one book (maybe under the time and page count limitations of a three-book contract — there are other signs of fast and somewhat sloppy editing, mainly copyediting).
the one other thing I wanted to flag is that despite the revelation that several centuries before the books the Aeyries nearly destroyed their entire species in a cataclysmic conflict so dramatic that they consciously erased it from their history — which, to be clear, is extremely compelling and would mesh well with the way the book is thinking about the relationships between past, present, and future — the book ends up undercutting the force of this new history by having that war, like the current one, be instigated by an Outside Force (in this case a group of extradimensional beings that feed off of negative emotions), rather than reflecting internal contradictions in Aeyrie society. this ultimately shifts the responsibility for this history of violence and destruction away from its perpetrators and onto a shadowy (or fiery, in this case) conspiracy, which, while it’s ultimately resolved in an interesting and unexpected way, is definitely a let-down, particularly after the first two books.
nonetheless, this was an enjoyable conclusion to a solid trilogy — as I said of Delan the Mislaid, the series as a whole is certainly aiming as high as Elemental Logic, even if it does not always reach the same heights.
moods: adventurous, hopeful, mysterious, reflective, tense