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language: English
country: USA
year: 1989
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Children of the Triad, #1
dates read: 30.5.23-31.5.23
out of curiosity I decided — since I have access to a good archive here — to go back and read Laurie Marks’s earlier books, starting with her first novel, Delan the Mislaid, the first book in her Children of the Triad trilogy. it’s a wild ride. it’s not as successful as Fire Logic, I wouldn’t say, but it’s certainly aiming just as high conceptually — possibly higher — and it does a lot despite falling slightly short.
the setting is a fantasy world inhabited by five (more or less) sentient species: Walkers, who are apparently essentially human except that a) they lay eggs and b) their fingers have seven joints; Aeyries, winged humanoids who also lay eggs and are androgynous/“hermaphroditic”; Mers, who are aquatic sort-of-humanoid mammals who have a telepathic shared group consciousness; onfrits, small winged creatures that are used as messengers by Aeyries; and a furred, nocturnal, centaur-like species from another continent, one member of whom appears in the book having been kidnapped by Walkers and imprisoned in a menagerie.
the title character has been raised by Walkers but is — it transpires — an Aeyrie. id (the neopronoun, ostensibly from the Aeyrie language — subject id, object idre, possessive ids, reflexive idreself) is sold into slavery by ids mountain-dwelling home community as a “deformed” Walker, to Teksan, a man from a lowland town who turns out to be a cruel sorcerer whose magic derives from pain. Delan discovers the truth about idreself when id escapes the Walker who has enslaved idre and, guided by another Aeyrie id has met, makes the transition to adulthood and grows ids wings. ultimately id finds itself caught up in ids “master”’s plot to eradicate the Aeyries and steal their technological knowledge, and must find a way to escape Teksan’s control and save ids newly-discovered people.
there’s a lot going on here. there’s an extensive exploration of Aeyrie social structures and social mores — no families but rather communal child-raising, non-monogamy is common and unremarkable, and more — and of both the tensions and the possibilities that emerge from the encounter with difference, in this case through the “Triad”, a unique community whose members include Walkers, Aeyries, and a Mer attempting to build a new, cooperative society where members of all three of the “main” species can intermingle (and even form romantic relationships) and learn and grow together.
there’s also the magic: Teksan’s power derives from fear and pain; he brutally tortures and rapes first Delan and then ids Companion (friend/mentor/lover who guided idre through ids transition to adulthood), and he initially controls Delan by means of a binding spell that Delan identifies as “Despair”, whose “greatest power is its ability to make me believe that nothing I can do is of any use”. that’s a lot!
I’m not sure if this was written before or after Marks realized she wasn’t straight (I think after, given the quote below), but either way there’s clearly a lot of subtext throughout here in terms of gender and sexuality: the way Delan has been (willfully) denied knowledge of idreself and ids origins, because it’s easier for the Walkers around idre to force idre into the “deformed Walker” box than to recognize idre as something they hate (an Aeyrie), and — while subject to Despair — easier for Delan to accept this than to venture into the unknown territory of being-Aeyrie. especially since the first thing that happens after id transitions to adulthood and grows ids wings is that id has sex with ids Companion for the first time and thinks this —
How could I have gone through life believing I wanted nothing more than to be left alone? It was not true at all. I wanted, oh I wanted many things, passionately, longingly.
— but then immediately freaks out and, pulled away by Despair, retreats back to the familiar violence of ids master.
there’s also something here about race, in particular Delan’s status as, effecitvely, a transracial adoptee, and ids subsequent position as a kind of mediator between Aeyrie and Walker culture. a lot of things in the book foreshadow stuff in Elemental Logic — it’s clear that Marks was interested in similar questions in both contexts. it’s also, ultimately, very interested in the possibility of change, both for the self (“I have seen, this night, to the other side of loneliness”) and for the broader social and political world that self moves through — clearly the implications of the Triad’s political project will be explored further in subsequent books.
the writing is excellent, although I have to admit I’m not the biggest fan of first-person narration. mainly I think there was just a bit too much going on conceptually and it didn’t have quite enough time to deal with everything the way I wanted it to — it never dropped the ball, but not all of them got as much time in the air as they needed, I think.
moods: dark, hopeful, reflective, tense