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language: English
country: USA
year: 2004
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Elemental Logic, #2
dates read: 21.8.21-23.8.21, 12.7.22-17.7.22, 18.4.24-28.4.24
Earth Logic, the second book in Laurie Marks’s Elemental Logic series, is a strong follow-up from the first book. in some ways it’s thematically quite similar to Fire Logic — in terms of the series’s consistent interest in finding ways to move beyond stasis and impasse and make things possible again — but the execution is very different.
one element of this is the shift in voices: Zanja’s still one of the POV characters, but there’s no Emil or Karis; instead we get Garland, a half-Sainnite deserter and cook, and Clement, the Sainnites’ lieutenant-general. (plus one chapter of Norina.) each of these people is facing very different kinds of stasis, and their methods of navigating these impasses are very different. [REDACTED] in Zanja’s case, cooking in Garland’s, war crimes in Clement’s.
the characterization throughout is incredible. even Norina manages to be almost lovable. even as (because) all of them have flaws and faults: they feel real, even when they’re caught up in the prescience and visions of fire logic or the implacable intuition of earth logic or air logic’s rigid and unyielding impulse towards truth (McKillip again: “I could not desire anything less for [Isig] than that it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself”). when Emil finally meets [REDACTED] I lose my mind.this is very much a book in which some war crimes happen, and for all that Clement is sympathetic I wonder if the way the series moves past this isn’t slightly too neat. at the same time, this also sets the stage of the later books’ concerns with, as it were, truth and reconciliation. we’re left to grapple with the violence of what Clement does in much the same way she is: how does one acknowledge one’s complicity in something like this? is it possible to meaningfully make amends? what must change in order to make real “reconciliation” possible? (spoiler alert: everything.)
Medric is always delightful but he’s especially so in this book — bouncing up and down while getting Emil to read his book, the fact that he writes the book at all. this book, like Water Logic after it, is about the weaponization of history — history both as a terrain of ideological conflict (what do we remember? what have we forgotten, accidentally or intentionally? who tells history?) and history as pretty literally a weapon (the Sainnites’ history, both qualitatively and quantitatively recorded is in a very real way the final blow to the occupation).
in terms of things that made me lose my mind: holy shit, the ritual. I also loved Garland’s observations of Karis’s family interacting (+ Emil and Medric inviting him to join them in bed), and the more I think about it the more I think that Garland is in fact moved by water logic in some ways. he’s so practical that he feels earthy at times, but in terms of his ability to perceive the different logics at work among Karis’s family and friends and the ways their reasonings clash, without taking sides or concluding that one or another is right. that’s water logic: holding contradictions together without trying to escape them. I also had forgotten how much fun Mabin can be in this context. in some ways she’s a fun audience stand-in — she cackles at all the same times I was as a reader.
I love it, and I’m looking forward to rereading Water Logic.
moods: dark, hopeful, inspiring, tense