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language: Gaelic
country: UK
year: 2010
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 28.6.18-29.6.18, 1.5.23-5.5.23
Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s Gormshuil an Rìgh is an enigmatic and ambiguous fantasy(?) novel(?) modeled after (primarily) Gaelic oral narratives. it narrates the end of a genocidal war between Luchd nan Sgeul (the People of (Oral) Stories) and Luchd an Leabhair (the People of the Book), with the latter essentially wiped out by the end of the novel — except, of course, that the protagonists, led by the title character, are themselves part of a book.
it’s a bizarrely structured novel, because it’s also mimicking the form and content of a series of overlapping and at times contradictory oral narratives, and it begins in medias res but with absolutely no explanation of anything that happened before the first sentence of the novel, which is the middle of someone telling a story. Luchd nan Sgeul are highly conscious of the fact that they are in one or more stories at all times — the first question they ask when they meet someone new is “what story are you in?”
it’s also far from the conventions of anglophone fantasy, even as I think it’s partly responding to the genre’s use of traditional Gaelic narratives, in its complete disinterest in “consistency” of world-building (different stories have different rules) or in explanations at all — characters change shapes (and, concomittantly, genders, although the book doesn’t explore the implications of this at any length), are beheaded and resurrected, reveal that they’re the long-lost siblings of other characters (who had no idea these siblings existed), and similar. the narration is very much operating in the mode of an oral narrative, where details about all of this don’t really matter or don’t need to be introduced in advance. if the story says Eachrais-Ùrlair can bring people back to life with her wand (twice, in many cases, since often peoples heads get reattached to their bodies backwards and she has to re-decapitate them and fix it), then she can.
it’s certainly not a character-driven work, but it’s also not really about the plot: it’s about the vibe. and about waging war against the authority of the Author and of unitary narratives of all kinds.
moods: adventurous, challenging, mysterious