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language: English
country: USA
year: 1976
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Riddle-Master trilogy, #1
dates read: 22.10.16-23.10.16, 4.12.17-9.12.17, 11.3.19-21.3.19, 23.5.20-24.5.20, 24.5.22-28.5.22, 2.10.25-5.10.25
somehow, in the three years since I started writing reviews for all of the books I read again, I have not reviewed any of Patricia McKillip’s books here or elsewhere. that changes now, because I’m rereading the Riddle-Master trilogy, some of the greatest fantasy novels of all time and some of my all-time favorite books.
the first book, The Riddle-Master of Hed, is, for me, the quintessential fantasy novel. it is, in Mendlesohn’s terms, a portal-quest fantasy: Morgon of Hed, the “land-ruler” of a small island off the coast of a larger continent, all under the protection of a mysterious entity known as the High One, leaves home, initially to see the woman he would like to marry. in spite of his avowed disinterest and his attempts to return to Hed, forces beyond his control — murderous shape-changers, political unrest, and his own insatiable curiosity — drive him north, towards Erlenstar Mountain, the home of the High One, in search of an answer to the riddle of his identity: what do the three stars on his forehead mean, and why do ancient mysteries seem to turn on his actions?
central to the novel’s world-building is the concept of the riddle, which in this context means not the familiar word-game but a kind of historical puzzle: a question about a person or event (“Who was Sol of Isig and how did he die?”); a brief historical account; and a “stricture”, a kind of moral (“A man running from death must run first from himself”). through this structure, McKillip gives her world a sense of historical contingency — not (exactly) in the sense that its political economy could be different but in the sense that its history broadly is contested and subject to revision.
this theme is developed more fully in the second and third books in the trilogy, but it’s clear already that part of what is at play here is a claim about history in general: insofar as the present builds upon the past — or, rather, on its conception of the past — then it is necessary to have an accurate understanding of the past in order to understand the present or create a future. the historical account of the Sol of Isig riddle is revealed during the novel to be false, built on a lie; if the answer is a lie, then surely the stricture is, too. the whole riddle collapses; the system falls apart.
without an accurate grounding in history you can only reach false conclusions. without a constant grappling with history, nothing can be known — only the same falsehoods, reproduced by rote as the world crumbles away beneath your feet; as you approach the Ending of an Age.
McKillip’s writing is gorgeous, although I did notice some copyediting errors (mainly punctuation) in the omnibus edition (Riddle-Master: The Complete Trilogy) that I’m rereading from this time because my standalone copies are fragile and I don’t want to carry them around in a backpack all day. while her later novels are often beautifully and ornately descriptive, here her prose is sparse, spare as the wild landscapes her characters move through; while McKillip’s introduction only refers to Tolkien, Le Guin strikes me as the strongest aesthetic reference point here.
one of the many other things I’m really interested in here is the way McKillip imagines relationships with land and the other-than-human, and particularly the ways this is tied to human governance. this is something that’s developed further in later books, but already here we can see that while Morgon is a titular “Prince” (regnant; a Fürst rather than a Prinz) and exercises a limited amount of human political power — which the other land-rulers have more of; Hed is just a particularly decentralized polity — the general title “land-ruler” does not, in fact, mean “ruler-of-land” but, rather, “ruler-who-is-land”: when the land-rule passes to a new land-ruler, they embody the land. in a very real way, Morgon is not (only) a human with a deep connection to Hed — its landscape, its animals, its people, its social and political institutions; rather, he is Hed. he is its peace embodied, such that to deviate from that peace threatens the foundation of his being. to take up a sword, as he is asked to do, is to sever part of his very being — to cease to be Hed-embodied and to become a stranger to himself.
which is another way of saying that I would teach this book’s handling of destiny alongside Sara Ahmed’s “Willful Parts: Problem Characters or the Problem of Character”.
moods: adventurous, emotional, mysterious, reflective