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language: English
country: UK
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 4.12.23-5.12.23
Nicola Griffith’s Spear is fine. the prose is nice — brisk and spare, a little more lyrical than Le Guin, but in this one respect I do think Alix E. Harrow’s blurb comparing Spear with Le Guin is correct. I think Peretur’s characterization is actually quite good — her arc through the novel is definitely the highlight, and for all the abruptness of it I enjoyed her relationship with Nimuë.
the novel follows the overall arc of Peredur, son of Efrawg, but a) Peredur (here “Peretur”) is a lesbian presenting as a man (I think there’s room for a transmasc reading but her interiority seems to be pretty solidly woman-in-disguise) and b) the witches are replaced by the Tuatha Dé Danann, with Manandán (i.e., Manannán mac Lir) searching for the Dagda’s cauldron.
I have a few different complaints. first and foremost, the main plot was not interesting — if only ever felt like a distraction from what the book clearly wanted to be focused on, namely Peretur’s developing sense of herself in her quest to become a knight. the best parts of the book were the parts that were allowed to just…be about Peretur, and/or about the people she meets — her conversations with Llanza/Lance, for example. these parts were great! the “actual plot”, in contrast, is just kind of a let-down overall, as well as being anticlimactic while insisting that it is climactic.
beyond this, the folding of medieval Gaelic material into what is first and foremost a Welsh narrative simply did not work. all of the Gaelic stuff felt like an afterthought — it managed to bore me with a narrative about the TDD as inhuman entities clinging to the shreds of their fading power that they brought from their cities! — and because it never got any focus the interventions she was making in the Gaelic material were much less developed and so less interesting than the interventions she was making in Arthurian material (which in turn could probably have borne some more attention — like the Arturus/Llanza/Gwenhwyfar ot3 situation!).
the names are wildly linguistically inconsistent. this is supposed to be ca. the 6th century and yet we have a bunch of modern Welsh spellings interspersed with “Artos” / “Arturus”, Peretur with Old Welsh -t-, “Andros” (???), Lancelot is Asturian for some reason (I still don’t understand this and I desperately want to. why!!!!), and of course modern Nimuë. Ireland is referred to as “Eiru”, which is just straight-up a typo except that it’s used consistently. oh, and the “Saessonin”, which, ???? feels like she had encountered the word “Saeson” and assumed it was singular. maybe.
also as a Cai apologist…yikes.
moods: adventurous, lighthearted, reflective