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language: English
country: USA
year: 2019
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 15.2.25-1.3.25
G. Willow Wilson’s The Bird King was not at all what I expected. I somehow missed the blurb describing it as “an epic journey” and explicitly noting that Fatima and Hassan “escape the palace walls”, so I was a bit jarred partway through when it becomes a quest narrative.
the novel follows Fatima, an enslaved “concubine” of the last sultan of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, and her gay best friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker with the supernatural ability to manipulate the shape of reality with his maps, on the eve of the final conquest of Granada by Castille and Aragon in 1492. Fatima and Hassan, accompanied by the jinni Vikram, flee the palace, and especially the Castilian inquisitor Luz, who pursues them relentlessly as they try to reach the mythical island of Qaf, setting of the Conference of the Birds and home of the Bird King, who they hope will give them refuge. along the way they’re joined by a Breton fisherman-turned-monk, Gwennec and, eventually, a group of others who have found themselves shipwrecked on Qaf: a Cornish woman, a Timbuktu-trained Dinka doctor, a Venetian soldier, and more.
it’s a good book, but I also found it difficult at times to keep myself focused on it. some of this was just because of the expectation clash: I had expected something more pensive, set just in the Alhambra under siege, so the quest required some reorientation. some of it was some (mostly mild) frustrations with the novel as it was. the plot relies on a series of dei ex machina as Fatima and Hassan are repeatedly saved at the last moment by jinn, by a rogue wave, by the leviathan.
the novel is focalized exclusively through Fatima, and Fatima and Hassan’s relationship is its emotional core: they are deeply in love; we are repeatedly both told and shown that they value each other over anything and anyone else, including at times their own lives. when, partway through the novel, Fatima and Gwennec hook up but do not pursue anything further, Gwennec observes that both of their hearts belong to someone else: his to god and Fatima’s to Hassan. Fatima and Hassan muse several times on the possibility of getting married, but they decide that Hassan’s sexuality, among other obstacles, makes that unviable.
Fatima is an extremely compelling character, both in her own right and for the way Wilson handles the particular social structure of concubinage: truly everything Fatima does is shaped by her experience of as a slave, the both visible and invisible limits it placed on her conduct. what she wants, and what she will die for, is total freedom. the tense relationship between Fatima and Luz the inquisitor is especially well-executed, because Luz at first seems to offer Fatima precisely what she wants, only for Fatima to realize that Luz brings different chains, both literal and metaphorical.
unfortunately, part of what was a bit disappointing about the novel was also its conception of “total freedom”. this is a novel about escape — Fatima is straightforwardly the prisoner who escapes from her prison — but it misses what Tolkien calls “recovery”, the return that follows escape, coming back with a new, clearer vision that allows for transformative action. instead it is a novel about refuge: they arrive on Qaf to find it empty except for a few other shipwrecked strangers, and they begin to build a new life for themselves in the ruins of an abandoned city, taking in more shipwrecked people and slowly building a community. ultimately, however, after an attack by two Castilian ships that they barely survive, they make a crucial choice: the now-reformed Luz will leave the island and destroy Hassan’s map, sealing them off from the world so they can live in peace. the novel turns away from transformative action towards the comfort and the safety of the in-group:
“Say we save a hundred more,” said Fatima. “Or a thousand or two thousand? What good will it do if the Spanish come back and we lose them all to cannons and pikes? How many more graves must we dig?”
Deng sighed and turned to look over the dunes at the line of the sky.
“We will fade here,” he said. “Out of time and memory. We will leave nothing, no legacy. There will be no record of what we have built. What is a kingdom if no one remembers it?”
[...]
“It must be enough,” said Fatima. “This must be enough. This, us, each other. It matters that we lived.”
now, at this point, it seemed like Fatima would go herself, which I think would have been a good ending: for Fatima to return to the world with a new, larger vision, prepared to oppose its injustice. but then Luz volunteers to go instead. I’m reminded of Jamie Berrout’s commentary on the politics of Dane Figueroa Edidi’s Yemaya’s Daughters:
Why is it that the characters, sisters in their priestesshood, possess great wealth and can recognize that their wealth exists in contrast to poverty and homelessness, without acting to lift to lift others out of the margins?
that this is both a novel about refuge and a novel that begins in slavery and ends in freedom likewise raises the specter of marronage. is this absolute removal from political life and, indeed, from the world itself truly “freedom”? it strikes me, rather, as another kind of bondage.
I also found the resolution of the Luz plot a bit flat: it turns out she’s been possessed by an evil spirit (which was giving her supernatural powers that she thought came from god), and once the spirit is exorcised she immediately repents and acknowledges that her faith was imperfect. the novel pays lip service to the idea that the Inquisition is a merely human institution, but this is belied by having its textual representative be supernatural (or supernaturally afflicted).
on a different note, as much as I liked both Fatima and Hassan and their relationship, I was also a bit frustrated by the treatment of Hassan’s sexuality and relationships. it began with Vikram, where Fatima immediately recognizes that Hassan is attracted to Vikram. jinn appear to be broadly bisexual, so anything is possible here, but instead Vikram mostly ignores Hassan and focuses all his attention on Fatima. then Gwennec shows up, and Hassan explicitly tells Fatima that he’s attracted to Gwennec — but of course Gwennec doesn’t appear to have any interest in Hassan, and instead he and Fatima — who has shown no prior interest in Gwennec, though she’s aware he finds her attractive — hook up. finally, Hassan is paired off in the tenth hour with Deng, a Dinka doctor, who by virtue of being introduced only near the end of the novel gets very little development.
if it had been an actual love/lust triangle where both Fatima and Hassan were interested in Gwennec but he chose (or even was categoricaly only interested in Fatima) I think I wouldn’t have minded it as much, but instead it came off has Hassan and his desires being (again) sidelined to focus on a heterosexual relationship. Hassan himself is hurt by this, which in some ways just made it worse:
Naturally it’s you he wants. It’s not as if I’m surprised. Only after that little speech you gave me when I said I wanted him, and you pretended to be shocked, I would have thought—no, I don’t know what I would have thought.
he says “[n]aturally”, says he’s “not […] surprised”, but of course there’s nothing natural about this: Gwennec is not a real person with a sexuality; it’s a contrivance of the author. it just came off as kind of insulting.
the one upside is that Fatima is also attracted to a female jinn who shows up to be a dea ex machina at one point (and in fact almost agrees to go off with her and become a jinn herself), and there’s a brief hint that there could be something between her and Mary, a Cornish seamstress shipwrecked on Qaf with Deng. nonetheless, the handling of sexuality all just kind of annoyed me.
notwithstanding these criticisms, I did enjoy the novel overall, and if you’re interested in stories whose emotional and narrative core is an intimate friendship where each party would die for the other I think you’ll find a lot to like here. and, above all, it’s refreshing to see someone actually drawing on this history of medieval/early modern Iberia as a fantasy setting (in this case as historical fantasy). if this didn’t entirely satisfy my desire for full-on Nasrid fantasy — the quest narrative and the fact that much of it is a sea-journey means it’s distanced from Iberia itself, whether Nasrid or Castilian — it did nonetheless scratch the itch a bit.
moods: adventurous, emotional, sad