War for the Oaks, Emma Bull

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1987
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 16.3.24-23.3.24

Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks is — with Terri Windling’s Borderlands anthology, Charles de Lint’s Ottawa novels, Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons, and some other late-’80s books — one of the starting points of the urban fantasy genre. in many ways I think it’s quite good: the dialogue is naturalistic, the plot never lags or drags, the characters are engaging, and it achieves what to me is the hallmark of good urban fantasy, the sense of life / vitality and simultaneously sur-reality (in the etymological sense of over-reality, reality to excess).

Eddi McCandry, a guitarist and singer based in Minneapolis, is chosen by the Seelie Court to be their human guarantor (it’s complicated) in a fairy war over the fate of Minneapolis. with the help of her bandmates, her “phouka” bodyguard, and some others, she has to figure out how to get through the war alive and also ideally prevent the heart of Minneapolis from being destroyed by the Unseelie Court.

along with the usual colonial flattening of “Celtic” (mainly Gaelic, in this case), English, and Lowland Scottish fairy traditions into one singular “Faerie”, it sets out many of the other conventions of the genre, most notably the performance of placedness — it’s set in the Twin Cities (mainly Minneapolis), and it never lets you forget this fact — and the strong interest in music (here as a metonym for a vague sense of counterculture). the descriptions of musical performance were good (though Eddi’s lyrics left imo something to be desired, lol), but insofar as the book wants to position its characters as vaguely countercultural through music it kind of falls flat — unlike (say) de Lint, there’s no attention to class and almost none to race, and this is really the biggest issue with the novel.

Bron, however, is clearly very much a) a misogynist and b) a transphobe — he thinks of himself pre-transition as reasonable and normal (albeit with a vague ennui), but as soon as he finds out Sam is trans (something he never previously thought about or suspected) he immediately starts mentally misgendering Sam and speculating about his gender. the book ultimately kind of dances around the implication that the reason Bron decided abruptly and with no prior thought to transition was — bluntly — a kind of ~autogynophilia~, that she has (tried to) become the kind of woman she wanted to be with as a man.

urban fantasy in settler colonies always in my experience comes with certain ideological problems, first and foremost: if fairies and other supernatural beings are real, what happened to the supernatural beings in the Americas? different writers address this in different ways (none of which I’ve found to be really successful); of the ways I’ve encountered Bull’s is, like, one of the worst, lol. not only is there no mention of any non-“Celtic”/English/Lowland Scots supernatural beings, not only is there only a single Indigenous character in the whole book — a nameless 10-year-old girl who appears in one seen, says something sassy, is accused of theft (not, at least, by the main character), and disappears — but in spite of this the first major battle relies on the power of an Indigenous sacred site, the origins of whose sacredness are never acknowledged. it’s just fairy colonialism!

it’s also honestly kind of weird about Blackness — the “phouka” is dark-skinned (something the narration draws attention to by identifying his skin as “too dark for his features”, that is, as a phenotypical mismatch) and does get called the N-word (by the same unpleasant man who accuses the 10-year-old girl / all Native Americans of being a thief), there’s some weirdness about Black musical genres (identified implicitly as not “fitting” or “expected” in this fairy context, but nonetheless claimed by/for the fairies), and a few other little moments that were just. a little to extremely uncomfortable. there’s some homophobia thrown around at the “phouka”, too, which seems also to be wrapped up in racism (the thought process, if there was one, seems to be: he’s Black and he dresses “nicely” and speaks formally —> this violates expectations / stereotypes about Black masculinity and so marks him as effeminate / effete —> he reads as gay and is targeted by homophobic slurs). to the novel’s credit, Eddi is never directly weird about his racial appearance (he is, of course, not actually Black) after her first observation of a phenotypical “mismatch” in his appearance, and her relationship with the “phouka” is the best-developed in the book. nonetheless, the handling of race is just…off.

is it good? for what it is, yes, I think it’s pretty good. the problem is, however, precisely the what it is.

moods: adventurous, horny, tense


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