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language: English
country: USA
year: 1993
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Young Wizards, #4
dates read: 16.12.12, 12.2.24-13.2.24
Diane Duane’s A Wizard Abroad reworks the medieval Gaelic narrative Cath Maige Tuired in the context of the cosmology of her Young Wizards series. it’s very engaging, and it introduces my favorite character in the series (Ronan my beloved, underrated Thing That Made Me Gay). I think it also does a good job balancing telling a self-contained story against its position in a series — you could, I think, read it on its own and enjoy it without having read the preceding three books.
it’s a classic Celtic Fantasy premise: Nita (the titular wizard) is sent to Ireland for six weeks by her family in hopes that this will help separate her from her working partner Kit (a boy!). instead of taking a vacation from wizardry, she ends up drawn into a desperate attempt to reenact the Second Battle of “Moytura” (i.e., Mag Tuired), involving a cat-bard, her aunt, a cute boy from Bray (Ronan), and most of the other wizards of Ireland, who must locate or recreate the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann in order to defeat the evil of the Lone Power (the origin of entropy and death) incarnate as Balor.
the pace is brisk, the handling of Nita’s almost-crush on Ronan was. hm. formative for me. and, most importantly, the drama of Ronan as Inhabited by a divine entity that he doesn’t want to acknowledge, afraid that he will be consumed by its divinity and left with nothing of himself, is incredibl. my only complaint about the overarching narrative in and of itself is that I wish this had gotten more page space, because it’s extremely up my alley and I want so much more of it. it’s also a really interesting snapshot of its historical moment: it was published in 1993, just before the beginning of the Celtic Tiger boom, at a time when many flights still had to at least stop at Shannon even if they were continuing on to Dublin and the Troubles were in the news enough that Nita actively has an impression of what Northern Ireland is like — something that I think not even reasonably politically well-informed American fourteen-year-olds would have today.
as an adaptation of Cath Maige Tuired it suffers from a lot of generalizations, some supportable and some more questionable, about the Tuatha Dé Danann in order to integrate them into the Young Wizards cosmology. there are also some factual errors — the sword from Findias is Núadu’s, not Lug’s, for example, and its association with Cú Chulainn’s sword is afaik speculative; likewise, I’m not aware of any association of the gae bolg with Lug’s spear — and much of the Irish is dubious if not outright wrong (“ban-droia”?). it also, of course, relies on a reconfiguration of the battle from a dispute over sovereignty to a great Battle of Good and Evil, which isn’t really what the medieval text is.
there’s also the usual treatment of Ireland as a magical, Otherworldly place (more or less explicitly “with an elastic relationship to the world of empirically provable facts,” as Simon Rodway puts it). this is somewhat offset by the intrusion of real-world economic concerns into the narrative — for example, the observation that while there are many younger wizards in Ireland, there are relatively fewer older ones because even wizards need jobs and so have to emigrate — but it’s still there and still. hm. there are also some echoes of older racialism in the affirmations of Nita’s “blood” connection to Ireland (though ironically predating the citizenship referendum) as the reason she’s involved in this situation, and the classic linking of the Irish language with magic, here through the equation of Irish (a real, living language spoken by natively thousands of people) with “the Speech,” wizards’ magical language. (charitably, perhaps this is a version of the Auraicept na n-Éces story, but it’s still a bad look.)
I also did not love the implication that the Powers That Be who created the universe just Loved Europe more than the Americas. these books are, broadly, a good example of the conceptual problems of contemporary-setting fantasy where humans have magic: if humans have magic and all of world history has nonetheless turned out exactly the same, the inevitable implication is that European Civilization is just Naturally Superior, such that things could never have gone differently under any circumstances.
nonetheless, in spite of these flaws, I think it’s a very good book, and I’m grateful for it getting me started on the road to actual Celtic studies, so there is that.
moods: hopeful, reflective, tense