Black Gate

The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce
Magic Carpet Books (256 pages, $5.95, May 2000)

To begin with, I should tell you that I adore Meredith Ann Pierce’s writing. It has a sense of fairy tale about it, a simple yet otherworldly quality. I will happily read anything she’s written and recommend it to others.

Nevertheless, I have to say that The Woman Who Loved Reindeer might push some peoples buttons for reasons that have nothing to do with the high-quality prose.

Caribou is an isolated girl of thirteen or so, living away from her people because of her true dreams and possible magic. Then her sister-in-law unceremoniously gives her a baby to care for. Although Caribou resents the request — the sister-in-law admits that the baby isn’t her husband’s — an obscure impulse makes her accept the child. And then her life starts to get both richer and stranger.

The child — Caribou names him Reindeer — is not entirely human. When he’s still a baby, a golden reindeer nearly takes him away. As he grows, Caribou dreams of him as a reindeer calf and notices that he casts a reindeer’s reflection in the water. Also, he doesn’t entirely comprehend human emotion. He’s a trangl, a shapeshifter who turns into a reindeer, a being that Caribou’s culture fears as essentially untrustworthy — a view that’s not entirely unfounded, since Reindeer seems to have a limited capacity for empathy.

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I don’t know what makes a novel great. Maybe every great book is great in its own way. I suspect, though, that a novel’s greatness resides most often either in its structure (not just its plot, but its balancing of themes and elements, its division into units like chapters, and its decision of what to describe and when) or its prose (its ability to make every word count, not only in depicting character and setting, not only in moving forward story, but in advancing the theme of the book, what it’s about, the idea that prompted the telling of the tale in the first place).

I suspect also that truly great novels fuse the two things, so that stylistic choices are an outgrowth of structure, while structural elements are visible in the voices the story uses. And all these things are always surprising the reader, even while making perfect sense.

Which brings me to Jeff VanderMeer, and his three novels of the fictional city of Ambergris: City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

This is not a typical trilogy. The three books are very different from each other in both style and structure, although they do have some themes and characters in common. Chiefly, they have Ambergris in common.

Ambergris is a strange place, a baroque metropolis defined by wars between sprawling merchant houses, the orgiastic annual celebration of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, and a mostly-subterranean nonhuman race called Grey Caps. The city changes over the course of the books — its technology shifts, its social structure is altered — but then the way we see the city changes as well.

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The Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly
Del Rey (311 pages, $2.95, March 1984)

The first note I made on The Ladies of Mandrigyn was, “too many adjectives!” I also took an immediate dislike to the main character, a mercenary captain who routinely buys and keeps teenage concubines.

The second problem resolved itself nicely during the course of the story, but the adjectives never did let up. If you like spare prose, this is probably not a book for you.

Before I talk about the story, I should mention that I’ve only read this book once. For all my previous reviews, I chose books that I’d read before. If these reviews have a theme, after all, it’s “good books you probably don’t know about,” so I started with some stories I remembered fondly. With this one, I checked to make sure it was the first of a series (the other two are The Witches of Wenshar and The Dark Hand of Magic) and bought it.

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