Death, Faith, Hope and Love

Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Passage by Connie Willis

Spiritual refreshment isn’t always found in the sunnier pastures of literature. Sometimes the most revivifying draughts well up from stories about the dark night of soul.

We interrupt this post for a public service announcement: If you didn’t pay attention to the masthead of this blog, now’s the time to remind you: Here There Be Spoilers. If you haven’t yet read Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold or Passage by Connie Willis, you may perhaps want to hie thee off to some other blog for the nonce.

I love speculative fiction—sf, fantasy, horror, supernatural, any of those literary categories that hint that Things Are Not As They Seem. Where but in SF or fantasy could the author kill off the main character halfway through the story, and then go on writing about him or her—without resorting to flashbacks?

In the midst of life we are in death, reads one of the prayers in the Anglican funeral office. Willis and Bujold in these two books have each tackled the subject of death in the midst of life—the life of the story, that is. These are two very different writers, and you can catch how very different these two particular stories are just by looking at the style of the cover art. And yes, as I hinted up top—in each of these books, the main viewpoint character dies partway through the book.

Passage, the story of near-death researcher Joanna Lander, who gets a lot nearer the big D than she planned, has a lot of the screwball comedy in it, like most Connie Willis stories—even her rather grim novels Doomsday Book and Lincoln’s Dreams. There is a lot of chasing around after an elusive MacGuffin or three, a lot of interweaving of stories and themes that don’t at first appear to be related.

Mirror Dance is a volume in Bujold’s continuing space opera saga of the Vorkosigan family, focusing mostly on the character of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, Imperial undercover agent, hyperactive mercenary fleet admiral and self-appointed knight errant. The main wonder is that in this line of work, Miles never managed to get himself killed any sooner in the multi-volume series…

As I said, these are two very different writers. Willis writes what I call “Science Fiction for people who hate Science Fiction,” where the technical details are mostly kept to a minimum. Bujold writes traditional space opera adventures of a very high calibre, strongly founded on characters facing acute moral conflict. But both of these literary cooks season their dishes with faith, hope and love—even, or perhaps especially, when their subject is Death.

UPDATE WARNING: I didn't mean to confuse anybody-- I just found out that Lois McMaster Bujold's newest volume in her Sharing Knife series is also, coincidentally, entitled Passage. Don't go confusing it with Connie Willis's Passage. Whatever-- most anything by either of these authors will be a good read!

Weavers of the Web of Story

Edit March 26/08: This book has just been nominated for the Hugo Award!

In her study of the Inklings, The Company they Keep, Diana Pavlac Glyer cites J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" and discusses how he "conceives of all stories everywhere existing as parts of a tapestry or web, an image that implies the work of many hands, many colors, many times, all contributing to one enormous, seamless, single work."

There are loads of wonderful things about Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings in this book. Reading about the heady creative sessions in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College or over pints at the Eagle and Child, I find myself wishing my own writing crit partners lived nearer so we could enjoy similar occasions, rather than just swapping electronic copies of works in progress by e-mail. But the essential element of reading and commenting on each other's work is nevertheless part of our creative process.

Equally essential is our collaboration with "the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors", as Cory Doctorow puts it in his acceptance speech for the Sunburst Award, quoted by Glyer in her book. Some of the best advice I have ever had about writing-- and I can't remember from whom!-- was to read widely, and read deeply. I'm reading deeply about Saint Cuthbert and Northumbria in the seventh to 10th centuries right now; but reading beyond the specialized field of one or two projects keeps me weaving in threads of new colours. Hard to say, even, just what will turn up in the finished story....and that's all part of the fun.

The Web of Story has many weavers. It's a privilege to be one of them, drawing on threads from the depth of warp and the breadth of weft to weave in my own small but unique threads to the Great Tapestry.