I picked up Dickinson because he married Robin McKinley, which I thought said a lot about the man. One of these days, I will devote a full post to McKinley and explain my love for her work, my grudging respect bordering on annoyance with her personality and my adoration of her dogs. For those in need of more details, her blog. Somewhere on there is the story of how they met, which I really enjoyed reading. So it made sense, as far as I was concerned, to read Dickinson's work because his wife wrote well. I do like being right about things.
Maja and Saranja come from a family in charge of "Singing to the Unicorns" who protect the Southern border of their valley, while Ribek speaks to water and, through his gift, protects the Northern border. For two hundred generations (ever since the events chronicled in The Ropemaker) these protections have stood strong. But the magic's time is up and now they have set forth, some rather reluctantly, to find the Ropemaker and ask him to renew the spell. The Empire into which they venture is a dangerous place, ruled by Watchers who zealously guard all magic and who are displeased, to say the least, when they catch anyone using it. Which means that, naturally, our heroes team up with a mage, Benayu, and his inter-dimensional lizard, Jex. To complicate matters, Maja discovers that she has a special sense for magic and, when too much of it is used around her, she blacks out. Between the five of them, they need to reach the Ropemaker without bringing destruction down on themselves and hope that he has the power to do something before the Watchers drag the world down into total chaos.
Dickinson, first of all, is a delightful author. Despite writing for children, he never talks down to his readers, nor does he ever do them the disservice of assuming they are too young for complex material. Like L'Engel, he merely searches for a way to present it so that his audience can understand his topic of choice. Angel Isle is a rare find, for it combines fantasy and science fiction in a way I have never run into before. Dickinson creates a typical fantasy world, but instead of throwing up his hands and saying "It's magic, suspend your disbelief", he takes the lawful relationships and equations that we use to understand our universe and applies it to his. I was eagerly awaiting his description of a Universe different than our own and he did not disappoint me.
Having finished the book, I'm still not entirely sure who the main character was. I think it was Maja, who certainly got the plurality of the spotlight and who grew the most, but I found myself equally drawn to everyone in the book...which is to say not very much. I enjoyed reading about them and the book kept me hooked from the first word to the last, but I never really identified with the characters. I felt as though I was exploring someone else's world and following along as they told me about it, but the adventure was never really mine. Still, that might just be a testament to Dickinson's ability to create very real characters, who are so well defined on their own that they don't need my input. Either way, I was more than happy to hear about what happens to them, even though they has to share the spotlight.
Dickinson's world building abilities are truly stunning - his Empire and the universe it inhabits is incredibly well delineated even for a young adult book (and certainly for an adult novel) and he manages to capture the long journey taken by the characters without adding in the tedium they, no doubt, felt. I have no problem with the characters feeling the effects of a long journey, but reading a book should not replicate the experience (which is one of several reasons why I no longer read Goodkind or Jordan). Dickinson strikes the right balance between realism and entertaining the reader and if they ate liver-kebab a few more times than I thought necessary...well, there are worse sins.
As noted earlier, this book is a wonderful specimen of genre-defying fantasy, both in its insertion of "real" science and in its ability to suprise me with the ending. Having slowly read my way through an appreciable amount of YA fantasy, I tend to assume that a certain number of events are possible as methods of resolution and so it's always nice to see an unexpected one handled well. Despite five hundred pages, Angel Isle never dragged, and my only regret, at the end, was that it did not continue. One can always hope for another sequel.
No comments:
Post a Comment