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The Fire Rose
Today I went home early, with the theoretical idea that I was going to do a little more work upon arrival. Secretly, I knew this was not going to happen, nor was that a huge crisis; I released a major update to the testers yesterday and in general felt that I'd earned an afternoon off.
What I figured was actually going to happen was that I'd work on the L story. I started it last night, didn't like what I'd done, had decided to tear it out, and got an idea this morning I liked much better.
That didn't happen either. What happened was I continued reading Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose as I ate a late lunch, and got so caught up in the book that I just sat and read the whole thing.
I have a love-hate relationship with Lackey. I adore the way she writes, but I can't read the vast majority of her books because the subject matter is a little too elves-and-bards for my taste. I like her Diana Tregarde "occult detective" books the best, so of course she isn't writing any more of those. Lackey, like Katherine Kurtz, is at her absolute best when describing the physical process of arcane ritual - the focusing exercises, the casting of circles, chalk marks and sacred implements. Unlike Kurtz, she doesn't seem to let that genie out of the bottle very often. Pity.
Fire Rose has a fair amount of it ... but at its heart this is a love story, and not just a love story - it's a Beauty and Beast story. Now, Ardent Readers know I'm a sucker for those. When I last read a retelling of this old tale, Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, I commented that it finally solved a major weakness that's always bothered me about the traditional story - one that McKinley herself had succumbed to in Beauty.
I didn't say explicitly what that weakness was, but since in that same entry I illustrated the point with "Lies Beneath The Skin," I figured it was pretty obvious.
I'll spell it out now: The Beast is always a hell of a lot more interesting a partner than the human he becomes when he's "cured." Lackey solves this problem in an unusually direct way. This is a minor spoiler, but frankly anyone with half a brain can see it coming midway through the book: She doesn't bother to "cure" the Beast at all. Hallelujah!
That guessibility is maybe the only problem I have with the book, actually. I'm pleased that Lackey always plays fair, dropping hints of where she's going in advance, but some of those hints are too obvious. When a Chinese Earth wizard says he's worried that "the dragons are restless" and we've already had earthquakes mentioned and the setting is the San Francisco area circa 1900, it is not believable that one of the book's other wizards can't figure out what he's implying. Or is that just me?
I should say that some people will find this book rather free of major conflict, sort of a wish-fulfillment novel: A young, acutely intelligent woman with no prospects due to the gender roles of her time learns that she is actually a born master of a powerful discipline, and the book revels in her joy of discovering these new skills and her new sense of self-worth. This is exactly the theme of McKinley's The Blue Sword, and it is the reason I don't understand why everyone likes The Hero and the Crown, the other book in the same universe, better.
But I'll be the first to admit that this particular wish-fulfillment theme has a special significance to me. Oh, well.
I'll discuss wish-fulfillment in fiction again in a day or two, because it reminds me of some thoughts I've been harboring about the TG Fiction list. But right now I have dinner guests and I should go be social. Plus there's always that L story to finish. It, coincidentally, is concerned with arcane ritual ... but of a more tantric sort than usually appears in any of Lackey's or Kurtz's books.
Pity, that last. I'd love to see what Kurtz could do with erotic themes.
© Columbine
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