I mentioned in my post about rereading Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago that I was eyeing up my old copies of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, and at this point I'm about a third of the way into book 5, the High King. I hadn't read these books since I was about ten, so apart from the odd scene from bits here and there I remembered nothing about them.
A couple of things jumped out at me from the start. One is that the books move fast - the longest of them, the High King, comes in at 286 pages, so there's not a lot of time lost charting the intricate political alliances of Prydain before Taran, in book 1, goes chasing after the oracular pig Hen Wen. Think of it this way: these five novels altogether are probably shorter than George RR Martin's first Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones, likely because younger readers are a lot less interested in the buildup to people hacking each other to bits with swords.
The other thing that I noticed straight away is the verbal tics of most of the supporting characters. The bard, Fflewddur Fflam, is constantly aggrandizing himself ("a Fflam is valiant!"), correcting ("if you take my meaning") and telling lies that make his harp strings snap. The Princess Eilonwy likens things to other things all the time, and Gurgi speaks in the third person about himself and others, and worries about his "poor tender head".
There are others, both for these characters and for others, but it strikes me as a quick way of letting the reader know who's talking - there are a lot of characters to keep track of so it becomes important that Fflewddur have a different voice than Eilonwy or the others. It also reminds me of a point the critic James Woods made in his book, How Fiction Works, where he described such motifs as a way of making a one-dimensional character work - by insisting repeatedly that she'll never desert Mr Micawber, Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield is giving a glimpse into her thoughts, which have probably involved deserting Mr Micawber.
The thing she - and the supporting characters in the Prydain books - repeats, becomes the defining feature, and while it's a single one that doesn't show her or them as fully realized human beings, it also allows them to come alive in a way that wouldn't be possible if the author were trying to give them that rich inner life.
Thinking about my own stories, the ones where I've differentiated the characters from one another more successfully are the ones where I've located an accent or a voice for them. That comes about from reading their dialogue out loud, so I suspect that my shorter stories are more successful in this regard than my longer novellas.
It's also worth noting that this is another example of YA literature doing something more economically (and perhaps effectively) than "serious" or "grownup" literature. Making a supporting character say the same things, or the same types of things, over and over isn't necessarily the best option for a character who'll be, for example, the point-of-view character for entire chapters, but without talking down or pandering to kids, it helps them get a quick sense of the character.
To take Fflewddur Fflam again: when he's introduced he's described as spiky-haired and spindly, a king who's so bored with ruling his kingdom that he went and learned to be a wandering bard. The lies he tells, which make his magic harp's strings break, reflect both his inclinations as a bard to make things more interesting, and hint at the idea that he's not so proficient either at music or at ruling.
Coming back to George RR Martin, he does something similar with the internal monologues of many of his characters, such as Ned Stark remembering the words "Promise me, Ned," which his sister Lyanna said on her deathbed. I've read some reviews that compared that to a musical motif, like in opera, though in contrast to Lloyd Alexander's characters it's hinting much more obliquely at the character qualities than having them repeat certain phrases or tics.
Beyond the characterizations, the stories are complex and sometimes quite dark, and discuss themes that fantasy authors these days are quite proud of themselves for addressing. In Book 4, Taran Wanderer, the reader is confronted with the human cost of all the wars and battles that populate fantasy fiction, and is also shown the pride and self-respect that non-nobles and non-combatants have for their trades, like smithing, weaving and pottery.
Apart from the lack of things for female characters like Eilonwy to do (and apart from the overall lack of female characters), such themes wouldn't be out of place in fantasy literature now, so imagine my surprise to learn (or re-learn) that the Prydain books came out in the mid-1960s. It also has very little echo of Lord of the Rings in it, which is another nice thing to notice, although surely Lloyd Alexander must have been familiar with JRR Tolkien's work when he was writing his own.
The books are simple, but they breeze along quite well and aren't (to me) embarrassingly childish. It's also nice to re-read one of the first series I was really into as a kid, talking about it with friends and my dad (who also spoiled the ending of Taran Wanderer for me). One of the nicest things as a reader of any age is getting stuck into a new series where all the books are readily available, so it's enjoyable to experience those feelings again.
No comments:
Post a Comment