(no subject)
Dec. 10th, 2022 11:49 amDuring ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer's visit last month she left me several books, including Naomi Mitchison's Travel Light -- only my second Mitchison Experience, and my first, To the Chapel Perilous, is a book I've not been able to shut up about since I got my hands on it a few years back, so it certainly won't be my last.
Travel Light is a very different book, short and lucid and deeply unpredictable from one section to the next -- I thought I had a grasp on what sort of story it was and kept finding myself wrong at each new turn. It starts out as a sort of Norse fairy tale, with heroine, Halla, being rescued by her nurse from the threat of Murder By Evil Stepmother as a baby. Thereafter the nurse rapid succession turns into a bear, discovers that it's highly inconvenient to raise a human baby as a bear, and gives Halla to a dragon to raise instead. Halla spends her formative years with the dragons, learning to love treasure and hate heroes and understand the sociopolitics of the realm through dragon eyes in a way that feels very much like a satire on what I assume were major sociopolitical and socioeconomical debates of 1952 in ways that are fascinating but probably warped through my particular 2022-lenses.
After a further series of upheavals and a significant encounter with Odin, she's painfully launched out of this particular genre and into an entirely different one, accompanying a group of earnest Christian pilgrims on a journey to Constantinople to lodge a plea against their evil local governor. The pilgrims are deeply anxious for their families back home, deeply unprepared to navigate Byzantine religious politics, and fully convinced that Halla is a saint who's been sent to assist them through their difficult times, even though Halla is not any more prepared for Constantinople than the pilgrims are; it's not the world she grew up in, and she's been moving lightly through time, as well as space.
If Halla has a long-running tie that persists through the whole book, it's Steinvor, the jaunty Valkyrie who occasionally pops up to try and convince Halla that she belongs among the Valkyries despite Halla's distaste for heroes -- in fact, the first time they meet, she tries to carry Halla off -- but also amiably rescues her from several of the traps in which she finds herself throughout her travels. (In a certain kind of book, Steinvor would absolutely be the endgame love interest; in this book I'm not saying she isn't.)
It's a very strange little book, often very funny, often very sad; impermanence and transience is the theme, on both big and little scales, and the losses and gains that come with that. I liked it a lot and, as with To the Chapel Perilous, would love to read more about the specific topics that Mitchison was in dialogue with while writing it.
osprey_archer's visit last month she left me several books, including Naomi Mitchison's Travel Light -- only my second Mitchison Experience, and my first, To the Chapel Perilous, is a book I've not been able to shut up about since I got my hands on it a few years back, so it certainly won't be my last.Travel Light is a very different book, short and lucid and deeply unpredictable from one section to the next -- I thought I had a grasp on what sort of story it was and kept finding myself wrong at each new turn. It starts out as a sort of Norse fairy tale, with heroine, Halla, being rescued by her nurse from the threat of Murder By Evil Stepmother as a baby. Thereafter the nurse rapid succession turns into a bear, discovers that it's highly inconvenient to raise a human baby as a bear, and gives Halla to a dragon to raise instead. Halla spends her formative years with the dragons, learning to love treasure and hate heroes and understand the sociopolitics of the realm through dragon eyes in a way that feels very much like a satire on what I assume were major sociopolitical and socioeconomical debates of 1952 in ways that are fascinating but probably warped through my particular 2022-lenses.
After a further series of upheavals and a significant encounter with Odin, she's painfully launched out of this particular genre and into an entirely different one, accompanying a group of earnest Christian pilgrims on a journey to Constantinople to lodge a plea against their evil local governor. The pilgrims are deeply anxious for their families back home, deeply unprepared to navigate Byzantine religious politics, and fully convinced that Halla is a saint who's been sent to assist them through their difficult times, even though Halla is not any more prepared for Constantinople than the pilgrims are; it's not the world she grew up in, and she's been moving lightly through time, as well as space.
If Halla has a long-running tie that persists through the whole book, it's Steinvor, the jaunty Valkyrie who occasionally pops up to try and convince Halla that she belongs among the Valkyries despite Halla's distaste for heroes -- in fact, the first time they meet, she tries to carry Halla off -- but also amiably rescues her from several of the traps in which she finds herself throughout her travels. (In a certain kind of book, Steinvor would absolutely be the endgame love interest; in this book I'm not saying she isn't.)
It's a very strange little book, often very funny, often very sad; impermanence and transience is the theme, on both big and little scales, and the losses and gains that come with that. I liked it a lot and, as with To the Chapel Perilous, would love to read more about the specific topics that Mitchison was in dialogue with while writing it.
