skygiants | (no subject)

sovay reminded me recently that it had somehow been over a decade since I last read Carol Kendall's The Firelings, one of my favorite and most formative books growing up, so obviously I was immediately forced to remedy that.

The characters of The Firelings live on the slopes of an active volcano; in their theology, the volcano is the god Belcher, and their religious practices center around keeping Belcher happy and contented. Long ago, 'ways to keep Belcher happy' included occasionally giving him a 'morsel' to soothe his belly, but modern Firelings obviously don't do that ... except once, ten years ago, when a lot of seismic activity caused them to panic ... but the loss of baby Hulin was an unfortunate and singular tragedy.

Obviously, the story picks up when Belcher starts rumbling again. The attention of the village immediately focuses on the orphan Tacky-obbie, who would have been first choice for sacrifice ten years ago, if his uncle hadn't hidden him away at the crucial time. Tacky-obbie's parents were killed in an earthquake after building a sacrilegious potting oven on forbidden ground, so it seems natural that Belcher would want to complete the set. This comes to a head pretty early in the book; the rest of the plot focuses on the growing defiance of the other adolescents in the village, who form a tacit conspiracy to not only save Tacky-obbie but forge a different future for their community.

Aside from Tacky-obbie, the other most protagonist-y protagonists include Life, Hulin's sister, whose anger and impatience with the world have grown in proportion to her parents' grief and withdrawal after losing her her brother, and Skarra, apprentice to Belcher's priest MudLar, who has spent his whole life being shouted at and abused for not appropriately filling the Skarra-shaped hole in MudLar's expectations; this is pretty indicative of the way that the characters in the book are shaped by fear, loss, and trauma. Something that's really notable about the book, to me, is the fact that we get far more negative descriptions of the characters than positive ones -- Life is belligerent and judgmental, Skarra is weak and scrawny and wavering, mildly telepathic adolescent co-conspirators Milk and Mole Star are weird and reclusive, Life's frenemy Trueline is an annoying know-it-all who composes bad poetry and makes everyone listen to her sing it off-key, Tacky-obbie's uncle Potter Ott is ranting and drug-sodden and makes bad pots. We're never told to like any of these people. Often they don't like each other, and more often, they don't like themselves. But they're still willing to stand up for each other, and help each other, in the ways that they can and at the moments when it counts -- and in the end, that turns out to be enough.

(I somehow hadn't thought to draw the Frances Hardinge comparisons until

sovay mentioned it, but as soon as I started thinking about it I would be genuinely shocked if this book hadn't been at least a partial influence on Hardinge's Gullstruck Island, with its untrustworthy adults, empty spaces left by past losses, and ambiguously hostile volcanic gods. )

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From:

starlady

I read the first part of the first sentence and my mind went immediately to Gullstruck Island. This sounds a bit more depressing, but I'm definitely interested.

From:

skygiants

I'd put them on about an equivalent plane, tbh - one the one hand Firelings has the human sacrifice and on the other hand Gullstruck Island has the genocide ... but both ultimately end with the hope for change and transformation! :D?

From:

sholio

I loved this book when I was a kid! The thing that stuck with me the most is all the plotting surrounding secret passageways and messages hidden in old maps/runestones, which was entirely my jam at age 9. I reread it as an adult (some time ago now; I'm probably due for another reread) and found it interesting how differently I reacted to the characters from an adult perspective - the biggest one was Skarra, who I remember hating as a kid (I thought he was wishy-washy and weak), but as an adult I have a lot more sympathy for the poor kid.

From:

sovay

the biggest one was Skarra, who I remember hating as a kid (I thought he was wishy-washy and weak), but as an adult I have a lot more sympathy for the poor kid.

I didn't read The Firelings as a child; I discovered it in college and Skarra was my favorite character when I did, possibly because he was having the hardest time figuring out how to be a person. Life is the character I really want to re-read for, because she's so spikily messed up in ways that now feel slightly ahead of their time for children's/YA literature—I remember in particular her suspicion and confusion when other people don't behave badly, which she is always trying to pigeonhole into selfishness or weakness so that they'll make more sense to her. (The example that seems to have stuck with me is when she insults Tacky-obbie's uncle's pots: Tacky-obbie doesn't defend his uncle; she scolds him for being a "truckler," never standing up to anyone; Tacky-obbie points out that his uncle isn't a good potter and it's no shame for him to admit it; Life has no idea what to do with this interaction.) She has emotions about discovering that Skarra isn't just weird and nervous, he's as plausibly damaged as you would expect from someone who has accepted a daily diet of emotional and physical abuse since childhood! Her ability to deal with said emotions is almost completely crap! And yet it's actually good for them to know one another, in their painfully awkward, desperately ironic ways, which I feel another novel might not have attempted or succeeded at. I agree with

skygiants that its sympathy for its characters is very take-it-or-leave-it, but I suspect that's one of the reasons it works so well for me. It doesn't feel heavy. I didn't notice for years.

From:

sholio

Yeah, this was probably one of the more noticeable examples of my feelings towards a book's characters shifting dramatically from childhood to adulthood. In most cases - well, at least those cases where rereading as an adult didn't leave me with a profound feeling of "Wow, this book is terrible" - either I reread the book frequently enough as I grew up that my opinions on the characters grew up along with me, or my favorites didn't really change all that much; a lot of the characters who had me at hello as a child still get me exactly that way as an adult.

But this one really changed! I remember very clearly that as the young child I was when I used to reread the book a lot, Tacky-obbie was far and away my favorite, I found Life very grating, and I disliked Skarra immensely. (And also, I found him incomprehensible; I was an extremely stubborn, opinionated child, and was often drawn to "bossy big sibling" characters, e.g. Susan was my head and shoulders favorite in Narnia from a very young age. I think I might have disliked Life because she was a more extreme version of that archetype and I might have seen some of my own flaws in her, without realizing it. Skarra was the polar opposite of what I was like at that age, to the point where I couldn't relate to any of his decisions at all.)

And then reading as an adult it was a shockingly huge perspective shift, especially since I remembered so clearly how I used to feel about everyone. Tacky-obbie was just kind of there as a typical everykid child protagonist, and I found myself really loving Life and Skarra for, on the whole, all the reasons I hadn't liked them before. It was a very interesting window into my childhood psyche, especially with Tacky-obbie, who I'd loved as a kid but as an adult I ... it's not even that I couldn't see why I used to like him, it's just that I found him uninteresting compared to the more damaged and prickly characters around him. It made me recognize why everykid characters are such a staple of middle-grade books, and also at what approximate age I must have developed the draw toward damaged, flawed screw-ups that I have now, because it was definitely after the period in which I read that book a lot.

.... oh, and I completely missed that this is the author of The Gammage Cup! I bought it on the basis of your post - it's sitting in one of my to-read piles right now - but I didn't recognize the name at all, and if you mentioned it in your post I must have skipped that part (there were parts of that post I didn't read once I had read far enough to realize this sounded like a book I'd really enjoy). That's great; I never actually thought to go looking for her books before, and I'm even more interested in reading it now.

From:

sovay

And then reading as an adult it was a shockingly huge perspective shift, especially since I remembered so clearly how I used to feel about everyone.

I really enjoy when I can track that kind of alteration in my own reading, so I love that The Firelings provided such a clear before-and-after for you.

It made me recognize why everykid characters are such a staple of middle-grade books, and also at what approximate age I must have developed the draw toward damaged, flawed screw-ups that I have now, because it was definitely after the period in which I read that book a lot.

That's so neat. I always seem to have loved them; my favorite characters as far back as I can remember were never the every-protagonists. I mean one of my earliest identifiable favorites is Schmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn (1968). That's just a fact a person has to live with. My favorite of the Pevensie siblings was Edmund.

That's great; I never actually thought to go looking for her books before, and I'm even more interested in reading it now.

I've only read her three fantasies, which are all in the same continuity—as mentioned elsewhere, I am not crazy about The Whisper of Glocken (1965), but it's more ambitious than The Gammage Cup and she may have needed to try it in order to get to The Firelings. I know nothing about her realist novels, which she seems to have written for both children and adults, I've never even seen copies of them, but now I am really curious to know if they are interested in the same kinds of characters and themes. I wish The Firelings had not been her last novel. It's going out on a high, sure, but it leaves me wanting to know what she would have done next.

From:

skygiants

I had the exact same experience wrt Tacky-obbie! I still like him and find him sympathetic -- I love that exchange with Life that

sovay describes above -- but everyone else is so much more vivid; after the first few chapters of setup he functions less as a protagonist than a plot device to get the other characters into position to begin their arcs. Even Milk and Mole Star get to change more than Tacky-obbie does! It really stood out to me when I was writing this review tbh, we see so much of everyone else's weird personalities and how they build on them or overcome them in their arcs but after the beginning we really don't see the other characters thinking about Tacky-obbie as a person very much other than 'we have to save him,' which could be about anyone.

(IMO the most interesting thing about Tacky-obbie is his relationship with his uncle, who is one of the most fascinating characters in the book, but then all the big Potter Ott moments in the back half of the book are given to Life rather than Tacky-obbie -- which is a bit unfair once you start to think about it, Tacky-obbie should probably have gotten to complete the relationship thread with his uncle, but Kendall obviously fell in love a bit with Life and her horrible personality as well.

From:

asakiyume

How old were you when you read it, and what age do you think it's aimed at?

I was intrigued when Sovay mentioned this to me in her entry on The Gammage Cup, but your writeup is giving me some pause. I'll probably try it at some point in any case.

From:

skygiants

I can't remember the first time I read it, to be honest ... I'm going to make a stab in the dark and say I was around ten? For me it read very effectively at that age and also at this one, but it's hard for me to say how it would work for someone who doesn't have it more or less burned into their backbrain.

From:

elsane

Oh my gosh I loved this book -- it was one of my go-to rereads as a kid. I have not reread it as an adult, and it's hard for me to be sure what I would think of it now, but I remember being enchanted by (and faintly in awe of) the deep consistency of the world building.

From:

skygiants

I was blown away by the depth of the worldbuilding rereading it, tbh -- that was never something that struck me as a kid or that I paid much attention to (I was much more interested in the characters) but the songs and the myths and the deep attention to how the wording and wordplay shifts as people repeat it, the symbol-writing and symbol-games, the small choices of word and the way everything that's referenced clearly has such thought-through context ... it's truly and tremendously impressive, nothing in it is just surface level.

From:

sovay

the small choices of word and the way everything that's referenced clearly has such thought-through context

"Dardomma" as the collective term for parents!

Edited Date: 2021-06-29 08:46 am (UTC)

From:

sovay

mildly telepathic adolescent co-conspirators Milk and Mole Star are weird and reclusive

The mild telepathy—I can't remember which one of them finally thinks to try it with someone else and it works, proving that it's not just a one-off bond between them—is one of the elements of the book that makes me wish Kendall had written more in this world, because she had clearly figured out a whole lot of things about it since 1959 that were light-years beyond even the complicated parts of The Gammage Cup. In that vein, it interests me that she sets the difficulty levels of the protagonists of The Firelings as casually high as she does, to the point where it took several re-reads for the scope of their damage to register with me. I really, unironically love Mingy and his inability to let an argument go, but this novel looks at his crankiness and asks if he would hold its beer.

But they're still willing to stand up for each other, and help each other, in the ways that they can and at the moments when it counts -- and in the end, that turns out to be enough.

And that isn't the only reason I love the book, because I also love the worldbuilding and the language (scars, truckler, corsa; everything about the volcano), but I'm willing to bet it's not a minor one, because that kind of pulling together of imperfection to makes something better is very important to me.

. . . Carol Kendall was not to my knowledge Jewish, who left all this doikayt lying around.

From:

skygiants

Yeah I would truly LOVE to know more about Milk and Mole Star and the telepathy!! (I think it's Mole Star who ends up being mildly telepathic with Potter Ott also, when they're trapped in the cave -- meanwhile Milk is less interested in telepathy and more interested in Trueline after the whole post-earthquake near-death experience. There's so much there in all of that, and it's just a sideplot to the main show of Life and Skarra and the missing places they don't fill.

Someone above commented on the worldbuilding and I can't believe I forgot to mention it in the main post because it's SO good, with a deep and visual intensity to it. The other thing that gets me, actually, is the fact that when they get out the others who got out long ago are waiting for them -- that there's been centuries of tradition of waiting for those who may never come, ready to welcome them. That feels weirdly Jewish too.

From:

sovay

There's so much there in all of that, and it's just a sideplot to the main show of Life and Skarra and the missing places they don't fill.

WHY IS THIS BOOK SO OBSCURE IT'S SO GOOD.

The other thing that gets me, actually, is the fact that when they get out the others who got out long ago are waiting for them -- that there's been centuries of tradition of waiting for those who may never come, ready to welcome them. That feels weirdly Jewish too.

You're right, it does, and I love it.

From:

lirazel

I've never even heard of this one but it sounds great. (Though that is...quite an interesting collection of character names. They don't...fit together?)

From:

skygiants

Yeah, the naming conventions are weird and interesting! The book never specifically says that kids often get different names when they get older and take different roles in the community, but it's pretty strongly implied; the two oldest people in the village and de facto leaders are Venerable and his wife Ven Ida, for example. (Tacky-obbie is named after a kind of bird and I think Hulin means something in the context of the world as well but I do not at all remember what.)

From:

sholio

The eclectic names are part of the book's charm for me, but there's one bit that I think really confuses the issue of how their names work, and that's the bit where the kids are trying to name Skarra. Beyond that scene, the book implies that most people get tagged with some kind of child-name as kids and often acquire other names as they age - presumably Very Old Toothacher and Venerable were not always called that!

But then there's the naming-Skarra scene, where the group all suggest names drawn from people they know in the village, implying that naming people after other people is common ... which is literally the exact opposite of the book's other implications about how names work for them! If names are commonly changed as people age and typically reflect personal characteristics or major life events, you would expect them to come up with names having to do with Skarra's current circumstances or even things like a flower or a passing cloud, but they don't; the way they talk about it makes it seem as if there are traditional village names and they just need to pick one for him.