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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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.

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.

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.