(no subject)

[skygiants]

I'd had Phyllis Ann Karr's At Amberleaf Fair on my shelf for years after picking it up at a used bookstore, but osprey_archer's visit kicked me into gear to actually read it so that I could pass it off to her on her way out.

This is a very strange little book -- a lot of large-scale-implications worldbuilding utilized to tell a very domestic little story that takes place over a couple of days at a local fantasyland market.

Ostensibly this is a book wrapped up in two mysteries:

Mystery A: toymaker Tobin's wizard brother has mysteriously collapsed and is now deathly ill! EITHER he is tragically afflicted with a common career-ending illness called glory-choking -- difficult to ask for a promotion or explain your accomplishments under these circumstances when being proud of yourself might end up fatal! -- OR he has a previously un-diagnosed allergy, but unfortunately since in this world fancy food is commonly illusion-transformed out of other, different, more boring food it's very difficult to know what he might have an allergy to

Mystery B: Tobin and his bff/foster brother have both proposed to the same girl [whom they've both known since they were adults and she was a child] and now the present that the foster brother made to propose to her with has been replaced with a piece of fruit that his magic-spelled-against-theft tent thinks is technically an appropriate enough trade that it's not actually theft, and he thinks Tobin did it even though no one else really thinks this is at all plausible

The three POV characters are Tobin, the nice age-appropriate storyteller who has a crush on Tobin, and the judge investigating the Situations; the suspense is much less about What Happened In the Situations (the judge has some theories and they're fairly telegraphed) than about whether the Situations are going to result in Tobin making different decisions with his life.

Meanwhile, I am not personally very interested in Tobin and his career or romantic stress -- none of the characters or relationships really go deep enough to be compelling to me -- but I am very interested in the ways in which Karr casually embeds these low-key world-altering bits of magic throughout the book and then pushes them to their limit through the medium of a detective investigation. "We magically transform food into other food on the regular" --> "so what does that mean for food allergies?" is SUCH a good question!

(I am also impressed that Karr manages to go the whole book without gendering the judge and I didn't notice she was doing it until midway through.)

rachelmanija mentions in her review that her copy had an author's note at the end which my physical copy did not have, explaining that the plot of the book was lightly adapted from an out-of-print musical. Based on Karr's known preoccupations, Ruddigore is the lowest-hanging fruit, and I guess ... I can make it Ruddigore?? but you have to really squint, Phyllis! "My brother is ill so I have to decide whether to take over the family wizard business" is NOT the same as "my brother is mad I faked my own death and forced him to take over the family doing-an-evil-deed-a-day-or-I'll-get-killed-by-angry-ghosts business" and really and truly does not create the same interpersonal energy!

Anyway, as Rachel did, I'd be very glad to hear other guesses if anyone else can think of any other Gilbert and Sullivans or other stories from that era that map.

Comments

[brainwane]

I learned of this book from a Jo Walton? list of low-stakes/personal-stakes sf/f and really enjoyed it.

[skygiants]

It's definitely very firmly in that space & I wish more sff was set there!

[greenygal]

I haven't read this in ages, but the relevant bit of the author's note is:

"Having set this Gentle World up, let me reveal that it really all started with Torin; and that Torin came into existence because of an editor who refused to buy any of my fictions about one of my favorite literary characters (from another author’s works long in Public Domain), and I determined that editor would, and so I created an alternate-world version of that character. Several Torin the Toymaker short stories made it into print. In crafting his novel, I drew the main plot so directly from his original’s story—for many formative decades my absolute favorite piece of musical theater—that I am amazed it is not obvious to everybody from the initial relationships of Torin, Talmar, Valdart, and Sharys. But then, the setting is so very different, as are most of the plot details and the mood and tone in general. Nor does Sharys so greatly resemble her original, so about all that really remains is the personalities and relationship of the three men, in whom I think their originals really are visible; but without the framework of parodic crime and curses, even this might be harder to recognize. And, while fundamental to my own literary outlook, the play may not be so widely known to the world at large. Dilys is the author, though with a certain amount of daydreaming re. popular success: in putting myself into the story, I changed the play’s romantic pairings. And, though the starting relationships are from the play, my plot as a whole was inspired by Van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels—each one containing three separate mysteries which may or may not be interlinked—except that I eliminated murder because it is out of keeping with the Gentle World and because my own feeling is that other crimes ought to be legitimate bases for whodunit fiction. After all, several Sherlock Holmes and two of the three August Dupin stories rest on something else; and neither “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” nor “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” even concern crime in the human definition."

--which all sounds to me like, no matter how directly inspired she was by Probably Ruddigore, she then changed almost everything about it--including creating a self-insert for the hero to fall in love with!--such that no reader would guess it was an adaptation without the author telling them so.

[osprey_archer]

Thank you for posting this excerpt! I can't get over the fact that she created a self-insert for her fave to fall in love with, but WHY NOT I suppose. If you're already writing a Ruddigore AU you might as well go whole hog.

[skygiants]

SHE SELF INSERTED HERSELF AND MATCHED HERSELF UP WITH THE HERO OF RUDDIGORE?

PHYLLIS. PHYLLIS.

[graycardinal]

FWIW, I am looking at that note and wondering whether there may be more than one source work in play, given that Karr at first refers to Torin as a public-domain "literary" character (which to me implies prose fiction), but later says his origin story was taken from a possibly-obscure work of musical theater.

What draws me in this direction is the editor's reluctance to buy stories about a genuinely PD protagonist - and one of my own favorite stories from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine back in the day (which I think was one of Karr's primary short-fiction markets) passes quite openly through the J. W. Wells family sorcery emporium at 70 St. Mary's Axe. In short, Karr shouldn't have had that much trouble selling a series based on Gilbert & Sullivan characters.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure this helps much in tagging the actual source material. I can think of several authors (Dickens, Twain, Hope) and a handful of musicals (Brigadoon, Camelot, Finian's Rainbow) that might fit some of the parameters, but I'm having trouble mapping a workable triple-combo of author, novel, and second-tier musical that checks off all the necessary ticky-boxes.

[greenygal]

No, it turns out to be definitely Ruddigore! I was curious enough to look at my other Karr ebooks to see what the author's notes said, and behold, right at the beginning of Frostflower and Thorn, while discussing the literary archetypes of her characters, she says that Torin the Toymaker was "conceived as an alternate-world Ruthven".

The unnamed editor might not have been interested in G&S pastiche, or might just not have wanted the story. Per ISFDB, the first Torin story, "Toyman's Trade," was published in 1974; it would have been one of her earliest published stories, so she wasn't an established author.

[chestnut_pod]

Hm, this sounds really interesting! Unfortunate about the age-inappropriateness, but I do love magical mysteries, especially when the central conundrum isn't murder.

[skygiants]

Yeah, the way the magic plays into the mysteries is very cool, and I also love when authors manage to figure out a plot engine for mysteries that isn't murder! It's so easy to reach for a dead body and I'm always so pleased when they do something else instead.

[sovay]

"We magically transform food into other food on the regular" --> "so what does that mean for food allergies?" is SUCH a good question!

Is glory-choking a natural hazard or is it some kind of leftover magic? It sounds extremely difficult for a society to live with.

[rachelmanija]

It seems like some sort of remnant of a very far in the past magical apocalypse which had various effects leading to a more peaceful society. If being arrogant and pushy can physically harm you, it either weeds out the Elon Musks of the world or makes it impossible for them to gain power. At the point where the story picks up, all the actual Elon Musks are gone and glory-choking is now more of an impediment than a positive force.

The worldbuilding is really interesting.

[sovay]

At the point where the story picks up, all the actual Elon Musks are gone and glory-choking is now more of an impediment than a positive force.

That makes sense and is also really neat.

[skygiants]

It's very cool and the way it's applied in the story is very cool -- like, it's a known ailment but definitely not something that happens to everyone, so of course the person whose career has already been ruined by glory-choking is like 'oh boy kiddo looks like you've got glory-choking, too bad about your career,' in much the same way that when someone complains to me about strange abdominal pain my first thought is always 'could be ovarian cysts!' because I, personally, have had ovarian cysts, but that doesn't mean it's always ovarian cysts ...

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I had a similar reaction to this book. I particularly struggled with Torin's romance: his switch from Sharys to Dilys is so quick! Like, two days after offering the marriage toy to Sharys, he offers the self-same toy to Dilys, seemingly on a whim? To me it seemed like a classic rebound situation. But Dilys is fine with it and by the end of the fair (again, just a couple days later) they're married. Which may not mean exactly the same thing that married means here and now, but they're already talking about children, so...

But the worldbuilding was so interesting. I really wanted more detail about it. Infodump at me, Phyllis Ann Karr!

Also, now that I've read the Wikipedia summary, I guess Torin is Sir Ruthven, Valdart is his foster-brother Richard, and Talmar is his brother Despard? Admittedly it's hard to tell a lot about characterization from a wikipedia summary but the characterizations seem very VERY loosely related.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I could not tell if Torin really felt strongly about any people as individuals at all, and as a result I found it quite hard to care about Torin! (or to understand why Dilys was so into him.) But I would love to read about people I did care about navigating this world with its interesting and unusual rules and hazards.

And the thing is I DO thing the question of 'what is the relationship between Sir Ruthven and Sir Despard Murgatroyed really like outside the confines of Gilbert and Sullivan parody' is an interesting one given the context, but that's simply not the question Phyllis is answering! Phyllis is answering an entirely different question and I don't even know where she got it from!

[osprey_archer]

I spent a certain amount of the book trying to discern if Torin was really worried about his possibly-dying brother and I simply could not tell! All his emotions seemed to go into his toy-crafting vs. magic-working career choice, which is an important choice and I get why he's worried, but perhaps he should be worried about his brother too?

What question do you think Phyllis is answering in the book? Something not at all Ruddigore related?

[troisoiseaux]

he has a previously un-diagnosed allergy, but unfortunately since in this world fancy food is commonly illusion-transformed out of other, different, more boring food it's very difficult to know what he might have an allergy to

This is so wildly inconvenient and I love it as a world-building detail.

[skygiants]

Right? It's so clever! (I admit I love whenever food allergies pop up in my fiction unexpectedly, every time I'm like [pointing] LOOK IT'S UNPRECEDENTED REALISM)

[scintilla10]

Oh my god! XD Reading this review and then all the comments certainly was a Journey.

I do love the idea behind some of the worldbuilding details, like the food allergies.

[skygiants]

Every new fact I learn about Phyllis Ann Karr blows my brain open a little wider. This woman has taken hyperfixation to a whole new level and I truly can only respect it!