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Mar. 24th, 2024 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsYesterday I met up with a friend of mine to talk about Nicola Griffith's Menewood, the second book in her epic historical fiction saga about St. Hild of Whitby.
I had been vaguely meaning to read this since it came out, but I also vaguely wanted to reread Hild, the first book before I did, and since Hild is 640 pages long and Menewood is 670 pages long that meant that in practice that I was not actually getting around to prioritizing either of them on my reading list until my friend gave me a concrete deadline. Given said deadline, I did not reread Hild. My memory of what happens in that book comprised a lot of vibes and exactly two concrete facts: a.) Hild has a complicated lesbian relationship with her maidservant and b.) Hild ends up romancing her secret half-brother.
I did also consult my untrustworthy externalized memory, Becca of 2014. Becca of 2014 absolutely can't be relied upon to either provide useful concrete spoilers or to have opinions that I still agree with; that said having now read Menewood, the old post is a reasonable summary of the Kind of Book that Hild and Menewood both are, i.e. among other things the kind that has an eight-page cast list in the front. Given which, I didn't actually find myself struggling that much with not having reread Hild; yes, there were some characters that I should have remembered from the previous book and did not, but equally frequently there was a character that I should have remembered from the previous scene and did not, and that was fine, because there were about sixty other characters to pay attention to and about twenty of them were people whose names I could consistently remember and whose plotlines I was emotionally invested in and broadly speaking I think that's just how a book of this nature goes.
Anyway. The thing that Hild did very well and that Menewood also continues to do very well is drawing a believable, compelling, immersive medieval world. The book is really interested in and thoughtful about material culture, how things get made and where things come from and what you need them for -- there's a big part of the book that honestly feels a little bit to me like watching Hild play a resource management sim, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way, it's a really well-developed and beautifully written seventh century resource management sim!
I should probably take a lesson from 2014 Becca and provide some more descriptions of plot points here to help guide me if a third book drops in 2034 or so. On the other hand, in 2024, will I really need to know the details of the plot .... there's a complex gameboard, and it's constantly shifting, and Hild is positioning herself within it to keep her people safe; the various little moves are less important than the textural experience of the whole. I did accidentally spoil myself for broad shape of the book before I read it and I rather wish I hadn't, though I do think it is a very bold choice to seed the looming threat of Incest Marriage Discovery throughout the whole front half of the book and then kill off both Cian and their baby in completely unrelated events before Chekhov's Incest Gun ever goes off ... have been trying to decide how I feel about that narratively and I think I have come down on 'respect'. Anyway, I also think I probably would have been hit harder by the way everything goes to shit in the middle of the book if I hadn't known it was coming, but I do think the portrait of grief and recovery is really nicely done, the way that the people she has left are just responsibilities to be resented at first, but that's enough to keep her in the world until she's healed enough to remember how to feel something genuine for other people again for their own sake.
There were only two moments that threw me out of the text completely, which frankly is not bad for a 675 page book. The first is when Hild's formerly-enslaved former-maidservant Gwladus pulls out three boxes of Hild's jewelry and Hild realizes that Gwladus' work has been so invisible to her that she doesn't actually know how much jewelry she has -- the evolving arc of Hild and Gwladus' dynamic is probably one of the most important in the book and for the most part I really like it, but I simply do not believe that Hild has not factored her THREE BOXES OF GOLD JEWELRY into the otherwise carefully detailed resource management sim of ensuring that her land and people survive the major challenges of this period of the book.
The second is when Hild's people are boasting about her to new recruits and one of them says "Cath Llew [one of Hild's many names] doesn't sleep, she waits."
I had been vaguely meaning to read this since it came out, but I also vaguely wanted to reread Hild, the first book before I did, and since Hild is 640 pages long and Menewood is 670 pages long that meant that in practice that I was not actually getting around to prioritizing either of them on my reading list until my friend gave me a concrete deadline. Given said deadline, I did not reread Hild. My memory of what happens in that book comprised a lot of vibes and exactly two concrete facts: a.) Hild has a complicated lesbian relationship with her maidservant and b.) Hild ends up romancing her secret half-brother.
I did also consult my untrustworthy externalized memory, Becca of 2014. Becca of 2014 absolutely can't be relied upon to either provide useful concrete spoilers or to have opinions that I still agree with; that said having now read Menewood, the old post is a reasonable summary of the Kind of Book that Hild and Menewood both are, i.e. among other things the kind that has an eight-page cast list in the front. Given which, I didn't actually find myself struggling that much with not having reread Hild; yes, there were some characters that I should have remembered from the previous book and did not, but equally frequently there was a character that I should have remembered from the previous scene and did not, and that was fine, because there were about sixty other characters to pay attention to and about twenty of them were people whose names I could consistently remember and whose plotlines I was emotionally invested in and broadly speaking I think that's just how a book of this nature goes.
Anyway. The thing that Hild did very well and that Menewood also continues to do very well is drawing a believable, compelling, immersive medieval world. The book is really interested in and thoughtful about material culture, how things get made and where things come from and what you need them for -- there's a big part of the book that honestly feels a little bit to me like watching Hild play a resource management sim, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way, it's a really well-developed and beautifully written seventh century resource management sim!
I should probably take a lesson from 2014 Becca and provide some more descriptions of plot points here to help guide me if a third book drops in 2034 or so. On the other hand, in 2024, will I really need to know the details of the plot .... there's a complex gameboard, and it's constantly shifting, and Hild is positioning herself within it to keep her people safe; the various little moves are less important than the textural experience of the whole. I did accidentally spoil myself for broad shape of the book before I read it and I rather wish I hadn't, though I do think it is a very bold choice to seed the looming threat of Incest Marriage Discovery throughout the whole front half of the book and then kill off both Cian and their baby in completely unrelated events before Chekhov's Incest Gun ever goes off ... have been trying to decide how I feel about that narratively and I think I have come down on 'respect'. Anyway, I also think I probably would have been hit harder by the way everything goes to shit in the middle of the book if I hadn't known it was coming, but I do think the portrait of grief and recovery is really nicely done, the way that the people she has left are just responsibilities to be resented at first, but that's enough to keep her in the world until she's healed enough to remember how to feel something genuine for other people again for their own sake.
There were only two moments that threw me out of the text completely, which frankly is not bad for a 675 page book. The first is when Hild's formerly-enslaved former-maidservant Gwladus pulls out three boxes of Hild's jewelry and Hild realizes that Gwladus' work has been so invisible to her that she doesn't actually know how much jewelry she has -- the evolving arc of Hild and Gwladus' dynamic is probably one of the most important in the book and for the most part I really like it, but I simply do not believe that Hild has not factored her THREE BOXES OF GOLD JEWELRY into the otherwise carefully detailed resource management sim of ensuring that her land and people survive the major challenges of this period of the book.
The second is when Hild's people are boasting about her to new recruits and one of them says "Cath Llew [one of Hild's many names] doesn't sleep, she waits."
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Date: 2024-03-27 12:34 am (UTC)I haven't read Hild but hitherto all the Hild reviews I had read raved about the f/f and did not mention the m/f incest at all.
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Date: 2024-03-27 01:35 am (UTC)Meanwhile, I read half of Mitchison's The Conquered on Sunday, and though it does not contain any incest, I do wonder now whether that subplot in Hild was a direct literary allusion.
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Date: 2024-03-27 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-28 01:04 am (UTC)