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Apr. 28th, 2024 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA lot of the Nebula-nominated novellas this year turned out to be about grief in one way or another. I've loved all of Nghi Vo's Singing Hills cycle and Mammoths at the Gates was no exception.
In this one, Chih the cleric comes home and finds that one of their mentors has died while they were away. Everyone in the temple is grieving, including & especially the cleric's memory-bird partner, in ways that make her entire bird community unhappy and uncomfortable; meanwhile, the dead cleric's grandchildren have camped outside the temple with a war party and are demanding that their remains be returned to the family.
It's a much more straightforward story than most of the previous Singing Hills books -- less clever, less playful, much less tied up in a clever meta-narrative conceit -- but honestly I was kind of glad of that; I would hate to think that these novellas always had to be structurally one-upping themselves in order to work, because that kind of thing is completely unsustainable, so it was good to read Mammoths and enjoy it just as much as I had the previous books. And though it's more straightforward in structure, it is, of course, thematically concerned with narrative and memory just as much as any of the others: specifically, the assemblage of narrative that makes up our incomplete understanding of the dead, once they're gone.
My one complaint about the book is that there is a serious and surprising question of something the dead person did or did not do in their past, as relayed through a story heard from another person who is now dead and told to that person's grandchild; the question of whether or not this did in fact happen as recounted is definitively resolved by the end. There are merits to this, but I can't help but wish it had remained an uncomfortable question without an answer.
In this one, Chih the cleric comes home and finds that one of their mentors has died while they were away. Everyone in the temple is grieving, including & especially the cleric's memory-bird partner, in ways that make her entire bird community unhappy and uncomfortable; meanwhile, the dead cleric's grandchildren have camped outside the temple with a war party and are demanding that their remains be returned to the family.
It's a much more straightforward story than most of the previous Singing Hills books -- less clever, less playful, much less tied up in a clever meta-narrative conceit -- but honestly I was kind of glad of that; I would hate to think that these novellas always had to be structurally one-upping themselves in order to work, because that kind of thing is completely unsustainable, so it was good to read Mammoths and enjoy it just as much as I had the previous books. And though it's more straightforward in structure, it is, of course, thematically concerned with narrative and memory just as much as any of the others: specifically, the assemblage of narrative that makes up our incomplete understanding of the dead, once they're gone.
My one complaint about the book is that there is a serious and surprising question of something the dead person did or did not do in their past, as relayed through a story heard from another person who is now dead and told to that person's grandchild; the question of whether or not this did in fact happen as recounted is definitively resolved by the end. There are merits to this, but I can't help but wish it had remained an uncomfortable question without an answer.
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Date: 2024-05-01 03:20 pm (UTC)I'm also glad that this one mixes it up structurally by having a straightforward structure, because, as you say, it would be unsustainable for the series to keep one-upping itself. IIRC (unfortunately I didn't write a review at the time, so I can't check my impression) I thought Into the Riverlands was weaker than the first two books, in part because of this need for yet another clever structure.
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