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.

As you all know, I love Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen, so when

sovay told me that she had self-published a Gilbert and Sullivan fanfic novella about Sir Ruthven Murgatroyed of Ruddigore, I immediately purchased it for airplane reading.

Unfortunately, I got on the airplane, started reading Dangerous Persuasion (the book in question), hit Chapter 2, stared at it, turned to

genarti, said "is this just the first chapter of Persuasion word-for-word but slightly condensed?", hit the third chapter, turned to

genarti, said, "I'M PRETTY SURE THIS IS JUST THE FIRST CHAPTER OF NORTHANGER ABBEY WORD-FOR-WORD BUT SLIGHTLY CONDENSED?", and decided that it was not kind to either of us to continue before I could scream at other people about it in real time.

The actual plot of Dangerous Persuasions is: Persuasion and Northanger Abbey are both happening in Bath at the same time, using as much of the original text as possible, and every so often Sir Ruthven Murgatroyed from Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore kind of shuffles himself into their respective plots to help the romances get together a bit faster.

If you don't remember the plot of Ruddigore, Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd's problem is that he is comically cursed to commit a crime every day as soon as he inherits the baronetcy. In the big finale of this book, Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd gets challenged to duels by both Anne Elliot's father and by Isabella Thorpe's brother, for extremely stupid non-crime reasons, and ducks comically out of them, embarrassing everybody but unfortunately not technically committing every crimes, much to his disappointment. Then he exits the book to pursue the rest of the plot of Ruddigore. Everyone else gets married, in, again, word for word the exact same fashion that they did in their original books, while having skipped most of the middle sections. All of this happens in a brisk 150 pages of which approximately 50% is new content and the other 50% is word-for-word recountings of the events of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey but with Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd introduced into various essential scenes.

Now, I absolutely cannot cast aspersions on any of this. It feels very much in the vein of the kind of proto-fanfiction that I wrote when I was twelve, which mostly consisted of me copying out the entire text of books and then inserting my own name into it so I could feel like I was Experiencing Adventures, i.e. "Frodo and Sam and Becca crossed into Mordor --" and this book certainly makes better use of its time than that! It has a joke that it's building towards, and then it makes the joke, and then everyone goes about their business again. Now, if I were accomplished author Phyllis Ann Karr, and I was desperate to write the tale of how Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd sorted out everyone's love lives, I think I would probably have used my own prose for the whole thing, since Austen's prose is not easy to imitate seamlessly and it makes for a rather jarring reading experience to be constantly hitting paragraphs and thinking "oh this is Jane again! hello Jane!" But on the other hand writing books takes a lot of time and Jane Austen's works are all in the public domain and if, again, all you want to do is pad out the necessary 150 pages to set up your comical dueling farce, there is nothing stopping you! There is, also, nothing stopping you from charging me $2.99 for this experience instead of putting it on the AO3! And I paid the $2.99 willingly for my experience, and said experience did do a great job keeping me awake when I was really struggling after a red-eye flight -- a tiny jolt of adrenaline every time I hit another bit of word-for-word Austen prose! -- so I can't say I regret it.

My personal parts are:
a.) the second chapter begins with a cited epigram from Persuasion before proceeding to, uncited, quote the entire rest of the beginning of Persuasion. one does respect the chutzpah
b.) early on in Northanger Jane makes fun of the lady Catherine is staying with for having completely lost touch with a friend from school and then being excited to meet her ten years later; this shows their affections were both shallow. later on in Persuasion Anne Elliott is really excited to meet up with a friend from school that she'd lost touch with ten years ago; this shows her kindness and fidelity. really fascinating to see how fundamentally Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are different books! the jokes don't cross!
c.) a later chapter begins with a cited epigram from one of Phyllis Ann Karr's own earlier novels. truly, truly one respects the chutzpah

For the past approximately 15 years, I've been attempting to write a novel about Sir Kay, the Orkney knights, and weird Arthurian family dynamics. It's one of those things that I pick up about my extent draft of approximately every five years, think "huh! maybe with some extensive revision," get halfway through the extensive revision, realize I still haven't figured out how to do it, and put it down again. Maybe someday! With extensive revision!

Anyway it was probably about five years ago that I realized that someone had already written this book, sort of, and since then I've been hunting in bookstores for used copies of Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen, which I have now finally acquired and read.

This was a weird reading experience in the way that it always is when reading a book that's almost the book you would have written. About half the things that she's doing are very specific things that I am also really interested in, and it's deeply mysterious to me I arrived at them completely independently when she was already there three years before I was born. And then there are things that I never in a million years would have done, like making Sir Kay desperately in hopeless love with Queen Guinevere. What? I mean, OK, sure, but I wouldn't have ever gotten there. There must be a word for this, that weird feeling of almost-mine-but-not-quite.

Anyway, the thing that Karr does that I think is most interesting -- that I would like to do and probably will never do half so well -- is the way that she looks very closely at Arthurian stories from Malory and various lays and legends and hews very much to the letter of What Happens In Them, while also sort of shaking them inside out and looking at how that might have looked to the various different humans involved (often, especially, the women). It's really clever and a lot of fun, while also being about as disturbing as anything that takes much of Malory and various other early Arthuriana literally would have to be.

The actual plot of the book involves Queen Guinevere being accused of murder, and Sir Kay and Mordred going on a DETECTIVE SPREE ends up getting tangled up not just in Guinevere's alleged crime, but also all the weird backstory Orkney blood feud stuff of who murdered whom in revenge against whom. Eventually there's a Locked Room Denouement in full Poirot style, but first there is the TWO MOST ANNOYING KNIGHTS IN THE WORLD on a ROAD TRIP, hanging out with various Arthurian side characters like Nimue and Morgan and Sir Pelleas and Sir Ironsides and irritating the heck out of all of them, and it is honestly amazing.

KAY: I'm traveling with Mordred because he's the worst, and because he's definitely a suspect for the murder.
SOME RANDOM NORMAL ROUND TABLE PERSON: Sir Kay, why are you traveling with Mordred? He's the worst! Aren't you worried that his bad reputation will rub off on you?
KAY: Um, excuse me? I was given to understand that I was the rudest and most annoying knight of the Round Table? I'm pretty sure you should be worried that my bad reputation is going to rub off on this poor, innocent child, so why don't you lay off??

[later]

Mordred: I am totally ready to be murdered by ANYONE, probably YOU, probably TONIGHT. Here I am, LANGUISHING IN MY BEDROOM, WEAPONLESS -
KAY: CHILD! why are you such a DRAMA LLAMA

[later]

MORDRED: Now, hypothetically considering the possibility that maybe Guinevere did want to murder someone -
KAY: I'll fight anyone who accuses the queen! I'll fight you anytime, anywhere! How very dare you imply that it's even REMOTELY POSSIBLE that the Queen might have been in ANY WAY responsible for -
MORDRED: lololol look who is the drama llama! PS are you ready to murder me yet?
KAY: CHILD!!!!!

(To be clear, Mordred is like in his thirties in this book.)

[KAY AND MORDRED ARE ARGUING AGAIN]
KAY: Suddenly, I feel like shit! Why is this!
NIMUE: That's because I cast a spell of magical depression on you to get you to briefly -- oh, so blissfully briefly -- stop talking.
KAY: Mordred is the one who was ruder, why didn't you cast it on him?
NIMUE: You're the one who told me that Mordred was very emotionally fragile and I should be careful of his tender ego!
KAY: ...ugh, so I did. Ugh, and I meant it. Fine.

Basically what I'm saying is that it's still remotely possible that someday I will get my version into shape for other human eyes to see, but despite the strangeness of the experience, I'm not mad that Karr did it first.