If you see fairies ya just might be crazy, or at a gay bar

 


Among Others by Jo Walton... eh... in all fairness it's difficult to be objective about a book you don't particularly like, and I'm pretty sure it's entirely scientifically impossible to be objective about a book you don't like where the main character reminds you painfully of an ex girlfriend. However let's give it a shot shall we?

 
The characterization of this book can be viewed as somewhat interesting since in my (absolutely non educated guess) Morwenna has a text book case of Asperger's Syndrome, however this also makes her a somewhat unlikeable character to those with a fairly steady psychological profile as she comes off as high strung, selfish, unreliable, and many of her social problems seem painfully self inflicted. Although Morwenna's musings on Lesbians are highly amusing since I've personally only ever had men share with me their thoughts and musings of how lesbians see communal woman’s showers and change rooms it's rather interesting to gain a straight girl perspective on the matter. I laughed.

The setting of the book lends itself to the fantasy aspect of the novel, bringing in aspects of folklore. As we discussed in class the time frame the book was set in to be per technology to convey the isolation of loneliness before computers allowed us to reach out to a larger pool of people to interact with to those who can't muster the social conviction, have a hard lot of being a social outcast. While I can agree with the perspective I just found that this theme detracted from my reading experience because I don't agree with it. Since internet interactions in and of themselves are a good percentage of fantasy and extremely malleable to personal perspective, I'm not so certain that what technology does to rectify loneliness isn't outweighed by the escapism of it. In the technology age it is perfectly acceptable to have imaginary friends as long as someone happens to be typing them out on the other end. It's not that the difference between real and imaginary bothers me so much, but the alarming and increasing amount of people who can seem to tell the difference irks me because personally I'd love to be that far in denial, however I'm not sure the end result makes you a better person.

Personally what I did like was the time setting of the book on the points that it is an adult novel. Thebook is written a time period that is going to be more relate-able to an adult audience and I think it is one of the factors that define it as an adult novel. Given the nature of Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, and Borderline Personality Disorder, I can see how adults that this book would appeal too relating better to a young adult character and people with a normal psychological/mental profile are willing to be more sympathetic to an immature young character than to an adult one. The time setting and age of the character up the relate-ability and likeability of the character to an adult audience.

The tone of the novel comes off more depressing based on the slow pacing of the book, not that I have a problem so much with depressing but are all good adult novels depressing? The tone of the book just really detracted from the reading for me because when I think of fantasy I'm looking for more of a back and white, with upbeat story line, and I think I kind of had that expectation when I saw the genre on the reading list then when I got to it, it so clearly wasn't what I wanted. I just don't understand why award winning books have to be so depressing. I do get the aspect of conflict but isn't their some creative way to be upbeat that is worthy of an award?

The language of the novel threw me a bit because it's not really written in the accent I would imagine the character to have given the setting, however every now and then regional slang pops up at random like an actor falling in and out of an accent. It makes the book harder to read with out adding all that much to it and personally I found it distracting.

At the end of the day Among Others was not my cup of tea. I can see why certain people would relate to it, I on the other hand like most lesbians my age who are not Wiccian or do not have a Wiccian partner probably think that if ya see faeries ya might just be a little bit crazy, based on personal experience, and unfortunately when you are a lesbian you have to make the conscious decision you don't actually fall into that circle (since that particular profile is pretty common). So perhaps I've just been a little to close to the book to get the fantasy enjoyment out of it or find it all that amusing/insightful to meditate on. Thanks to Ellen for being on my team here.