Knight ants are a special caste of ants dedicated to
defending their colony’s home. They grow
particularly wide heads to protect their colonymates, who also benefit from the
greater coordination signaled by the knight ants’ pheromones.
Megapon ants, meanwhile, have the rare distinction of being
(in the editions I own, anyway) the only Bestiary
species I’ve seen to not merit a description.
(Heck, I can’t even Google a good definition for megapon.) But at CR 6, they’re nothing to sneeze at;
they can carry prodigious amounts of weight; and their Strength-sapping poison
suggests the sting of a fire ant or some aggressive, prehistoric lineage.
A clan of dwarves
uses alchemical scents to tame and coax behaviors out of their ant livestock. A local war calls most of the clan elders
away from the hold, and when they return they discover that the artificial
scents have spoiled. Their knight ant
guards now bar the way to the lower levels, no longer recognizing the dwarves
as friends.
A martial arts master
with some training as a druid believes in basing his forms and stances off of
those in nature. In order to learn his
specialized skills (in game terms, teamwork feats), adventurers must study
knight ants in the tunnels of their hill—without killing a single one.
Adventurers are
racing through the canopy of the great god’s-home trees, fleeing cannibals
hot on their trail. They come across a
column of megapon ants using their bodies to create a bridge for themselves and
their giant aphid thralls. If the
adventurers can find a way to sneak across the ant bridge, they will easily
lose their pursuers. Otherwise they
might have to fight the enormous ants and the kuru-maddened cannibals at the
same time.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
27
I recently relistened to the audiobook version of Susanna
Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,
read by the outstanding Simon Prebble. I
first listened to it during a massive, speeding ticket-filled, two-day road
trip from San Francisco to Portland via Crater Lake several years ago. I’m happy to say I loved it then—so much so
that in my hunger for more I discovered Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin books—and I loved it now—so much so
that I accrued $28 in overdue fines because I had other books checked out and
didn’t want to give any of them back. (If
you throw in the speeding tickets, that’s compelling evidence that good books
make me make bad choices, apparently.)
JS&MN truly is
an extraordinary book—all the more so because it’s a first novel. (Neil Gaiman’s quote about a fragment from
one of Clarke’s early drafts—“It was like watching someone sit down to play the
piano for the first time and she plays a sonata”—still holds up.) The
true-to-the-1800s language, the sense of place, and the treatment of academic
arguments as being as important as a battle are nearly perfect. I love the characters; I love the world; I
love the faerie lore; I love almost everything.
Because I love it so much, certain things still drive me
nuts. Most of these little things are
insufficiently answered (to my mind, at least) questions or breakdowns in
verisimilitude: How can Mr Norrell justify obstructing the progress of all
other magicians if he publicly claims to want to restore English magic…why does
Childermass remain with Mr Norrell for so long even after the meanness of his
master’s character is revealed…why do Lady Pole and Stephen Strange’s maladies go
so long undiagnosed, even with a faerie glamour to blame…things like that. In reality, the book may be better for not
answering these questions, but they still leave me fidgety with agitation.
A second listen did also confirm a major beef I had the
first time I listened to it, though: It is a figure eight of a work, its whole
shape constantly circling around two black holes of noninformation.
The first is that the actual working of magic is barely
shown and never explained. Clarke has
said that she “really like[s] magicians,” but weirdly she seems willing to
gloss over the magic they do almost entirely.
(Early in the book this is amusing—even the characters are impatient to
see magic done—but by 2/3s of the way in it’s infuriatingly coy.) We almost never get a sense of how it feels
for the magicians to do magic, or why these two men have succeeded where almost
no one else has. (That they were
prophesied doesn’t cut it.) It’s a
staggeringly strange omission, especially to a fantasy fan audience used to
reading about how it feels to come into one’s power, whatever that power may
be. Strange in particular stumbles into
magic and then the narrative curtain closes; when it reopens he is already a
thaumaturgical Mozart. That is, as the South Park kids would say, some total BS
right there.
The second problem is that this is a work of alternate
history that refuses to share its alternate history. True, the novel purports to be written by
someone from Strange’s acquaintance only a generation or so later, so much of
this knowledge is assumed to be held by the reader. But despite all its many, many, many footnotes, the book barely gives us
a coherent alternate timeline, and so much of how the novel’s history diverges
from our own is unclear. (For
comparison, Philip K. Dick is a downright clumsy author compared to Clarke, but
I can tell you more about the history of Man
in the High Castle, and it’s a mere pamphlet next to the Bible-fat JS&MN.) I don't need much more detail, but I do need more.
Worse yet, not only has Clarke created a fictional northern
England with a fictional Raven King that we don't know enough about, but she also
seems to have fallen a little in love with him.
(Strong evidence of this is that the characters positively won’t shut up
about him; he even gives his name to the novel’s third act.) It is dangerous to fall in love with
fictional people or settings, and doing so is a surefire way to undermine the
story. (Notice, for instance, how
Tolkien burns the Shire, and how J. K. Rowling—whose writerly smarts are often
underrated—is careful to get her characters out of Hogwarts after the love
letter to it that is The Order of the
Phoenix. Now compare that to, say, The Name of the Wind, which struck me as
loving its central character just a bit
too much, or the insufferable anime Clamp
School Detectives, whose love for its own impossible setting is a veritable
fountain of onanism (see what I did there?) that eventually feels like a taunt
to the viewer who will never attend there.
You can’t love your fictional children too hard, and Clarke loves John Uskglass.
So as I said, a great novel, but a figure eight thanks to
these two crucial holes. Do not under *any* circumstances let these
prevent you from reading it though!
Unfortunately, a new qualm came up as I was listening this
time: the novel’s hagiography of Englishness.
In a 2005 interview with Locus,
Susanna Clarke practically quoted Tolkien word for word in her lament that
England did not have a myth of its own.
(Sidebar: English culture is odd in that its most famous legend, Beowulf, takes place in Denmark, a
divorce of a people from its mythic geography that seems to really bother certain writers. In fact, this lack is responsible for both The Silmarillion and JS&MN. King Arthur doesn’t work for them for some
reason; he’s either too British rather than English—a distinction too arcane
for my American mind, but there it is—or too Welsh, and his legend has
definitely become too French. Robin Hood
doesn’t work either, for some reason, despite his being safely nestled in the
East Midlands. The tl;dr of all this is
that there is no understanding the English mythic imagination when you’re a fat
Yank git.) So Clarke fills JS&MN with her love for England—its
people, its cities, and its countryside, especially the North, where she revels
in its preindustrial wildness. And Englishness
as a laudatory attribute fills nearly every page. (More on this can be found over on Wikipedia,
but don’t go there until you’ve read/listened to the book, because it’s spoiler
central.)
The thing is though, Clarke is smart enough to know that
glorifying England, Englishness, Englishmen (emphasis on the “men” there), and
king/queen and country has caused a lot of pain for other folks in the
world. So she works very hard to
undercut this worship of Englishness, giving strong roles to women, nonwhite,
and poor characters, and amplifying their voicelessness in the society of that
time through the narrative. It’s all a
genius balancing act, and it all serves to intentionally undercut and deflate
the project of England worship that the novel is busily engaged in…
…And yet, Englishness, in the end, wins out. England remains the hero. The English countryside itself in
instrumental in turning the tide in the final encounter. Lovely, lush green, hilly, moor-covered
England is still the hero.
Which should be
all well and good, but… Well, I’m just
not on board with cheering for England right now.
I’m a Top Gear
fan. And I watched Jeremy Clarkson’s no-one-is-better-than-us
casual racism—as an American I’m spared the overt racism of his other
appearances—wax stronger with every season, slowly curdling my affection. And I watched Brexit throw my expatriate
scientist friends’ careers into a tumult and imperil their research. It was also, more to the point, a triumph of Englishness over the needs of Britishness.
And here on this side of the pond, I’ve watched a similar
dynamic play out, as many Americans have taken to celebrating America—or at
least, their mean, small-minded, and resentful notion of it—to the point that
pride of place and race have become more important than the principals that
make America work.
So I still love JS&MN. And I think you should read and even love JS&MN. And zero
of what I’ve said in the previous two paragraphs is Susanna Clarke’s
fault. But in JS&MN, a country is a character—the protagonist even. And right now, in 2017, loving a place more
than people doesn’t feel that good.
So I’m going to return JS&MN
back to the library for another 7 years or so, or maybe for longer. And the next time I get it out, I hope I’ve
fallen back in love with England and America.
Because that is
the magic I most want to see.
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