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Greer Gilman, Cloud
and Ashes: Three
According to Wikipedia, classical Greece had a title for professional musicians: the word was rhapsode, and it signifies one who stitches songs together. Such musicians were often portrayed in art as wearing a cloak and carrying a staff, implying that, rather than being court musicians with specific patrons, they traveled from town to town, weaving together the stories of both high and low culture, mingling epics about kings and queens and heroes with the local tales of country matters. This sewing together of high and low, of myths about the immortals mingling with folklore about the seasons and the cycles of the sun and moon, makes an apt description for the world Gilman presents us in Clouds and Ashes, and for the style in which she tells these tales. Cloud and Ashes is a dark pastoral shaped from bits of ballads, scraps of nursery rhymes, fragments of Tarot, tatters of ancient myth, and shreds of archaic language, all shot through with luminous ribbons of Gilman's own personal cosmology. Gilman includes no map nor glossary to her world, but instead lets the language itself -- and it is a language as dense and rich as an old gingerbread recipe -- do the work of world-building. As in the case of those fantasists of the early twentieth century whose texts Gilman's work invokes, the stories concern the at times poetic, at times violent, clashes and transformations which occur when the wild magic of the immortals meets the ordered world of mortals. Cloud and Ashes contains three tales: "Jack Daw's Pack," "A Crowd of Bone" (which won a World Fantasy Award), and "Unleaving." The first two are short stories and the third is a novel-length narrative, but since the whole weaves together a set of reoccurring characters, the collection is easily read as a single novel. In these stories Gilman revisits the fantasy realm
she created -- one might say invoked -- for Moonwise.
The subtitle of "winter's Tales" is significant,
referencing the pastoral setting of Shakespeare's play, a place
concerned with the wheel of the year as it manifests in such
activities as planting, sheepherding, and harvesting. This is an
even darker world that the one depicted in Shakespeare's
"Winter's Tale," however, for in this world the
immortals themselves experience the tempestuous emotions of
jealousy, desire, love, hate, and the world of mortal humans
becomes the chessboard upon which their family dramas are played
out, with mortals often enacting the will and desires of the
incarnated immortals. The sense of storm and tempest is further
conveyed through landscape, for the stories are located in the
wild landscape of Yorkshire. Yet this is a betwixt-and-between
Yorkshire where incarnations of the sun, moon, stars, and seasons
walk amongst mortals, although these immortals are never arrogant
in their own powers but, instead, are eternally cast in the parts
of Ariadnes, Persephones, and Demeters, as they wander, lost and
lonely, caught up in the family dramas of both mortals and
immortals which manifest as both the all-too-brief seasons of
human lives and the eternally returning seasons of the celestial
year. The thread which most strongly weaves these tales
into a single elaborate tapestry, however, is the language.
Logophiles in particular will find the prose an intricate web of
words culled from numerous sources, from Elizabethan English to
archaic Yorkshire dialect to arcane terms used in sailing and
weaving, two threads which add particularly vivid color in
Gilman's multi-textured narrative. While some readers may find
themselves frustrated by the unfamiliar words, those readers who
enjoy discovering new and wonderful words are in for a feast.
Words which I found particularly fascinating included: crowd
(fiddle, as in the crowd of bone of the title), lyke (meaning a
dead body, as in "The Lyke-Wake Dirge"), lading (the
cargo of a ship), and pleach (to weave the branches of a hedge).
Aside from the pleasure such words give to those of us who enjoy
collecting shiny new/old words, Gilman's prose reminds us that
most magical systems locate the power of magic in the power of
language itself. Readers can read the first story from Cloud and Ashes, "A Crowd of Bone," at the Small Beer Press Web site. Cloud and Ashes can be ordered online from the Small Beer Press Web site and also from Indiebound.
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