Bookish-Dreaming

A Mixed Basket

by

Gillian Polack

Some days, everything is paired. Today you have a pair of articles about paired books and TV. The first is about two stories that look as if they ought to have nothing in common at all but share a surprising amount. The second is about a pair of writers who look as if they ought to have a great deal in common, but in reality write quite, quite different works.

1. Fruit and cousins
At first sight the anime Fruits Basket* and the 1875 children’s book Eight Cousins are odd bedfellows. What has nineteenth-century America got in common with twenty-first century Japan, after all? This is my pair of works, however, that I believe have a great deal in common. They’re not complete matches, but there are some very striking similarities. Definitely worth a little exploration.

Fruits Basket is a tale about a girl meeting a cursed family. It began as a manga (comic books) series in 1999, but I’ve only seen the anime (cartoon) series. Any differences between the two—and Wikipedia in its infinite wisdom albeit dangerous level of unreliability assures me that there are indeed differences—are irrelevant to me right now, and all references here refer to the anime. I explained this very defensively because I really feel as if I ought to read all twenty-three books. Alas, I do not have them. One day, though, I’d like to. For one thing, the anime leaves the story unfinished and I want to know how it ends.

Eight Cousins was published in 1875. It’s the first of a short series by Louisa May Alcott, better known for Little Women and its sequels.. Alcott was interested in women's suffrage and social change. Her writing, however, wasn’t a hobby and she needed to make a living from it, so Eight Cousins is an interesting mixture of her ideals and the expectations that her publisher and readers had of her writing.

Both Fruits Basket and Eight Cousins are about girls who are learning to be strong and fit for the world they must live in. This means they each have distinctive cultural features. Fruits Basket has a typically Japanese school (typical for anime, at least), with its heroicised senior boy and its cliques. These show up in many anime series and are part of the anime furniture.

Eight Cousins’ world is that of the sad orphan. I used to gravitate towards girls’ stories of the era when I was in my early teens simply because of the amount of pathos they carried. Everyone thought I was being remarkably literate: only I knew that it was my equivalent of dressing in black and playing a guitar alone in my room, singing songs of sorrow.

So the backdrops for both stories belongs to a place and a time. Modern Japan. 1870s USA. They fit the needs of their place and time. A school setting with a fantasy element. An extended family where tragedies abound. Sometimes these backdrops are used in the story—Yuki is the popular senior boy with his own fan club, and also one of the cursed Sohmas; Rose starts the story dressed in black and feeling sorry for herself—but both tales play with their genre assumptions. And this is where they become interesting. They don’t just play with assumptions, Fruits Basket’s play has certain key elements in common with Eight Cousins.

Both have significant levels of pathos, though they handle that pathos in quite culturally specific ways. Rose is encouraged to be happy though quietly her relatives say that yes, she has had misfortunes (losing both one’s parents is Not a Good Thing) but at least she is an heiress and she’s a child and children must behave in certain ways and one of those ways is to look on the bright side of life. Tohru Honda is precisely the girl Uncle Alec expects Rose to be, not talking about things that go wrong, always finding a positive way of looking at life. What’s more, she has superhero housewifely powers. Mind you, she is a couple of years older than Rose, and she is no heiress, so maybe she is what Rose will grow into when focus on the Pollyanna aspect succeeds.

The pathos extends from Rose to Mac (one of the seven cousins and love interests) in the sequel to Eight Cousins and definitely applies to all the cousins of the clan in Fruits Basket. After all, what can be a bigger cause of pathos than a curse that prevents hugs?

In both stories the girl gentles a boyclan, and in both the boys help the girl move comfortably into a wider world and to grow. In both of them the girl is encouraged to conform publicly to solid middle-class values.

What struck me in particular were some general similarities between the way certain characters operate in these two narratives.

In both the anime and the novel, an older man (Uncle Alex in Eight Cousins and Shigure Sohma in Fruits Basket) provides some sort of link between the younger characters and the adult world.

With the younger characters, there's also some overlap. As Archie (the oldest cousin in Eight Cousins) puts it “This big one is Prince Charlie, Aunt Clara’s boy. She has but one, so he is an extra good one. This old fellow is Mac, the bookworm, called Worm for short. This sweet creature is Steve the Dandy. Look at his gloves and top-knot, if you please. They are Aunt Jane’s lads, and a precious pair you’d better believe.”

Charlie and Steve between them add up to Yuki (kempt and popular and kind and very beautiful and known at school as ‘Prince Yuki’) and Mac is in the same situation as the cat (the outsider who can’t deal socially) although the personalities are quite different.

The differences fit the genre and countries of origin and the expectations of the audience—there often is a wild and uncontrollable boy who is nevertheless of good heart in anime and bookish boys without good health are quite likely to be outsiders in Victorian literature of the improving variety where good health is pushed to exhaustion.

There’s more to explore in terms of why these works have this interesting overlap, but I’ve lost my notes and besides, I promised two miniature studies this time round, and the second is quite different. You might want to clear your mind before you dare the portals of the second part.

* Fruits Basket is the actual title. I always wince when I see it.

26b

2. New Arthurs
The lure of a book that hasn’t been published yet is a terrible thing. Angry Robot is a new imprint (a HarperCollins subsidiary) and understands this far too well. They send books out to bloggers all over the world. Recently, Angry Robot sent me an advance copy of a new book. Normally, I would blog a new book on LiveJournal, being a plebian sort of soul, and I’ve done that already with this new book. It has something special about it, however. Something that needs more than 300 words. And then Pyr sent me copies of two of James Enge’s Ambrose series and the temptation to compare them became overwhelming.

Before I explain the books, I need to explain myself a little. I am—like most women of a certain age—a creature of careers. In one of my many pasts, I was an Arthurian specialist. I wrote an Arthurian section in a thesis and I presented a couple of conference papers and wrote a couple of barely-adequate articles. Then I wrote an Arthurian novel and it was published and now my old colleagues read it and laugh at my in-jokes. At least, I hope it'’s my in-jokes they'’re laughing at.

Angry Robot announced last year that they were publishing a kick-ass Arthurian novel, Maurice Broaduss' King Maker.

I’ve seen that announcement before. There are something like 4,000 modern Arthurian novels and most of them have been described with one superlative or another. I carefully didn’t let Angry Robot know that I might be interested in an advance copy of their kick-ass novel* because the likelihood was that I would take one look at it and see its antecedents and analyse it and say that Mary Stewart or T.H. White or Donald Barthelme or John Steinbeck or John Cowper Powys or someone else entirely had already written the definitive version of that particular style of Arthurian novel.

This is what I did with James Enge’s books, after all. What I saw in This Crooked Way and Blood of Ambrose was a generous tribute to Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny and a light-hearted salute at how fantasy writers have played with the Arthurian legends. There is almost nothing Arthurian in them. Merlin and his wife and their children are central characters (with the focus mainly on their peripatetic son Morlock) but there’s only a hint of Arthur. These are wandering fantasies, full of whimsy and blood.

I thoroughly enjoyed both books, but was imbued with no great desire to review them. They speak for themselves, in a way. They reach the same audiences that like big, sprawling fantasy series that are slightly tongue-in-cheek. It belongs to a clear branch of Arthuriana, one that’s established and reliably entertaining. Even in its thirteenth-century incarnations, this branch of Arthuriana didn’t contain much of Arthur.

King Maker is different. King Maker is based on an idea so very clever that I keep telling my friends “Look—it’s clever!” It’s like watching West Side Story for the first time. It’s like reading Malory as an adult, after having discovered Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius and Wace and Chrétien and Marie.

The approach to Arthur isn’t that new. The fabric of the story, however, the weft and the warp, make an Arthurian weave that makes as much perfect sense of Arthur’s rise to power as Mallory’s underling disorder made for his work.

My Arthur (the Arthur that crept into my doctorate) is the Arthur of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Arthurian stories back then reflected a small society, very inward looking and very close to the edge. Most Arthurian tales form the twelfth century reflected need for order. My favourite tales weren't Arthurian—they were chansons de geste and the most dangerous and edgy of them show how close the fabric of society was to tearing at any time. Deny someone their inheritance and you could doom the country to patterns of bloody death. Have a weak king and ordinary lives were worthless. The most gut-wrenching chansons de geste made the courtly tales of Arthur look terribly, terribly tame. Both reflected that inward and edgy society, though, just in different ways. I put Enge next to Broaduss and think that, yes, here I’m seeing a similar pattern.

Broaduss creates a small world. It’s complete and dangerous and in modern Indianapolis. It works. That small world has the same fear and the same desperate need for perfect courtesies and respect as my darling medieval epics. Enge’s world is giant and unpredictable and romantic and just as dangerous.

It makes so very much sense that Arthur (or King, in King Maker) should be born into Broaduss’ setting. The sword in the stone story is not about a young boy growing into Walt Disney wonderment. It’s about a man who has had to compromise all his life and who may have to change the world around him when the danger and edge make compromises impossible.

The body language that Broaduss describes is very familiar to me, intellectually. The eye contact and the non-verbal challenges are perfect to show rank and danger and the shape of society. I have no idea if it’s perfect for the US: I live on the other side of the world, after all. It is, however, the perfect way of describing how knights on the shifting border—trying to find sources of power—would operate.

Enge’s Morlock is half-worshipped, half-feared and keeps assuming he’s alone. Yet he, too, has his little group of supporters. He, too, saves others from dooms and destructions. Sometimes he does it grudgingly and sometimes with style. Nothing is inevitable in Enge’s world, not even death.

If you strip away the glamour of knighthood and the romance of the storytelling, the world that makes particular Arthurian tales possible is a harsh one. Life is precarious. Training and mentorship are essential. Paths change and life patterns change unpredictably. Hierarchy and respect and being seen fulfill precise functions: these are some of the stuff of life that keep children, boys, men operating. As for women, sometimes they operate in the interstices. Sometimes they find refuge. Sometimes they are possessions. Sometimes they just get out of the place. And sometimes they play the game better than anyone and become terrifyingly powerful.

If you strip off the mystique, this is the world that needs a great leader. The role of the great leader in such a world is to help provide achievable outcomes. To reduce danger. To reduce uncertainty. To help see what his subjects can do to achieve a passable future, or, in many cases, any future at all. Broaduss assumes a great leader who will probably succeed; Enge shows us a much older more frustrated and not at all noble soul. All of the tales have a subtext that tests leadership, what it is and what it can do.

Forget the romances and forget the Holy Grail. This is the dark side of the matter of Arthur. That dark side in Broaduss and Malory is what lies beneath Uther’s desperation to beget an heir, the need for the right person to pull the sword from the stone, the need for a Merlin to offer advice that cuts through the chaff and helps the new leader see the world differently. This is the world that can be jeopardised by love, for love changes the political reality. The king has to not only be a leader, he has to be seen to be a leader. Guinevere’s love for Lancelot, Mordred’s betrayals: these are the sort of things that undermine this vision of security, that bring back the dark.

The dark side in Enge sours everything. No success lasts. No joy is complete. Everyone hurts in the Great Adventure.

Once you strip the gloss of the story, you can start to see other things in it. Some of this dark aspect of Arthur makes me think of the mercenary fighters of the Late Middle Ages, with their capacity to destroy societies if left unchecked. Some of it makes me think of the rise of Henry II like a phoenix out of the ashes of civil war. Both the century of the mercenaries in the Late Middle Ages and the reign of Henry II in England were glorious times for the Arthurian tales. Those tales became the ones we know then. This means, to me, that the darkness is inextricably part of the legend, just as much as the Round Table and the Holy Grail.

*I so like typing that phrase. It's very exotic.

Books mentioned in this column (a selection)
Blood of Ambrose by James Enge (Pyr, 2009)
Le Chevalier de la Charrette by Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1180)
Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott (1875)
Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya (TokyoPop)
A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys (Simon and Schuster/The Bodley Head, 1932)
Historia Britonnum by Nennius (ninth century)
Historia Regum Brittaniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1138-9)
The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart (William Morrow and Company, 1973)
The King by Donald Barthelme (Minerva, 1992)
King Maker by Maurice Broaduss (Angry Robot, 2010)
Lanval by Marie de France (c. 1160)
The Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (first print edition Caxton, 1485)
The Once and Future King by T.H. White (Collins, 1958)
Roman de Brut by Wace (c. 1155)
This Crooked Way by James Enge (Pyr, 2009)
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck (Covici-Friede, 1935)


Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.

 


 

 
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