Moonbound by Robin Sloan
I found this book profoundly affecting. The beginning was fun, light-hearted, tense in all the right ways. The tale revealed a tapestry, seemingly woven together from countless other tales (aren't they all?)
But as it went on and the centrality of the tale came into focus, the character of Ariel, what he learned, his choice, and the central lesson of the tale rings with Truth: we must face our fear of annihilation, of Death, in order to truly live. All avoidance of death leads eventually to madness, to a self-forgetting.
The irony is that the self-forgetfulness wrought by death-avoidance is actually the True Death. It becomes self-annihilation, self-abnegation. "For he who desires to gain his life, will lose it, and he who gives his life for the sake of another, gains it."
It is through facing death–not just mentally acknowledging it, but taking action which may result in our death–that we find life. On the other side of death, life. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." John 12:24
Recruitment is actually friendship: "To sit and talk of nothing for hours."
The tapestry that Moonbound is woven from is rich! It's an homage to the books, ideas, places, artists, music. As I first read I wondered why this "winking at" so many other stories, drawing from their tales. But I came to see in the "multi-dimensionality" of the Wyrm of Wyrd (the scholars language) that the novel itself builds upon all of these dimensions: transcendence, joy, adventure, even bagel-ness. Delightfully abstract while stringently concrete.
I came to enjoy the tapestry, to look for it. Little bursts of delight when I found gems hidden in the text:
- The seven notes of Plan Z - I tried to guess what these were before having any clues. I imagined them as the Harry Potter melody, which also has seven notes. But then seven-nation army!! And the joy of realizing that the song itself is composed of a seven-note refrain - which I had never realized!
- Jacob Campbell's monomyth
- The Arthurian legends, that it is, and isn't - the shiver of premonition when we are introduced to the Morgan, when the Wyrm gives Ariel a gift in the pool, I'm absolutely screaming for it to be sword! (redolent of That Hideous Strength)
- The seven-leaguer boots (Howl's Moving Castle)
- The talking sword (swordnimi)
- The chronicler (Jane from Ender's game)
- The talking animals, Lewis's Narnia
- The towns, each with their pattern and lesson, The Phantom Tollbooth, Pilgrim's Progress
What a wild ride!
Questions:
- What happened to Mallory? Mallory is a necromancer.
- Why did Ariel tell Mallory about the chronicler? Pride and gloating don't fit with his character. It would have to be a movement of compassion, pity, something else.