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This is going to be a discussion of the agony of identifying with characters who turn out to be living their lives and not the life you want them to have. It's going to be about loving a book so hard that it can break your heart and inspire you to new heights. It is--and I am in no way proud of this--about bi erasure. This is a post about why it took me nine years to be able to bear to re-read the fantasy novel that is perhaps my favorite fantasy novel of all time. (I haven't re-read it yet because I needed to write this first.) This is not yet a review of Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword, it is a review of my memories of having read The Privilege of the Sword. As a review of nine-year-old memories, it's going to be a bit fuzzy, as memories often are.
Warning: this post is going to have spoilers in it.
Having written this, I'm finally going to re-read the book and the write a review of the book that it is. But this is a review of the book I wanted...needed it to be.
* * *
The Privilege of the Sword is a book that enthralled and enraged me. It thrilled me and then it broke my heart. It came >*< this close to being the book I had been longing for all my life... And then at the last minute Lucy pulled the football away and I landed flat on my back crying.[1] This is not a book I am indifferent about.
[1] It occurs to me that this metaphor may be slipping out of common knowledge. I refer to this running gag in the Peanuts comic strip>
I needed it to be the fantasy adventure where the fabulous, daring, sword-wielding girl falls in love with and gets the girl in the end. Not the story where the fabulous, daring, sword-wielding girl desires the girl and rescues the girl and romances the girl...but ends up with a guy instead. It was like being invited to dine at Chez Panisse and being handed a Big Mac. The message seemed inescapable: if even a famous big-name lesbian[2] fantasy author couldn't conceive of writing a story in which the girl gets the girl, I was never going to be allowed to Have Nice Things.
[2] As I post this, I have suddenly panicked that I may be misidentifying Kushner and have frantically gone onto Google trying to confirm whether she identifies as lesbian or bisexual. But this is a post about my memories, and my memory is that she has used the label "lesbian". Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Let me be clear: The Privilege of the Sword is a wonderful book and anyone who has the slightest enjoyment of strong, adventurous female characters, complex gritty world-building and swashbuckling adventure...well, if you enjoy those things, you've presumably already read it. And I'm sure that when I go back for my re-read it will be abundantly clear that Katherine was set up from the beginning as bi and I'd stubbornly refused to recognize that due to my own emotional needs as a reader. But it wasn't the book I needed it to be. And it wouldn't have broken my heart if it hadn't come quite so close to being that book. (Goodness knows, I'd grown numb through a lifetime of the daring sword-wielding girl never even wanting the girl in the first place.)
And you know, that's OK because it was presumably the book Kushner needed and intended it to be. I say "OK" as if my judgement were important. Let me restate that: Kushner is far too talented a writer for it to have been anything other than the book that she clearly intended and wanted it to be. My "permission" as a reader is irrelevant here.
And when it comes down to it, I will be forever grateful to The Privilege of the Sword for not being that perfect book that I needed, because reading it finally pushed me to the point of saying, "Dammit, I just need to write my own stories because nobody else is going to do it." And then I picked up a notebook and started writing Daughter of Mystery. (The vague resemblance between the two books has been noted by readers, but this is me admitting that, yes, there's a direct connection.)
So there's that. And now I can re-read it. (The book has been sitting on my iPad for a year now waiting for me to get up the nerve to post this.) And then I'll write my real review.
Warning: this post is going to have spoilers in it.
Having written this, I'm finally going to re-read the book and the write a review of the book that it is. But this is a review of the book I wanted...needed it to be.
* * *
The Privilege of the Sword is a book that enthralled and enraged me. It thrilled me and then it broke my heart. It came >*< this close to being the book I had been longing for all my life... And then at the last minute Lucy pulled the football away and I landed flat on my back crying.[1] This is not a book I am indifferent about.
[1] It occurs to me that this metaphor may be slipping out of common knowledge. I refer to this running gag in the Peanuts comic strip>
I needed it to be the fantasy adventure where the fabulous, daring, sword-wielding girl falls in love with and gets the girl in the end. Not the story where the fabulous, daring, sword-wielding girl desires the girl and rescues the girl and romances the girl...but ends up with a guy instead. It was like being invited to dine at Chez Panisse and being handed a Big Mac. The message seemed inescapable: if even a famous big-name lesbian[2] fantasy author couldn't conceive of writing a story in which the girl gets the girl, I was never going to be allowed to Have Nice Things.
[2] As I post this, I have suddenly panicked that I may be misidentifying Kushner and have frantically gone onto Google trying to confirm whether she identifies as lesbian or bisexual. But this is a post about my memories, and my memory is that she has used the label "lesbian". Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Let me be clear: The Privilege of the Sword is a wonderful book and anyone who has the slightest enjoyment of strong, adventurous female characters, complex gritty world-building and swashbuckling adventure...well, if you enjoy those things, you've presumably already read it. And I'm sure that when I go back for my re-read it will be abundantly clear that Katherine was set up from the beginning as bi and I'd stubbornly refused to recognize that due to my own emotional needs as a reader. But it wasn't the book I needed it to be. And it wouldn't have broken my heart if it hadn't come quite so close to being that book. (Goodness knows, I'd grown numb through a lifetime of the daring sword-wielding girl never even wanting the girl in the first place.)
And you know, that's OK because it was presumably the book Kushner needed and intended it to be. I say "OK" as if my judgement were important. Let me restate that: Kushner is far too talented a writer for it to have been anything other than the book that she clearly intended and wanted it to be. My "permission" as a reader is irrelevant here.
And when it comes down to it, I will be forever grateful to The Privilege of the Sword for not being that perfect book that I needed, because reading it finally pushed me to the point of saying, "Dammit, I just need to write my own stories because nobody else is going to do it." And then I picked up a notebook and started writing Daughter of Mystery. (The vague resemblance between the two books has been noted by readers, but this is me admitting that, yes, there's a direct connection.)
So there's that. And now I can re-read it. (The book has been sitting on my iPad for a year now waiting for me to get up the nerve to post this.) And then I'll write my real review.
