In The City We Became, the neonatal New York and its six avatars (five boroughs plus one to rule them all) have to fight for survival against an ancient enemy known as the Woman in White (snappy name). To do this, they have to find each other and fight as one. The premise is original, but the plot is well-worn -- for a reason: it makes for great storytelling. And the author, NK Jemisin, tells a great story. There's just one catch.
I have a theory -- let's call it my 'He was in the vicinity' theory. Authors and writers create bad guys (and sometimes good guys) who are larger than life and apparently impossible to defeat -- until ... until some flaw or accident or characteristic unique to the hero (that the hero usually doesn't know how to exert or control) cuts them down. But the flaw or accident or characteristic is just so insignificant next the legend of the bad guy that the author has created. The defeat is tainted because the victory seems coincidental, rather than earned, but we give it to the hero because, well, he was in the vicinity.
The City We Became suffers from Vicinity syndrome. The Woman in White is not only ancient, she's angry (as it turns out, not unjustifiably so) and she's everywhere. The author describes in excruciating detail the feathery white tendrils that adorn buildings, roads and even people, in some places forming portals to another dimension that are like wide cables that extend from the ground into the sky.
By contrast, the city's avatars are newborns. Only two of them have any conscious understanding of who they are and what they can do, one more so than the other. They bounce from encounter with the Woman in White and her lackeys to encounter, surviving mostly by dumb luck and occasionally instinct. In the process, they glean some information about who or what they are, because the antagonist can't resist the opportunity to monologue.
Ultimately, they survive, because this book has sequels and why would someone read a sequel with no surviving characters? But they do it by obliterating two of the initial premises, which I call cheating. So not only do the characters win against an enemy who outranked them but they do it by changing the rules. This is a corollary to my initial theory: sometimes the only way for an author to defeat their own villain is to prove that one of their own statements about said villain or about the universe they have created is untrue. Sometimes they get away with it; sometimes it triggers my existing trust issues. In this book, it was the latter.
When I think about this book, the adjective that comes to mind is 'slick'. The author is quick to distract us from the destruction of the laws of her own universe and on to happier things. Much like she does in other sections of the book, for example, when the avatars find out the tragic truth behind how their city comes to be sentient and the reason for the Woman in White's anger. One of the avatars briefly has an existential crisis, but she gets over it remarkably quickly and doesn't mention it again.
Rarely does a review criticise a book for being well written and edited, but this book could stand to be rougher around the edges. It is too neat, distracting the reader from the shapes the plot is contorted into to convince you that good is good and coincidently it's also the side that's telling the story. I want a story where the Woman in White is not only manipulative, she's also right; she's just telling a different story.
I also want a story that doesn't violate its own premises so that those in the vicinity can claim victory.
No comments:
Post a Comment