Random Thursday: Not quite yet a review of The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner

[hrj]

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.

Comments

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I get this. I really do.

I had a different experience, coming at the book after having read "The Fall of the Kings" (Where we meet an older Katherine with, IIRC, a female lover and a 'swings both ways' reputation. Also, being bi, and so not needing the girl to get the girl in the same way.)

But without that foreknowledge, I can see how this book would seem. I had a similar reaction to Robin McKinley's version of Sleeping Beauty, where it has a lot of possible set up for the girls ending up together and instead thinks a May-December male relationship is the way to go. But at least with McKinley, her own straightness (and prior books) make me less likely to *expect* that turn from her.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, having read TPOTS when it first came out, I wasn't privy to any authorial intention. All I knew was that the possibility of the two women getting together was there in the book -- it wasn't just my wishful thinking -- and then I was left with empty hands.

And you know the funny thing? Reading The Fall of the Kings later didn't change any of my memories. I don't know that I even connected the two characters. (For some reason I had the impression that Fall of the Kings was set much earlier than the other two books. Not sure why.)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Are you thinking of Jessica, the lesbian pirate sister? Katherine doesn't have a lover in FotK, as far as I remember. (Nor do I like Katherine's FotK portrayal at all. She is hardly recognizable as the same person as Privilege!Katherine.)

I love Privilege, and I was also disappointed that the final relationship ended up Katherine/Marcus rather than Katherine/Artemisia. I don't mind that Katherine is bi; rather, I just prefer her dynamic with Artemisia to her dynamic with Marcus. Artemisia is slowly fighting her way out of the narratives she's been offered to guide her life, by finding different narratives to live by. So is Katherine. Marcus is past that stage, and he gets unpleasantly know-it-all and smug about it.

In my head, sometime after the events of Privilege, Katherine breaks up with Marcus and Artemisia moves in with her permanently, and that is that.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Well that might explain why I hadn't connected anything in that story with Katherine!

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

This makes me think of how I ended up becoming very upset at Andre Norton, and swearing off all her books, when I was a kid. Because I read several of her books, and while she's written many with female protagonists, the ones my library had all seemed to have male protagonists. Which I thought was to be expected, because "Andre" was a boy's name, and boys only write about boys, everyone knows that. But when I found out the author was a woman, and was still writing about boys, I was outraged. All those adventures she could have been writing with girls in them, and she didn't! It felt like being cheated.

Which is not fair at all, from my adult perspective. But I still remember how upset I was at the revelation at the time. It ended up feeling like everyone only wanted stories about boys, no matter what, and only boys got to do interesting things.

But, well. Long story short, I kinda get where you're coming from, on this one.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

There are several authors I have felt this way about. The waste, the sheer waste. (From my very selfish point of view, of course.) I think it hurts most when a female author seems to gravitate toward male characters because she simply can't imagine how a female character could have an interesting story. But it isn't fair of me to try to second-guess motivations like that.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

If I don't make a point of deciding otherwise, I find that I tend to write male protagonists. (I often make a point of deciding otherwise.) It's just so bone-deep in the culture that male characters are the starting point, and who interesting things happen to, and who decide to do interesting things, that it requires actual effort to not, well. Default that way.

On one novel, I made a point of making every single character I created female unless I had a reason to make them male. (It didn't have to be a huge, pressing reason: just a specific reason that existed in what I was doing with the story.) When I went back and counted, I had about a 50/50 split in the cast. Go figure.

[kyrademon.livejournal.com]

> "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."

So, I read this comment, and my first thought was, I'm sure I read a book like this when I was young, why can't I think of it?

It slowly dawned on me that it only existed in my mind.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

But if we can imagine it, we can write it. Sometimes even imagining it is the hard part.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

"Dammit, I just need to write my own stories because nobody else is going to do it."

I've heard many writers say the same thing. (I, on the other hand, write because I want to play with the voices in my head.)