A Little Book by the Name of The Dragonbone Chair
So, a word of warning: this blog post will be a little maudlin. 2020 has been a rough year. Not just for me, but for everyone. You can see it in the memes and in the news stories–this year has been one for the ages (in recent history obviously), and its only a little over half over. Usually we get days like this throughout the year. Sometimes we get months (I remember that Desert Shield had occurred only days after I had moved into my dorm room and it felt as if the world had upended itself — I was enrolled in college, but I was painfully aware that I had recently signed my required Selective Service form–for those outside America, its a required form for the military in case they need to draft you into military service), but rarely has there been a year so consistently full of challenges. It has been hard to do anything, including academics: either being a student, or being a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA), or being graduate student (which is, surprisingly, different from just being a student in that you have other responsibilities to attend to such as conferences, prospectus/dissertation, trying to find publication opportunities, financial aid and grant applications, and on and on and on). All this to say: that this year has been quite stressful.
Doctor’s Orders: Read
Luckily, about a year and half ago (Dec. 2018), I asked my Primary Care Physician for ways of dealing with stress. While exercise was something that he talked about, I felt that I was already doing that with my GTA position (something that I’ve missed due to not having classes), so he also suggested that I might want to read at the end of the day. As that was something that I’d done as a child. For those who don’t know, from my earliest days in school until I graduated from high school at the age of 18, I had a curfew, and it was fairly early (10:00 pm on school nights). Even in the summer, when school was out, my family had a fairly routine curfew of 11:30 pm. We never stayed up much past that time, and if any member of my family was still awake at 12:00 am, that was something so rare as to be memorable. Now, this changed slightly in the 1990s when talk shows really came into their own and ran longer formats, but even then, 12:00 am/12:30 am were pretty much the latest anyone (usually my uncle, who was the only one of us who watched the late night talk shows) stayed up. So, as a child, I would be in bed by 10:00 am, but I’d never really be sleepy. Since TV was out of the question (I’d get in trouble as curfew technically meant “lights out”), I’d read until I was sleepy. I had a bed night light that technically meant that I was “bending” the rules, but for the most part, my parents turned a blind eye to it as I was reading. I did get into trouble one time when I read too long (over an hour because the book was so good), but for the most part: 10 pm – 11 pm was my reading time. Last year at about this time, I began to do the same. I’d only read a chapter or two, usually no more than 20 minutes before I’d be too sleepy to continue, but I credit this reading with helping to successfully mediate the stress in my life. No, it wasn’t a perfect solution, but it at least helped.
The Dragonbone Chair and The (former) Underground in Atlanta
Why am I telling you all this? Because I’m a reader–given a choice, it is what I prefer to do. In fact, it is so ingrained in me, that in high school, we were given the opportunity to go on “college trips,” where we were given the choice to tour colleges in an “area” and teachers chaperoned us to those universities. I figured that I wouldn’t have the money to go far away, so I just chose the “southeastern area” trip, which was essentially the colleges in the same basic geographic area where I live (the states of Tennessee and Georgia). On the way down, I read–fantasy books by Raymond Feist, if I’m not mistaken (Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master, Silverthorn, and A Darkness at Sethanon.) We visited several schools in the area (I remember it being a 2-3 day trip) and we also visited some malls in the Atlanta, Georgia area. One of the malls, The Underground (which sadly is no longer active the last I checked and is now pretty much defunct and a bad part of town to visit) was a mall built “underground.” I remember finding a cool bookstore (independent), but the back wall was rock tiles all stacked on each other). This was, unfortunately, in the era before cell phones, but I still have the image indelibly marked in my mind. I cruised the Sci-Fi and Fantasy sections and found a copy of an intriguing book: The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams. While I bought a copy and admired it on the trip home, I didn’t actually read it as I was still in the midst of the books by Feist. However, later that month, when I did get a chance to read it, I was hooked and I’ve been a reader of Tad Williams every since. This book is fairly typical by today’s standards, but remarkable by the standards of the day. It features a young boy protagonist, who becomes a warrior–sounds cliche’ right–but Simon never becomes the best at anything he does–he is more like an “everyman” character. He more or less “bumbles” his way through the story–more towards the beginning in Dragonbone Chair and less toward the end in To Green Angel Tower, but he is never the most powerful or the best at anything he does, although he does manage several incredible and impressive feats just by being who he is as a person. Make no mistake, Simon is not an “incompetent” hero and this is no Fantasy comedy story–it is Epic Fantasy at its finest. However, Simon is given the nickname Simon “Mooncalf” early in the story for his propensity to daydream when he should be doing his work and it takes him a while to lose that trait.
The Witchwood Crown
And now to the maudlin part: Tad Williams made this book into a trilogy (The Osten Ard Trilogy) and it was my favorite series of my late teens and early twenties. Well, he has a new trilogy set in the same universe, and I was fully on-board. I read the story The Heart of What Was Lost, what is being called a “bridge novel” in that it bridges the two trilogies together. I thought it was well done and back to form, so I picked up a copy of The Witchwood Crown, the first book in the new trilogy.
And I didn’t like it–and I didn’t get very far. It had aged up our heroes and they are bitter (due to life circumstances that could be considered spoilers). He did the thing that Star Wars did–age the protagonists out of relevance to focus on the younger characters, and I rebelled. I stopped reading, pretty much 6 months ago, and I’ve yet to pick up the book again.
I probably will finish the book, and who knows, maybe I’ll be surprised by the resolution and discover that Simon and Miriamele have relevant roles in the story (I doubt it, but maybe). Look, these are fictional character (not real ones) and writers want to reflect reality–but I can’t but help but feeling cheated. I got to miss out on the best bits of their lives (a la Star Wars) and I’m being asked to accept that their stories no longer matter–no, it the new generation that matters now, and these battered, bitter old grumps need to be put out to pasture so we can move on to these new and better characters (a la Star Wars), and as a writer and reader, I just rebel. There are so many times in which, by the logic presented with “out with the old, in with the new,” that Simon would not have made it in the original trilogy. There are so many times that Simon is either saved by someone older and wiser than himself, or the actions of someone who is older and wiser saves him incidentally than I can count in Dragonbone Chair, let alone the times in which older and wiser characters actively take part in the narrative — Isgrimmnur and Jiriki alone either directly or indirectly save Simon (and the ones he loves), so many times that one could almost make memes from it, and yet the author can’t do that for his protagonists: Simon and Miriamele. No, they have to become old and bitter due to tragedies that have befallen them in life (a la Star Wars), and we, the audience are supposed to then just accept their fate without because, hey, “life isn’t fair” (a la Star Wars).
This bugs me in so many ways because if life wasn’t truly fair, then there’s no way Simon (or Miriamele) would have survived their original adventures. To invoke it in their old age (after not letting the readers see their prime years) seems churlish at best. No, this isn’t an attack on Tad Williams, who remains one of my favorite authors, rather it is an attack on both ageism which states that anything good can only be done by the young/or come from someone who’s young, and an attack on this idea that protagonists are only special in their first/early adventures. That “specialness” always, somehow, seems to rub off the moment we need “new” protagonists. As a writer (and a reader), I have to object: if the characters were special before, then they should be special after–to do anything less is to do a disservice to the characters themselves and the story that was told before with those characters. And Star Wars–you really should be listening in to this conversation.
See, I told you it was going to be maudlin. 
