The Inheritance and Other Stories

I stumbled across this book in the catalog of the Vancouver Public Library recently, and decided to pick it up for a quick read. I have been a fan of Meghan Lindholm for around 20 years at this sitting, as I first started reading her many years ago, when I picked up the paperback of "The Wizard of the Pigeons". Since then I have made a point to read most of the work she has published, including the epic fantasy trilogies that she writes under her other pseudonym, Robin Hobb.

Reading through this collection I found that two of the tale were already familiar, in particular "The Silver Lady and the Forty-ish Man" and "The Fifty Squashed cat", both of which are classics. I was pleasantly surprised by "A Touch of Lavender", the opening story, if only because it combined some of her usual themes with an extremely interesting and well-developed science fiction premise, complete with weird alien race. Very cool stuff.

The book is split between the two writing personas, but reading the stories of Lindholm and Hobb together definitely reveals how much the two "different" authors have in common. There are seven stories written as Lindholm here, and three as Hobb--but the continuity between the two groups is strong.

Lindholm typically sets her stories in a contemporary world skewed only a few degrees from our own: its shopping malls and slums are very familiar, and despite the science fiction and fantasy content these are essentially slipstream stories about rather ordinary people whose largest problems are generally pretty mundane--poverty, divorce, the inability to connect with family. Robb is writing in an exotic high fantasy setting; the three stories in this collection seem to focus around the Rain Wilds/Bingtown area of her fantasy world--which is not surprising, since her most recent novels are also set in that region.

All but two stories in this collection share a common pool of themes and problems, however, and seeing them all collected here definitely shows the unifying traits of both pseudonyms. "The Inheritance" as a whole is very much about poverty and privation, the struggle to make ends meet and secure the basic necessities of life. The issues that rise up out of this fertile soil are incredibly important, and they are common to the protagonists of both the mundane and the high fantasy worlds of the author.

What we see here is the battle for dignity and autonomy against a world which simply does not care that we exist. The characters are often people who have problems claiming their power, whether they are women in societies where women have few resources and rights, children from bad neighborhoods, or artists who are losing sight of the value of her art--and by extension, losing sight of their own value.

The struggles of these characters are almost painfully sympathetic and highly engaging; they are generally the sort of people that we root for, despite our occasional temptation to smack them in the back of the head.

I give this book four stars out of five, not because the book as a whole or any story in it is flawed, but because this author has given us even finer moments in the course of her career. I'd recommend any one of her books quite happily; they are always quite vividly imagined, and she is one of the best writers in her genre. I recommend this one in particular because the central argument of the collection is a sound one: the inheritance that women need most is not any material thing, but a sense of their own worth.

The Inheritance & Other Stories