Reading: A Companion to Wolves
What this book is not: This book is not a male/male romance. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary, I think I was more relieved by the fact that it was not a romance than anything else that happened in the plot-line of the book.
What this book is: This book is a well-written fantasy novel that seemed to just get better as I read, instead of falling apart from an interesting premise as is so often the case. And, yes, there was some homosexual activity within the main story, but the variety of emotional love between men represented in this novel was refreshing. Rather than the book being all about the grand, sweeping romantic love that almost every book in the world features as the main driving force of every character to some degree, this book concentrates instead of a kind of bond between humans — in this case men — that is just as deep, just as important, and just as vital, even if the romantic aspect is either not present at all or buried under a lot more intense connections that supersede romantic love. There was the bond between the men and the wolves, the bond between the wolves themselves, the bond between human members of the ‘pack’, the deep abiding love of men who have given up everything in their prior lives to be in the situation they’ve chosen, and to fight alongside each other in a war. The fact that there was sex thrown into that mix for *reasons* (it made sense within the world of the book) — sex that while at times had dubious consent, or at least a lack of enthusiasm, ended up being pleasurable with the ‘right’ partners.
I almost hate to focus on the sex because while I found it titillating (hooray!) in the end it seemed to be one of the least important things about the novel (though admittedly one of the things that got me into the novel in the first place, because hooray for intriguing, unconventional sexual situations in books!), but given how the sex is represented in some of the comments, I feel like I want to address it. I think any reader of BDSM novels will recognize some elements within the story. Man is equal to the wolf (in good BDSM the sub is of the same or greater value than the dom), but in the matter or situations driven by pack instinct, such as mating, then the man must not fight the choices of the wolf. “It’s her [the wolf's] choice,” was mentioned more than once, and reminded me of BDSM scenes in which the sub allows the dom to choose a partner (or partners) for him/her to have sex with, and in which the sub allows the dom to choose what happens to him/her during a scene of any type. It’s pretty clear in actual BDSM research I’ve done, while less clear in romanticised BDSM novels, that there are times the sub does not sweepingly love the choices of the dom, or even entirely *enjoy* them all. I suppose that is the kind of mindset I had while reading those scenes, and I did not find them troubling or difficult to swallow. However, if that kind of reading (or in my case research for writing) isn’t part of your personal history, then the lack of swelling romantic feeling during the sex scenes might be off-putting; this might be complicated for a reader by not going into the book understanding point one above: this is not a romance novel.
Being who I am, of course, I did start to develop an attachment to various other men that I wished Isolfr would fall for, but in the end I was happy that was not the way the book went.
This book reminded me of a more enjoyable, more interesting, fantasy version of The Sagas of the Icelanders by Jane Smiley. Only better. Because that novel nearly made me cry tears of boredom. (Sorry, Jane Smiley!) This book was not written for the purpose of anything more than telling a sweeping tale of an unlikely, almost unwilling hero, and his wolfsister and pack-brothers. I was encouraged and relieved to find such a book existed in the world. Not every book featuring m/m relationships, or m/m sex, needs to be romance.
In other words, I loved this book for all that it actually was and didn’t hold it against it for all that it wasn’t. In fact, I rejoice in what it wasn’t.
