Tuesday Book Review Weblogging: Steven Brust

Jo Walton: After Paris: Meta, Irony, Narrative, Frames, and The Princess Bride: [Steven] Brust is definitely writing genre fantasy...

...and he knows what it is, and he is writing it with me as his imagined reader, so that’s great. And he’s always playing with narrative conventions and with ways of telling stories, within the heart of genre fantasy--Teckla is structured as a laundry list, and he constantly plays with narrators, to the point where the Paarfi books have a narrator who addresses the gentle reader directly, and he does all this within the frame of the secondary world fantasy and makes it work admirably.

In Dragon and Taltos he nests the story (in different ways) that are like Arabian Nights crossed with puzzle boxes. But his work is very easy to read, compulsively so, and I think this is because there’s always a surface there--there might be a whole lot going on under the surface but there’s always enough surface to hold you up. And like Goldman, he loves the work, and he thinks it’s cool, and he’s serious about it, even when he’s not. Thinking about narrative, and The Princess Bride, and Brust, and Diderot, made me realise the commonalities between them. They’re all warm, and the meta things I don’t care for are cold and ironic....

There’s no 'Ha ha, made you care!' no implied superiority of the author for the naive reader, there’s sympathy and a hand out to help me over the mire, even when Goldman’s telling me the story I didn’t want about 'his' lack of love, he’s making me care about 'him', in addition to caring about Inigo and Wesley. Nor is he mocking me for believing in true love while I read the fairytale, he’s trying his best to find a bridge to let even his imagined cynical reader believe in it too....

This is why Galaxy Quest works and everything else that tries to do that fails in a mean-spirited way. The Princess Bride is the same.... The Princess Bride in both incarnations has a real point to what its doing and cares about its characters and makes me care, including the characters in the frame. And you can read it as a fairytale with a frame, or a frame with a fairytale, and it works either way. And I might not be the intended audience, but I love it anyway.