I blogged a while back about Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania,” which was the first in a series of four fantasy novels. I recently finished the third in the series, The White Tyger (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Paul%20Park%20White%20Tyger, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhite-Tyger-Paul-Park%2Fdp%2F0765315297%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1175103188%26sr%3D8-2&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325) which is just as wonderful. The novels are profoundly character driven in a way that few genre novels are; they deliberately and specifically refuse to conform to a conventional quest narrative. No-one knows exactly what they’re supposed to do; they’re making it up as they go along. All of the main protagonists (and some of the minor ones) are in some sense or another _doubled_; their selves are split in two so that they have difficulty in explaining their motivations to themselves. The book is less a conventional fantasy story in which the story is external to the characters, determining who they are and what they do, than a working through of the ways that individuals make up their own fantasies, spinning out _ex post_ narratives to explain their actions to themselves and others. The main protagonists don’t know themselves.
This is most obvious in the character of Baroness Ceaucescu, who sees herself as the heroine of an opera, smoothing away the grubby and selfish motivations for her actions and reconfiguring them as the essential elements of a grand and inexorable tragedy, where she has no personal responsibility for what she does. She steals every scene that she’s in. The three novels are vertiginous, and a little jarring. They don’t have the feeling of safeness and stability that most fantasy novels do. All that is solid melts into air. Yet nor are they self-consciously or coyly reflexive (their contingency doesn’t seem playful to me; rather it appears like a very serious attempt to talk about how the world is). I don’t want to say more about _The White Tyger_ for fear of ruining surprises; I do want to recommend it (and I can’t wait to see what the fourth and final novel does).
{ 4 comments }
Rich Puchalsky 03.28.07 at 6:03 pm
I’ve only read the first in this series, and I fully agree (based on reading three of his other books) that Paul Park is a major author, well worth literary study. Based on the first book, I also agree about the vertiginous slipping-away quality — they aren’t even precisely metafictional in the usual metafictional way. It’s as if Park decided that he had to write a traditional young adult “ordinary girl finds out she’s a princess in Faerie” book and then set out to avoid as many stereotypes as possible, given that initial one.
One other thing I really liked about the first book that other readers probably won’t care about: its local feel. Just as I loved Lovecraft growing up because finally there was someone bringing glamor and mystery to the small New England town, the first part of the first book is set in a place where people ride bikes through woods near museums — which triangulates to the general area where I and Paul Park both live.
Jake - but not the one 03.28.07 at 8:29 pm
I, too, have read the first book. Or most of it, anyway.
Rather than speaking to me about the uncertainty of life, the “vertiginous” element felt artificial. Neither did I think the characters were well drawn – all the characters fell “cut-out” – and there was no sense of the story impelling the characters, or the characters impelling the story.
The scenes and scenarios were exquisitely drawn, however. I recall specfically the snow and the river with the soldiers in the cabin.
Perhaps it is plebian of me, but I prefer stories with a direction.
Jake
SG 03.29.07 at 3:41 am
Is this the same Paul Park who wrote the Starbridge Chronicles? I remember them very fondly.
Henry 03.31.07 at 3:00 am
the one and the same.
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