Review: Among Others

Among Others by Jo Walton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jo Walton is a good deal smarter than me, and better read. She's also about three years older, as is her narrator/diarist in this book, Mori - clearly based quite strongly on her own teenage self. So I wasn't reading all the same books as Mori at the same time, and I haven't read all of the ones she mentions, though like her I was a huge Lord of the Rings fan as a teenager (and a huge Roger Zelazny fan, eventualy, though I came to him much later). Like her, too, I found the comparison to "Tolkien at his best" on the cover of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant grounds for suspicion, though unlike her I did read them. She complains about the limitations of her school library, but between that and the local library I think she probably had access to a wider variety than I did at the same age; also, our tastes differ somewhat.

There's a lot of literary reference here, including the use of invented terminology from one novel (Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle) which I don't think I've read - or if I have, it was when I was about Mori's age, and I've forgotten it. Because there were so many references to books I wasn't familiar with - because Mori's world was so much built of the fantasy and SF available at the end of the 1970s - parts of this book were lost on me, and I think that will be a common experience, since few people are so well read as Mori/Jo in that literature and, if they are, have quite likely not read the books recently.

The books of that era tended to speculate about different ways for people to be in community, rather than, like many contemporary books, speculating about different ways for people to live as individuals (it's a matter of emphasis, and I won't fight you about it if you disagree). Because, again, Mori lives so much in the world of books, a lot of her thinking is formed by them; her view of sexuality is almost entirely out of Heinlein and his contemporaries, which is probably not a great model, and she has a bit of difficulty with it in practice.

But none of this is the really important thing, which is that in this version of Jo Walton's childhood, she (or rather Mori) can see fairies, and do magic, and she was disabled and her twin sister killed when they prevented their witch mother from becoming a Dark Queen. And since Mori, despite her matter-of-factness, reads as an unreliable narrator, I spent much of the book in two minds about whether she was engaging in an elaborate self-delusion following a terrible trauma, or whether these aspects were real. She emphasizes that magic is "deniable"; you can always come up with a reason why something happened naturally that you were trying to make happen with magic, because you can see the chain of cause and effect, but that chain is itself the effect of the magic. She is deeply worried, when she finds a group of like-minded SFF fans, that she has magically manipulated them into liking her, or perhaps even into existing, and swears off magic except for prevention of harm (which does her credit, ethically).

The magic gets less deniable, less plausibly a self-delusion, towards the end of the book, and a book that began as very much a diary with character development and events, but not really more of a plot than real life has, turns into a story by the end. I feel like I would have liked it more if it hadn't, if it had stayed ambiguous throughout; but I could be wrong.

The gradual backstory reveal works well, though, and is well paced. I related very much to the image of an intelligent teenager who reads a lot and doesn't fit in and cares more about people in books than the people who are part of their real life (though I was fortunate enough to have two excellent friends at my school, something that Mori doesn't have; she has to find them outside).

It's a bravura performance by someone very clever, but at the same time it feels like it's not sure what it wants to be - which is also accurate to the teenage experience, of course. The mundane details of boarding-school life and teenage drama are told with an insightful depth of observation that transposes them into a higher key, and the fantastical backstory would also make a great book by itself, but the two of them together felt at odds sometimes. It's the fantastical that wins, and, as I said, I'm not fully convinced that it ought to have. So I'm left with: it's brilliant, and, indeed, brill, but for me it lacks the clarity that it needs in order to be truly amazing. Four stars, not five.

I'd still read another Jo Walton in a heartbeat, and indeed I've asked for another from Netgalley (which is where I got my review copy).

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