Stravaiging through Talia
Nov. 5th, 2005 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThrough the LitFest connection, I got to read two of the Stravaganza books, and to hear their author, Mary Hoffman, talk about them.
The books are Young Adult fantasy, in which teenagers from our world are able to visit Talia, a sort of Renaissance period Italy-but-not-Italy, and become embroiled in various adventures. They are very far from being the worst of this genre: City of Masks, the first and establishing volume of the trilogy, rattles along most entertainingly (City of Flowers, being the third and concluding volume, relied less on the reader's desire to find out what the situation is, more on the intrinsic interest of the situation itself, and didn't carry it off as well; and I didn't manage to get hold of the intervening City of Stars, but the implication is that it is much concerned with horses...) But, as this will suggest, they are not the best either.
Mary Hoffman's talk was interesting and entertaining: she has a charming explanation of "where she got the idea from"* (which it would be mean to give away). But several of the things she said illuminated what it was about her books that didn't work for me. For example:
"I've been accused of being a fantasy writer, but I don't think it's true, because I haven't made a world."
Here we go again. When a writer holds a genre at arm's length that way, for whatever reason, it means they aren't familiar with its conventions, they aren't aware which questions have already been examined and answered. It would be good to think that this ignorance might occasionally produce something original, unconventional; more often it leads to the painstaking re-invention of the wheel.
It's true that she hasn't made a world, though, that Talia is Italy at a certain time with some changes of name and décor: the City of Masks itself, Bellezza, is a thinly disguised Venice (to the extent that the Italian publisher apparently wanted to change the title, and since this was impossible refused to use the cover design with the picture of Venice: in Italy, he explained, to call Venice the City of Masks was a very tired cliché). It is a Venice ruled by a Duchessa not a Doge (though gender rôles seem otherwise unchanged), in which silver is more valuable than gold, because gold tarnishes as silver does not.
Not setting the story in the real world was a way of avoiding having to get historical details right, not having to worry about anachronism; elements (like coffee, chocolate, potatoes and tomatoes) which were not present in our world at that time are not anachronisms but evidence of the way time moves at a different speed in Talia.
Anyone who thinks that inventing your own world is an easier option than using the one we already have - well, anyone who thinks that obviously doesn't intend to do any serious world-building. Mary Hoffman does herself an injustice here, because she is sufficiently interested in the history and art of Renaissance Italy that her characters, in particular, have a genuine period flavour to them - they may have other faults, but they are not modern characters in fancy dress. But she isn't interested in what the details tell us beyond their immediate decorative effect. The Talians have coffee, chocolate, potatoes and tomatoes, she tells us in a closing note: they do not have tobacco. Very well, where do these exotica come from? Do the Talians already trade with a New World, or do they grow their own potatoes, tomatoes... Doesn't matter.
The Stravaganti are people who can cross between Talia / then and our world / now; it's a lovely word. And it provides much of the plot, certainly of the first book, and much of the interest is in deducing from the available clues just how it works. But according to Mary Hoffman, this central element of the narrative is motivated by her need to offer her readers a way of connecting with her fantasy world.
I really don't know how to take this remark - she must surely know that there is plenty of highly successful YA (and adult) fantasy which does no such thing. (It occurs to me that the big change made to the book by the film of Howl's Moving Castle is precisely to disconnect it from this world - but that's another story).
It raises more problems for the author, of course: who are the travellers going to be, how will they juggle their two lives? Mary Hoffman commended her readers for spotting that the teenagers chosen to be stravaganti are all unhappy for some reason: Lucien has cancer, Georgia is bullied...
I was extremely uncomfortable with this: Lucien is seriously ill, but he travels in his sleep to a place where he is entirely healthy. Yet there is no suggestion that Talia is his fantasy, that it is not, within the terms of the narrative, quite real. Cancer seems too weighty a matter to be a mere plot device; a story in which a central character has cancer is going to be about cancer, to some extent, whether that is the intention or not. The plot develops in such a way that this becomes more and more of a problem (but which would be too spoilerish to discuss even for me).
*Writers joke about how they hate to be asked where they get their ideas from, and in that general form, it's a pretty silly question. But when they do know where the idea for a particular book came from, they are usually bursting to tell you...
The books are Young Adult fantasy, in which teenagers from our world are able to visit Talia, a sort of Renaissance period Italy-but-not-Italy, and become embroiled in various adventures. They are very far from being the worst of this genre: City of Masks, the first and establishing volume of the trilogy, rattles along most entertainingly (City of Flowers, being the third and concluding volume, relied less on the reader's desire to find out what the situation is, more on the intrinsic interest of the situation itself, and didn't carry it off as well; and I didn't manage to get hold of the intervening City of Stars, but the implication is that it is much concerned with horses...) But, as this will suggest, they are not the best either.
Mary Hoffman's talk was interesting and entertaining: she has a charming explanation of "where she got the idea from"* (which it would be mean to give away). But several of the things she said illuminated what it was about her books that didn't work for me. For example:
"I've been accused of being a fantasy writer, but I don't think it's true, because I haven't made a world."
Here we go again. When a writer holds a genre at arm's length that way, for whatever reason, it means they aren't familiar with its conventions, they aren't aware which questions have already been examined and answered. It would be good to think that this ignorance might occasionally produce something original, unconventional; more often it leads to the painstaking re-invention of the wheel.
It's true that she hasn't made a world, though, that Talia is Italy at a certain time with some changes of name and décor: the City of Masks itself, Bellezza, is a thinly disguised Venice (to the extent that the Italian publisher apparently wanted to change the title, and since this was impossible refused to use the cover design with the picture of Venice: in Italy, he explained, to call Venice the City of Masks was a very tired cliché). It is a Venice ruled by a Duchessa not a Doge (though gender rôles seem otherwise unchanged), in which silver is more valuable than gold, because gold tarnishes as silver does not.
Not setting the story in the real world was a way of avoiding having to get historical details right, not having to worry about anachronism; elements (like coffee, chocolate, potatoes and tomatoes) which were not present in our world at that time are not anachronisms but evidence of the way time moves at a different speed in Talia.
Anyone who thinks that inventing your own world is an easier option than using the one we already have - well, anyone who thinks that obviously doesn't intend to do any serious world-building. Mary Hoffman does herself an injustice here, because she is sufficiently interested in the history and art of Renaissance Italy that her characters, in particular, have a genuine period flavour to them - they may have other faults, but they are not modern characters in fancy dress. But she isn't interested in what the details tell us beyond their immediate decorative effect. The Talians have coffee, chocolate, potatoes and tomatoes, she tells us in a closing note: they do not have tobacco. Very well, where do these exotica come from? Do the Talians already trade with a New World, or do they grow their own potatoes, tomatoes... Doesn't matter.
The Stravaganti are people who can cross between Talia / then and our world / now; it's a lovely word. And it provides much of the plot, certainly of the first book, and much of the interest is in deducing from the available clues just how it works. But according to Mary Hoffman, this central element of the narrative is motivated by her need to offer her readers a way of connecting with her fantasy world.
I really don't know how to take this remark - she must surely know that there is plenty of highly successful YA (and adult) fantasy which does no such thing. (It occurs to me that the big change made to the book by the film of Howl's Moving Castle is precisely to disconnect it from this world - but that's another story).
It raises more problems for the author, of course: who are the travellers going to be, how will they juggle their two lives? Mary Hoffman commended her readers for spotting that the teenagers chosen to be stravaganti are all unhappy for some reason: Lucien has cancer, Georgia is bullied...
I was extremely uncomfortable with this: Lucien is seriously ill, but he travels in his sleep to a place where he is entirely healthy. Yet there is no suggestion that Talia is his fantasy, that it is not, within the terms of the narrative, quite real. Cancer seems too weighty a matter to be a mere plot device; a story in which a central character has cancer is going to be about cancer, to some extent, whether that is the intention or not. The plot develops in such a way that this becomes more and more of a problem (but which would be too spoilerish to discuss even for me).
*Writers joke about how they hate to be asked where they get their ideas from, and in that general form, it's a pretty silly question. But when they do know where the idea for a particular book came from, they are usually bursting to tell you...
