Number two in a series of story dissection for my own edification. (Probably unnecessary spoiler alert; don't go further until you've read the stories if you're going to. And you should). For each story, I want to answer the following questions to help me in my own work:
Why is the story good or why might it have been awarded/bought.
How does author:
- do character/alien descriptions
- put the reader in the protagonist's skin
- evoke emotional truth/reader emotion
- depict character emotion
- create mood
- handle EDACE (Eric Witchey's analysis tool, which I'm employing in a truncated fashion)
"Mulberry Boys" by Margo Lanagan, originally published in Blood and Other Cravings, is the second in my totally subjective list from The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton.
Why is the story good or why might it have been awarded/bought.
The author does a wonderful job of making the reader squirm with the teen protagonist, George. Its premise was delightfully appalling, and its gruesomeness, and yet simple decency wins out over clever wicked greed.
It's a revenge fantasy written in an acceptable way (i.e., most revenge fantasies are best left on one's hard drive or unwritten), something for me to keep in mind for dark days.
Much of this is in the protagonist's head, and the pivotal moment is crystal clear, and finalized by the protagonist for us: "I sit up slowly, a different boy from the one who lay down." And his behavior is consistent with that difference, in how he views the mulberry/John and how he treats him before and after.
How does author
- do character/alien descriptions
Spare, mostly in action. For the first several pages, all we get is attitude via dialogue and thought and values. We're in the protagonist's head, and he is never described except by dialogue, his thoughts, Phillip's treatment of him, and what he can and cannot do.
Pride: "The man had not bothered with me; how could he know I was not what he wanted, from that quick glance? But also I was ashamed to be so obviously useless...I wanted a man like that to recognize me as of consequence.."
(wondering about subduing the mulberry) "Where's the challenge in that, and the pride upon having done it?"
Phillips is described by behavior and attitude (arrogance, sneering, surprise the protagonist would take offense, which makes the reader wonder if the protagonist is more than a touch insecure) and just a few details: "shining hair-waves and his sharp nose, the floret of silk in his pocket...(color, pigeon)" and "His white, weak hands, long-fingered, big-knuckled..."
And the mulberry: "...his round stary face, his froggy body, his feeble conversation, trying to be friendly."
- put the reader in the protagonist's skin
That may be the greatest strength of this piece, and yet the author doesn't much use the technique I usually think of -- providing regular full sensory details. There are some: "the teeth are all clagged with leaf-scraps, black in this life." And occasional visual details, small things: "his bound purple hands" "slip of a man" and "mulberry's puffed-up belly," probably one a page, although I didn't look that closely because...
Mostly it's all in the the protagonist-narrator's voice, starting from the beginning:
"So night comes on. I make my own fire, because why would I want to sit at Phillips's, next to that pinned-down mulberry?"
A page later, ..."It's been a long day and a weird, and I wish I was home, instead of out here with a half-man, and the boss of us all watching my every step."
(that graf transitions to the now.)
"...He calls me boy the way you call a dog."
A picture emerges of a boy who is proud, yet insecure and not settled in hims own mind; he laments being unable to hold to himself in the forest when he is with others. We never see him as he sees himself until near the end.
There are visual details, things lit by firelight and seen in memory.
The surgery, such as it is, is given us from the point of view of a young woodsman familiar with knives and skinning and hunting but not slicing people open, and through the that experience, his fascination with it, his revulsion of it, and the pain of the poor mutilated boy, we get his epiphany that the mulberry is in fact a human ruined for profit. The power of that epiphany is tied to our belief the protagonist is coming to it and we are as tied to the scene as he is.
- evoke emotional truth/reader emotion
Author creates a sympathetic character: a proud yet slightly insecure boy treated poorly by a powerful, wealthy boss who considers himself better than the young woodsman during a job the young man considers fairly easy but unpleasant.
Author puts that character into an increasingly uncomfortable position (literally) until he is faced with the realization that this creature he has hunted, who he holds down while it is carved open, is still human, just stunted by whatever Phillips has done to it. He sees truths with a teen's visceral moral clarity.
He remembers and talks about the mulberry by name, after the howl of pain. "..it was as if I had been asleep to John Barn and he woke me... there were three of us here, not two and a creature.." And he is stuck there, forced to watch, pinned by Phillip's will and John's pain, and the reader's empathy is purchased with his awkward, miserable position.
The plight of the mulberries, their horrible fate, is given us in a single sentence: "The rest of the year, the mulberries live in their box, and the leaves go in, and the silk comes out on spindles, an that is all there is to it." Followed by the memory of Phillips choosing the crop of children the year before. Just how life is, the horror in the reader created by how accepted it is by the townfolk, their economic dependence on their mutilated children.
The author's slow patient depiction of the surgery, the fixing of the silk, is done over so many pages, so carefully depicted, with its mixture of grudging respect for the skill involved, and the reeling teen and his empathy for the cut mulberry beside him, his calming him by name, and the careful dialogue, so careful, as George asks Phillips questions, first to throw him off and then more seriously.
And in his thinking and his choices after that, he acts as a man, not a boy. He's making choices for more than just himself, and he is himself in the forest; embodies the forest. John is afraid of his smell; mulberries fear adult men.
- depict character emotion
Implied by thought:
"why would I want to ..." Revulsion.
"Must I? ... I'm sick of the sight of him..." Sulking.
"He calls me boy the way you call a dog." Resentment.
"So he says, to a boy who's wrestled tree-snakes so long that his father near fainted to see them..." Pride, disgust at being patronized.
"And Phillips works...as unmoved as if he were sewing up a boot." Contempt?
"Boy?" (the same word Phillips uses, but John Barn is saying it, and George thinks, "He has forgotten my name again.") Compassion.
Observed by other characters:
"...gave me a look that said, Bet you can't. And I'm certainly too important..." Arrogance (Phillips)
Stated by character:
"He knows I don't. I hate him and his words."
"I am patient and determined."
Implied by other character action:
"He looks up surprised ..." Insecurity of protag; Phillips was going to ask him to be his assistant for the night, give him a title.
By description:
Paragraph about coming with others into the forest; worry he might be weak-minded because he's so strongly influenced by other people.
"I spend a lot of time listening to folk in my head, but whenever I look to Barn, and think of holding him down...they fall silent; they have nothing to say."
- create mood
By voice, as above.
"So night comes on." The opening line of a tale told by a man in a bar, much like "No shit, there I was."
By character choices:
There's conflict from the beginning because the narrator is resisting being close to his companions, dislikes them enough to bother making a separate fire in a camp.
By word choice:
"We are stuck out here...
"I dislike his sneering manner.."
"...Oh, they give me a shudder...
"..now his hands are even more loathsome.
"Dawn light is starting to creep... stars are still snagged...masses of darkness go about their growing, roots fast...thick trunks seeming to jostle..."
"I am enormous myself, and wordless like the forest, yet full of burrows and niches and shadows where beasts lie curled..."
"white cross of John Barn glimmers"
"which is now, which is here, which is me.
"the water fighting white among the boulders"
Withheld information:
...now that I'm past the age where he can choose me for the other thing."
The origin and nature of the mulberry "boys."
The emotional weight lacking in certain things:
The straightforward way the narrator conveys that John Barn lives in a box and will for the rest of his life; and that the parents of the village are all complicit in this; by the simple summation of George's judgement: Just me and my folk, and our children.
- handle EDACE
Story can be condensed into a few long compound sequences
Resentment/disgust/wounded pride/revulsion toward mulberry/desire for Phillips' respect
Follows orders, ignores, feeds and pins mulberry
(Mulberry howls, cries out, trembles in pain and fear)
Compassion/empathy/revulsion of Phillips/grudging respect of Phillips skill/surprise Phillips does as he says he will
Comforts John Barn (mulberry) and questions Phillips while watching him "fix" the silk and John, arguing with Phillips
Feels he has lost the argument yet gained some measure of respect
Helps willingly, knowing he is aiding in a profit scheme/asks Phillips one last question (is lied to)
Decides this must end (not shown)
Kills Phillips, thinks through the consequences as he leads John home.
No long wants Phillips' respect/accepts his own adult status with equanimity, worries about uncertain future, comforted (?) by forest and John's simple pleasure in it.
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