Warbreaker - The Color of Magic

I didn’t make it all the way through Warbreaker. Novels with elaborate fantasy worlds, like the one created in Warbreaker, are difficult for me to get interested in because learning all these rules and terms of the world, along with the unusual names, is like learning a new language. By the time the distinction from a Hedwig and a Hagrid, or a Vasher and a Vahr has sunk in the book is nearly over. Maybe that’s why fantasy tends to be so long; so we don’t feel cheated for having learned all this new information.

The story becomes that much more difficult for me if it involves kingdoms and princesses, only because they seem a bit banal. But Biochromatic Breath is an interesting idea, and I enjoyed the use of color in the story. Color is life and life is magic. The fear of color that is portrayed in the novel seems like a fear of living out of the concern that the life and color will only fall prey to those who take it away.

It made me think about the connection of color to magic in other works of fantasy. I don’t know if it is particularly common in this sub-genre of fantasy but there’s an obvious one in The Color of Magic, even though, apart from the title, I couldn’t make out anything outstandingly significant about magic having its own color in the TV show. It’s not until the second episode when Rincewind mentions it and even the spells that various wizards cast were shown to have different colors of light – as in Harry Potter. Each color in Harry Potter more or less represents a unique power, and while it maintains to be true in Warbreaker that every color has its own property, color in general represents a power as opposed to colorlessness.

Despite the feudalism structure there’s a lot of political commentary in Warbreaker that is relevant to today. The story starts with a Cold War feel to it, and all the complexities of foreign affairs are dramatized nicely. It’s perfect how the king of Idris, being the commander in chief he is, is essentially willing to sacrifice his least favorite daughter not to prevent war, but to knowingly delay it so he would have a better chance at victory. His leadership isn’t really looking for the most humane solution but the most strategic. I think that’s a fairly accurate depiction of the types of world leaders in the real world. 

The Magicians

The Magicians was an interesting read, especially for someone who grew up reading the Harry Potter series. Grossman has brought a dose of realism to fantasy. The whole mood betrays what I would expect from a normal Fantasy novel. There are no real triumphant moments, or marked ecstatic highs from their adventures. Every new discovery only disappoints Quentin, failing to ever fill him up. A particularly brilliant part in the book, I felt, was their arrival to Fillory for the first time, and how everything about the place, down to the overgrown talking animals, was way too eerie to enjoy. What Quentin thought would be perfection is really just weird and kind of scary. And in a new and bizarre world with its own foreign rules we should actually expect nothing less. Fillory is a bit like adulthood. As children we dream of freedom adulthood offers, but coming out of adolescences and seeing the world for what it is can be a let down.

There was also no mission, or “Greater Calling” if you will, that thrusts the protagonists into necessary heroic action. It’s the boredom of their new adult lives that causes them to seek out thrills in Fillory. Again, this is more true to life than traditional fantasies. None of us are “The Chosen Ones” with a simple black and white goal laid out in front of us, for us. We have to make our own choices in life and risk facing the unknowns ahead of our decisions.

In an existential way I suppose one could argue this makes Quentin more heroic than Harry Potter. Still, Quentin was unable to rescue anyone himself, he cost a girl her life to Martin “The Beast” Chatwin due to a bit of carelessness, and it was his girlfriend, not him, who in the end made the ultimate sacrifice. As an edifying fairytale, The Magicians is a redemption story, not a tale of good versus evil; about how power corrupts.

I don’t read an awful lot of fantasy but the genre seems to have put itself in a rut since Tolkein. To see Grossman shake up the genre is exciting. I definitely want to read the sequel, The Magician King, although I wouldn’t expect it to be too similar to the first novel. Quentin’s time with the Centaur’s has ostensibly made him an infinitely more mature person, and that much more likeable. With everyone grown and out of Brakebills somehow Grossman will have to find a way to use the magic of Fillory to comment on adulthood.

Kwaidan and Audition

There are numerous recurring motifs in Kwaidan: vengeful women of a supernatural beauty, cannibalism, wandering priests, unexplained mysteries, wise and foolish samurais, and heads and decapitation. An almost perfect example: the goblins, or Rokurokubi, were cannibals with necks long enough to lift their heads high up in the air, and the priest was able to take one of the heads off during a fight. All very strange, and I’m not sure what the significance of any of it is, but it’s very entertaining.

Often some information is withheld from the reader at the end of a story that adds to the otherworldliness of it. It’s unusual for a horror story to end with a mystery. Typically the mystery is introduced at the beginning and the reader learns more about it as the story progresses. Stephen King’s The Mist for example. Yet in Of A Mirror And A Bell the final sentence reads, “But no!-I really cannot tell you with what [the jar] was filled!”

Diplomacy is probably my favorite. It breaks all the rules of a horror story. The ending is anti-climactic and gives you the opposite of what you would expect, but it’s such an interesting explanation of why spirits are able to come back and haunt its victims that it is satisfying. It’s hard to think of another horror story where a main character’s confidence didn’t betray him/her and put his/her life in danger, but that happens more than once within the Kwaidan collection. There’s no deciphering if this is done to convey any particular message or if it’s simply meant to be a “strange tale”.

The Jikiniki reminds me of a vampire, in that he is required to eat human flesh (albeit dead humans) and it is considered to be a curse on him, which sort of distracts from or downplays the curse that has been placed on the village because of it. For a vengeful “curse” it’s not totally fair. Unlike a vampire he doesn’t take any thrill in this, only shame, but it is interesting to see the self-centered archetype portrayed as “damned” in both Western and Eastern fiction.  

It may be that the more recent Japanese horror has taken a turn from the whimsical horror such as in Kwaidan. Overall, the short stories of Kwaidan were more playful than the Audition movie, although they both dealt with concepts like vengeful women and the deceptiveness of beauty. Audition felt like it was a very slow and long build to one very gory scene. Even Kwaidan had descriptive moments of gore in its text but the dream like quality of the stories kept it always feeling quaint and never too serious. But Audition was hard to sit through at times, not just because of the gore, but I think because it dealt with more relevant and real horrors like child abuse.