“Or What You Will”
Oct. 8th, 2020 01:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I’ve read the estimable Jo Walton’s latest novel, Or What You Will, and I was rather impressed. I’ve said of Ms. Walton before that one thing I like about her is that she doesn’t keep churning out the same book under different names; she writes quite different books. That said, some interests of hers are evident, and can be found in more than one novel, so a reader should not be surprised to find the city of Florence or the plays of Shakespeare in the new novel.
Jo has played literary games before, as in Lifelode, and the latest book is self-referential, being partly about a woman writer who is writing a book about some of the other characters in Or What You Will, and the novel is partly narrated by the writer’s alter ego, someone from the mists of her mind who has been various characters in previous books. Unlike some people who play literary games, Jo (she once invited me to call her Jo when I addressed an email to “Ms. Walton”) can actually write a story of interest to civilians. There are characters in the book, some of them familiar from The Tempest and Twelfth Night, with lives and problems and ambitions that the reader cares about, and then there is the narrator himself, who is concerned about being trapped in the bone cave and dying when the writer dies; the writer is suffering a recurrence of cancer.
I won’t try to explain how these various stories interact, but Jo, who has come a long way since The King’s Peace (by no means a contemptible first novel), weaves the threads together successfully.
I have wondered if I could manage to save up enough annual leave to take a trip to Florence, which I visited as a child but do not really remember (even though my first sentence was “The taxicabs in Florence are green”). The city’s tourist board ought to pay her a commission.
Jo has played literary games before, as in Lifelode, and the latest book is self-referential, being partly about a woman writer who is writing a book about some of the other characters in Or What You Will, and the novel is partly narrated by the writer’s alter ego, someone from the mists of her mind who has been various characters in previous books. Unlike some people who play literary games, Jo (she once invited me to call her Jo when I addressed an email to “Ms. Walton”) can actually write a story of interest to civilians. There are characters in the book, some of them familiar from The Tempest and Twelfth Night, with lives and problems and ambitions that the reader cares about, and then there is the narrator himself, who is concerned about being trapped in the bone cave and dying when the writer dies; the writer is suffering a recurrence of cancer.
I won’t try to explain how these various stories interact, but Jo, who has come a long way since The King’s Peace (by no means a contemptible first novel), weaves the threads together successfully.
I have wondered if I could manage to save up enough annual leave to take a trip to Florence, which I visited as a child but do not really remember (even though my first sentence was “The taxicabs in Florence are green”). The city’s tourist board ought to pay her a commission.