Last Wednesday I read Robin McKinley’s Beauty, and then Thursday to Friday I read Rose Daughter. Both are her adaptations of the original eighteenth century fairy tale, written twenty years apart. They’re tremendously different from one another and really not comparable because of that. But the 1978 version, Beauty, adds a layer of richness to the original tale that I love — but it seems to me that Disney loved it, too. A lot of the characterizations and images are pretty much taken from that book, in my opinion, though Disney would likely never admit it, or claim coincidence. Perhaps it was a coincidence. I have no idea, I’ll just complain about it. (By characterizations I mean Belle’s bookishness and the library in the Beast’s castle that amazes her; the Beast’s mournful temperament, the voices of the mysterious servants, etc. Disney added things, of course, and McKinley’s book is more like the original tale in the fact that the father is a merchant whose fortune deflates because of bad luck and that Beauty is the youngest of three sisters.) Anywaaaay. It’s a fairy tale that is out of copyright and everyone can retell it in their own way, I suppose.

Rose Daughter was good, too. Very different from what I was expecting, and I’m not sure if I like it better, necessarily. It reminded me — in terms of style — more of the other McKinley books I’ve read, but I did enjoy the first person of Beauty in some regards. And it was much more fantasy-esque than Beauty was; Beauty could have been more slightly askew historical fiction but Rose Daughter was clearly fairy tale fantasy. Both worth a read.

I also started The Liveship Traders Trilogy by Robin Hobb with the first book, Ship of Magic. I read the Farseer Trilogy over the summer in Germany (it was one of the only series they had wholly in the English books section) and then I read the Tawny Man Trilogy last October — I hadn’t realized she had written more in that same world — then mid-way through the second book of that trilogy there’s a chapter where one of the characters meets an old friend and they talk of characters with names I’ve never heard of. Hobb is brilliant at foreshadowing and characterization. She doesn’t do anything idly. Every name she drops she drops for a reason. So I thought to myself, “Did I miss a book or two? Who are they talking about?” so I looked it up. Apparently there was an entire trilogy between the other two trilogies (not with the same main character, but set in the same world, so they interconnect vaguely) and I’d missed it.

Naturally, in the few paragraphs in Golden Fool I read it “revealed” what happens to the main characters of the Liveship Traders trilogy, but I was still intrigued. So I’ve bought the first volume and I’m already getting into it — mostly because of what I’ve already read in The Tawny Man Trilogy. But that’s okay. Both the first and third trilogies set in this world are written first person from the character FitzChivalry Farseer’s perspective, so his introspective, often naïve point of view taints everything. (She’s carefully mindful of her perspective and his narration is brilliantly adapted to his character. She does it more artfully than many authors who don’t write “genre” fiction.) The Liveship Traders Trilogy, though, is third person, and the point of view shifts have gone between four characters in a chapter and a half. It’ll be interesting to see how she does the entire trilogy. Will she settle on one character or give us the “ensemble” as we go?

Many fantasy books I’ve read switch point of view needlessly and the characters whose third person perspective “narrates” the segment flow into each other and it’s clearly just the author writing all of the time. In my opinion, there are two specific reasons to change point of view in a third person novel — especially “genre”: (1) the author wants to give the reader a sense of dramatic irony, so we see the “villain” or another antagonistic or love interest character’s point of view so when the protagonist meets that character, the meeting is full of portent for the reader. But in that situation, there is clearly a protagonist’s main point of view and it doesn’t switch away unless it’s to give dramatic irony. Something like that. Or, (2) the protagonist can’t know something that’s essential for the plot and therefore we’ve got to see it from someone else’s point of view — the most famous example being Treasure Island’s mid-first person narrative switch to the doctor’s because Jim Hawkins has been captured and can’t know the Captain is on his way to save him. (But that’s first person; that’s odd.) A fantasy, third person example: in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry is too busy playing Quidditch and staying on his broom to see the Quirrell/Snape tension in the stands, so the POV switches to an omniscient one so we see Hermione put blue fire on Snape. We could not see that from Harry’s attached third person perspective. It’s one of maybe a handful of times in the series Rowling deliberately detaches from Harry for sake of the narrative’s development (the other times being the opening chapters).

(It doesn’t count when the book is consistently omnisciently third person in the sense that we fly from perspective to perspective as suits the narrative of the protagonist — example, The Hero and the Crown, when Aerin and Tor are talking and we know Tor’s thoughts and the fact that Aerin, from whose perspective we’ve seen most of the novel, could never know what he’s thinking — but that’s the brilliance of the irony; Aerin sees what she expects to see and Tor is too timid to tell her what he really thinks. It’s important for us to know that for the story, because that’s how McKinley is writing this story, and she’s consistent with it, and she doesn’t use white space to break apart the characters’ thought shifts, she just glides. Her narrators tend to be fairy tale omniscient, which is altogether different from a lot of books.)

But the needless POV switch happens a lot in “epic” fantasy and science fiction — it’s one of the things I tend to use to define whether or not a book is trying to be “epic” or not. A lot of times authors (Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind) do it to show their amazing protagonist from other points of view so we can bask in his well-muscled glory. We see the protagonist from the love interest’s POV to see his handsome figure, some crap like that. It’s annoying when that protagonist might as well just narrate it, because he’s there in the scene, but no. But Robin Hobb is good and would never do that — she’s much too intelligent and clever. Her descriptions, even in third person, are reflective of what these characters would see and notice; the arrogant, self-important character is very different from the standoffish one, and then different from the man desperate to prove himself, etc. Fascinating. But she has a penchant for 800-plus pages. Oh, well, I started reading books of that length — the Star Wars novels — in the summer before eighth grade. I read a lot of 800 page books. I admit, I like them. Not too interested (at this point) to write one, though. I prefer writing 100,000 word, non-epic novels…

Anyway. Enough ranting. Back to work!