kate_nepveu: Q for those who've finished The Orphan's Tales

Kate (

kate_nepveu) wrote,
@ 2008-02-06 06:55:00

Entry tags:

books, sff

Q for those who've finished The Orphan's Tales

Do not click the cut unless you've finished both volumes of The Orphan's Tales. You won't be able to answer the question and it will ruin your reading experience. Really.

Does anyone else feel like the book's ruthless examination of fairy tale tropes failed at the last minute? Because I think that "The world is wide, and the rearing of children is a delicate thing," is a not sufficient explanation for leaving Sorrow alone and frightened for her entire life to date, and that Sorrow and the rest of the characters should not have just accepted it as such—especially when Solace grew up well and happy and didn't have to be swapped at all.

Or am I being overly sensitive to this because it's an adopted-kid fantasy?

(BTW, I was completely faked out by Solace's appearance; I said, huh, well, I was sure Sorrow was the girl in the garden, but I guess not now, and Aerie must've had her own reasons for not telling Lantern her name. The swap never occured to me, I think because I couldn't see any good reason for it.)

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	rosefox 2008-02-06 06:23 pm UTC (link)
	I had the same feeling, though for me it was when the boy and the girl headed off together into adventureland and Dinarzad was left behind. (Reply to this)(Thread)

kate_nepveu
2008-02-06 07:08 pm UTC (link)

I found that very sad, but I never got the sense that she was in a fairy tale, and so I wasn't surprised. Admittedly now I'm wondering whether the reminder of non-fairy-tale endings was necessary.

I'd also wondered whether any contrast was intended between the boy in the garden, who like the Prince of the first book renounces inherited male-line power, and Dinarzad who does what's expected of her and then feels trapped. (Or perhaps the comparison is really Dinarzad and all the other women in the stories, and the boy just comes to mind because of their relationship and location.) I didn't get any feeling of condemnation from the narrative, but the comparison did occur to me.

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tool_of_satan
2008-02-07 03:21 am UTC (link)

I did not follow why Aerie felt it necessary to swap the children, either.

Leaving Sorrow there after Zmeya visited, while cruel, I can kinda sorta see a possible explanation for - the stories at that point were fixed, so it was necessary for them to be left to play themselves out. Something like that. On the other hand, Sorrow wasn't involved in those stories, so why not take her elsewhere, even if Solace cannot be brought back to the palace?

But the original swap I don't see a motivation for. It is possible I am missing something very subtle, and if I diagrammed all the chains of cause and effect in all the stories I would find a link which makes Solace's part of the story crucial to the whole thing, or something. Even so, why wouldn't Sorrow do as well in that position?

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tool_of_satan
2008-02-07 03:06 pm UTC (link)

Further thoughts, for whatever they're worth.

Another possible explanation for leaving Sorrow in the garden is that Aerie, having had the childhood she did, is not disposed to see living outdoors being tended by birds as a problem. While I like this as an explanation (for a suitable value of "like"), the fact that Aerie simply didn't say this when asked makes it unlikely.

And of course there's still the question of why Aerie swapped the children in the first place. The only thing I have come up with so far is this: many events in these books happen twice. Suppose that they all happen twice. In that case Aerie in some sense has no choice but to swap the girls since this event has already occurred (Orfea and Ursilla) once and must be mirrored. This also serves as an explanation for leaving Sorrow in the garden, since we already had one child raised by birds and so another is required - although since both Sorrow and Solace are raised by birds, we end up with this occurring three times, which is a problem.

The big problem with this theory is that I actually don't know that everything happens twice. I have a vague sense that it might be so, but I would have had to have kept careful notes to be sure, and of course I didn't. I can think of lots of things that do happen twice, and in the ones I can think of, one event is voluntary and the other involuntary, which if a general pattern fits well with Aerie's action - Orfea and Ursilla swapped voluntarily, so an involuntary exchange was necessary.

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kate_nepveu
2008-02-07 05:31 pm UTC (link)

The cause & effect hypothesis seems unlikely, since the swap happens so late in the story.

Your doubling hypothesis is interesting, because I hadn't tracked things to that degree. I don't find it satisfying [*], but it's interesting.

[*] Basically, things happen twice: "says who?" No-one in story, that I recall, so that's the author, and then it's the same problem all over again.

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tool_of_satan
2008-02-07 06:14 pm UTC (link)

I agree with both your points.

I am not 100% sure that all the causes and effects run in the expected direction. I think they do, but it would be very possible for me to have forgotten a clue from the first volume which indicates that some event in the past is caused by something that happens after Solace is born. Which is no indication that there is such, obviously.

The doubling hypothesis is indeed arbitrary. The end of the book damaged my enjoyment of the rest of it - not fatally, but it did hurt it a bit - so I would like to rationalize it so that it no longer does so. Sadly it does not really satisfy me, either.

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