#& beyond the persistent “back in x year “back when I fought y or Baz did z etc etc

[goosegirlandfalada]

I was thinking about why Carry On works for me when typically I like minimal exposition! I like being dropped into a story and figuring it out as we go along. Some of my favorite books are like that. And a lot of Carry On is spent on the past, musing over memory & history. I think it works for me because it feels very grounded in the Simon’s personality and emotional experience. He truly doesn’t believe he has a future… so of course he treads over the past.

That’s part of why it works for me: it feels emotionally honest.

In the story, this backwards focus serves several purposes: it orients us at the end of the heroes journey (think of your life flashing before your eyes before you die) and it builds up the color and weight of Watford & by extension the world of magic. It suspends us in Watford’s history & Simon’s longing. Which I think creates a nice tension w the end, we’ve spent the book thinking about Simon’s story and what it means for him that he has lived this life and how it seems totally at odds with a future. And we know that he loves magic, we feel it viscerally in his descriptions. And then he loses a heroic end AND a life with magic. He gains a future but it’s not any kind of future he might have imagined. This then carries us into the next books where things are so radically different, which for all their sadness feel more hopeful than Carry On lol

*(and the rest of the series but i have a whole other list of things I love for those)