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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

Text

The Oracle Renamed

by Robinson L

Monday, 21 September 2009

Robinson L hops halfheartedly aboard the Catherine Fisher bandwagon.~

Listen ... I will trust you. There's no one else, and I will be dead soon. The Speaker is corrupt. The Oracle is being betrayed. Burn this. Stay alive.

So reads the teaser on the dust jacket of Catherine Fisher's 2004 fantasy novel, The Oracle, first book in The Oracle Prophecies trilogy. For reasons I cannot fathom, the titles of all the books in the trilogy were changed for the US editions. So, for instance, both copies of The Oracle I read bore the title The Oracle Betrayed. (I went with a picture of the US edition only because I much prefer that one's cover design.)

Kyra's reviews of Incarceron and Corbenic convinced me to give Catherine Fisher a try. Unfortunately, Incarceron hasn't been released on this side of the pond, and the Corbenic review, while convincing me of the need to read something of Fisher's, did not convince me of the need to read that particular book.

Therefore, when my mum and I needed a book to read over the summer, I browsed my library system's limited catalogue of Catherine Fisher's works, and eventually selected

The Oracle

. I only realized as we were about to dive in that it was the first book in a trilogy. Still, better than the second or third book in a trilogy, eh?

Minor spoilers ahead.

With

The Oracle

, Catherine Fisher has created a fairly well-developed fantasy world, with obvious Egyptian influences, and perhaps a slight flavor of Greco-Roman thrown in.

It's helpful to keep these influences in mind, for though

The Oracle

only concerns itself with one god, and contains only vague allusions to the existence of others, the metaphysics involved are clearly closer to those at work in Egyptian or Roman mythology than in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic canon(s). The god involved, while greater than humanity, is not the all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere-residing entity preached by Judeo-Christian or Islamic faiths.

The story revolves around Mirany, a young woman recently inducted into the Nine, the entourage of the god. In her duties as Bearer-of-the-God, Mirany is witness to the death of the Archon, the god's human vessel on earth. Before he dies, the Archon slips Mirany an expanded version of the note from the beginning of this review.

In the note, he explains that Hermia, the Speaker-to-the-God—who supposedly consults with the titular Oracle to learn the god's will, is corrupt, ignoring the god's voice and following her own will in partnership with General Argelin. The note warns that when it comes time to appoint the next Archon, Argelin and Hermia will choose their own puppet, rather than the true vessel of the god. It charges Mirany to find the next Archon, and prevent Hermia and Argelin from installing their puppet.

Mirany soon enlists the assistance of Seth, a young Palace scribe, and Obleck, a gruff old musician and former friend and confidant of the old Archon. Together, these three plot to put the true Archon in his rightful place, thwart the schemes of Hermia and General Argelin, and return the rains to a drought-parched land.

On the whole the book is, well, decent. The characters are familiar-feeling but reasonably good, as is the plot. The world-building and the exploration of metaphysical and philosophical concepts might have raised

The Oracle

from reasonableness to greatness, but while interesting, they don't really seem to go anywhere. There's no sense of payoff at the end.

The first part of the book is the superior portion, in which Fisher introduces us to characters, setting, and plot, and manages to stir her readers' sense of wonder and excitement (see the opening quote again). By the time she gets two-thirds of the way through, though, Fisher has run out of surprises for her audience, and then it's just a question of marking time and working out the exact details.

As with

Incarceron

The Oracle

ends abruptly, on the cusp of change, with little in the way of

denouement

between climax and ending. Again, this is not a problem, but the climax is also lacklustre and a little confusing. I get the feeling that Fisher had a really great ending in her head which didn't coalesce so neatly on paper. As it is, the finale is adequate, no more.

And while the prose is generally pretty good, occasionally Fisher's word processor throws up an eyesore like this:

behind her the cacophony of the trumpeters and drummers was loud as pain,

Or this:

A strange warped music was all that came down to them, its syllables oddly lengthened, a language filtered through strata and stone, without meaning, translated to mystery.

I hate to be unkind to Ms. Fisher, but I might just turn “translated to mystery” into a catchphrase.

In case you hadn't guessed yet, reading

The Oracle

was not the mind-blowing experience for me that reading

Incarceron

apparently was for Kyra. On the other hand, here and there throughout

The Oracle

there are glimmerings of potential that—with a couple years' honing—could believably develop into the awesomeness our esteemed editor describes.

Fisher has a good eye and a steady hand for crafting tension and addressing obstacles. Round about what would be Chapter 9 if they were numbered, Seth and Obleck set off to find the new Archon in a place called Alectro. In the next chapter, they not only find Alectro, but the young Archon himself. All in one chapter. If Rowling had been writing this book, it would've taken them

at least

two chapters to find Alectro, and another chapter or two to find the Archon, and that's assuming they didn't decide to go camping ...

Another time, about midway through the book, General Argelin has caught Mirany doing something suspicious, and says he will “discuss it with her later,” leaving Mirany to worry that he knows she's on to him, and will have her arrested. They have their confrontation in the next chapter, rather than a hundred pages down the line.

A third example: Hermia learns where the true Archon is being kept, necessitating his removal to another part of the island. The only ones who knew of his whereabouts were Mirany and her only friend in the Palace, Chryse. Mirany confronts Chryse a couple pages later, not only avoiding the Rowling convention of letting a plot thread stagnate for ten chapters with no forward motion, but also dodging the Veronica Mars imperative to take circumstantial evidence for ironclad proof and set about plotting revenge, or something equally disastrous.

Another aspect which shows promise is the characters and their interactions with each other, especially Mirany's with the other Nine. In

The Oracle

, Fisher seems not to have figured out how to handle her minor characters — a problem which is also evident in Terry Pratchett's early

Discworld

novels - but there's an originality to the relationships of the Nine which hint at a great potential for characterization once Fisher has mastered her technique.

At 333 pages in hardcover, the book is not short, but is not exactly long, either. It's also listed as Young Adult, but you wouldn't know it by reading it, unless the publishers' criteria for “Young Adult” consists entirely of “anything lacking excessive amounts of sex and violence.” Not that I think

The Oracle

would be inaccessible to a Young Adult audience, just that I don't see it as being particularly aimed at that demographic.

I can only give

The Oracle

a lukewarm recommendation, but I'm still interested in looking at some of Fisher's more recent work to see how much it's improved.Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Young Adult / Children

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~Comments (

go to latest

)

Wardog

at 15:56 on 2009-09-21*weeps bitter tears*

I'm only halfway through so and I've actually really loved it so far so I shall save my response until then.

It's just possible you have no soul.

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Arthur B

at 15:58 on 2009-09-21What's wrong with "translated to mystery"?

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Wardog

at 17:19 on 2009-09-21I have to admit, I was wondering that, but given how totally biased I am in favour of Mrs Fisher I am I didn't want to be the first to say :)

"behind her the cacophony of the trumpeters and drummers was loud as pain" is not so gret aktually.

But I quite like the paragraph about the strange warped music. I think it's real purty. "A language filtered through strata and stone" is gorgeous.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-09-21

It's just possible you have no soul.

Ooh, that's harsh.

Yes, "A language filtered through strata and stone" is very good, it's the next part, I feel, which crimps the sentence. I suppose the real meme should be "

without meaning

, translated to mystery." So you're saying that what we have here is something which doesn't mean anything translated into something which makes no sense?

It seems to me there was another awkward phrase which gave me pause early on in the book, but I can't remember any details about it.

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Arthur B

at 21:01 on 2009-09-21

So you're saying that what we have here is something which doesn't mean anything translated into something which makes no sense?

I read it as something which doesn't mean anything translated into something which sounds like it means something, which is entirely in keeping with the idea that the half-heard music sounds a bit like a strange, unknown language to the listener.

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Jamie Johnston

at 23:48 on 2009-09-21If we're playing 'find the favourable interpretation' (which is a game I always enjoy):

In what sounds like it might possibly be a ritual context, and especially given the Egyptian / Graeco-Roman frame of reference, could 'mystery' perhaps have a connotation closer to its original meaning of 'ritual secret'? And [he says, becoming less plausible by the second] could 'translated' perhaps also have a flavour of the medieval usage in which the 'translation' of a saint meant the physical moving of the saint's remains or relics from one church to another?

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Robinson L

at 00:02 on 2009-09-22@Arthur: Clearly we read that sentence very differently.

@Jamie: I tried out what I

think

all that would come to in my head, and it makes even less sense.

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Jamie Johnston

at 00:11 on 2009-09-22Probably! :)

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Shim

at 09:40 on 2009-09-23

A strange warped music was all that came down to them, its syllables oddly lengthened, a language filtered through strata and stone, without meaning, translated to mystery.

See, I have no problem at all with that. I don't understand why you're all reading it as sequential. Surely then, "without meaning" would be earlier and not form its own subclause. To me, "without meaning" and "translated to mystery" are different ways of expressing the oddness of it. Just like if I say, oh, "she was a dark woman, like a whip, slender and strong", it doesn't mean the woman was like an unusually slender and strong whip. I'm sure someone can write a better example... Basically I read it as saying the original meaning has been lost, and "warped", "filtered" and "translated" are all parallel.

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Arthur B

at 12:56 on 2009-09-23To be fair, I think it's usually natural to read that sort of thing sequentially because, well, language is a series of words arranged in an intelligible sequence. And if you read the bits of the sentence as synonymous statements existing in parallel, then Fisher is basically stating the same thing over and over again in the same sentence with massive redundancy, which is usually a bad habit.

I think it's a lovely bit of writing however you interpret it.

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Wardog

at 13:17 on 2009-09-23Oi, I wasn't reading it sequentially... I just like it =P

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Shim

at 14:41 on 2009-09-23Sorry Kyra, didn't mean you!

Okay Arthur, I see your point, and to be fair, if that had been pretty much any other subclause that would work best. I suppose the thing is, here is doesn't make much sense when read sequentially, and the meaning you get from sequential reading would be more naturally expressed another way, so I assumed it wasn't sequential. Metaphorical writing is a bit weird though. I personally really like the sentence as well (I suspect my writing tends to use subclauses like that, so I may be biased).

It's a bit like "Opening the door and running upstairs, he leapt through the broken window," which people condemn on logical grounds, but can and should be read in the way that actually makes sense.

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Arthur B

at 14:56 on 2009-09-23

I suppose the thing is, here is doesn't make much sense when read sequentially, and the meaning you get from sequential reading would be more naturally expressed another way, so I assumed it wasn't sequential.

"Natural" ain't always "best", though. I like the sentence the same way I like Jack Vance's dialogue: nobody actually talks that way, but it's so gorgeously crafted you don't care.

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Shim

at 15:53 on 2009-09-23

...the meaning you get from sequential reading would be more naturally expressed another way, so I assumed it wasn't sequential. "Natural" ain't always "best", though.

Okay, from Arthur's response I'm not sure I explained what I meant very well, so I'll do a better explanation for my peace of mind. I meant something like:

a) read sequentially, it can be interpreted as "

X (which is without meaning) has been translated to mystery

". As Robinson says, this doesn't seem to make much sense.

b) if I

wanted

to say that the music (or the language) had no meaning, I would write "

music without meaning..., translated to mystery

" or something, which seems a "more natural" (as I phrased it) way to express that meaning.

c) given a and b, this sequential reading is quite likely not the reading the writer intended. Since there is an alternative reading available, which seems to make more sense, that seems preferable. So I assume that was the reading they intended.

Of course, b) is subjective, and I can't always assume the writer is like me, or that my intuitions on "natural" expression are universal. Some writers' styles are very different from what I'd write, or they're deliberately vague and "artistic". How generously writers get benefits of the doubt and alternative readings also depends on how much they try my patience.

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Arthur B

at 15:57 on 2009-09-23

a) read sequentially, it can be interpreted as "X (which is without meaning) has been translated to mystery". As Robinson says, this doesn't seem to make much sense.

I think this is where we need to just disagree: I think it makes complete sense. Mysteries imply a solution, which in turn implies a meaning; turning meaninglessness into a mystery would entail creating the impression of a hidden meaning where there is, in fact, none.

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Shim

at 09:37 on 2009-09-24

I think this is where we need to just disagree: I think it makes complete sense.

Another apology - I don't actually disagree, I quite like your interpretation and in that reading it does make sense.

On the other hand, I wasn't using this sense of "mystery" when I wrote either comment, but a general idea of something the listener doesn't understand (without your undertone that there might be something to understand), more like Robinson's definition - and I'd say that sense supports my comment.

This may be a good time for me to abandon textual analysis.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-09-24*Changing his story slightly yet again*

I guess I'm still stuck on "translated" as meaning "turning something you can't understand into something you will understand" with "mystery" meaning "something which you don't understand."

"Without meaning" only compounds the problem, whether we take "translated to mystery" to refer to it, or both of them to refer back to "a strange warped music etc."

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Arthur B

at 20:36 on 2009-09-24Ah.

I don't think translated means what you think it means. :)

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Andy G

at 21:11 on 2009-09-24Having worked as a translator for a year, I can assure you that "to translate" very often means "turning something neither you nor anyone who's actually a native speaker of the language understand into something else you don't understand in such a way that you can cover your ass with bullshit excuses if it turns out it didn't mean what you half-guessed it might mean"*.

So it actually makes a lot of sense to me - if the original text is gibberish, you hedge your bets and translate it with something vaguely suggestive of meaning.

* Disclaimer: I can't think how to say this without using American English, even though I know I would sound utterly ridiculous if I said it out loud rather than merely typing it.

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Jamie Johnston

at 22:53 on 2009-09-24Still no takers for my implausible medieval interpretation of the word 'translated'? :(

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Rami

at 06:57 on 2009-09-25I'm still holding out for 'translated' meaning a mathematical transformation, and 'mystery' being a secret notation for the new coordinates of the gibberish.

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Wardog

at 12:23 on 2009-10-05Now that we've dealt with this sticky 'translation' issue is there a more general feeling that Catherine Fisher is AWESOME, yet?

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Robinson L

at 15:00 on 2009-10-06

Now that we've dealt with this sticky 'translation' issue is there a more general feeling that Catherine Fisher is AWESOME, yet?

Fine with me. I haven't read

The Scarab

Corbenic

yet, though, and until somebody brings up another specific aspect of

The Oracle

to discuss, I've said my piece on that score.

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Robinson L

at 15:00 on 2009-10-16Oh wait, I did think of something. There's a part towards the end of the book where Mirany is telling the new Archon (the living vessel of the God) that the God has promised her that she'll be all right, too which the young Archon replies: "Yes, but what if the God lies?"

Now that

an awesome line, and it opens up an infinite number of interesting possibilities about where the story will go. Unfortunately, none of the possibilities is followed up in

The Oracle

, but maybe in

The Scarab

The Archon?

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Wardog

at 11:26 on 2009-10-20I'm probably going to read them all - I generally found The Oracle a much more positive and interesting experience than you did... but I'll refrain from comment until I've done the lot of them. The book is so obviously an opening that it's pretty difficult to review.

#Ferretbrain #Robinson L #Catherin Fisher #The Oracle Prophecies

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