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in the Vanishers' palace
Sep. 21st, 2018 11:00 amAliette de Bodard sent me a review copy of her new novella, In the Vanishers' Palace. This book bills itself as an f/f retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It is, by a fortunate coincidence, the third queer Beauty and the Beast novella I have read this year: the others were Aster Glenn Gray's m/m fantasy Briarley, set in England during World War II, and an as-yet-unpublished aromantic take on the fairy tale, set in ancien régime France, which I will tell you all about as soon as you can buy it.
There are a set of questions that one asks when embarking on a retelling of Beauty and the Beast: how was the Beast transformed? Who are the Beast's invisible servants? What is the palace? Who is the fairy that transformed them all? Wasn't it immoral to curse an entire palace and all of its inhabitants, along with the Beast? How can the Beast justify trapping another person in an enchanted palace, no matter what promises have been made about love? Who are Beauty's family, and why did they agree to give Beauty up?
Briarley answers these questions head-on; its invisible servants, in particular, are delightful. In the Vanishers' Palace offers layers of hypotheses. It's not so much a retelling of Beauty and the Beast as an argument with it. In true fairy-tale fashion, the argument focuses on what is beautiful and what is good. (I'm sorting out my own argument about structure, here, so my language is necessarily stark. That's a disservice to the book's sense of beauty, which is complex and made of shifting light.)
In the first layer of answers, Beauty is Yên, a poor teacher who lives with her mother the doctor because she has failed the imperial exams. The Beast is Vu Côn, a dragon. She's a river spirit, with antlers, whose robe trails water and words. Like Yên's mother, Vu Côn is also a doctor: she takes Yên as the price for a magical healing, and Yên goes because the elders of her village are willing to trade her away. The palace belonged to the Vanishers, beings who manipulated genes and magic, broke the world, and left. That makes the Vanishers our fairy, in some sense, and their vanishing the curse.
The next layer becomes evident when we ask who was transformed, and why. Vu Côn is a dragon; but she has always been a dragon. She shifts between more-human and more-draconic forms for her own reasons, not the Vanishers'. Perhaps it would make more sense to think of Vu Côn as one of the palace's servants: she served the Vanishers, and she's still trying to carry out the duties of a dragon, even though the context of her work is gone and the world has changed around her. Meanwhile, Yên's shape is less certain. She's not a constant, steady Beauty; she doesn't know how she fits into either the village or her palace, and that uncertainty of mind is mirrored by an uncertainty of body, flickers in her pulse, a sudden intuition for magic.
Maybe the entire planet is the palace: after all, the Vanishers changed it, and then left. There's no easy spell to make it right again, though; kisses won't restore things, true love or not. The only answers here are partial and contingent. Much of the tension of this book involves the pull between power, duty, and responsibility: when do you have to try to fix things? If you broke them the first time, when do you have to try again? When is it your duty to sort things out on your own, and when do you need to ask for help?
One of the things I admire about this book is the way it takes both healing and teaching seriously as forms of power. The men who matter in this book (Vu Côn's husband, a farmer, a legendary scholar) all happen to have died before the story starts. We see women and nonbinary people trying to sort out what to do with the world. In particular, we see some of them grabbing for power and fucking things up. Healing and teaching are often coded as feminine, subservient, and selfless, but this story centers on the ways they are aggressive. These are forms of leadership, decisiveness, imposing your will on the world and pulling other people with you.
Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you fall in love with a river.
There are a set of questions that one asks when embarking on a retelling of Beauty and the Beast: how was the Beast transformed? Who are the Beast's invisible servants? What is the palace? Who is the fairy that transformed them all? Wasn't it immoral to curse an entire palace and all of its inhabitants, along with the Beast? How can the Beast justify trapping another person in an enchanted palace, no matter what promises have been made about love? Who are Beauty's family, and why did they agree to give Beauty up?
Briarley answers these questions head-on; its invisible servants, in particular, are delightful. In the Vanishers' Palace offers layers of hypotheses. It's not so much a retelling of Beauty and the Beast as an argument with it. In true fairy-tale fashion, the argument focuses on what is beautiful and what is good. (I'm sorting out my own argument about structure, here, so my language is necessarily stark. That's a disservice to the book's sense of beauty, which is complex and made of shifting light.)
In the first layer of answers, Beauty is Yên, a poor teacher who lives with her mother the doctor because she has failed the imperial exams. The Beast is Vu Côn, a dragon. She's a river spirit, with antlers, whose robe trails water and words. Like Yên's mother, Vu Côn is also a doctor: she takes Yên as the price for a magical healing, and Yên goes because the elders of her village are willing to trade her away. The palace belonged to the Vanishers, beings who manipulated genes and magic, broke the world, and left. That makes the Vanishers our fairy, in some sense, and their vanishing the curse.
The next layer becomes evident when we ask who was transformed, and why. Vu Côn is a dragon; but she has always been a dragon. She shifts between more-human and more-draconic forms for her own reasons, not the Vanishers'. Perhaps it would make more sense to think of Vu Côn as one of the palace's servants: she served the Vanishers, and she's still trying to carry out the duties of a dragon, even though the context of her work is gone and the world has changed around her. Meanwhile, Yên's shape is less certain. She's not a constant, steady Beauty; she doesn't know how she fits into either the village or her palace, and that uncertainty of mind is mirrored by an uncertainty of body, flickers in her pulse, a sudden intuition for magic.
Maybe the entire planet is the palace: after all, the Vanishers changed it, and then left. There's no easy spell to make it right again, though; kisses won't restore things, true love or not. The only answers here are partial and contingent. Much of the tension of this book involves the pull between power, duty, and responsibility: when do you have to try to fix things? If you broke them the first time, when do you have to try again? When is it your duty to sort things out on your own, and when do you need to ask for help?
One of the things I admire about this book is the way it takes both healing and teaching seriously as forms of power. The men who matter in this book (Vu Côn's husband, a farmer, a legendary scholar) all happen to have died before the story starts. We see women and nonbinary people trying to sort out what to do with the world. In particular, we see some of them grabbing for power and fucking things up. Healing and teaching are often coded as feminine, subservient, and selfless, but this story centers on the ways they are aggressive. These are forms of leadership, decisiveness, imposing your will on the world and pulling other people with you.
Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you fall in love with a river.