Book #192 of 2021:
Fable of the Swan by Jenna Katerin Moran
This is without a doubt one of the strangest books I’ve ever encountered. It’s weird fiction in every sense of the term, the sort of story that has to teach you how to interpret its slipstream oddities as you go along, and even at the end, I’m not sure that I understand the rules of the setting well enough to articulate them back here. (It’s also apparently connected with author Jenna Katerin Moran’s “Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine” tabletop RPG, although I don’t know how directly the properties intersect. There’s not anything/body named Chuubo in the novel.)
In broad strokes, I guess this is Young Adult fantasy. The protagonist is a nameless teenage girl, who goes to school with the descendants of frost giants and other primordial beings who have retained a fragment of their ancient family powers. Gradually, she comes to realize that her entire reality is a lie, an illusion which periodically rewrites itself to erase the elements that don’t fit, and she desperately seeks a way to break through to the True Thing underneath, which may just be absolute nothingness. This occasionally manifests in casual declarations that she’d like to destroy the world and/or kill everyone in it.
Early on in the tale, the heroine’s first boyfriend rips her heart out. That’s not a metaphor — he literally reaches inside her chest while kissing her, extracts her core essence in the form of a bloody and jagged mechanical key, and uses it to fuel his magic. All that’s left is an emotionless husk of an automaton, unrecognizable to most of her friends, who nevertheless continues to walk around, talk, and narrate for us. I think there’s a possible interpretation of the text where events like that are seen as simply a stylized way to describe heightened juvenile emotions, but as written, it’s all on the level: anyone can turn people into the raw materials for sorcery, presuming they have the stomach for the violation and the gore. Our narrator does so at several points herself as she attempts to force open the gates keeping existence from the void, even after getting her own personhood restored to her.
It’s all very off-putting, especially at the beginning, before readers have any idea what’s going on. It doesn’t help that the writer sometimes drops into an archaic and formalized poetic register, with run-on sentences, faux-biblical diction, and odd resumptive pronouns: “Like fields of grain they then were they, unending miles of them, teeming seamless seas of them, cold-hearted people they the kingdom of Death they were, the people born of it there they, arising there they or previously preceding, if such they’d ever done: arising, originating, flowing forth from some an unknown origin they who were them their kingdom in the dark.” I mean… what is one to do with that, really?
In the final analysis I’m not entirely convinced this is my kind of narrative, and I honestly might have put it down if it hadn’t been selected for me to read and review by a generous Gold-tier donor on my Patreon page. Aside from the overall weirdness noted above, there are definite weaknesses to the plot, including a fairly passive main character and worldbuilding that’s so open and undefined that no new development is ever particularly surprising. At the same time, though, I find that I can’t stop turning it over in my mind, and it is certainly unlike anything else I can remember reading. It’s extremely funny too, with punchlines that wouldn’t necessarily work in a more grounded title. The balance of frustration to entertainment probably varies among different audiences, but I’m mostly impressed by how distinctive it is, and that’s ultimately worth a high critical rating in my view.
★★★★☆
–Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!–
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 
Leave a comment