Victoria Goddard and Her Works
Jul. 12th, 2023 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidge A few months ago, I ran across a reference by Jo Walton in one of her Tor reading lists to a work by Victoria Goddard, whom I had never encountered before. A quick check around the net revealed a large number of very positive reviews of Goddard's work, so I decided to check her work out.
(Note that as Goddard is self-published, her work is quite reasonable in price if bought as e-books but fairly pricey if bought as hardcopy. E-books are available directly from her website or via various other sites (though not from Google Books).)
Goddard is good, and worth recommending, although she is not quite as good as many of her more enthusiastic reviewers would make her out to be. The discussion below is (of necessity) rather full of spoilers.
Strengths
There are three areas where she shines. First, and most generally, she is tremendously humane writer; her viewpoint characters are (usually)[1] very easy to empathise with and, their values generally reflect a high degree of civilisation. The contexts of her narratives -- mainly two worlds which are, at least locally and in the present, well-governed and generally prosperous -- are, one might say, the antithesis of grimdark. She is essentially a comic writer.
[1] with one notable exception, who is not only more difficult to identify with but whose internal consciousness has elements of "that which I would, I do not; that which I would not, that I do". The notable exception is not a failure; in fact a little more shadow in some of her characters might make for more interesting and complex work.
Secondly, putting to one side a tendency to make her central characters rather better than the average run of people both in capability and in inclination she is a fine delineator of character detail. Her characters are, put simply, pleasant to be with because they are interesting.
Thirdly, although she has structural issues, she is very good at setting up and presenting set piece scenes (occasionally, cascades of scenes). Such scenes as the opening of the Symphony where the identity of Cliopher's "my Lord" becomes clear to everyone is a prime example; so is the scene where Jullanar is divorcing her husband.
Editing
That being said, she could really improve in a number of ways.
She is self-published; her work shows the lack of really strong editorial input, at several scales.
Her longer books are, as Henry James said of Trollope's work, "large, loose, baggy monsters". In many cases they are essentially episodic; there is one arc which defines the beginning and the end, but there are many incidents which are there not because they are integral to the arc of the novel but because the author liked them enough to put them in. Sometimes the end is poorly or arbitrarily defined. At the Feet of the Sun does not so much have a clean ending as an arbitrary cutoff (followed by a coda which jumps forward in time and points in the direction of closure but is disconnected in time and place from the rest of the book).
The Hands of the Emperor could do with some tightening up; At the Feet of the Sun badly needs editing down to reduce repetitive elements. Even the shorter Greenwing and Dart books, which are really slices of one long narrative, vary between fairly tight plot arcs (Love-in-A-Mist) to fairly arbitrary truncation (Plum Duff). The issues raised at the beginning of the first book, defining one thematic narrative arc, take three volumes to (mainly) resolve (one thread has to wait for the next book).
Many plot elements are driven by coincidence. In a few cases this actually grows out of the plot; in The Return of Fitzroy Agursell the tendency of his wild magic to generate improbable coincidences is a plot point. But in many cases this is another pointer to an architectural sense which might be improved.
At a micro level, more attention could be paid to diction. The Greenwing and Dart books are explicitly comedies of manners; they echo (in particular) Heyer (Austen never uses slang; but "bear-leader", for example, is a Regency term present in Heyer and in these works). But when characters use intrusive of, which is very much a twenty-first century usage (and just feels flat-out wrong to someone of even my age), it breaks my WSOD: "It's not that big of a mystery".
At a substantive level, I keep raising eyebrows at some of the implicit economics underlying her invented worlds. These are places where magic was so fundamental to everyday life that people relied on it for domestic heat and light; presumably it was also critical for agriculture. With the Fall of Astandalas it goes away -- its use then, in fact, being rejected by a significant set of Alinorel locations -- and although there are references to famines in some places as side-effects of the fall, notably in Petty Treasons, the degree of disruption to basic functioning of the society at just about every level this implies seems to be remarkably small.
The levels of productivity needed to support, say, Cliopher's minimum guaranteed income scheme, or the middle-class life of rural Alinor in Ragnor Bella was not reached, in our world, until after the first stages of the agricultural and technical revolutions -- at a minimum by the early 19th Century and rather later for other aspects.
The way in which bookstores are patronized suggests a cost of production requiring not just the use of movable type but the types of improvement associated with the development of Linotype in the 19th Century; Jane Austen's heroines don't patronize bookstores, they patronize lending libraries (Mr. Bennet buys his books, but he is a well-off gentlemen among a very small group in his village.) There is a throwaway reference to Regency-style three volume novels but the social and economic dynamics around books are those of the early to mid-Twentieth Century.
I can believe in a magically-enhanced economy which can reach that level, but I find it very hard to believe that the collapse of magic at the fall of Astandalas would not have blown such an economy to bits over an extended timeframe, with effects like a massive reduction in the population taking generations to recover from.
The Alionorel religion looks implausibly like rural English Christianity of the early 19th Century with the lady pasted over the Christian God not only as far as the social patterns and architecture go but even down to the text of a grace at table from the BCP which echoes a grace with a long history going back to the Roman Breviary. This just doesn't feel plausible. Parallel development can go only so far. Even if the ultimate underlying deity is identical to the Christian God (it's clear from what the Hunter in the Green says that the Lady is essentially at the level of a Tolkienian Vala) - certainly in the air as a possibility in the Ysthar books - the way on which it is expressed ought to diverge from the rural C of E at least as much as that in, say, the Ethiopian Church does.
(When Jemis dies and meets the Lady, by the way, the experience looks a *lot* like that from C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce even down to the mountains in the background combined with aspects of Dante's Ante-Purgatory, with a bit of universalism mixed in along with some Manichaeanism; I would argue for direct influence there. Dante would be unsurprising, as Goddard's thesis was on Dante; the Lewis is a little bit more unexpected.)
An editor with an ear tuned to substantive plausibility might significantly improve some of these matters, or at least ensure that whatever the author has in mind to make this sort of thing plausible would be expressed.
Characterisation
In general Goddard's characters are basically decent and well-meaning. It may be just a tic that the ones who aren't are pretty unreservedly bad, and that they all come from one walk of life, the aristocracy. (There are also lots of good aristocrats. Jemis is an aristocrat. But it's hard to think of antagonists who are neither aristocrats nor are trying to be aristocrats, and hard to think of any who are tragic rather than, essentially, melodramatic.[1] Prince Rufus represents the aristocratic party formally and he does, indeed, have redeeming qualities, but he's not a villain in terms of his function in the plot. He's more like Sir William Lucas, in the end )
[1]There's one exception: one of Cliopher's cousins who seems to have no redeeming virtues. Close reading, however, will indicate that the side of the family *not* related to Cliopher is ... noble or at least gentle in origin. Perhaps his mother, Cliopher's aunt, might also count.
She does provide her characters with enough in the way of characterization that it would be inaccurate to say that she deploys perfect characters. They have social flaws (and spend significant time working through them). That being said, her central characters go well beyond the levels of competence and/or achievement needed for their stories. Cliopher from the beginning is a very highly competent bureaucrat and statesman: that's a condition of his character at base. But making him, in addition, a hero dealing with world-changing mythic encounters (as At the Feet of the Sun does) and a key figure for the future transmission of part of his culture, the only person left who can perform the greater fire dances, piles Pelion on Ossa. Having a brilliant and subversive poet/trickster figure as a character central to the entire oeuvre is fundamental to the way the stories have been built from the beginning; making him an exceptionally good governor when his context changes is not really necessary. Jemis Greenwing is an intelligent, principled, and incident-prone young man; by four volumes into the series featuring him he has become a saint of the local deity, and not only comfortably well-off but extremely rich. All three of the above probably qualify as multi-ordinal geniuses. Pali is not only the second best sword-fighter in nine worlds (and at least once beat the best one in single combat); she also has a second career as a prominent and distinguished academic.
It's clear from some of the things Goddard herself has said that she doesn't write to pre-planned detailed arcs, and that her work goes in unexpected (to her) directions as she writes. Cliopher was originally supposed to be a small vignette around the story of the Last Emperor; the Greenwing and Dart series has expanded beyond the scope she originally intended. One can see that the backbone of the larger narrative was already present quite early on (the Red Company and its members, the Fall of Astandalas, and Antonin Damara as a powerful magician after the Fall, Pali as a professor of history, can all be extracted from the early Ysthar stories and "In the Company of Gentlemen", also early), but a very large quantity of her work is actually ancillary or peripheral to that primary plot line, even allowing for Greenwing and Dart as a separate conception from the point of view of both tone and plot from the beginning.
This is in itself in no way a problem. But it does tend to mean that without careful revision there will be weaker structure and sometimes small inconsistencies. (There are two different backgrounds given for "The Hands of the Emperor" as a title in different works. It's pretty well inconceivable that someone studying for the comprehensive and difficult civil service examinations would not be fully conversant with the title of the head of the civil service; likewise, Cliopher at one point refers to the presence of his name on all sorts of general official government documents; but then one (or more) of the local employees of the offices in Gorjo City would long ago have recognized their cousin's name on whole sets of official documents.)
(Note that as Goddard is self-published, her work is quite reasonable in price if bought as e-books but fairly pricey if bought as hardcopy. E-books are available directly from her website or via various other sites (though not from Google Books).)
Goddard is good, and worth recommending, although she is not quite as good as many of her more enthusiastic reviewers would make her out to be. The discussion below is (of necessity) rather full of spoilers.
Strengths
There are three areas where she shines. First, and most generally, she is tremendously humane writer; her viewpoint characters are (usually)[1] very easy to empathise with and, their values generally reflect a high degree of civilisation. The contexts of her narratives -- mainly two worlds which are, at least locally and in the present, well-governed and generally prosperous -- are, one might say, the antithesis of grimdark. She is essentially a comic writer.
[1] with one notable exception, who is not only more difficult to identify with but whose internal consciousness has elements of "that which I would, I do not; that which I would not, that I do". The notable exception is not a failure; in fact a little more shadow in some of her characters might make for more interesting and complex work.
Secondly, putting to one side a tendency to make her central characters rather better than the average run of people both in capability and in inclination she is a fine delineator of character detail. Her characters are, put simply, pleasant to be with because they are interesting.
Thirdly, although she has structural issues, she is very good at setting up and presenting set piece scenes (occasionally, cascades of scenes). Such scenes as the opening of the Symphony where the identity of Cliopher's "my Lord" becomes clear to everyone is a prime example; so is the scene where Jullanar is divorcing her husband.
Editing
That being said, she could really improve in a number of ways.
She is self-published; her work shows the lack of really strong editorial input, at several scales.
Her longer books are, as Henry James said of Trollope's work, "large, loose, baggy monsters". In many cases they are essentially episodic; there is one arc which defines the beginning and the end, but there are many incidents which are there not because they are integral to the arc of the novel but because the author liked them enough to put them in. Sometimes the end is poorly or arbitrarily defined. At the Feet of the Sun does not so much have a clean ending as an arbitrary cutoff (followed by a coda which jumps forward in time and points in the direction of closure but is disconnected in time and place from the rest of the book).
The Hands of the Emperor could do with some tightening up; At the Feet of the Sun badly needs editing down to reduce repetitive elements. Even the shorter Greenwing and Dart books, which are really slices of one long narrative, vary between fairly tight plot arcs (Love-in-A-Mist) to fairly arbitrary truncation (Plum Duff). The issues raised at the beginning of the first book, defining one thematic narrative arc, take three volumes to (mainly) resolve (one thread has to wait for the next book).
Many plot elements are driven by coincidence. In a few cases this actually grows out of the plot; in The Return of Fitzroy Agursell the tendency of his wild magic to generate improbable coincidences is a plot point. But in many cases this is another pointer to an architectural sense which might be improved.
At a micro level, more attention could be paid to diction. The Greenwing and Dart books are explicitly comedies of manners; they echo (in particular) Heyer (Austen never uses slang; but "bear-leader", for example, is a Regency term present in Heyer and in these works). But when characters use intrusive of, which is very much a twenty-first century usage (and just feels flat-out wrong to someone of even my age), it breaks my WSOD: "It's not that big of a mystery".
At a substantive level, I keep raising eyebrows at some of the implicit economics underlying her invented worlds. These are places where magic was so fundamental to everyday life that people relied on it for domestic heat and light; presumably it was also critical for agriculture. With the Fall of Astandalas it goes away -- its use then, in fact, being rejected by a significant set of Alinorel locations -- and although there are references to famines in some places as side-effects of the fall, notably in Petty Treasons, the degree of disruption to basic functioning of the society at just about every level this implies seems to be remarkably small.
The levels of productivity needed to support, say, Cliopher's minimum guaranteed income scheme, or the middle-class life of rural Alinor in Ragnor Bella was not reached, in our world, until after the first stages of the agricultural and technical revolutions -- at a minimum by the early 19th Century and rather later for other aspects.
The way in which bookstores are patronized suggests a cost of production requiring not just the use of movable type but the types of improvement associated with the development of Linotype in the 19th Century; Jane Austen's heroines don't patronize bookstores, they patronize lending libraries (Mr. Bennet buys his books, but he is a well-off gentlemen among a very small group in his village.) There is a throwaway reference to Regency-style three volume novels but the social and economic dynamics around books are those of the early to mid-Twentieth Century.
I can believe in a magically-enhanced economy which can reach that level, but I find it very hard to believe that the collapse of magic at the fall of Astandalas would not have blown such an economy to bits over an extended timeframe, with effects like a massive reduction in the population taking generations to recover from.
The Alionorel religion looks implausibly like rural English Christianity of the early 19th Century with the lady pasted over the Christian God not only as far as the social patterns and architecture go but even down to the text of a grace at table from the BCP which echoes a grace with a long history going back to the Roman Breviary. This just doesn't feel plausible. Parallel development can go only so far. Even if the ultimate underlying deity is identical to the Christian God (it's clear from what the Hunter in the Green says that the Lady is essentially at the level of a Tolkienian Vala) - certainly in the air as a possibility in the Ysthar books - the way on which it is expressed ought to diverge from the rural C of E at least as much as that in, say, the Ethiopian Church does.
(When Jemis dies and meets the Lady, by the way, the experience looks a *lot* like that from C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce even down to the mountains in the background combined with aspects of Dante's Ante-Purgatory, with a bit of universalism mixed in along with some Manichaeanism; I would argue for direct influence there. Dante would be unsurprising, as Goddard's thesis was on Dante; the Lewis is a little bit more unexpected.)
An editor with an ear tuned to substantive plausibility might significantly improve some of these matters, or at least ensure that whatever the author has in mind to make this sort of thing plausible would be expressed.
Characterisation
In general Goddard's characters are basically decent and well-meaning. It may be just a tic that the ones who aren't are pretty unreservedly bad, and that they all come from one walk of life, the aristocracy. (There are also lots of good aristocrats. Jemis is an aristocrat. But it's hard to think of antagonists who are neither aristocrats nor are trying to be aristocrats, and hard to think of any who are tragic rather than, essentially, melodramatic.[1] Prince Rufus represents the aristocratic party formally and he does, indeed, have redeeming qualities, but he's not a villain in terms of his function in the plot. He's more like Sir William Lucas, in the end )
[1]There's one exception: one of Cliopher's cousins who seems to have no redeeming virtues. Close reading, however, will indicate that the side of the family *not* related to Cliopher is ... noble or at least gentle in origin. Perhaps his mother, Cliopher's aunt, might also count.
She does provide her characters with enough in the way of characterization that it would be inaccurate to say that she deploys perfect characters. They have social flaws (and spend significant time working through them). That being said, her central characters go well beyond the levels of competence and/or achievement needed for their stories. Cliopher from the beginning is a very highly competent bureaucrat and statesman: that's a condition of his character at base. But making him, in addition, a hero dealing with world-changing mythic encounters (as At the Feet of the Sun does) and a key figure for the future transmission of part of his culture, the only person left who can perform the greater fire dances, piles Pelion on Ossa. Having a brilliant and subversive poet/trickster figure as a character central to the entire oeuvre is fundamental to the way the stories have been built from the beginning; making him an exceptionally good governor when his context changes is not really necessary. Jemis Greenwing is an intelligent, principled, and incident-prone young man; by four volumes into the series featuring him he has become a saint of the local deity, and not only comfortably well-off but extremely rich. All three of the above probably qualify as multi-ordinal geniuses. Pali is not only the second best sword-fighter in nine worlds (and at least once beat the best one in single combat); she also has a second career as a prominent and distinguished academic.
It's clear from some of the things Goddard herself has said that she doesn't write to pre-planned detailed arcs, and that her work goes in unexpected (to her) directions as she writes. Cliopher was originally supposed to be a small vignette around the story of the Last Emperor; the Greenwing and Dart series has expanded beyond the scope she originally intended. One can see that the backbone of the larger narrative was already present quite early on (the Red Company and its members, the Fall of Astandalas, and Antonin Damara as a powerful magician after the Fall, Pali as a professor of history, can all be extracted from the early Ysthar stories and "In the Company of Gentlemen", also early), but a very large quantity of her work is actually ancillary or peripheral to that primary plot line, even allowing for Greenwing and Dart as a separate conception from the point of view of both tone and plot from the beginning.
This is in itself in no way a problem. But it does tend to mean that without careful revision there will be weaker structure and sometimes small inconsistencies. (There are two different backgrounds given for "The Hands of the Emperor" as a title in different works. It's pretty well inconceivable that someone studying for the comprehensive and difficult civil service examinations would not be fully conversant with the title of the head of the civil service; likewise, Cliopher at one point refers to the presence of his name on all sorts of general official government documents; but then one (or more) of the local employees of the offices in Gorjo City would long ago have recognized their cousin's name on whole sets of official documents.)
