I loved Catherynne M. Valente’s THE GIRL WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED FAIRYLAND IN A SHIP OF HER OWN MAKING from the first sentence:
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog.
Actually, I loved it from the title of Chapter 1, “Exeunt on a Leopard,” which is followed by this charming epigraph: “In Which a Girl Named September Is Spirited Off by Means of a Leopard, Learns the Rules of Fairyland, and Solves a Puzzle.” I just love this kind of whimsy in stories. And THE GIRL WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED FAIRYLAND (which I will now refer to as FAIRYLAND, because it’s so dangdably tedious to type out) is chock full of whimsy.
After reading the first couple of pages of this book, I decided I needed to write down some of my favorite quotes. I soon gave up, because in the first ten pages, I had written five quotes. And I was even being picky. So I stopped writing quotes, except when I absolutely had to, which I often did….
Let’s sample one of the quotes I took down, shall we?
I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins, and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two (p. 129).
Really, this is one of the most gorgeously-written books I have ever picked up. Reading it was like eating fudge. And I do love fudge.
However, too much fudge can get tiresome.
While there was so much to enjoy in this book, I will admit that after a while, I got sick of the dream-like plot where it seemed like anything could and did happen. This almost felt like irresponsible writing until I realized that this was a stylistic tool. I love the kind of tightly-woven story where, while I’m in the middle of reading the book, it feels like the story simply must happen the way it’s happening. I didn’t feel that way about FAIRYLAND until the end of the book, which pulled together all loose, seemingly-nonsensical threads. While I appreciated that the dream-like quality was essential to the style in which Valente chose to write, I never once wondered—really wondered—what would happen next. I figured it would be something dream-like and fun. But I wasn’t concerned for the characters. I was just a witness to the story, when I prefer to be invested in the story.
I did eventually slow my reading pace in the hopes that coming up for air would “cleanse my palette” of all the “fudge.” It did seem to help. When I set the book down for a couple of days and then went back to it, I enjoyed it so much more. And please, don’t get me wrong. I did enjoy FAIRYLAND. I enjoyed taking in the rich writing in bits, and I valued the methods Valente employed to capture the particular style in which FAIRYLAND was written. And the characters were just plain charming.
Neil Gaiman “blurbed” this book, saying that it was “A glorious balancing act between modernism and the Victorian fairy tale, done with heart and wisdom.” Much of modernist literature is characterized by the abandonment of the ornamental writing style of the Victorian era. While I do think Valente’s writing style in FAIRYLAND has a Victorian whimsy to it that makes it read like J.M. Barrie’s PETER PAN, I agree with Gaiman that it isn’t verbose. Passages that deserve loads of attention because of their meaty (or fudgy) nature are given in a very matter-of-fact manner. It’s whimsical writing, but it’s also quick. There is no languishing in the loveliness of the language.
Despite the focus on language and the fast pace of this story (that’s ironic, isn’t it?), Valente’s characters are surprisingly well-rounded. Valente accomplishes this by delivering bits of information about each character in a manner that doesn’t slow the story (except for when she wants it to slow the story, as in the case of Chapter IX, “Saturday’s Story,” and in Chapter XIX, “Clocks”). For example, when a fairy named Calpurnia Farthing, tells September that the only way to reach the Autumn Provinces quickly is to whip her velocipede (a bicycle that acts a lot like a bison), Penny, a precocious changeling, protests. And September’s new friend Saturday, “who knew a thing or two about whipping” (emphasis added; p. 126) says, “Penny, you don’t have to do a thing.” It’s that kind of deft move—inserting backstory (in this case, Saturday’s backstory) in a way that doesn’t interfere with the forward progression of the story and even enhances the story—that gives Valente’s characters depth. Another great example is near the end of the book, when the Marquess reveals her backstory and Valente makes it all the more real when she has the Marquess say, “Let this be a place where no one has to be dragged home, screaming, to a field full of tomatoes and a father’s fists!”
It is also worth noting that time, in the story, has a different meaning from time as we (and September) know it. The seasons are treated as locations on a map. September, her Wyvern friend Ell, and Saturday and destined for the Autumn Provinces, and Calpurnia Farthing takes them as far as the equinox. The very fact that Saturday’s name is the last day of the week and September’s name is a month—a month that, as Calpurnia says, “Is the beginning of death” (p. 131)—further complicates the idea of time having a unique meaning. Names are important in FAIRYLAND, too. Ell, whose real name is A-Through-L, possesses a name that is more a measure of distance, or an idea, than an actual name. And Penny, the changeling, was once named Molly. Calpurnia shares a name with the wife of Julius Caesar—a woman who saw her husband’s death in a dream before it happened. The Calpurnia of FAIRYLAND “feel[s] a powerful urge to tell [September] to be careful” (p. 131). And near the end of the book, September discovers the Marquess’s old clock, which reveals her true name: Maud Elizabeth Smythe. September says, “True names have power…But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I do now.” The idea that true names have power isn’t a new one, but it’s an enduring one.
The strongest theme in the story, to me, was what it meant to have a heart—and, in particular, to love.
When the Green Wind came for September, she didn’t wave goodbye to Omaha or her mother because, as the narrator explains, “All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one” (p. 4).
The Marquess says much the same thing to September: “You are selfish, after all, and heartless, like all children” (p. 220).
However, Calpurnia Farthing (who really plays a comparatively small role in the story) understands a child’s capacity to love. She tells Saturday that “The riddle of the Ravished [which is what September, who will one day become romantically involved with Saturday, is]…is that they must always go down into the black naked and lonesome. But they cannot come back up into the light alone” (note in [brackets] added; p. 132).
The above quotes from the narrator and the Marquess about children being heartless is the kind of “Fact About Children” or “Wise Observation on Some Element of Life” that a reader can often find in classic children’s stories, such as PETER PAN, THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (where the heroine is from Kansas, but could as easily be from Nebraska), and even ALICE IN WONDERLAND (though that particular story isn’t quite as rife with Quotable Quotes as the other two—or perhaps that which is of a philosophical nature is delivered less obviously).
So, finally (this review is getting really long), here are some Quotable Quotes from PETER PAN and THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. I chose these quotes because they are about hearts and they really illustrate the style that I believe Valente was after when she wrote FAIRYLAND. They are very similar to quotes from FAIRYLAND that I’ve already shared. I think of this as Valente’s “nod” to two wonderful, classic children’s stories.
From PETER PAN:
Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time; and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be embraced instead of smacked.
and…
Children are gay and innocent and heartless.
From THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ:
A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.
and…
Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
and…
Once I had brains, and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.
This is a book I tried to read once before, but I got stuck because I was listening to the audiobook on a long road trip and I didn’t know what the word “tarpaulin” meant. There’s an entire section wherein a tarpaulin plays a rather critical role, and I was like, “Whaaa???” Thanks to the power of The Almighty Google, I now know that a tarpaulin is a “heavy-duty waterproof cloth, originally of tarred canvas” (oooooh! makes so much sense now!), so I can finally finish what I’ve been told is a spectacular book. :)
– but deep struggles that have arisen because of the frailty of mortality. The idea of it being destroyed and reborn as something that I will master, instead of the other way around, was one of the most hope-filled thoughts I have ever encountered.
