Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales [Hardcover]

Greer Gilman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2009

"A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of. Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
—Paul Kincaid, SF Site

"A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origin."
—Locus

"Sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect . . . readers who enjoy symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilman’s use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology."—Publishers Weekly

"'Green quince and bletted medlar, quiddany and musk': Greer Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories. Gilman writes like no one else. To read her is to travel back, well back, in time; to wander in thrall through mist on moor and fell; to sink up to the nostrils in a glorious bog of legend and language, riddled with bones and iron, sodden with witches' blood."
—Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels

"Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. Cloud and Ashes is a triumphant, heart-rending triptych, a mosaic of folklore, intellectual pyrotechnics, and marvelous, motley characters that takes the breath and makes the blood beat faster."—Catherynne M. Valente, author of In the Night Garden

"No one else writes like Greer Gilman. She is one of our most innovative and important writers, in fantasy or out of it. If you want to see what language can do, the heart-stopping beauty it can achieve, read Cloud & Ashes."
—Theodora Goss, author of In the Forest of Forgetting

"Cloud and Ashes is a dark pastoral shaped from bits of ballads, scraps of nursery rhymes, fragments of Tarot, tatters of ancient myth, and shreds of archaic language, all shot through with luminous ribbons of Gilman's own personal cosmology.... Gilman's prose reminds us that most magical systems locate the power of magic in the power of language itself. Cloud and Ashes is particularly recommended to those readers who enjoy myth and folklore, especially the myths of Ariadne and Persephone. Cloud and Ashes is also highly recommended to those readers who enjoy fantasy which explores language and folklore."
—Green Man Review

“Gilman's ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings."
—The Washington Post Book World

“I am wind and memory who spells this . . .”

In the eighteen years since her Crawford Award–winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing, more beguiling and inventive.

Gilman’s second novel, Cloud & Ashes, is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. To step into her world is to witness the bright flashes, witty turns, and shadowy corners of the human imagination, limned with all the detail and humor of a master stylist. In Gilman’s intricate prose, myth and fable live, breathe, and dance as they do nowhere else.

Cloud & Ashes collects three Winter’s Tales (“Jack Daw’s Pack,” “A Crowd of Bone,” and the longest, “Unleaving”) centering on folk traditions, harvest rites, the seasons, gods, and trickster figures.

In “Unleaving,” Margaret, granddaughter of a goddess, escapes from the underworld into the human realm, Cloud. She is pursued, and, in escaping, brings about an epochal change, separating the kingdom of myth from the human world.

Cloud & Ashes is a work that reaches back to the richness of Shakespeare—Gilman understands that the depth of Shakespeare’s work lies in his range—and the reader will rejoice in her counterplay of high myth and bawdry even while being drawn into the world of Cloud.  Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales.

Greer Gilman is the author of the novel Moonwise, which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. and Mythopoeic awards, as well as of the World Fantasy Award–winning “A Crowd of Bone.” She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Almost two decades after the publication of her debut novel, Moonwise, Gilman returns to the fantasy realm of Cloud with a trilogy of interconnected narratives. 2000's Nebula-shortlisted Jack Daw's Pack follows an otherworldly traveler as he creates a rich tapestry of myth in the cards he throws down. 2003's A Crowd of Bone, which won the World Fantasy Award, is a decidedly nonlinear tragedy about child witch Thea, who flees her goddess mother and a foolish love-struck mortal. The novella Unleaving, the original piece of the trinity, revolves around Thea's daughter, Margaret, who unravels the heavens and, in turn, much of the mythos of Cloud. Though the sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect is challenging, readers who enjoy symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilman's use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology. (May)
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About the Author

Greer Gilman is the author of the novel Moonwise, which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as the World Fantasy Award-winning "A Crowd of Bone." A sometime forensic librarian, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Small Beer Press (June 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931520550
• ISBN-13: 978-1931520553
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,402,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If in love with English, July 20, 2010

By 

C. Lewis (San Francisco/Berkeley, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (Hardcover)

There's a solid fairy-tale story in this (a grim one, with agriculture and poverty and betrayal by family); but the unique delight of Greer Ilene Gilman is how much she loves English. It isn't just 'love of language'; she specifically writes in English with English dialects. I can enjoy it just for the pretty sounds and allusions, or for the puzzle and framework of all the allusions together. I don't read this when I'm tired or lazy, though; more when I want to get out of my own head into another world.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clever and beautiful, if imperfectly paced, August 29, 2010

By 

A. D. MacFarlane (England, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (Hardcover)

A novel comprising three connected tales: the previously published short works "Jack Daw's Pack" and "A Crowd of Bone", followed by the new, novel-length "Unleaving". Set in a mythic land akin to Britain, complete with fantastic dialect and its own mythology. Which, ahh. Love. So real and flawed. Over the course of the book, several characters take on this mythology and in the end radically alter it: this is the core plot, around which are the lives of various people affected by the Ashes myth.

The two short parts are tightly written: the first flits around the myth of Ashes and the woman Whin's intersection with it, the second concerns Thea, daughter of goddess Annis, and her attempt to flee her mother's influence. However, the pace of "Unleaving" dawdled before running. Too much time is spent on Margaret - grand-daughter of Annis - who, having fled her prison in the myth-world, arrives at a country house and settles there with its owner Grevil and his staff. She helps Grevil with his academic pursuits, she makes a telescope and looks at the stars, she mets the "crow lad", illegitimate child of a woman who was Ashes. This takes a surprisingly long time and is not helped by Margaret's comparative blandness as a character - compared to, say, the rarely appearing Whin, the goddesses Malykorne and Brock, even Grevil, whose academic, kind nature is useless against the sinister powers that later appear. Still, put Margaret under the stars and she comes to life, and her quiet smallness is justified by her life before. (Whin, who featured prominently in the two shorter works, is also manouevred by the goddesses but is a harder, more determined, active character. Whin's just cool and I wish more of the book had been about her. She's also black, because Gilman is capable of writing a faux-Britain and not just making it about white people. My diverse nation sings its thanks.)

Once Madam Covener appears, the plot starts to get going: Margaret is trapped, yet a way out through the myth and practise of Ashes is presented. From Hallows night onwards, I didn't want to put the book down. Margaret at the very end - who suffers and is central, at the same time - is far from a timid girl who sneaks out at night to watch the stars.

I love Greer's myth-making. The Ashes myth, for instance. Each Hallows, a local woman is chosen by chance - her candle is the last to go out, as they all walk across the moors - to be Ashes until spring, telling deaths and choosing her own lovers. It's freedom for some. Playing the role of Ashes hurt Whin and drove an old woman to madness, yet Barbary longed for its freedom and it's said that other women enjoy the sexual release. You're a whore in this world if you sleep around, except as Ashes you're expected to, you're free to choose (although some as Ashes are raped, it's technically very bad to do so), you're even allowed to pick other women. A key factor: any child got on you is to be sacrificed at birth to the fields. Never mind its link to Annis, who got the original Ashes in her glass, a link very potent for Margaret and Whin especially.

Then there's death - the Lyke Road - and what happens to the characters who walk it, but I'll leave off telling too much of that.

Cloud & Ashes is a pleasure to read, not least because Gilman has an ear for language unlike almost any other author - although the style is not, shall we say, transparent - in places you have to pick at it a little, re-read some passages, but for me that's part of the enjoyment. (Could have done without quite so many repetitions of phrases like "There's all to do" and "unleaving", though.) It's clever, the characters real and sympathetic - or horribly sinister, in a couple cases - the world marvellous. If only there'd been less emphasis on Margaret in the house! It made a sizeable chunk of the book a bit ehhhh for me. Still, when I think of the book as a whole, words like "fantastic" and "marvellous" pop into my head over and over.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, mythic tale. Cloud and Ashes has everything I need for a REALLY good read!, December 13, 2009

By 

Lieserl (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (Hardcover)

Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales is the best novel I have read in a long while. I compare it, in different veins, to John Gardner's Grendel, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, but with a more literary bent.
The cycle of myth that Gilman has created is on par with anything you'll hear about from Joseph Campbell - an origin story, the lunar and solar yearly cycles, the hero journey, the lover's tryst, the folktales of the peasants, the relationships with the natural world. It's a synthesis of Western myth, told in a believably familiar, but completely entrancing and new voice.

The craft, the images, the themes, the sheer poetry of the three stories (two shorter ones to set the scene, and a long novella) can be difficult to slog through initially (especially if you've never encountered writing like this before) but if you keep with it you'll be very satisfied. The prose is told as if through a haze of all the words that came before it, and most of it is in dialect - I haven't read much Joyce but it's similar to that. Additionally, the abstraction and ethereal tone that Gilman evokes can give long spans of the novel no sense of place, but it works - the world of Cloud is held together tenuously, like the web in her story. Frankly I find it beautiful.
There are so many layers and planes that the story works on, from the celestial, to the everyday, to the literary. The experience of reading Cloud and Ashes is to be fully immersed in the present moment, being overwhelmed with the beauty that the hodgepodge English language can produce. Sounds kind of pretentious, but it's true. Of course it helps that the author-ess is a lexicologist.

The plot circles in on the unassuming and reticent girl, Margaret, who was born and raised in the celestial plane of Law by her sinister grandmother, the goddess of the moon, Annis - but escapes. Margaret is the product of an incarnation of Annis' daughter, Ashes, who was stolen away to the earthly land of Cloud with a simple fiddler. Her journey through Cloud to find her mother and escape the prying eyes and spies of her grandmother is a myth as rich and multilayered as any hero journey from the European tradition.

For anyone interested in literature, myth and folklore, or pagan culture, I highly, highly recommend this book. Especially for women!