Customer Reviews

Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales

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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.

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.

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!

I had been waiting for this author to write something more. And now she has. Technically, this is a prequel, in a way, to her very poetic, very alluring fantasy book "Moonwise," which I have read and re-read about four times.

This book is all about the myths that create and haunt the alternate worlds two young women fall into in the first book "Moonwise." But it is not necessary to have read "Moonwise" to enjoy "Cloud and Ashes."

What I love about these books is the poetry. Pure and simple. I am a lover of words, and I just love to sit down and read something that illicits beauty and images in my head without me really caring about the plot as much as how autumn is described, again and again, in new and innovative ways that spin me into Gilman's intriguing "otherworlds." I will freely admit I do not understand the definition of every odd word used, because much of the language used in the writing of this novel is archaic and dialectic. But the writing literally hypnotizes me. It is as if it almost alters my mental reality, which is what a good book should do if you become "involved" with it. The words of this novel literally make me "feel" the magic of the seasons, autumn most especially, and the myths and images that abound. I love the witches. I love the farmers. I love the travelers. I love the crow-lad and his innocent, pure art of surviving. I love Margeret and Grevil, Whin and Kit. I love Mally (who is also GREAT in "Moonwise") and I just cannot say enough how outstanding the landscapes and settings and details are.

To me, when I read this book or "Moonwise," I feel like I am reading by lantern-light in a lost cabin in a foreign wilderness a long, long never-ending poem. That's a good thing, because it's a poem I want to never end. I want to be able to pick it up and read it forever. This book transports me. I am a lover of language, so it stands to reason this will remain one of my all-time favorite books.

I can't imagine the effort and energy it took for this author to compose this, but I hope to see more from her in the future.

Not for an easy way to pass the time. Her writing is beautiful and dense, with many references to English folklore regarding the winter season. The first time I picked up "Moonwise", I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my own experience with the Renaissance Faire and English Country Dance had some pay-off besides knowing some esoteria. I am glad that it is in print again, and that she wrote another novel.

This is fantasy in the mythic mold, filled from first page to last with eloquent language of almost poetic beauty, clearly showing an intense commitment to literary accomplishment and great skill with writing. So, of course, I hated the book.

Well, that's a bit too strong, but I definitely felt lost at sea in the reading of it. It's very hard to establish place, plot or significance, and ultimately the experience of reading it was more frustrating than rewarding. There are some moments of description that stand out and make the work tangible, but overall it's far too self-indulgent and deliberately resistant to perception. The work with the themes and level of description at points were good enough that on my big ranking of 2009 books I felt compelled not to put it too low, but I don't expect to seek out any more books by this author.

Clarity is a virtue.