Customer Reviews

Lifelode

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Sharyn November's introduction compares it to The Dubious Hills by Pamela Dean & Deerskin by Robin McKinley, which are two of my favourite books. I'm not put in mind of Deerskin that much, but the feeling does resemble The Dubious Hills, in the sense of a familiar-yet-strange village sitting in the middle of a great deal of magic & being the site of an important choice. Taveth, one of the mainest main characters, is housewife/chatelaine of the local castle, & in a poly arrangement with her husband, the lord of the manor, & a potter who is the lord of the manor's wife. Taveth can see through time to people's past or future selves, & see some of the memories of Applekirk village. Two strangers, Jankin the scholar & Hanethe the wizard, come to Applekirk, & set off a chain of events which leave the village...the same & not the same.

The people who read Jacqueline Carey & have been clamouring for another sex-positive novel will be pleased, although there is no explicit sex. But poly relationships are the norm (the occasional dyad is looked on as strange & charming) & both male & female priests go around naked, which is accepted as the norm, although I think a horny youth looks at Ghislain's breasts once.

There's also people of varying colours represented in the characters, although I think the main characters are light-skinned. People are described as varying colours of wood rather than white or black, & there isn't an assumption that people are one colour or another, or at least not one that I picked up on. Maybe that's something you bring with you to the books you read.

There's also neat unfamiliar words stuck in with the often-familiar pattern of a medieval village - like yeyana, rendsome, frubbed, raensome, & carmody. Jo Walton always thinks up pretty & unusual names (I particularly liked the name of the goddess Agdisdis) & apparently thinks up nice words as well.

The narrative is kind of interesting, because the first half of the book is told back & forth in time, as the characters reminisce & Taveth sees futures & pasts, & then the 2nd half is told in chronological order, as large & exciting events happen with increasing frequency. It wasn't confusing to me; I think it works. I just think it was interesting (outside the book) that the storytelling strategy changed in the middle.

The intersection of people's love lives, war, legal disputes, divine vengeance, & wizardry is very engrossing, & I finished reading it tonight instead of typing up my homework on the computer.

Applekirk is a small rural community, where time is strange; months may pass elsewhere while years pass in Applekirk. Here, people go about their business, in the farms and in the manor house, leading their lives as they're bid to by each one's own lifelode, that part of their self which tells them what their talent and work should be in life. Taveth is the quiet heart of the manor house, keeping it in order as she keeps its extended family in order, according to her lifelode. She also has a strange talent: she sees multiple times at once, and multiple selves of the people she interacts, their past, present, and future selves. When two new people come to Applekirk, they disrupt the quiet orderliness of its routine and its people's lives.

I was struck with delight about fifteen pages into _Lifelode_ when I suddenly realized that Walton was using Rumer Godden's trick of narrating as though everything is happening at once, moving backward and forward in time. I found that fascinating in Godden's _China Court_ and _Take Three Tenses_, and I've never encountered it anywhere else. Taveth describes it this way: "Time, she knows, is an illusion. Things seem to happen one after another, but when you look back they all happened at once and seemed at the time to be part of one story was part of another...."

In her introduction, Sharyn November calls _Lifelode_ a domestic fantasy, which I think is an apt description. I found it very much a celebration of love and family and home, although it also involves politics on a small scale and religion on a much larger scale. I think it may well develop into my favorite of Walton's books (which is saying something, given how much I love the Farthing series and Tooth and Claw).

Walton complains in the FAQ at the end of this novel that people don't like standalone novels, but I personally think she does well in them: her earlier novels The Prize in the Game and Ha'penny felt like they were suffering a bit from sequelitis compared to the highly original books they followed on from; whereas by contrast her standalones The King's Peace/The King's Name (one novel in three parts and two volumes), Tooth and Claw, Farthing, "Lifelode" all came across as refreshingly different from her previous material.

"Lifelode" tells the story of how the scholar Jankin came to meet Hanethe, who has fled the vengeance of a goddess. Jankin is from the Westmarch, where yeya doesn't work, "yeya" being to "magic" as "armiger" was to "knight" in "The King's Peace", i.e. a term that conveys the meaning but without the associations of the term we're used to. Hanethe by contrast, has come back from the east, where "people run together and separate as fast as rainbows on oil, and only the gods can keep themselves whole" (and if that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what will). The novel takes place in the village of Applekirk, where Hanethe had walked away from being lord sixty years earlier (time running slower the further east you travel). (This whole east/west conceit I learned in the FAQ is an attempt to do the Zones of Thought of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep in a fantasy setting, which, frankly, I am ashamed of myself for not spotting as I read.)

The novel is told largely (though far from exclusively) from the viewpoint of Taveth, the housekeeper of the Applekirk manor, and in a strange omniscient style that refuses to recognise tenses--appropriate enough for Taveth, who can see echoes of the past and future; perhaps less appropriate when in other people's heads. In this style, bits of speech are reported in advance of when you get to hear them in context, which means they resonate for you when they do, nicely paralleling how Taveth perceives the world.

Along with all of the above comes an exploration of a societal structure which takes polyamory for granted, and one which reacts to the possibility of a key conceit in "The King's Peace" the opposite way to the society in that novel; also one in which no one (bar the teenage point-of-view character) bats an eyelid at the fact all priests are naked all the time. As with all good fiction, the reader is drawn sufficiently into the world being portrayed that none of this seems at all strange.

In summary, this is in my not so humble opinion, a top-class, if slightly unconventional, fantasy novel which ought to be better known.

This is a great book....see the other reviewers if you want more information about just how good it is. What I want to focus in on is the Amazon listing about the book. When I first saw it, I was a bit taken aback that the price being charged was the full list price. That happens so rarely on Amazon. I figured, I get a 20% Educators discount at B&N...so I'll go order a copy at my local store. When I got there, they were happy to order me a copy BUT their price was $40!!!! So, even with the discount I would paying $32 plus sales tax. They have real nerve...and deserve to slow death that Amazon is bringing them!
But back to WHY Amazon charges the full list price for this book. It's a number edition of less than 900 copies. If I had known that from the start, I wouldn't have hesitated to order my copy immediately. But I don't see that fact listed anywhere in the Produce Description. There should be a slot in the description for including details like these. Whether or not a book has a limited print run, is hand numbered or may be a signed copy are important details to my way of thinking. How do you make suggestions to Amazon regarding matters like this??

Marakanda is a university town - one of three in the world that tell of Applekirk, a neighboring town where magic, dragons, and adventures abound. Taveth's lifelode is keeping the Applekirk Manor and its interlocking families safe during a time of change, but a scholar's arrival and time transition marks a world that can't be controlled. A powerful story, Lifelode is a top pick for any fantasy library.