By one and one they rise and stare about them at the timbers of the Ship, and at the wreckage of their world's mythology: a sickle, buried to the haft in sand; a sieve; a shuttle wound with bloodred yarn; a bunch of keys, rust gouted; ruined hay, a dazed goat browsing it; the rootstock of a thorn, salt-bare. The tideline is a zodiac. [loc. 5214]
This book comprises three works set in Gilman's mythic, allusive, alliterative world of Cloud: the short story 'Jack Daw's Pack', the novella 'A Crowd of Bone', and a full novel, Unleaving. Cloud is shaped and kept by its seasonal rituals, by its goddesses and its constellations, by witches and mummers and sacrifice. It is pagan and cruel and densely layered, and the stories here will bear rereading, not once but many times. Which is to say that I'm not sure I have understood more than fragments of those stories, or their underpinning.
The axle of the story is Ashes, a role which a woman chosen by chance must play each winter so that spring will come; a role which steals her voice, bestows some arcane gifts and some sexual freedom (welcome in an otherwise judgemental society) but also imperils her ...and which requires the sacrifice of any child conceived when she was Ashes. All three of the female protagonists -- Whin, Thea and Margaret -- take on the role of Ashes: all three are changed, and in changing change their worlds.
There are no pretty fairytales here: there is raw, rough, rude language, and raw rude behaviour. There are rapes and murders, treachery and trickery, loves unrequited and doomed. But there is also great beauty, and a binding-together of threads by unbreakable bonds of story, and the celestial storytelling of constellations and zodiacs which is, in this world, literal truth. And there are echoes and mirrors of our familiar world: language that is often on the verge of iambic pentameter, quotations or riffs on Shakespeare and Donne and a dozen others, images familiar from myth and folksong. It's a dizzying novel, like looking up at a clear night sky: it's sometimes terrifying and sometimes brutal, and sometimes mercifully kind. I shall reread, in a future winter.
As an aside, I did have some issues with the ebook: I couldn't change the style of the font, and for a while I was trying to puzzle out why some 'i's were dotted and some not, until I realised that this was an artefact of my Kindle: searching the text or my highlights revealed no distinction between i and ı.
(Compare the i in eight and in grinning.)
Fulfils the ‘a book that intimidates me’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge. I have owned this book since 2011! I've started reading several times, but been awed or cowed or envious of the language: and it is not always easy to focus on the underlying story when one is glamoured by Gilman's language. I also think this would not be a good book for me to read if I were in the middle of writing something myself: I'd end up a mere mimic.
Handy lexical reference: A Cloudish Word-Hoard, by Michael Swanwick.
Interview from 2021: The Matter of Cloud: An Interview with Greer Gilman (Uncanny magazine). (Oooh, and an earlier interview from 2000: Inside Jack Daw's Pack: An Interview with Greer Gilman.)
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