It’s been quite a while since I had gotten into a book so much that I was, when out doing something enjoyable, eager to get back home and back inside the novel. This happened with The Hallowed Hunt, the latest Chalion book by Lois McMaster Bujold. I had been only half-eager to read the thing, as witness the six months I allowed to elapse since its publication, but once started, I did not want to stop until I had finished, and I didn’t want to stop then, either.
Which is particularly odd, because I don’t think it’s a wonderful book. It’s a little soon to tell whether it will stay with me, but attempting to be objective, I’d call this one inferior to The Curse of Chalion, and possibly also to The Paladin of Souls. This was much more obviously and openly a romance novel, with the couple meeting cute in Chapter One, etcetera etcetera. And for all that I wanted to keep turning pages, it wasn’t because I was curious to know what would happen next. After all, I knew that he and she would marry in the next-to-last chapter, that (given the world’s theology) the protagonist(s) would, after struggling with disbelief, pride, and willfulness, find a way to open a gate for the Five Gods to use their divine powers to Make Everything All Right again. I wasn’t guessing how, because after all the Five Gods could do nearly anything they wanted, once given liberty to act. And although the characters would be put in various predicaments along the way, I was sufficiently confident they would escape that I wasn’t rushing back just to see what would happen.
Nor, I think, did I want to immerse myself in the book because the novel’s world was so wonderful that I wanted, for a time, to live there. No, I wanted to live in Oz, in Wonderland, in Middle-Earth (as a kid), even on Barrayar sometimes, even (believe it or not) within the Foundation, but Chalion doesn’t have that appeal for me. Perhaps it’s Ms. Bujold’s attention to minor discomforts on top of the various external and internal injuries she inflicts on her characters, or perhaps it’s my own more realistic head-picture of Arthurian times, but given the opportunity to vacation in either the High (if slightly degenerate) Chalion of the first two books or the Transitional Chalion of the Hunt, I would decline, with sarcastic thanks.
Digression: Your Humble Blogger is aware that Chalion, properly speaking, is the name of a nation, region or family, rather than of the planet or universe, and that Hunt takes place in a different part of the world entirely (unless the map in my head is confused, and the Wealding lies to the North of Darthaca, and is thus the region later called Chalion). However, Chalion being the first book in the series, and having been the shorthand for the two books set there, it is either too late or too early to call the series, oh, the Quintarian Series, or some such. We shall see; if twelve books are set in the world but not the nation of Chalion, it’s more likely that we will all want a different name for it. End Digression.
What I was going to write about, however, is that peculiar sense of immersion that I get, that I assume Gentle Readers get, in certain books. For me, at any rate, I don’t think that it correlates, exactly, with either great books, or my favorite books, or anything like that. Or at least, there are lots of books that I absolutely adore, that I think are wonderful, and that don’t plunge me into them like this one did. Is it something about the writing style? Is it something about the created world? Is it something about my mood, and the book just has to hit me at the right moment? I don’t know. Honestly, although in a way I love being immersed in a book that strongly, in another way it’s not an altogether pleasant sensation. Well, or at least if I include the waking up afterwards it isn’t altogether pleasant.
And yet, it is, in large measure, what I’m looking for, it’s why I read speculative fiction. Oh, I have experienced it in other genres, particularly historical novels, but more frequently in specfic. That’s why I suspect it has to do with world-creation, although that, too, may differ from reader to reader. Anyway, it’s what I really experienced as an eight-year-old reading The Hobbit, and perhaps that experience, being eight and being new to all that stuff, perhaps that’s what I’m looking for. Perhaps.
What do you think, Gentle Readers? What books have had that effect on you, and do they have that effect on you when you reread them? Are those your favorite books, or is that some different criterion? Was it something that happened more frequently when you were a child, or is it a part of your grown-up reading experience as well? What’s up with this?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.