So. Y’all remember the whole Goose Girl/Goose Chase business? Excellent. Well, I finally actually read Shannon Hale’s fine book The Goose Girl. It was interesting to read this one after reading the third in the series; I am looking forward to reading the second one at some point, but, I think, not soon.
The thing I found particularly striking about reading this and Mimus back-to-back (I will have more to say when I get around to reporting on that, real soon now) is that both have royal protagonists who are raised in luxury and then betrayed. Both protagonists experience poverty and hunger. Both stories include details of small mercies provided to the protagonist in extremity. Both include details of small cruelties inflicted.
In both cases, it’s those details of their newly impoverished lives that are memorable, rather than the circumstances of the betrayal, the inevitable romance or even the eventual come-uppance of the villains. Well, in Goose, the betrayal takes place very slowly and the protagonist utterly fails to see the extent of it, which makes the whole thing more wrenching. In Mimus also, there is the long journey on horseback, which we the reader know will end in betrayal and death (from the book jacket, if nothing else) but the protagonist does not, but when the reversal comes, it comes suddenly and totally, so it isn’t as brutal or memorable. Still, it’s the relationships that are made when the protagonist is hungry, poor and unprotected that are the powerful things in the books. The friends who believe unlikely things, or help without believing them. The vicious pettiness of the enemies, and the (perhaps temporary) impossibility of revenge, or even of escape.
The other thing these stories have in common is the value, to our protagonists in their extremity, of storytelling itself. The goose girl and the jester prince both become storytellers, and both use their newfound ability at storytelling to make relationships as well as to learn their way through their own stories. It isn’t really relevant to the point I was making up there, but it’s a nice thing nonetheless.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.