Humanity has been firmly rebuked by the Others. Towns
have been depopulated, bodies have piled up, communication is splintered.
Humanity tries to rebuild in the aftermath and to face
the new reality they live in, under new rules and under new restrictions.
And none more so than Lakeside – Meg, Simon et al have built a whole different way for humans and Others to interact and the Elders are curious. What they learn in Lakeside may decide the fate of all humanity.
And the appearance of Cyrus, Monty’s criminal, shiftless
brother, risks upending all of that.
The Meg, The Meg is back! We love the Meg. We adore the
Meg. This is known!
After last book, the whole land has been mauled by the Others.
Humanity has been slaughtered and the conflict that has pretty much defined the
last few books has been dramatically changed. The whole Humans First and Last
movement is no longer a force to be reckoned with. The Others have revealed
their claws and the whole idea of humans rising up and taking the land is now
well and truly gone.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of humans who hate
the Others – of course there is – but the whole idea of them as an
institutional powerful force has slipped. Even the position of local
government et al has slipped considerably towards appeasing the Others.
Humanity is on survival mode now which makes for a very different tone
overall for the books and characters specifically.
This book also carries on the tone of the Others being
dangerous. That was always on the cards but as we saw more and more of the
Others playing with the Exploding Fluffballs of the female pack, of the crows
being endearing and curious – and even, in this book, Meg scolding the Elders
for being insufficiently polite (and it’s moments of humour like this that
really adds the peak to this book series). But this book not only presents the
threat but reminds us that even the friendly, happy Others like Simon and the
Crowguard are still vicious, dangerous and willing to eat humans who break the
rules. The teeth is back in the series with this book.
The ongoing conflict is how the humans exist in this new
Thasia. A world with more shortages, less communication, less trade and
generally everything being so much more isolated than it was. It’s interesting
how it touches on things like shortages – because that means “famine” or “starvation”
to the Terra Indigene, but means “lack of options” to many of the humans.
Obviously, The Others are less inclined to be sympathetic towards the idea of a
monotonous diet being a terrible hardship (most of them are carnivores with a relative
narrow prey selections) while at the same time being indulgent of the Female
Pack
And, yes I love the women of the Courtyard. Because
though Meg earned her respect and position among the Others with her unique
abilities and nature first of all, the other women earned their place through
personality, strength, capacity, courage and compassion (and attacking enemies
with a teakettle). We also have some really excellent depiction of abusive
relationships – but violent and non-physically violent relationships, how words
have power and how people can be beaten down so completely in these
relationships (and how domestic violence isn’t always between partners). It’s a
meaningful and powerful storyline with some excellent characters. I’m also
hoping for other women, including the women of the new frontier town, one of
which is a police office resisting the sexist assumptions of humanity with the
sheer bemusement of the others.
Twyla. Twyla gives me complex feelings. On the one side,
she is the quintessential mother figure and no-one messes with her. The Others
respect (and slightly fear) her, absolutely everyone obeys her. Everyone was wary of her and no-one argued with her because she was right and wise and excellent.
She was loving and caring and patient but also stern and unyielding and wise
and uncompromising and experienced and beloved, adored, respected by all. She
was awesome with Simon, she was awesome with the young wolves. She was awesome
in recognising both the strengths and weaknesses of her own children and really
just being perfect in every way. No-one was better than her in making Simon
forget who was the boss in his town.
I loved Twyla. I adored Twyla. I cheered every time Twyla appeared.
Buuuut… strong, wise, tough Black lady who acts as mother
to everyone around her? Yeaaah that’s kind of central casting for a Mamy right
there. Especially with book having one of her sons basically facing terrible
circumstances and her daughter leaving while she acts as mother forgive for the
whole district. Even her refusing to choose between her children’s “packs” and
instead choosing Simon’s felt less, as it was explained, of Twyla asserting her
own identity in the face of her family so much as Twyla deciding to become
ur-parent of the whole of Lakeside. This includes her choice of where to live:
ostensibly so she can have her own life and not just be a
grandparent/childminder. All well and good and an excellent idea – but then she
becomes mother figure to everyone.
This is an example of a character both being awesome… but
kind of a stereotype as well.
Cyrus/Jimmy. I’m kind of torn on his character. On some
level there is something passionately wonderful about having a complete
arsehole character get his righteous comeuppance. So I revelled in how awful he
is. I loved how terrible he was. I was properly HUNGRY for the terrible fate we
knew was heading for him with joyous awfulness. I was viciously looking forward
to it
But… he was also something of a caricature. I mean the
whole idea that the elders needed to keep him around to study a terrible human?
They learned everything the need to know within 5 minutes. He was made of
awful. He was a caricature of awful. I was amazed he lived to adulthood, how
did Twyla resist drowning him as a child? Again, it was satisfying, but subtle
villainy it wasn’t.
I also somewhat wonder if some of the messages Cyrus/Jimmy
could have taught the Others and made a great point of was missed. I mean, the
Elders ended up admitting their mistakes but I feel the Others in general,
including Tess, Simon et al, kind of missed one of the most important issues:
The humans all saw it coming. The underlying motives for keeping Jimmy around
was allowing the Others’ to identify a subtle trouble maker amongst the human
Pack and the trouble he could cause among them. But the main thing to learn
from this would be a clear “the humans can clearly identify an arsehole” and “they
would have kicked him out long since if you didn’t insist he stay”. For all the
humans are fearful of the fallout, ultimately they did everything they could to
deal with their own trouble maker. I think some acknowledgement that humans can
actually handle their own shit, if you let them would have been nice.
Especially since it meant Monty and Twyla were quite willing to turn on their
own family for the sake of The Others. That deserved a nod.
In this book we finally moved into the area we’ve been circling
for so long. Meg and Simon are now heading towards a relationship. I quite like
how it works in part of this story since the central conflict for Simon is how
human he is becoming – reflecting how human the Terra Indigene are – and the
central conflict for Meg this episode is how much like a “normal” human she can
actually become with her Blood Prophet powers. As she looks at the lives of the
other humans around her and begins to envy elements of their lives and begins
to wonder if she can have the same (this comes with some absolutely awesome
lessons from Jester about being whole you are and the strengths you have - it’s
excellent). So it’s a romance that fits very much into the ongoing story of
Simon and Meg…. Yet at the same time I don’t know if this is necessary since
their interactions are already so awesome with the wonderful games (the Pester
Game is definitely fun)? Yes, I’m the guy in the corner muttering “change, I
don’t like change”.
Diversitywise, we have Monty’s family who are Black and
definitely the most prominent humans by far. We also have the new mayor is an
Asian man and the new police commissioner is a latino man, both promising to be
powerful and prominent characters. There’s some good diversity there despite
what I mentioned above. We continue to have no LGBT characters
I love this series, we both love this series. There are
some problems as mentioned as above. And there remains the underlying awful
issue of the entire series in that the Namid is clearly an Earth parallel which,
as we’ve mentioned repeatedly before, completely removes Native Americans and
creates a continent of wild monsters instead to replace them. This can never
not be a problem, you cannot create such an obvious Earth parallel and remove
an entire racial group, especially with the context of colonisation as well –
which would make the removal of Native people very much a genocidal “convenience”
for the colonisers – or the story
It’s one of the constant things we have to remember as
social justice readers – and decent people. Love your books, adore them, revel
in your favourite series and everything that makes them so very awesome – but never
overlook their problems in doing so
