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Prelude to Revision: Characters - The Hollow of the Crown
Working on the plotlines, my first job has been to compile a useful list of the major characters in Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. One of the issues that came up quickly is a structural issue for the whole of Three Katherines of Allingdale, and makes me think I'll do well to keep the thirty-year gap unfilled if I possibly can. It's the question of what the major political players are doing in it.
Katy Elflocks and Killer-Kate have one unpremeditated similarity: the great monarchs and courts of East and West are responsible for a lot of stuff right on the borders of the tales, but are no more than constraints within them. They're not on the ground, they can't contribute anything particularly useful or harmful once things have kicked off, and frankly they don't get much of a clue about anything that happens in either story until the very end, if then. These are overwhelmingly stories about peasants and servants, provincial lords and gentry, and the struggles between them. Only Luke and the King of Elfland's daughter actually come out of the frames to play important direct parts in the tales.
Still, the shape of the frames is important. Far removed from either the cosmopolitan rationality and thriving commerce of the King of Morgander's Charlbury, or the unspeakable mysteries of the Elf-King's legended Palace of Blue Flames, the tales take shape amongst people who know very well they are poised between the two poles, and for the most part will go well out of their way to avoid getting mixed up with either.
Crown of Foxfires pivots around Kit Fox, but it's overwhelmingly about principalities and powers, nations and statecraft, kings and queens and princesses and politicians and their assorted followers. The other two stories are all about the agency of ordinary people, the terror of war, and the dubious nature of greatness and glamour: Foxfires treats of monarchs and merchants and courtiers and charismatics, and the good and evil they can accomplish on the grand scale. It's a high-political story between two militantly low-political ones, and that's a real clash of mode, even though I really do think the events of both belong in the same history and the same set of assumptions about the world. And Foxfires is long and intricate, perhaps as much so as both the other tales put together. Best then, for yet another reason, to keep it at arms' length for the foreseeable future.
What this leaves me in Katy and Kate is a lot of bracketed royals in the character lists: people whose characters and agendas constrain the whole story, but don't have much to say about its unfolding. To my way of thinking, that's a much more natural way of handling them than the old fantasy game of "king returns and sets everything to rights because he can, no honestly, he can and all!" It seems wholly suitable for stories which so severely interrogate the value of concentrated power. The 'good guys' at court - most particularly, Luke's elder and more liberal siblings, his despised common-born sister-in-law Cabbage-Caro*, and later Caro's two children - aren't just competent, but about as benevolent as anybody holding their positions could credibly be. Having all of them around and empowered in the space of one generation is almost a once-in-a-civilization event.
Their entire direct contribution to both Katy and Kate is: (i) to alarm the more reactionary nobles by being who they are, and involuntarily incite them to do worse dumber things than they otherwise might have; and (ii) to endorse after the event facts other people have already created on the ground; and (iii) thereby to avoid replacing the more or less happy endings of my tales with heaps of bones and blood sausage, a labour on which these books do not at all dwell but which should not for this reason be underestimated, since comparable achievements are at best rare in my understanding of real history.
They are, I say again, frame characters: people whose nature governs the boundaries of the tale, and who don't draw over-much attention to themselves, but whose presence allows certain narrative conventions to occur without magic or outrageous luck. They aren't, at any stage, allies of our protagonists - that would be a bad idea for characters so relatively powerful and so external to the main narrative - but they are enlightened antagonists who think they can get what they want by going with the flow rather than against it for now, and whose word is worth more than the spit behind it. In a word, they are excellent people for reinforcing the logic of the story's natural boundaries.
Dearly as I love my Caro Green-Rose - who, for all her privilege, is arguably a much more genuine instance of the interestingness and agency of utterly ordinary people than such an iron-willed clever-handed star-eyed peasant as famous Katy Elflocks - I think it's better after all that she and her circle support this tale rather than partake of it. The bookshelves carry returns of the kings enough already, and I hardly believe in any of them. Let mine now step back to the edges of this story, and guard it for everybody else. Isn't that supposed to be the excuse for royalty in the first place, anyway?
* Who is really slightly less 'common-born' than, for example, our own Duchess of Cambridge. But Caro's society is not ours, and furthermore she has the personality of a shy bookkeeper and the general aspect of an amiable, short-sighted dumpling, which makes her clearly less noble by nature than otherwise. The popular assumption that such a person cannot reasonably be sensitive to casual emotional abrasion is not, in fact, correct.
Katy Elflocks and Killer-Kate have one unpremeditated similarity: the great monarchs and courts of East and West are responsible for a lot of stuff right on the borders of the tales, but are no more than constraints within them. They're not on the ground, they can't contribute anything particularly useful or harmful once things have kicked off, and frankly they don't get much of a clue about anything that happens in either story until the very end, if then. These are overwhelmingly stories about peasants and servants, provincial lords and gentry, and the struggles between them. Only Luke and the King of Elfland's daughter actually come out of the frames to play important direct parts in the tales.
Still, the shape of the frames is important. Far removed from either the cosmopolitan rationality and thriving commerce of the King of Morgander's Charlbury, or the unspeakable mysteries of the Elf-King's legended Palace of Blue Flames, the tales take shape amongst people who know very well they are poised between the two poles, and for the most part will go well out of their way to avoid getting mixed up with either.
Crown of Foxfires pivots around Kit Fox, but it's overwhelmingly about principalities and powers, nations and statecraft, kings and queens and princesses and politicians and their assorted followers. The other two stories are all about the agency of ordinary people, the terror of war, and the dubious nature of greatness and glamour: Foxfires treats of monarchs and merchants and courtiers and charismatics, and the good and evil they can accomplish on the grand scale. It's a high-political story between two militantly low-political ones, and that's a real clash of mode, even though I really do think the events of both belong in the same history and the same set of assumptions about the world. And Foxfires is long and intricate, perhaps as much so as both the other tales put together. Best then, for yet another reason, to keep it at arms' length for the foreseeable future.
What this leaves me in Katy and Kate is a lot of bracketed royals in the character lists: people whose characters and agendas constrain the whole story, but don't have much to say about its unfolding. To my way of thinking, that's a much more natural way of handling them than the old fantasy game of "king returns and sets everything to rights because he can, no honestly, he can and all!" It seems wholly suitable for stories which so severely interrogate the value of concentrated power. The 'good guys' at court - most particularly, Luke's elder and more liberal siblings, his despised common-born sister-in-law Cabbage-Caro*, and later Caro's two children - aren't just competent, but about as benevolent as anybody holding their positions could credibly be. Having all of them around and empowered in the space of one generation is almost a once-in-a-civilization event.
Their entire direct contribution to both Katy and Kate is: (i) to alarm the more reactionary nobles by being who they are, and involuntarily incite them to do worse dumber things than they otherwise might have; and (ii) to endorse after the event facts other people have already created on the ground; and (iii) thereby to avoid replacing the more or less happy endings of my tales with heaps of bones and blood sausage, a labour on which these books do not at all dwell but which should not for this reason be underestimated, since comparable achievements are at best rare in my understanding of real history.
They are, I say again, frame characters: people whose nature governs the boundaries of the tale, and who don't draw over-much attention to themselves, but whose presence allows certain narrative conventions to occur without magic or outrageous luck. They aren't, at any stage, allies of our protagonists - that would be a bad idea for characters so relatively powerful and so external to the main narrative - but they are enlightened antagonists who think they can get what they want by going with the flow rather than against it for now, and whose word is worth more than the spit behind it. In a word, they are excellent people for reinforcing the logic of the story's natural boundaries.
Dearly as I love my Caro Green-Rose - who, for all her privilege, is arguably a much more genuine instance of the interestingness and agency of utterly ordinary people than such an iron-willed clever-handed star-eyed peasant as famous Katy Elflocks - I think it's better after all that she and her circle support this tale rather than partake of it. The bookshelves carry returns of the kings enough already, and I hardly believe in any of them. Let mine now step back to the edges of this story, and guard it for everybody else. Isn't that supposed to be the excuse for royalty in the first place, anyway?
* Who is really slightly less 'common-born' than, for example, our own Duchess of Cambridge. But Caro's society is not ours, and furthermore she has the personality of a shy bookkeeper and the general aspect of an amiable, short-sighted dumpling, which makes her clearly less noble by nature than otherwise. The popular assumption that such a person cannot reasonably be sensitive to casual emotional abrasion is not, in fact, correct.