Companion to Wolves
Sarah Monette &
Elizabeth Bear
I wasn’t sure what to make of this book till the very end. I began with the awareness of the underpinnings of social commentary, having read various discussions online about the idea of Isolfr taking on a woman’s role, and thus emphasizing the artificiality of gender constructs. However, as I went through the actual journey of the book, that point never really came to the forefront for me. I enjoyed the fluid writing style, and was fascinated at the eleventh-hour involvement of the svartalf… it was a strange, sparkly sort of thing to find among the dirt and brutality of the rest of the world. But I was getting to the end of the book and fingering the slim depth of the pages left, and wondering: how does this book make a coherent whole?
And then they hit me with this line:
That last line, that last idea – goddess of whores – really slammed the book home. Everything converges.
And it has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with self-worth, damage, desperation, and survival. Everything to do with the fact that someone who can say, ‘it was worth it’ blithely has never paid for something with more than money, or maybe muscular exertion. “Worth”, and everything it implies, everything in which it is rooted, value judgments and unforgivable sin and the false broken-whole dichotomy… that’s really the core of this book, for me.
The context of this realization, the encounter with the troll witch, was also interesting. It was reminiscent of the Ender’s Game resolution, but where Card’s ending seems like a cop-out in many ways, this one works pretty well. I think maybe the part about taking the baby to another tribe was too much information for me, or invoked Ender’s Game too strongly… it would have been more thought-provoking for me to have him let her go without that assurance. Sure, then everyone would be like, “WHAT! Now they’ll just come back again!” but I think that kind of statement of faith would have completed the ‘worth’ theme. And it’s kind of a “WHAT!” book, anyway.