Ever After. By Kim Harrison.
Harper Voyager. $27.99.
The Undead Pool. By Kim
Harrison. Harper Voyager. $27.99.
Reconciliation and
forgiveness, it turns out, together make up the overarching theme of the
marvelous series of novels of “The Hollows” by Kim Harrison, the pen name used
for this sequence by Dawn Cook. Whether Harrison intended this theme from the
beginning or evolved it as the books went on is an open question and, this far
into the series, a moot point. What is going on now as the planned 13-book
grouping nears its conclusion with its 11th and 12th
entries is that the increasingly complicated and elegant structure of the books
is beginning to wind tightly toward an eventual form of gathering-together that
is sure to have its unhappy, even tragic moments, but that will prove fully
satisfying to readers who have followed the adventures of Rachel Morgan since
the first Hollows novel, Dead Witch
Walking, appeared a decade ago.
Foreshadowings of where this
outstanding fantasy series are going now appear everywhere, although they do
not indicate precisely where things will end up or, equally important, how they
will get to whatever that place is – Harrison is far too skilled a writer for
that, and is becoming better with almost every book despite a touch of
backsliding here and there. For example, in the 11th novel, Ever After, Ceri, a subsidiary but
important character, tells Rachel – who narrates all the books – that Trent
Kalamack, a decidedly non-subsidiary character who is becoming ever more
central to the narrative, is “more than he ever was, more than just himself.”
And readers will immediately connect this statement to Rachel, whom we
initially meet as a witch but who, in various books, has assumed an important
intermediary role among the weres (werewolves) and vampires as well, who is
connected with such disparate species as pixies and gargoyles, and who is now
known to be a day-walking demon – a role that makes her existence crucial to
the survival of the entire demon species.
If the names of these
various species seem unclear or too
clear, you are not familiar with Harrison’s series, in which the supernatural
beings are not at all what they are elsewhere in popular culture – or are what they are expected to be but
are, at the same time, more. This is one thing that gives the Hollows novels their
depth and staying power. Another is the sheer intricacy of the plots of each
novel and of the series as a whole. New readers should not try to jump into the
Hollows with Ever After or the 12th
book, The Undead Pool, because they
will quickly find themselves in over their heads (speaking of pools!) through
the most apparently casual of references, which in fact are quite deep and are
crucial to the ever-developing plot – such as Rachel’s throwaway lines in Ever After, “I’ve had four relationships
in two years. One was a thief, one died as a political gift, one walked away
because I was shunned, and the last is a slave in the ever-after.” This is
absolutely true and, in a sense, recapitulates the plots of several lengthy and
dense novels in a couple of sentences, while reminding readers of how much has
happened in a very short time span. In fact, to fans of this series, the
statement will be tremendously resonant as well as predictive, or at least
potentially predictive, of where things are going. To anyone trying to get into
the series now, however, it will make little if any sense – with the result
that any newcomers will get less than they could from it and from the events
that follow.
Those events, in both these
books, not only expand but also tighten the “reconciliation” theme that
underlies so much here. Rachel’s need to reconcile the different elements of
her own personality – witch and demon – is only one part of it. The greater
part involves reconciliation of the entire world, or rather worlds, of magic
and non-magic. The overt plot of Ever
After involves the shrinking of “the ever-after,” the world parallel to
reality in which the demons live – and the place responsible for the existence
of all magic, which will disappear if the ever-after does. Rachel, who is
responsible (more or less) for the shrinkage in the first place, has to find a
way to arrest and reverse it for the sake of all magic-wielding species. There is much, much more to the plot
that that – Harrison’s plots are complex to the point of convolution – but
readers who focus on the “save the ever-after” elements of the book will
readily see how they fit into the theme of reconciling opposites.
And that theme is inexorably
moving toward a reconciliation of the two races whose genocidal war, long in
the past, set in motion all the events of the entire Hollows series: demons and
elves. Rachel’s inborn demon nature makes an eventual relationship between her
and Trent, who is not only an elf but also the elves’ greatest hope of
rebounding from the near-extinction that they face because of their long-ago
war with the demons, inevitable; and there have been many, many hints of it in
previous books, dating back to the childhood that Rachel and Trent shared in fraught
and complicated ways. However, this is not a straightforward Romeo-and-Juliet
story and is far from a simple “opposites attract” plot – it is a tale not of
two enmity-filled families but of two species that have almost succeeded in
destroying each other and that can be reconciled only at great mutual peril,
through a series of near-disasters with Rachel at the center of pretty much all
of them. The fact that the posed cover of The
Undead Pool includes, for the first time in the series, a model portraying
Trent as well as one portraying Rachel, is scarcely an accident. By the time of
this 12th book, there is a deeply felt and entirely believable
relationship not only between Rachel and Trent but also between the forms of
magic they represent: here, Trent’s elven magic, which is as unreliable as it
is potent, is the only way of stopping a kind of “magical misfiring” of the
forms of magic with which Rachel is familiar – and “misfiring” is too mild a
word, since the events of the book (which, like almost all the Hollows novels,
takes place in and around Cincinnati, of all places) involve what could become an
all-out war among the supernatural species.
Looking at Rachel as the
ultimate reconciler, in this book and throughout the series, is important, but
is scarcely necessary to enjoy the novels as pure entertainment, which they
manage to be (through elements such as their titles’ references to Clint
Eastwood movies) even as they are something more. Using far deeper
characterization than is offered in the vast majority of fantasy novels –
indeed, far more than most mainstream novels provide – Harrison allows Rachel
to be a highly flawed character (whiny, unsure of herself, romantically and
sexually confused, impulsive, frequently indecisive until the last possible
instant and sometimes just a shade afterwards) while still making her
centrality to the individual books’ stories and the sequence as a whole
abundantly clear. Trent is himself no angel – far, far from it, having proved
at various points in the series to be a drug lord, killer and torturer, and a businessman
who is ruthless almost to the point of parody (although Harrison handles his
story so well that even the worst of his crimes turn out to be only apparent crimes – a fact that is not
always clear, however, within the specific novels in which they occur). But the
reality of the Hollows series is that Rachel and Trent, who needed each other
(or whose families needed each other) in childhood, need each other as adults,
too, for purposes that go far beyond their individual lives. This is becoming
clearer and clearer as the books progress, but Harrison is so good at managing
the story (and her readers) that it remains tantalizingly uncertain, even at
this late stage in the Hollows series, exactly where things are going to end up
and exactly how this very complex tapestry will eventually be completed and
displayed.
It will be, though. Any
reader who doubts it has missed one of the most important reconciliation
elements in the books to date: Jenks, Rachel’s pixy partner and one of
Harrison’s most wonderful creations, has accepted into his family and become
dependent on a now-wingless fairy named Belle – who in turn has become
surrogate mother to Jenks’ many children after the heartbreaking death of
Jenks’ wife, Matalina, for which Belle’s clan was responsible. Pixies and
fairies are sworn mortal enemies, have been from time immemorial, and fight to
the death at every opportunity. If this sounds like the situation involving
elves and demons, it should, because the parallel is very clear to anyone who
wants to see it. Thanks to Rachel, there has been a breakthrough – not a
universal or perfect one, but a major one nonetheless – in the relationship
between two species that have long sought nothing less than to exterminate each
other. Inept and uncertain of herself and her powers Rachel may be, but she has
proved, again and again, to be an (imperfect) peacemaker against impossible
odds. She proves it again in Ever After
and The Undead Pool, as Harrison
inexorably moves the Hollows series closer to a conclusion in which the
reconciling of opposites is sure to be the major theme – but with enough complications
and uncertainties remaining to keep fans of the Hollows novels talking about
them long after the sequence comes to an end.
No comments:
Post a Comment