Among Others – Jo Walton

Among Others
Jo Walton
302 pages
published in 2010

Have you ever read a book you just wanted to gulp down in one sitting, so eager to get on with the story that everything else has to wait? Or alternatively, have you ever read a book you didn’t want to end, stretching out your reading so you could savour it, making excuses not to read it just now, so as not end it too soon? I’m sure you have and so have I, but much rarer are those books where you want to do both, gulp down the story and stretch it out because once the book is finished you can never read it for the first time again. That’s how Among Others was for me, a book I wanted to stay in, but also wanted to keep turning the page to see how it would all turn out. Jo Walton has always been a good writer, but here she’s surpassed herself.

But perhaps I’m not quite objective. After all, I’ve known and liked Jo since the mid-nineties, as a fellow fan and friend from the rec.arts.sf.* Usenet groups, who has had a huge influence on my reading, in science fiction, in fantasy, who I got to know about as well as you can get to know a person from Usenet posts. All I could think about at the start of the book was how Jo-shaped it was, even knowning going in that this was rooted in her actual life growing up as a science fiction reading Welsh girl in a post-industrial landscape which she populated with fairies. She made the fairies and the magic real for Among Others but at heart it’s still her own story and that’s what made me want to spent more time in it, because being with Jo, a disguised Jo in fiction is the next best thing to seeing her at a convention.

Which is all good and well, but what will that do for you, if you don’t know Jo Walton and are just wondering if all the praise from people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Cory Doctorow, Robin Hobb, Steven Brust, Suzy McKee Charnas and many others is justified? Will you get anything out of this?

Yes.

Because more than likely you don’t know what it’s like to be a fifteen year old Welsh science fiction and fantasy reading girl sent away from her familiy to an English boarding school in 1979, but you do know what it was like to be a bookish fifteen year old, slightly odd in the eyes your friends and family and you know that being halfway through Babel-17 and wanting to see how it ends is an excellent reason not to die. You know what it’s like to discover all those new science fiction authors, how to get the most out of limited allowances to buy books and how brilliant libraries are, how important science fiction and fantasy are in your life, in their own way as important as school, family, friends, how much you learned about the world through science fiction and how you perhaps tried to apply that logically to your own life. So you will know a lot of what Mori writes about in her diary and while you won’t recognise the Jo-ness of some of her likes and dislikes and beliefs, you’ll still be able to recognise Mori as yourself.

And let’s make this clear: this isn’t pandering, this isn’t fans are slans, ego stroking for insecure science fiction readers to show that really we are the bestest people in the world, far better than those mundanes. Mori isn’t perfect, she’s wrong on several subjects and she makes some bad mistakes in the course of the novel. No Mary Sue here.

The fantastical element in Among Others is that there exist clearly supernatural beings Mori calls fairies, that magic exist but is deniable, you can work magic and rearrange the world to get the outcome you won, but this is always done in such a way that there are perfectly rational explenations for why this happened. Jo shows this with the first entry in Mori’s diary, as she and her sister have gotten instructions from fairies on how to stop the Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi that was poisoning the forest for miles around by dropping flowers in a pool at the factory; they expect some great magic to work, but instead get a headline in next morning’s newspaper: factory to close.

When the story proper opens with the next entry in Mori’s diary, her sister is dead, she is crippled with a bad leg and has to walk with a cane, has ran away from home to escape her evil witch of a mother (not a slur) and she has been sent to her father, who abandonded her and her twin sister when they were born. Under control of his three sisters, he knows nothing better but to sent her to a boarding school. She never tells outright exactly what happened between her and her mother, other than that she and her sister had to stop her from taking over the world and that’s why she’s is crippled and her sister no longer living. She and her sister had always been very close and being twins, hard to keep apart, to the point where they shared the same nicknames, Mori, or Mor or Mo, as one was called Morwenna and the other Morganna. Though dead, Mori’s sister obviously remains a huge presence in her life.

In some ways this then is a story of what happened after the real story has ended, the Last Battle is been fought and the survivors had to get on with their lives. Something Jo has written about earlier, more directly, in the short story Relentlessly Mundane. There the story had been finished, the magic had gone and would not return; here it’s still present and Mori’s work isn’t quite done.

But that isn’t what her life revolves around. For the most part this is the diary of a fifteen year old girl interested in science fiction and fantasy, a fan of Ursula LeGuin, Robert A. Heinlein, Roger Zelazny and James Tiptree Jr., but not Philip K. Dick or Stephen Donaldson. Her diary entries are about what’s going on with school, reading books and buying books, getting involved with her father’s side of the family and worries about the family she left behind in Wales, Grampaw and Auntie Teg and finding other people who like science fiction, including her father. These parts are where the Jo-ness shines through, but also the most universal parts of the story. There’s one heartbreaking little scene when she and her father are staying in a hotel somewhere and he gets drunk in the bar below and comes into their room and tries to climb into her bed and kiss her and she’s trying to reason it out through what she learned from Heinlein that incest is not a sin if no children are concieved but she has no contraceptives and it doesn’t feel right but it’s nice to be wanted and…

Nothing comes of it, but it’s hard to read, yet exactly the sort of reaction a bright but unworldy fifteen year old sf fan might have. What’s interesting is that it’s one of a series of plot threads that go nowhere, just sizzle out. The incident is not mentioned again and her father is a decent if weak bloke throughout the rest of the book. The same goes for several other developments, where you sort of could see the shape of the story that could’ve been if Jo continued this plot thread, but she chose not to. Later on, there is a very Jo-ish scene where the school librarian is shelving new children books and they’re all dreary modern Problem books about teens with drugs habits or abusive parents, so you have to wonder if putting in that scene with Mori and her father and then not following it up is a slightly pointed rebuke…

What struck me reading Among Others, apart from how much of herself Jo has put into this, is how much meaning can be teased out from what at first seems to be a fairly conventional coming of age story. This could be a novel taught a hundred years from now, with English teachers insisting all those fairies and magic had to be seen as a metaphor for [blah], while some girl or boy at the back of the class is silently fuming, knowning better…