Gwyneth Jones – Wis[s]e Words

Cover of Spirit

Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant
Gwyneth Jones
472 pages
published in 2008

So about halfway through Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant, when the heroine is rotting away in prison on an alien world, forgotten by everybody, it looked like the novel was going to be a science fiction adaption of The Count of Monte Cristo. It wouldn’t have been the first; The Stars My Destination just being the most famous example of such an adaptation. But while the imprisonment of Bibi, Spirit‘s protagonist does consciously echo Dumas’ famous novel, including having an older mentor imprisoned with her who leaves her a fortune, it changes its mind almost instantly and doesn’t become a revenge story after all.

Which is for the best, as Bibi is no Edmond Dantès. Whereas the latter was unknowingly framed for a political crime for those he thought his friends, only discovering the truth years into his imprisonment, Bibi was just collatoral damage, not for the first time either. She had started live as Gwibiwr, the probable daughter of a (Welsh?) chieftan of the White Rock clans who’d long lived in rebellion against the one world government, a rebellion now crushed. Bibi herself is taken into the entourage of Lady Nef and becomes a minor servant, young enough to have lost most of her memories of before. She was therefore a victim of politics long before she was left ot rot in an alien prison for being part of a conspiracy against an emperor who hadn’t yet taken the throne when she had last been on Earth. And unlike Dantès, the people on which she could’ve had her revenge were mostly innocent bystanders as well.

Cover of Bold as Love

Bold as Love
Gwyneth Jones
403 pages
published in 2001

Bold as Love is the second book in my year of reading women sf challenge, chosen partially because Niall Harrison was also going to read it in February, for Torque Control‘s similar project. For a long time I wondered whether I had made a mistake selecting this book, picking it up and putting it down again, not getting to grips with it. Didn’t like the writing, didn’t believe the world building or plot, couldn’t care for the protagonists. Only the fact that I was reading this as part of a self imposed challenge kept me going. That, and the feeling that a novel which had won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and which was commercially succesful enough to span four sequels, must have something in it that I was missing.

Perhaps it was just that this was a novel I needed to immerse myself in fully, not read in bits and chunks here and there during the daily commute. Gwyneth Jones is not a writer who grabs you from the first sentence — at least she isn’t for me. She writes her characters from the outside in, rather coolly and hence it takes more time to get into her characters’ heads than it would with a more “warmer” writer. I had the same sort of problems with the future England Bold as Love predicted, which at first seemed dated and implausible, more sixties New Wave than early 21st century science fiction.

Articles with the Tag Gwyneth Jones

Spirit — Gwyneth Jones

Bold as Love — Gwyneth Jones