Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling. NY: Harper, 2014, 434 pp.
Back in the old days, authors told you what you were going to get, and it only came in two flavors: comedy and tragedy. A comedy had a happy ending, and a tragedy was sad. Therefore, Dante’s Divine Comedy really was a comedy despite all the sad figures from history laboring in hell and purgatory, despite Virgil’s eternal exclusion from the Divine, because it ended with Dante, our Everyman, in Paradise.
Conversely, any story with a sad ending was a tragedy. We’re pickier today, having taken back up with the ancient Greek tradition of the Great Dionysia, that a tragedy requires a hero in an impossible position. Think Antigone, trying to decide whether to obey the state and let her brother Polyneices’ body rot, or obey the gods and bury him properly. The focus on classic (and modern) tragedy is not on what happens, but on how it happens. Freed from getting caught up in the emotional roller coaster of “will our hero survive?” since we know damn well she won’t, instead we focus on the inevitability of the action. Lest you think this is outdated, witness the same mechanics at work in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, where from the opening of the film we know Maximus is walking through the Elysian Fields, or Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm, where the film poster features the Andrea Gale mounting the fatal wave. The filmmaker invites you to know the end before you walk in to the theater; in fact, the events depicted and their sad outcome formed part of the marketing strategy. Have you not wondered why?
Distance.
Before we revived the strict definition of tragedy, everything with a sad ending was a tragedy, even those works that today we would call melodrama. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for instance, are we not urging Friar Laurence’s messenger to move a little damn faster to tell Romeo about the sleeping potion before Balthazar does? Or urging that same slow friar to hurry his butt along to the crypt before Romeo poisons himself? There’s nothing inexorable about it—it’s all in mislaid plans and bad timing. That emotional hang-by-your-fingernails aspect to the play, that whole accidental failure doesn’t exist in classic tragedy, but by Shakespeare’s lights, this is still a tragedy. He tells us so in the prologue:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
The whole point of the play is the ending of the feud, not the love story. But we get caught up in the love story, because that’s the better tale, as the narrator of Life of Pi would put it. Even if you had never heard of Romeo and Juliet, you would know from the first fourteen lines, this little sonnet that foregrounds the story, that It Does Not End Well. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde does the same, as well as innumerable other works. That’s one aspect of Classicism that survived through the Vulgate Age—giving the audience a heads up about having a sad.
Now, this has itself been a long prologue for a book review, but it has a point. Usually we read, caught on the tenterhooks of “what happens next?” But what if you have a book, the first of a series, where you already know how the whole damn thing is going to end, and the story elements are among the most tired of tired fantasy tropes, but the handling is so deft and surprising that you can’t help but be hooked?
Why, then, you have Erika Johansen’s 2014 debut novel, The Queen of the Tearling.
Kelsea Raleigh, the heir of the Tear, lives in a medieval-style world, an orphaned princess in hiding, raised by foster parents Barty and Carlin Glynn. On her nineteenth birthday, guards sworn to her service, Queen’s Guards, arrive to escort her to her throne.
There the trope ends. The guards don’t want to be there and she doesn’t want to go. But that doesn’t matter:
She was the crown princess of the Tearling, and this was her nineteenth birthday, the age of ascension for Tearling monarchs all the way back to Jonathan Tear. The Queen’s Guard would carry her back to the Keep kicking and screaming, if need be, and imprison her on the throne, and there she would sit, hung with velvet and silk, until she was assassinated. (p. 6)
Kelsea has been educated in history and politics and equipped with all the tools her guardians can give her—except that she knows nothing of her country’s present, nothing of political realities, nothing of international matters. She knows only that her country is poor and weak, and the neighboring kingdom, Mortmense, with their evil red queen, threatens them. Carlin tells her, “We swore to your mother that we would not tell you of her failures, Kelsea, and we’ve kept our promise. But not everything at the Keep will be as you thought. Barty and I have given you good tools; that was our charge. But once you sit on the throne, you’ll have to make your own hard decisions” (p.9).
That assumes that Kelsea survives long enough to reach the throne. Her own small guard is hunted, first by the Caden, assassins sent from Kelsea’s uncle Thomas, the current regent, and next by a band of outlaws led by a master thief, the Fetch, who is more than he appears to be. By the time Kelsea arrives in the capital, New London, we’ve realized that this is not the fantasy we expected. Instead it’s a dystopia mixed with a fair amount of magic—magic jewels, dark magic, dead men walking. The politics are ruthless, the nobility spoiled and entitled, the black market thriving, the Church almost entirely corrupt, and almost everyone wants Kelsea dead—everyone except the commoners and her own loyal handful of retainers.
Unfortunately marketed as a Young Adult mashup of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, The Queen of the Tearling is none of those things. Classic fantasy tropes—magic sapphires, an evil queen, the Promised One being our plucky orphaned heroine—clash headlong into an adolescent girl’s raging hormones and body image issue, including her painful awareness that she’s not beautiful, thrust into an impossible political situation. Instead of a quest, Kelsea has a more difficult path: she has to lead a country that’s been rudderless for too long. Instead of dragons to slay, she has an army whose generals think she’s a witless girl (in every antifeminist sense of the word), a Church and Civil Service that, if they can’t control her, plot to destroy her, and a cadre of assassins in waiting.
But here’s the thing: we know she’s going to triumph.
If there’s ever been a theorem in Fantasy, it’s this: read the prologues and forewords. Often skipped because they seem beside the point, authors put the there to guide you, to give you hints.
Johansen is no different. The foreword to the first chapter reads as follows:
THE GLYNN QUEEN—Kelsea Raleigh Glynn, seventh Queen of the Tearling. Also known as: The Marked Queen. Fostered by Carlin and Bartholemew (Barty the Good) Glynn. Mother: Queen Elyssa Raleigh. Father: unknown. See appendix XI for speculation.
---The Early History of the Tearling, as Told By Merwinain
This passage tells us two things: Kelsea will reach the throne and the kingdom of Tear will endure, since Kelsea is part of its early history.
Other chapter forewords are more explicit, chronicling Kelsea’s courage, her triumphs. We’ll see an extract from The Tearling as a Military Nation, biographies of the queen, memoirs about her legacy, riddles and children’s nursery rhymes:
Here is Glynn Queen, here is Red Queen,
One to perish beyond recall,
The Lady moves, the Witch despairs,
Glynn Queen triumph and Red Queen fall.
So we know already that Kelsea, the Glynn Queen, is going to prevail. So why read?
For the pleasure, of course, And because, freed from the melodramatic “will she succeed?” vibe, you get to enjoy the ride. You get to watch the how, instead of the what. It’s the same reason that tragedies get labeled at the beginning.
The situation Kelsea stumbles into when she enters the city is itself sufficiently dramatic to justify me not spoiling it. It’s enough to say that, knowing nothing of current events, the young heir rides directly into a confrontation with the much more powerful and technologically advanced Mortmense. To say she makes an impression is an understatement. In one situation after another, Johansen teases us with classic tropes, only to undercut or deftly twist them. Carlin and Barty have given Kelsea good skills, and her trusted servants give her good advice, particularly Lazarus, the Captain of her Guard, who becomes something of a father figure to Kelsea. Their help and her innate strength will have to be enough to make her a queen in more than name.
There’s really not much more I can say about the plot without hefty spoilers. It’s widely known already that the novel is set is a dystopic future, even though it begins as quasi-medieval fantasy. At this point in the series we don’t know what happened before the Crossing, but we do know that the descendants of Americans and English landed in the agrarian Tear while other refugees in New Europe got mineral and strategic advantages that made them richer and more powerful. Most medicine has been lost, along with advanced technology. Although Christianity survived and thrived, its hierarchy has been thoroughly corrupted. It’s a dismal situation for a young woman, but Kelsea has to make do. Lazarus assembles a household for her—a few women with children rescued from their abusive husbands on the day of the queen’s arrival in New London; a bookie for an exchequer, a man uniquely qualified for his duties since he already knows everyone’s dirt. Although I can’t reveal much of the plot, I can tell you that the climactic finish is not what you expect.
The three villains are fairly stock figures, and here is about the only place where Johansen stumbles and shows herself a debut novelist. The regent, Kelsea’s uncle Thomas, is a pastiche of weak and dissolute ruler tropes; Thorne is straight out of Dickens and the Red Queen is on loan from Sleeping Beauty. Or almost. She has her own weaknesses, and the forces of darkness that she depends upon hew close to the dark magic of the Fetch, hinting at intriguing correspondences.
One of the few things that barely survived the mythic Crossing is books. Books are rare, and Kelsea loves them. She was raised on a whole library of fiction and nonfiction, one which, when it’s transported to her Keep in New London, gives her the chance to recommend to the palace children various adventure novels like The Hobbit and the “seven volumes of Rowling.” Such is the self-conscious skewering nature of Queen of the Tearling.
The book doesn’t deserve its Young Adult marketing status. Although YA accommodates dark, not this kind of dark: child rape, mutilation, sexual deviance, murder. The book glosses over explicit sexuality, but torture is there, as well as enough dark impulse to discomfit the most jaded reader. I’m told it gets worse in the sequel, Invasion of the Tearling, which supposedly bears a passing resemblance to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’ve been holding back because I wanted a clear perspective on this first novel. Fantasy not-a-fantasy, coming-of-age novel but not really, The Queen of the Tearling is many things but, at base, is entirely original, and well worth the read.
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There, see how easy it is? Nothing to it. Next week, Angmar reviews Lilith.
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