In Great Waters by
Kit Whitfield
Published: Jonathan
Cape, Del Rey, 2009
Awards Nominated:
World Fantasy Award
The Book:
“During a time of
great upheaval, the citizens of Venice make a pact that will change the world.
The landsmen of the city broker a treaty with a water-dwelling tribe of
deepsmen, cementing the alliance through marriage. The mingling of the two
races produces a fresh, peerless strain of royal blood. To protect their
shores, other nations make their own partnerships with this new breed–and then,
jealous of their power, ban any further unions between the two peoples.
Dalliance with a deepswoman becomes punishable by death. Any “bastard” child
must be destroyed.
This is an Earth where
the legends of the deep are true–where the people of the ocean are as real and
as dangerous as the people of the land. This is the world of intrigue and
betrayal that Kit Whitfield brings to life in an unforgettable alternate
history: the tale of Anne, the youngest princess of a faltering England,
struggling to survive in a troubled court, and Henry, a bastard abandoned on
the shore to face his bewildering destiny, finding himself a pawn in a game he
does not understand. Yet even a
pawn may checkmate a king.” ~WWend.com
I read In Great Waters for the April selection of Calico Reaction’s Theme ParkChallenge.
My Thoughts:
In Great Waters is
a supernatural alternate history, though I don’t think that it adheres strictly
to any particular historical events.
The story seems to be set in a Europe several centuries in our past, and
it focuses primarily on the English royal court. The main difference between this world and our own is the presence
of merpeople, known as deepsmen.
The deepsmen are not the shell-wearing princesses of Disney cartoons. They’re violent and clannish, have a
simple language based on clicks, whistles, and other sounds that carry cleanly
through water, and are quite biologically dissimilar to humans, called
‘landsmen’. The deepsman tribes
represent a naval advantage to any nation that can hold their loyalty. I liked how the story fleshed out the
deepsmen’s society and way of seeing the world, and the attention that was paid
to how their presence would affect human society.
Though I enjoyed the exploration of the role of deepsmen in
European politics, certain elements seemed rather implausible to me. First of all, I did not feel that there
was a compelling reason for all the coastal royal families to interbreed with
deepsmen. The purpose of the
interbreeding was to gain the ability to speak with the deepsmen and form
alliances with them. It seemed like creating a translator position at court to
be filled with non-royal hybrids would have been a much less extreme way to
achieve the same goal. Considering how obsessed the royals were with protecting
their bloodlines, I had a hard time accepting that they would all consent to
interbreed with an entirely different species. The mingling of blood also left the royal families as
physical cripples, both on land and in the sea. I would have liked to have been
given a convincing reason why the monarchs themselves absolutely needed to have
deepsman blood.
The eventual ban on interbreeding seemed a little
unmotivated as well. I suppose I
wasn’t successfully impressed with the importance of deepsman blood to think that
executing all hybrids would be a reasonable step in securing the position of
the royalty. After all, in
reality, all humans are of the correct physical form to overthrow their
monarchs, but most monarchs don’t seriously propose that slaughtering all their
citizens is the only way to secure their power. It didn’t really make sense to me in terms of protecting
royal bloodlines, either. The
royal bloodlines were already mixed with the deepsmen, anyway, and preventing
further mixing only resulted in severe birth defects from inbreeding. It seemed like the worst of both
options—the royal bloodlines were already ‘tainted’ and they still had to deal
with genetic disorders. I wished
there could have been more of an explanation for this development in
deepsman-landsman relations.
Though I had trouble buying some of the landsman policies
regarding deepsman, I was very interested in the portrayal of the two societies
and their differences. On this
topic, I particularly enjoyed the early story of the two hybrid protagonists,
Anne and Henry. Henry was an
illegal hybrid who spent his first few years living with deepsmen. I thought his introduction to
above-water life was shown very skillfully. It was clear that his worldview was shaped by his years underwater,
and that this affected his efforts to make sense of his new world. Anne, on the
other hand, was a child of the English royal family. She was very conscious of her surroundings from a young age,
and I enjoyed watching her slowly develop a construct of her world and the
rules that bound it. I loved
these chapters, and their exploration of how the main characters were shaped by
their upbringing and environment.
However, as the story progressed, it seemed to lose its
tension and drive. Both protagonists
seemed to live lives marked by abnormally good luck, so their personal journeys
never felt as difficult as they might have. This became more pronounced later in the story, where their
run of luck began to seem progressively more unlikely. The protagonists’ good fortune also
seemed to outstrip their ambition, which also seemed to mute the joy of their
successes. For instance, the only reason
Henry ever wanted to be king to avoid being executed—he had no real interest
whatsoever in landsmen. I remained interested in what would become of Henry and
Anne, but I was never quite as engaged as I was with the story of their early
lives.
My Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment