We’re done! It’s a miracle.
Oh, squiders. This one started out so much better. There were other characters! There was a clear plot! And then it spiraled down into insanity still. Sigh.
Goodreads tells me that this book was nominated for best novel for the World Fantasy Awards in 1986, so I’m just going to assume that 1986 was a bad year for fantasy novels. (Actually, further research tells me books like Redwall, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Light Fantastic came out in 1986, so maybe we were awarding awards based on how smart we thought books were that year. Do you know what I mean? Where something is totally incomprehensible, so it must be because you’re not smart enough to understand it, not that it’s just a mess?)
I feel like we got an incomplete story. At the end of Undersea, Finn/Llugh/Ar Elon had disappeared instead of leading his people to war, as had been foreshadowed through both Yearwood and Undersea. And as it doesn’t seem like Paul Hazel wrote any more books related to this (there seems to be a fourth book, The Wealdwife’s Tale, which is not directly related), apparently that will just never be finished up.
Winterking takes place at some unspecified time which I assume is roughly the 1930s. It’s after WWI (as I assume the “Great War” is referring to) and there are cars, yet if it wasn’t for those clues, I would assume it was earlier, sometime in the 1800s, because despite taking place in New England somewhere, it feels distinctly like Regency-era novels I’ve read in terms of setting/conventions. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be the New World because it felt like we were in England.
(Of course, it’s not really New England and it could literally be any time, but that leads us into the messy part of this and I’m not ready for that yet.)
SPOILERS AHEAD
We follow Wykeham, whom I originally thought was Finn but I’m pretty sure is actually supposed to be Wyck, who was present for most of Undersea though not seemingly of any import til the end. (Remember when I was talking about allegories about youth?) Finn gave him his cloak early-ish in Undersea which apparently made it so he could never age, and so he’s just gone on, forever, pretending to be his own son, in what’s a fairly standard I’m-immortal-and-this-is-how-I-don’t-seem-too-suspicious way. That part was interesting.
And then it gets messy. So apparently Wykeham has the ability to remake the world, or at least a little section of it, whenever things start to not go his way, or whenever Duinn (the god of death) gets too close. I assuming Duinn is Finn/Llugh/Ar Elon, that this is the name he did not give in the last book, though this is never explicit. So I could be completely wrong.
So Duinn gets too close, and there’s something about Indians burning churches (I really just…did not understand what the Indians ever had to do with anything. They’re in there from the beginning, and at first, before the whole world remaking madness cropped up, I assumed they were just your standard Native Americans handled indelicately because it was the ’80s. But later on I think they’re more of an indicator of how close Duinn is to catching up to Wykeham.) and Wykeham gathers nine men to him to remake the world again, and he uses the memories from himself and the nine to create the world, so it keeps people and conventions and things that people want in it.
And then, and I’m just trying to make sense of the madness, something goes wrong with the new world creation, because it’s snowing, and there’s still Indians, and the stone kings from the first book, and I think the implication is that the women (who left during the actual world remaking) got into the process accidentally, or at least Nora did, since she didn’t get all the way away (distracted by Duinn) during the remaking, and also because she’s Wykeham’s daughter, and maybe somehow has some of the same ability.
AND THEN THE BOOK JUST STOPS so there’s STILL NO RESOLUTION.
AUGH.
Anyway, if you’ve read these along with me, I’m sorry. Also, I hope you followed what happened better than I did.
Have a good weekend, Squiders!
