I’ve read this book three times – in (roughly) 2012, in 2016 while I was writing The Angels of L19, and now again in 2021. My experience of it has changed significantly with each re-read. One might expect this with a book first encountered in one’s teens and re-read in middle age, but this process has taken me by surprise for a book I first read only a decade ago. Perhaps all great books do this – keep tapping us on the shoulder, challenging us to return to them.
There was a lot of buzz around this title in the SFF community when it came out – it won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards – because it is about a protagonist discovering that community as a teenager c. 1980, and in the process discovering herself. For Mor, the book's protagonist, the fellow fans she discovers in her local library’s reading group become her ‘karass’ (a word she borrows from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, meaning a group linked by an essential or true spiritual connection). And the end of the book looks forward optimistically to the expansion of this community at fan conventions, and among fellow students at university, who Mor expects to be more congenial than the games-obsessed philistines at her girls’ boarding school.
On first read, I was a little disappointed with this aspect of the book. It’s written as a diary, and some of the entries felt like mere lists of books Mor is reading (she reads very fast, over a book a day, so the novel name-checks a lot of titles). I still think it might have been better to trim some of this name-checking, even if one concedes that the novel is for fellow fans. I am about five years younger than Mor, but, while I was/am vaguely aware of many of the authors mentioned, a lot of the individual titles are unfamiliar to me. However, this doesn’t matter when the novel takes pains to explain precisely what particular books means to Mor or her fellow book-group members – on re-read, I found these more substantive discussions pitched at just the right level of detail and complexity. They’re not lit-crit evaluations. The closest the book group really gets to this is in distinguishing books that prioritise ‘style’ from those that prioritise ‘ideas’ (I’d be interested to know where this leaves Philip K Dick, who the novel largely avoids discussing). Rather, Mor uses books as ways to make sense of what’s happening to her: as models for working out and thinking through her orientation to the people and events of her life.
This phenomenological approach is of course verboten in academic criticism, where it would be regarded as hopelessly naïve, but it’s very true to teenage experience I think. All the more so in Mor’s case, given that she lives inside an SFF story: to be precise, a fantasy story with magic and fairies.
Both these aspects of the book are defamiliarised enough to seem fresh despite their centrality as themes in fantasy – but not so much that they can’t draw some of their force from the tradition the book forms part of and is frequently in direct conversation with. That’s a difficult balance to strike, and the book does it casually. One of the ways it does so – and this is part of its example for me – is to present the fantastic elements as already familiar to its protagonist. There’s no tedious ‘origin story’ in which half the book is frittered away with the protagonist trying to come to terms with an unexpectedly transformed reality. The transformation is congenital, so to speak: magic and fairies have always been part of her reality. And even when she’s obliged to try to explain this to her new boyfriend, his immersion in SFF makes it easier for him to get his head round it all (even if he keeps insisting that the fairies might be ghosts: i.e. he’s imposing a familiar, pre-existing category – though of course that is also what Mor is doing by calling them ‘fairies’).
I wanted to do something similar in The Angels of L19, where all the characters are Christians, and therefore believe a priori in the existence of angels and demons – I am about try to manage the same trick again for a new book. That whole emotional arc of ‘This can’t be real. But what if it is real? Oh my god it’s real!’ is just of no interest to me. I want to move past it as quickly as possible – or preferably omit it entirely.
Among Others has another structural innovation: its story unfolds after the climactic confrontation in which Mor’s twin sister has been killed, and Mor herself has been badly injured, during a successful attempt to prevent their mother conducting dark magic. And we never really get a full account of this confrontation – it remains slightly out of focus, even as the ache of loss and grief for the dead sister is the book's central emotion. As Mor puts it to herself via her usual habit of comparing her situation to a story – it’s as if the entire book is focussed on the Scouring of the Shire rather than the epic quest to which it forms an appendix in Lord of the Rings.
I suspect I was also disappointed with this literally anti-climactic structure on first read – the novel seems to be building throughout towards a second epic confrontation, but when this arrives, it’s over almost immediately. But this structure now seems to me both daring and interesting, and I found the book’s unusual rhythms quite satisfying on re-read. These rhythms are perhaps to do with those of adolescence: the substitution of a peer group with whom commonalities have to be discovered and constructed for a family with whom shared intimacies are taken for granted, but also ultimately limiting and even stifling. It doesn’t get more intimate than a twin sister with whom one also performs magic – and her death enacts being cast out of this charmed circle of pre-existing assumptions into a broader social universe.
I’ve seen Among Others described as YA. I don’t read enough YA to know how well it sits within that definition, but one thing it does very well is to use Mor’s teenage incomprehension of the adult world to defamiliarise that world. There’s a particularly bravura passage on class distinction as a form of magic (the latter is of course very familiar to Mor; the former, bizarre and incomprehensible).
I wonder if my initial downplaying of the book’s merits was a self-protective one: its influence on The Angels of L19 now seems very obvious to me, but writing in the direct light of that influence would have been inhibiting. For example, my novel features three scenes with characters watching films (Time Bandits, Footloose and Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc) and thinking about or discussing how these films fit (or don’t fit) with their Christian beliefs. It also includes characters thinking about music in the same terms. (I chose films and music rather than books because the former two are mass media and more likely to be familiar to readers, and because the Bible is the ur-book against which all other cultural productions are measured in my fictional world – it therefore leaves little room for other books). But Walton’s presentation of community, and of the interplay between the social and the esoteric, now seems just as important. And as I’ve mentioned above, her book’s acceptance of the fantastic as a given was also a model. Even her structural gambit of starting where most other stories would finish finds an echo in my novel’s continuation of its story past the expected climax – something I’ll discuss in more detail closer to publication with reference to Tolkien’s idea of the eucatastrophe: the undoing or reversal of a tragic ending.
Since in my book this ‘fourth act’ takes the form of a re-writing of the legend of the Harrowing of Hell, I might also note that the same legend is the basis for Walton’s more recent novel Lent (although I didn’t read her take on this until I’d finished writing my book).
There are plenty of other influences on The Angels of L19 (for example, Charles Williams), but, having just re-read Among Others, I wanted to acknowledge its importance in detail.
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