Staff picks A random assortment
of good books chosen by the ASR
team and friends
about conflicts of loyalty; abou
spells that can levitate buildings
and open the gates of time. A t
its core, though, Alphabet of
Thorn is about real magic: the
delirious, compulsive pleasure of
reading and the transformative
power of books.
Alphabet of Thorn
Patricia A. McKillip Penguin,
L ondon, 2004, 304 pp.
A l phabet of T horn is a book
about identity; about a kingdom
perched on both the edge of
the world and the edge of ruin
during the reign of a young,
inadequate ruler; about passing;
38
Orphaned N epenthe, raised
in the R oyal L ibrary carved into
the cliffs beneath the Palace of
R aine, “had drooled on words,
talked at them, and tried to eat
them until she learned to take
them into her eyes instead of
her mouth”. A translator, she
unravels forgotten alphabets of
fish and leaves. O ne day a book
comes into her hands, written in
Above Nepenthe, R aine
trembles: armies mass on the
borders, insurrections hatch,
the long-dead founder of the
kingdom appears with ominous
warnings to beware of thorns.
But neither the threat of war
nor a blossoming romance
can compete for N epenthe’s
attention with the book written
in thorns.
T he magicians of R aine don’t
recognize the magic that has
her entranced, but anyone who
has ever turned the final page
of a novel, and looked up to
find its three in the morning,
will. Writing a book about an
unputdownable book is a risk,
inevitably inviting comparison,
but M cKillip’s sinewy plotting
and gorgeous lyricism make
Alphabet of Thorn as spellbinding as the alphabet of thorn
itself, filled with vivid character
and resonant themes, and like
N epenthe I found myself resenting every moment spent not
reading until the book was done.
Alphabet of Thorn contains
a powerful exploration of the
value and virtue of books, their
revelatory and transformative
power. A s well, its narrative is
a subtle argument for speculative fictions ability to reveal the
familiar by rendering it strange.
A foreigner is the only one
to recognize that N epenthe’s
face comes from “an ancient
kingdom … [that] no longer
exists except on paper"; Kane
hides a dangerous secret inside
others’ assumptions about race
and disability; nepenthe’s book
tells of impossible events that
are nonetheless true. only by
embracing the impossible logic
of magic can the people of
raine recognize the realities of
their danger and their strength.
By the end N epenthe, like
all readers, discovers that the
magic in her book is that it
tells her ultimately more about
herself than the characters
she reads about, just as the
author of the book of thorns
comes to realize that the act
of telling her story changes her
understanding of it. To reach
that point, both must accept the
necessary suspension of disbelief that magic, and the magic
of reading, demands.
M cKillip, as a fantasy writer,
has always asked her readers
for the same suspension of
disbelief she requires of her
characters. O f all her nearly
thirty novels, Alphabet of Thorn
draws the strongest parallels
between the magic in stories
and the magic of them: both a
powerful, memorable evocation, and a delightful example,
of the pleasures and rewards
of books.
Ashley Hogan
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Image: greg ba
thorns: “brambles, curling and
twisting around one another,
linked by their sharp spurs”.
U ntangling the alphabet of
thorns, picking apart its sharp
spines to find the words inside,
N epenthe discovers the story
of the warrior King A xis and
his sorcerer, Kane, “dust for
thousands of years”.
But books can translate their
readers across time as well
as space, and as we watch
over N epenthe’s shoulder her
gradual, halting translation of
a story of war and poetry and
love, M cKillip tells us also the
story of the writing of that
book, the tale of A xis and Kane
wrapped inside the story of a
woman reading the tale of A xis
and Kane.
kes
Muses / Anne Summers Reports