THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS

Since it just came out in Spain, published by Editorial Hidra, I thought I maybe should review my favourite stories in this anthology of retellings of Victorian fairytales, right?



The Soldier Prince - This one was my favourite, a retelling of the Nutcracker story with Tin Soldier and Pinocchio elements, set in a provincial town in the island nation of Kerch, the counterpart Benelux with some influences from the Victorian UK (so much for evoking my Dutch senpai Liz!); mysterious foreign clockwork- and dollmaker Heer Droessen (AKA Drosselmeyer), renowned throughout local society, creates a prince in bright blue uniform that he gifts to Clara, the daughter of his patrons, for counterpart Christmas, intending to use the Zelverhaus children as pawns for his own sinister aims on a quest for power. Here Clara is the younger sister, Frederik AKA Fritz (a cadet who is gay) the older brother, and there is no Louise - so the siblings' birth order is just like in the Dumas version. Another detail straight out of the Dumas version is the family surname, this time Zelverhaus (Silberhaus=Dumas, Stahlbaum=Hoffmann)! So The Soldier Prince is far closer to Dumas than to Hoffmann! The parents are unhappily married grands-bourgeois of the local society, big fish in a small pond stuck in a marital crisis. And the nutcracker... this nutcracker doll believes he is a human royal or lieutenant, a person of flesh and blood, meant to love "Princess" Clara and to fight battles as a "Lieutenant" as second-in-command to "General" Frederik (plus something more, something queerer)... The rat king plays a key role I will not spoil here, but it suffices to say... The shock of reality, including his own reality -that he is a nutcracker doll-, is too much for him to handle. By the end, the clockwork creations of Heer Droessen come to life and claim their destiny, while the family lives of the Zelverhaus clan fall apart like a house of silver cards, in this story evoking white winters and officers in period uniform...

Droessen knew the properties of every kind of wood and paint and lacquer; he could finesse the gears of a clock until they spun with silent precision. And yet, though he could smile readily, charm easily, and play the part of a gentleman, he had never truly understood people or the workings of their steady-running but constant hearts.

Are you my soldier? ... Are you my prince? Are you my darling? Are you mine? 

He kissed her (Clara) beneath the stairs. He kissed Frederik in the darkened hall.
“Do you love her?” Frederik asked. “ Could you love me too?”
He loved them both. He loved no one.

"He can sleep in my room," said Frederik. 

“Yes,” said the nutcracker.

He'd fought bravely, and yet somehow, he always ended up here, alone in the dark.

Wanting is why people get up in the morning. It gives them something to dream about at night. The more I wanted, the more I became like them, the more real I became.

The nutcracker thought of the road again, but now he saw the road was a future—one his father would want him to choose for himself. He imagined the snow in his hair, the ground beneath his boots, the limitless horizon, a world full of chance and mishap and changing weather—gray clouds, hail, thunder, the unexpected.

She (Clara) considered her options and decided there was nothing for it but to become a writer. She sold her pearl earrings and moved to Ketterdam (the capital), where she took a small apartment with a window facing the harbour so that she could watch the ships come and go. There, she wrote fantastical tales that charmed children, and under another name, she penned rather more lurid works that kept her in nougat and sweet cream, which she always took care to share with the mice. 




When Water Sang Fire - This one is my second favourite, a Little Mermaid-inspired story (actually, a prequel or backstory for the dark sea witch and the Little Mermaid's and her sisters' parents!!) set in Fjerda, ie counterpart Scandinavia (most surely counterpart Sweden; since they are sworn enemies to Ravka, counterpart Russia, and "Fjerda" sounds more like "fjärd" than the Norwegian "fjord"). The basic premise is that three young merpeople who form a ménage à trois at the mer-king's court (recalling the ménage à trois in Fouqué's Ondine, the inspiration for Andersen) -Signe, a ginger mermaid; Ulla, a dark mermaid; and Roffe, a blond merman crown prince; all three with different personalities-, turn human and visit the surface; a coastal seat of learning to be more precise (the place is called "Söndermane", which sounds like Sudermania-Södermanland, right? So it would be like counterpart Turku or Uppsala). They trade their tailfins for legs and their gills for lungs without the need for bargains with mer-witches or voice-killing draughts, which means they get to keep their alluring siren-singing voices (that definitely subverts and puts a fresh spin on the Little Mermaid mythos!) along with their inhumanly beautiful looks.
Song was not just a frivolity then, something meant to entertain or lure sailors to their doom. The sildroher (merfolk) used it to summon storms and protect their homes, to keep warships and fishing boats from their seas. They used it to make their shelters and tell their histories. They had no word for witch. Magic flowed through all of them, a song no mortal could hear, that only the water folk could reproduce. In some it seemed to rush in and out like the tide, leaving little in its wake. But in others, in girls like Ulla, the current caught on some dark thing in their hearts and eddied there, forming deep pools of power.

There are elements of Black Swan and-or Swan Lake that make this not only a Little Mermaid retelling (in fact, this story is the backstory of the sea witch and the parents of the Little Mermaid and her older sisters!!), as a love quadrangle unfurls between the fiery Signe, the dark Ulla, merman prince Roffe, and a young scholar at the local university who turns out to have a strong connection to the merfolk... Blood will flow, innocents will have their hearts and lungs torn out of their ribcages, and the blood-dimmed tide is on the rise in this story told in a manner reminiscent of Ende's Neverending Story (printed in blue when the setting is underwater, and in red when it's on land).
Hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.