A Stranger in Olondria - Starter 1 - The Plot

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What did you reckon was the core of A Stranger in Olondria? A love story? A traveller's tale? A link between reading, writing and spirituality? Something else? Did this work for you?

Comments

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    Quite liked the book. Thought the core was the kind of auto-biography that Jonah, or perhaps William James (who said he didn't have a religious bone in his body), might produce to describe his life. Was particularly impressed with the handling of how knowledge is derivative, but presents itself as complete and original nonetheless. Also liked the handling of motivated imitation throughout the book.

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    I think it's mainly about how our memories, past experiences, and the people who raise us can shape us. It's also a love story, but here love in the greater sense, rather than personal love. Jevick goes from fearing his ghost to loving it over the course of writing its biography. In this sense, I think one of the themes of the book is that in the understanding of someone, one can love them. Walk a mile in ones shoes to love thy neighbour, if I may mix some metaphors.

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    The core was Olondria itself to me. The land itself, which enabled everything within it.

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    An observation from someone who didn't finish. Is it the case that this novel only really starts half-way through? All the questions reference things I don't think I got to. I stopped at 50%, when thingammy had just escaped the asylum. Was the first half of the book really necessary?

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    @NeilNjae said:
    An observation from someone who didn't finish. Is it the case that this novel only really starts half-way through? All the questions reference things I don't think I got to. I stopped at 50%, when thingammy had just escaped the asylum. Was the first half of the book really necessary?

    Good question! The early parts establish Jevick's background (personal and social) and his relationships with various folk including Jissavet and Tialon, among others. From those early parts you may well not have had any clear sense that the dynamic with Jissavet was going to become such an important part of the whole.

    In terms of Jevick's journeys, they only really start after escaping from the asylum, and from this point on we get a much more sweeping sense of the broader landscape away from the major towns. I think if we had not had the town-based part we might have missed out on the nature of the transition - as @Apocryphal mentioned at some stage, Jevick's identity as pepper trader is wrapped up in the travel to carry out trade, and as he sheds the trading identity he also moves out into the wilder parts of Olondria.

    So I guess one could have maybe started with the second part, but one would have lost a good chunk of background and setup. A bit like if a traditional fairy tale started with the protagonist already out in the woods trying to find the dragon's cave (or whatever) as opposed to starting in the woodcutter's house or such like.

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    We need to have the early part to introduce Jevick and his relationship to his father. And to his mentor, Lunre, who comes back at then end (ghostlike) as a more pivotal character than we initially thought.

    The story structure is something like:

    *We meet Jevick. He has a fraught relationship with his father, and this relationship has meaning both good and bad.
    *Jevick also has a mentor, one that he can relate to much more closely. The mentor is imperfect, too, as we learn at the end.
    *Jevick travels to Olondria, and on the boat meets a young girl. This marks the beginning of his transformation. She will be his constant companion.
    *Jevick struggles with this ghost (who is also an angel). Society doesn’t like ghosts, so he’s left to deal with it on his own. Trials and tribulations follow.
    *Jevick is eventually forced to confront the ghost, and in doing so comes to a greater understanding of her, of himself, and of the world.
    *Jevick returns home and finds that everything was not as it seemed. But now he’s armed with greater understanding, and can be the man he wants to be, rather than the one that his father and society expected.

    That’s my take, anyway. If any of the novel could be cut, it was the middle, where there was a lot of drifting.
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    @NeilNjae said:
    An observation from someone who didn't finish. Is it the case that this novel only really starts half-way through? All the questions reference things I don't think I got to. I stopped at 50%, when thingammy had just escaped the asylum. Was the first half of the book really necessary?

    I think it was necessary, but it depends on what theme the book is conveying. I thought the story was about the relation of people with their external soul (jut for those who know of it). The ghost/love story is motivated by this, and we can't understand this without the first part of the book.

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    @BarnerCobblewood said:
    I think it was necessary, but it depends on what theme the book is conveying. I thought the story was about the relation of people with their external soul (jut for those who know of it). The ghost/love story is motivated by this, and we can't understand this without the first part of the book.

    I probably overstated my case. Some background and setup is necessary (and I somewhat enjoyed the account of Jevick's childhood), but did we need quite to much setup? Did we need quite so many walls of descriptive text. I was skipping through the book just before I abandoned it, but I managed to completely miss Jevick being possessed by some saint/ghost and hence be deemed mad or dangerous.

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    @NeilNjae said:
    ... I managed to completely miss Jevick being possessed by some saint/ghost and hence be deemed mad or dangerous.

    I think that was an interesting twist in the plot, based initially on a misunderstanding of words. Jevick (in my reading) wanted to convey that he felt that he was in communication with someone who had died and moreover her body had not been granted the necessary rites of passage to liberate her spirit.

    Those hearing him then say "ah, do you mean you are talking to an angel" to which he, unaware of the nuances of what he is admitting to, says "yeah, sure" and then finds himself in a whole raft of trouble because of what that admission conveys to the ruling faction. The rapidity with which he then becomes a useful tool or pawn in the tension between the two main groups is rather startling, and drives most of his remaining movements and affiliations - until the point where he surrenders to the demands to tell the ghost's story and so liberate both himself and her.

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    @NeilNjae I don't think we needed the descriptive text, but in its defence I thought it was quite effective at explaining how things (or the social environment) works with and against individual's wishes. The people Jevick meets reveal this both in what they say and what they do, but this view is only available because we have a reliable narrator.

    @RichardAbbott said:
    Those hearing him then say "ah, do you mean you are talking to an angel" to which he, unaware of the nuances of what he is admitting to, says "yeah, sure" and then finds himself in a whole raft of trouble because of what that admission conveys to the ruling faction. The rapidity with which he then becomes a useful tool or pawn in the tension between the two main groups is rather startling, and drives most of his remaining movements and affiliations - until the point where he surrenders to the demands to tell the ghost's story and so liberate both himself and her.

    It's like Jevick and Jissavet function as a jut for the Olondrians, who are simultaneously 1) Ignorant of what is going on, and yet 2) Riven within themselves about the role of external souls in their society. The Jevick-and-Jissavet-jut enables them to solve it according to their civilised way (war and violence with the other as pawn), but there is a repetition of the structure, where the same conflict is played out with Jevick and Jissavet. By Jevick's agency being stripped from him by both the Olondrians and Jessavet, it is revealed to him how he will resolve his conflict between his agency and his jut, which in turn is revealed to have already been symbolised in his home society. The mystic leaves his home only to return etc.

    I think of this as like Cloud Atlas, except that instead of the development being going from home in the past to the future, then returning to past, Jevick travels through space, and time continues on. I guess for me this story is more useful because I know how to actually travel to-and-fro through space, while such travel through time is quite beyond me.

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    @BarnerCobblewood Oh, that’s easy - you give your stave to an adept, along with 50 simoleons, and then walk backwards up a hill, drive forward down the hill, and row your luggage twice around the harbour… (a reference to The Gradual).
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    BTW

    There’s a ‘companion volume’ to Strangers in Olondria’ called ‘The Winged Histories’. I don’t think it’s a sequel, but rather tells a different story in the same setting. There’s some small reference to the first book, but it stands quite alone. The first review I see on GoodReads says it’s actually four interlocked stories on sundry themes. She says all the nice writing elements are there, but the storytelling is more successful. So I’m definitely going to check it out.
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    @Apocryphal said:
    BTW

    There’s a ‘companion volume’ to Strangers in Olondria’ called ‘The Winged Histories’. I don’t think it’s a sequel, but rather tells a different story in the same setting. There’s some small reference to the first book, but it stands quite alone. The first review I see on GoodReads says it’s actually four interlocked stories on sundry themes. She says all the nice writing elements are there, but the storytelling is more successful. So I’m definitely going to check it out.

    I'll probably do the same, once my reading pile has gone down a bit:) I had a look at the Goodreads reviews for The Winged Histories and they looked like they came out on balance rather like our reactions as a group here to Stranger - a bunch of folk who really liked it, another bunch who thought they liked it but found that the storyline got lost in the writing, and a few people who just didn't get on with it at all.

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