Hild, by Nicola Griffith

Hild
Nicola Griffith
FSG: 2013

Who was St. Hilda of Whitby?  Everything that is known of St. Hilda comes from the Venerable Bede, who was born seven years before Hild's death in 680 AD, and all of that is five pages of text describing her life.  Nicola Griffith writes,

We don't know where Hild was born exactly and when her father died—or her mother. We have no idea what she looked like, what she was good at, whether she married or had children. But clearly she was extraordinary. In a time of warlords and kings, when might was right, she begins as the second daughter of a homeless widow, probably without much in the way of material resources and certainly in an illiterate culture, and ends a powerful advisor to statesmen-kings and teacher of five bishops. Today she is revered as St Hilda.

What sort of person must she have been?  What sort of woman?  What must she have faced?  Nicola Griffith uses the bare framework laid down by Bede some 1300 years ago, works within the guideposts of what we actually know to have occurred at that time, and fills in the gaps with how this all could have gone down. 

Who was St. Hilda of Whitby?  Nicola Griffith answers a different question: Who was Hild? 

Hild, as presented here, is a child, then a young woman, who presents herself as a "seer" who becomes the advisor of her uncle, Edwin, king of Northumbria.  It may not matter whether the visions that Hild presents are real, though the way Griffith writes them, the visions come across more as policy / suggestion presented as vision. They are ways to coerce Edwin into action as well as preserve and protect the place of Hild in his court. 

Throughout the novel Hild grows from a young girl to a woman of eighteen years, and while she has lived something of a charmed life, it has been a precariously charmed life. She has an importance and a place in her world that rises above the perception of her age and perhaps her gender (in that world), but that importance and surety of safety lies along a very thin thread: anger the king or fail with the wrong "prophecy" and she will be killed. 

Griffith takes this often brutal world and makes it come alive through her prose. Hild is a remarkable character, never anywhere close to perfect, but fully realized and growing all the while. But, it isn't just Hild that is a fleshed out character. From kings to warriors to peasants to slaves, Griffith presents each character as someone who might just have lived so many years ago, and with deft touches, those characters have their own lives that keep on going even when they are not on page. 

Hild is a beautifully written book, as remarkable in what it accomplishes as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, only here Griffith has less source material to work with in fleshing out what this world of the 600's must have been like, with Christianity only beginning to take hold and become part of a conversation between kings and gods.  Griffith ends the novel with Hild still a young woman, not yet the woman or saint she will become, but a fascinating and important woman in her own right even still. 

A powerful novel on its own, Hild addresses the question of "who is Hild" but leaves the reader wondering still just how Hild becomes St. Hilda.  For that, we must wait, eagerly but patiently, for a future novel. Until that day, Hild comes highly recommended. 

Are Women Human: The Conversation

Yesterday I posted the text of Nicola Griffith's author's note for Ammonite. In a nice bit of recursiveness, here's a continuing conversation about some of the ideas raised in the essay over at Nicola's blog.

She writes, in response,

I wrote this seventeen years ago--as a combination rant, explanation, and PR exercise. I read it again today for the first time in years and wondered if I would write it now--wondered if I would need to.

Her answer is ultimately yes and then she continues the conversation. There are a small handful of comments that are also worth reading. It's good stuff.

As a reminder - go read Ammonite. You'll be glad you did.

"Nicola Griffith talks about writing Ammonite"

The below essay followed the text of Nicola Griffith's novel Ammonite. I wanted to include a passage from the essay in my review of the novel, but the more I thought about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to convey it, the more I realized that I really wanted to quote the entire essay. Her words were far more eloquent and powerful than anything I could have said. Below is the complete text of the essay "Nicola Griffith talks about writing Ammonite". I think it's important.

It is reprinted here with the permission of Nicola Griffith.

********************


“Are women human?” That question forms the subtext of more speculative fiction novels – fantasy, SF, horror, utopia and dystopia – than I can count. I intended Ammonite as a body blow to those who feel the question has any relevance in today’s world.

I am tired of token women being strong in a man’s world by taking on male attributes: strutting around in black leather, spike heels and wraparound shades, killing people; or riding a horse, swearing a lot, carrying a big sword, and killing people; or piloting a ship through hyperspace, drinking whatever pours, slapping boys on the back, and killing people. I am equally tired of women-only worlds where all the characters are wise, kind, beautiful, stern, seven-feet-tall vegetarian amazons who would never dream of killing anyone. I am tired of reading about aliens who are really women, or women who are really aliens.

Women are not aliens. Take away men and we do not automatically lose our fire and intelligence and sex drive; we do not form hierarchical, static, insectlike societies that are dreadfully inefficient. We do not turn into a homogeneous Thought Police culture where meat-eating is banned and men are burned in effigy every full moon. Women are not inherently passive or dominant, maternal or vicious. We are all different. We are people.

A woman-only world, it seems to me, would shine with the entire spectrum of human behavior: there would be capitalists and collectivists, hermits and clan members, sailors and cooks, idealists and tyrants; they would be generous and mean, smart and stupid, strong and weak; they would approach life bravely, fearfully and thoughtlessly. Some might still engage in fights, wars and territorial squabbles; individuals and cultures would still display insanity and greed and indifference. And they would change and grow, just like anyone else. Because women are anyone else. We are more than half of humanity. We are not imitation people, or chameleons taking on protective male coloration, longing for the day when men go away and we can return to being our true, insectlike, static, vacuous selves. We are here, now. We are just like you.

But Ammonite is much more than an attempt to redress the balance. It’s a novel. One about people – how they look at the world and how the world makes them change; one that attempts to look at biology, and wonder What If . . . ; one that shows readers different ways to be; one that takes them to other places, where the air and the temperature and the myths are not the same. If, a week after reading Ammonite, you pause over lunch, fork halfway to your mouth, and remember the scent of Jeep’s night air, or on your way to work daydream about the endless snow of Tehuantepec, or wonder for a moment as you climb into bed whether or not a virus could enhance our senses – then I’ve down my job.

--Atlanta, 1992.


copyright belongs to Nicola Griffith

Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith

Ammonite
Nicola Griffith
1992

The incidence of infection of Company personnel was one hundred percent. Eighty percent of Company’s female personnel recovered; all of the men, including Courtivron, died. The planet was closed; no one on, very few off. Pg 14

Welcome to Jeep, the setting of Nicola Griffith’s debut novel Ammonite. The opening pages give a sense of claustrophobia as Marghe Taishan, in a quarantined part of a station orbiting Jeep, readies herself to be inoculated with a vaccine against the virus. Marghe is an anthropologist working for the Settlement and Education Council of the Durallium Company. Her contract is to travel to Grenchstom’s Planet and “study over a million people who had been out of contact with humanity for two or three hundred years” (pg 6). Jeep was a former colony planet, but the virus closed the world and the people of Jeep are now unknown quantities to the Company. The Company, perhaps as any company would, sent Marghe as a test subject for the vaccine and probably to find what Jeep can be worth to the Company. Marghe is there for the opportunity as an anthropologist. She carries some emotional baggage with her relating to her previous stint working for the Company. Nicola Griffith explores Marghe’s history as a natural part of the storytelling of Ammonite, and manages it without infodumping the reader.

Now, it would be perhaps an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room if I didn’t bring up the fact that this is a novel featuring a planet populated entirely by women – and moreover, that all female population manages to reproduce without males, and further – that all men die from some strange virus on the planet.

I don’t wish to diminish Nicola Griffith’s intentions and accomplishments with Ammonite to call the gender issue “window dressing”, but the fact is, when you read Ammonite you’re probably not going to pay too much attention to the fact that there isn’t a single male character in the novel (excluding a flashback). What you’re going to pay attention to is the fact that Ammonite is entirely populated with “people”. What you’re going to pay attention to is the story Griffith is telling. What you’re going to pay attention to is everything you pay attention to when you read.

It is only after the fact that we realize just what it is that Nicola Griffith did here. She twisted a number of conventions of science fiction and she did it so skillfully that if you don’t look closely, you might have missed the mechanism because you were caught up in the show. This “sort” of novel of discovery and exploration tends to be male focused and male dominated and here, the women are not simply men with female names. They are women. The idea of the all-female society doesn’t look like the various cultures and tribes of Ammonite because the idea of the all-female society is a broken cliché that doesn’t treat women as actual people. Griffith gets at this in the essay that follows the novel. If you think this was all some great accident that Griffith just happened to write into the novel, think again. This was intentional and it was skillful and it was seamless with the actual storytelling.

We will feed you, and clothe you, share everything that’s ours with you, without reservation, without condition. You in your turn must do the same. Will you do that? Pg 210

As much as it is about anything else, Ammonite is a novel that questions what family and identity really means. To Griffith, or more accurately – as presented in Ammonite, family is about what is chosen and what the responsibilities and consequences of that choice are. Most novels don’t really get at this in such a clear way. There are families, and sometimes characters get to choose a family, but seldom does what that acceptance of family means come across so succinctly. Sometimes it takes different cultural norms to spell it out and have it not feel like a lesson. Taken out of context, the above passage is a good explanation of what a family is. Taken in the context of Ammonite, it is a beautiful and powerful moment.

Ammonite is filled with such moments. As a collection of individual moments Ammonite would probably still be a powerful novel, but Nicola Griffith does so much more than just string together moments with string. Ammonite is a complete novel, strong and whole, with depth and layers I’m sure I haven’t seen yet on a single read. This isn’t to suggest that it is dense and impenetrable, because it isn’t at all. It is to suggest that Ammonite is filled with richness of storytelling and is a novel that should sit with the reader long after the last page is turned and the cover closed. It is to suggest that Ammonite features oh so very real characters who all have their own agendas and needs and wishes, and that I may not have parsed them all correctly the first time through. It is to suggest that Ammonite is, without question, one of the best novels I have read so far this year.

You know those books you finish reading and you know you must read everything else the author has written? Ammonite is that book.