Skip to main content

Occasional Media Consumption: Magic for Liars, by Sarah Gailey

My niblings and I were talking, during our week-long vacation/family reunion together, about the experience of unreliable narrators. This was during our discussion of another book, and of course we talked about Catcher in the Rye, and how when I first read it as a tween I was so taken in by the experience, and how much I loved it, and how as I've grown older I've come to love it less and less. And a big part of that was realizing that every book that has a narrator, by definition, has an unreliable narrator, because books told from a point of view by necessity take on the position of the person telling us the story (which is different from the author telling us the story, obviously, but that's what parenthetical disclaimers are for, right?). So the experience of various narrators suddenly turning out to be unreliable is a trope that maybe I've outgrown in my old age. If you're going to be honest with anyone, you can be honest with me, dear narrator.

So how refreshing to have Sarah Gailey's Ivy tell us up front: she's not trustworthy, but for this length of time, anyway, she's going to try and be truthful with us, if maybe not so much with herself. Because that's where, unreliable narrator tropes aside, lying gets into trouble: what happens when you start lying to yourself? And how a single lie, a single choice, can snowball rapidly out of control into something bigger than anything, bigger than life, and so uncontrollable that the only recourse is to blow yourself and your life up and hope you can escape in the confusion and wreckage.

The thing is, Ivy isn't incompetent; she isn't bad at what she does (she's actually pretty good at it, in fact). But she's not good at this one particular thing, and that's her soft place, the place where the tooth was, the place that hurts to poke and yet you can't stop poking at it. And this book is full of that impulse. The impulse to poke, to find that pain and feel it, in the hopes that maybe, if you poke it enough, it won't hurt any longer, or at least you'll get used to it.

In Magic for Liars, Gailey gives us the most difficult of all writer's challenges: an AND. Because this book is not just a fantasy book about a person who knows magic is real in a world that denies the existence of magic; it's a fantasy AND a murder mystery. So everything has to follow both sets of rules, in order to avoid cheating the reader. And Gailey does it expertly and brilliantly while ALSO giving us a narrator who constantly and consistently bullshits through the world inhabited and defined. Ivy is trying to find the truth in a world where reality itself lies, and not just truth; she's trying to find justice, which itself may be the biggest lie.

It's a journey and a search that's worth a little self-deception.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Organizing And You: Lessons from Labor History

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in an at-will

Money and Happiness as a fungible resource

Money really does buy happiness. Anyone who tells you differently has a vested interest in keeping you poor, unhappy, or both. I know this because I grew up on the ragged edge of poor, and then backed my way into a career in IT, which is where the modern world keeps all the money that isn't in Finance. So I am one of the extreme minority of Generation X that actually had an adulthood that was markedly more financially stable than my parents. And let me tell you: money really does buy happiness. To be clear: at 45 years old, I'm now in a relationship and a period of my life where our household is effectively double-income, no kids. I live in the city, but I own a house, and can only afford to do that because of our combined income. We also have two cars -- one new, one used (though neither of them is getting driven very much these days) -- and we have a small discretionary budget every month for things like videogames, books, and the like. What my brother used to call DAM -- Dic

Activision, Blizzard, Game development, IT, and my personal role in all of that.

 I'm pretty sure if you spend any sort of time at all on Twitter and/or spend any sort of time playing videogames, you are by now at least aware of the lawsuit brought forth by the State of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing versus Activision Blizzard, Inc., et al. From this point on, I'll add a Content Warning for folks who are sensitive about sexual assault, suicide, and discrimination based on sex, gender, and skin color, as well as crude humor around and about sexual assault , and what the State of California refers to as "a pervasive 'frat boy' culture" around Act/Bliz, especially in the World of Warcraft-associated departments.   Just reading the complaint is hard rowing, even with the clinical legalese in place. The complaint itself is relatively short; 29 pages laying out ten Causes of Action (basically, "these are the legs on which our lawsuit stands"). I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to properly express how a