On Influences, part 2.5: Orson Scott Card's "Hart's Hope" (Patreon)

Though it hasn't been a great week for writing (so far), it did find some time for reading. Inspired by the recent post about writers that influenced me in my youth, I tracked down some used copies of some Chalker and Orson Scott Card novels.  First up was Hart's Hope, which I remember having a big impact on me as a teen, though I could barely remember any of it as I started reading this week. 

It's an... odd novel.  I suppose I'd recommend it, perhaps because of that oddity.  On the one hand, it's bookended by this really annoying, somewhat pretentious faux-Biblical style, a sort of High-Fantasy mythological writing that I found grating, in that it requires the reader to accept some pretty high-grade nonsense from both plot and character.  Because characters are acting in this religious-inspired, mythic mode, they act in either unlikely or horrible ways; and the reader is meant to be okay with this, I think.  For example, the whole plot is predicated on the protagonist's rape of a twelve year old girl to secure his rulership of the kingdom; the "mercy" he shows afterwards; and her revenge.  

That the girl's revenge is equally horrible to what was done to her doesn't really salvage the protagonist, in my opinion, though the novel seems to want us to get behind the guy.  More worrying perhaps is that the novel is rooted in this violent act.  It felt, to me, gratuitous, in part because the internal logic of the novel suggested it didn't have to happen.  Equally, the way the antagonist gets her power is meant to be horrifying--something "no woman would do" the novel says--yet the entire middle section of the novel seems to suggest that's nonsense.

Yet it's this middle section where Card seems at his best.  I vaguely remember reading--perhaps in his short text on how to write Sci-Fi and Fantasy--that the initial idea for the story came from a very large sheet of blank paper he found one day.  He started sketching out a fantasy city, and this became the city of Hart's Hope/Inwit, and from this geography the rest of the novel emerged.  And I can believe it: the novel is at its best when the -real- protagonist of the novel, Oram, makes his way to the capital.  The city is vibrant and well realised, and the characters there behave far more like real people.  The dialogue is better.  One character, Flea--basically a reskin of Bean from Ender's Game--is likeable and compelling.  The whole middle section is a fine example of quality Fantasy writing.  Even the system of blood-based magic and the tension between the three main Gods is intriguing, though their divine actions and origin story don't make a lot of sense.

There's this attempt at creating tension through the occasional dialogue of at-first ambiguous first person narrator arguing for the release of Oram, and it doesn't really work because it again requires a bizarre level of stupidity or ignorance from the characters; just as the antagonist shows at the end of the novel.  I think Tolkien makes a powerful counterpoint: his "high" characters (the wizards and Aragorn, et al) all operate in a high-mythic mode inspired by Norse and Anglo-Saxon sagas and poems, but they're never -stupid-. (Well, maybe in the Hobbit but that's a children's book and done for comedy.)  Similar to Tolkien, however, I'm not convinced Card's particularly good at writing female characters.

And yet... I can also see how Hart's Hope inspired me, as a teen, and influenced my writing, I think.  It's definitely not a conscious thing.  At his best, Card has a way of presenting 'darker' emotions in main characters that is compelling; his protagonists often have unlikeable traits, and act in horrible ways, but usually for understandable reasons, and this makes them more rounded, more believable.   They're not Mary or Gary Sues.  I'm not sure I've achieved the same with my characters in Constant, but I suspect at some level I was stumbling my way towards something similar.  Equally, I can see a little of Graff and Rackham and Anderson, the military personal secretly guiding Ender towards his destiny in Ender's Game in the characters of Jonathon, Crystal and K.