I had finished the things I had been working on, and cast about for something. I started Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" but had to put it down before I got to the "meaning" part because for now the descriptions of concentration-camp life are too much, even though I know it eventually gets to something more hopeful.
I thought about starting a new mystery novel but didn't quite want to.
I started a sort-of devotional book called "Mere Hope" by Jason Deusing but bogged down a little in some of the theology about a third of the way through, and I wanted a *story*, so I just grabbed a book off the top of a stack....and got The Gammage Cup.
This is an older YA "fantasy" novel. Fundamentally, it's about a group of Hobbit-like people (the Minnipins) that live in a safe place between two mountain ranges - they were apparently chased there about a thousand years earlier by "the Mushroom People" (which I am wondering if they're a metaphor for humans). Only one Minnipin in recent memory has been out of the mountains, and that was Fooley (or, apparently he was also known as The Fool, though Minnipins now, because he brought back mysterious artefacts and a journal with foreign words (actually abbreviations, and his offspring are called "The Periods" because they are named after these abbreviations because they all contain a period, like Etc. The rest of the Minnipins are mostly named for what they do for a living). The fact that little "lore" beyond the artifacts and names is known is handwaved by the fact that Fooley fell out of the balloon he returned home in and developed amnesia.
It's an interesting thought, kind of in its own way like "Motel of the Mysteries" - how do you figure out a culture with only a few scraps of it? Or rather, here, they built THEIR culture on the scraps he brought back, and actually seem to privilege those scraps over their own, older lore from King Gammage, who was the founder of the new settlement.
I'm not very far in yet but there is some foreshadowing that there's going to be a big battle, probably with the mushroom people again, but hopefully since this is an older YA novel it won't be too bleak.
But for now: the worldbuilding is fun. It's nice to imagine the Minnipins, most of whom have small and fairly simply lives: they do what their parents did, so the potters are children of the earlier potters, and the farmers are the children of farmers. (There is also an 'aristocracy' - the forenamed "periods" and apparently some who live far upstream - the dozen or so small villages are along a river and are each named for some aspect of it). There are also a few misfit characters, who are "different" (they dress a bit oddly, they have a different mindset, several are artists, or, Muggles, who seems to be the main character, is a bit clumsy and absent-minded. But it's also implied the misfits may be the ones who save the rest of the culture).
Perhaps also, it's a picture of a culture that's become too comfortable, too complacent, and stale - and therefore at risk for attack from outside (or....decay from within, or perhaps dissension from within, which makes me wonder if the Minnipins are not that unlike us).
But thus far, I'm enjoying it. Like I said, the worldbuilding is nice, and the characters are more interesting than average, partly because none of them are described as beautiful or 'sexy' and it seems like many of them are middle-aged - Muggles is apparently middle-aged, and unmarried and childless, and yet, she has a nice life (even though it's implied most Minnipins have children)
I've been slowly reading my way through YA novels that existed when I was a kid (this book was written in 1958 or thereabouts) but never read as a kid. (Oddly there are a lot of good "YA" novels out there that no one ever directed me to. Possibly some of them were out of favor in that era (I don't think, for example, anyone knew Rosemary Sutcliffe in my vicinity), maybe others were ones I never looked at because I preferred "animal books." But it is nice to have these now....
No comments:
Post a Comment