UBC: Troll: A Love Story
Nov. 28th, 2007 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Sinisalo, Johanna. Troll: A Love Story. Originally published as Not Before Dark in the UK and as something with a heck of a lot of รค's in Finnish; as I don't have my copy with me, I cannot transcribe it at the moment. Won the Tiptree in 2004.
And I have to admit, I am a little puzzled thereby.
There are a lot of things about Troll that I admire, things that are fascinating and nuanced and brilliantly done . . . but none of them is the exploration of gender. Our characters are Angel, a 30-ish gay photographer smitten with Martes, an advertising executive who is perfectly willing to exploit Angel's passion for him, but not to put out in any way, shape, or form, plus Angel's ex, a veterinarian whom Angel exploits just as Martes exploits Angel (although Angel at least gives poor Spider sex in the whole deal, and Spider knows Angel is playing him and lets himself be played), and Ecke, who is in creepy stalkerish love with Angel, but turns out to be actually okay once he gets Angel in bed. And the Filipino mail-order bride who is being abused by her husband and turns uselessly to Angel to save her. Oh, and the troll.
There is an interesting parallel between Angel keeping the troll locked in his apartment and Palomita's husband keeping her locked in his apartment, but Sinisalo really never does anything with it beyong saying, look, isn't this interesting! isn't this clever! She's not interested in Palomita except as (a.) a useful plot device and (b.) a parallel for the troll. We find out what happens after the troll leaves Angel's apartment; we do not find out ANYTHING about what happens to Palomita after she (presumably) leaves her husband's. Palomita is the only female character in the novel, and her presence, in all its stereotypical oppressed female unglory, only serves to emphasize how little is being said about sex and gender. Women are treated like animals? Yes. Go read Carmen Dog.
Now, as a quick scan of my own work will show, it would be deeply hypocritical of me to say that a book has to have major female characters in order to be feminist, or in order to have something new and thought-provoking to say about sex and gender. But Sinisalo's gay men, predators and prey, the two categories swapping places fluidly--well, yes. That's not a new observation either. And the pheromone-induced eroticism of Angel's relationship with Pessi the troll . . . I was very meh about it because, again, it just didn't seem to be SAYING anything. Angel is so morally dissolute to begin with that inadvertent lapses into bestiality neither shock nor interest me.
All this carping, mind you, is based on coming to the book because it won the Tiptree. Had I come to it any other way, I wouldn't have nearly as many complaints, because as a work of fantasy, Troll is excellent. I love the way Sinisalo world-builds, the matter of fact insertion of trolls into the ecology, biology, sociology of the world as we know it, with the excerpts from imaginary historical documents, including scholarly studies and children's books and newspaper articles. The story she tells, about the impact of the troll on Angel's egocentric and loveless existence, is painfully believable, even down to Ecke's death and Angel's decision to run. She does an excellent job of showing Pessi as an animal rather than a person in a fur suit (and she uses Angel's profession as a photographer very well to highlight that exact point), and never forgets that Pessi's behavior makes sense according to his logic, not according to anyone else's. The inevitability of Ecke's death is carefully set up and convincing. And the kicker, suggesting as it does that Pessi has been playing Angel all this time, is a very nice kicker, making very creepy sense of the motif of the changeling child.
So, leaving aside the expectations engendered (so to speak) by the Tiptree and then not met, my problem with Troll is the problem I'm finding with more and more fantasy and science fiction these days, which is that the novel stops just as the story gets interesting. Or, in other words, a lot of sf is about setting up a catastrophe in the same way a joke is about setting up a punchline. Ergo, once we get to the catastrophe, we stop. But, see, the interesting part of a story is what happens after the catastrophic punchline, when the protagonist has to pick him- or herself up off the floor and figure out what to do next. That's the hard part, both to live and to write, but by the same token, it's the part that matters. It's the part that would force Sinisalo's characters--Angel, Spider, Palomita--to become real people, queens (to borrow a metaphor from Carroll which has its own gendered and sexualized freight when applied out of the context of chess) instead of pawns.
And I have to admit, I am a little puzzled thereby.
There are a lot of things about Troll that I admire, things that are fascinating and nuanced and brilliantly done . . . but none of them is the exploration of gender. Our characters are Angel, a 30-ish gay photographer smitten with Martes, an advertising executive who is perfectly willing to exploit Angel's passion for him, but not to put out in any way, shape, or form, plus Angel's ex, a veterinarian whom Angel exploits just as Martes exploits Angel (although Angel at least gives poor Spider sex in the whole deal, and Spider knows Angel is playing him and lets himself be played), and Ecke, who is in creepy stalkerish love with Angel, but turns out to be actually okay once he gets Angel in bed. And the Filipino mail-order bride who is being abused by her husband and turns uselessly to Angel to save her. Oh, and the troll.
There is an interesting parallel between Angel keeping the troll locked in his apartment and Palomita's husband keeping her locked in his apartment, but Sinisalo really never does anything with it beyong saying, look, isn't this interesting! isn't this clever! She's not interested in Palomita except as (a.) a useful plot device and (b.) a parallel for the troll. We find out what happens after the troll leaves Angel's apartment; we do not find out ANYTHING about what happens to Palomita after she (presumably) leaves her husband's. Palomita is the only female character in the novel, and her presence, in all its stereotypical oppressed female unglory, only serves to emphasize how little is being said about sex and gender. Women are treated like animals? Yes. Go read Carmen Dog.
Now, as a quick scan of my own work will show, it would be deeply hypocritical of me to say that a book has to have major female characters in order to be feminist, or in order to have something new and thought-provoking to say about sex and gender. But Sinisalo's gay men, predators and prey, the two categories swapping places fluidly--well, yes. That's not a new observation either. And the pheromone-induced eroticism of Angel's relationship with Pessi the troll . . . I was very meh about it because, again, it just didn't seem to be SAYING anything. Angel is so morally dissolute to begin with that inadvertent lapses into bestiality neither shock nor interest me.
All this carping, mind you, is based on coming to the book because it won the Tiptree. Had I come to it any other way, I wouldn't have nearly as many complaints, because as a work of fantasy, Troll is excellent. I love the way Sinisalo world-builds, the matter of fact insertion of trolls into the ecology, biology, sociology of the world as we know it, with the excerpts from imaginary historical documents, including scholarly studies and children's books and newspaper articles. The story she tells, about the impact of the troll on Angel's egocentric and loveless existence, is painfully believable, even down to Ecke's death and Angel's decision to run. She does an excellent job of showing Pessi as an animal rather than a person in a fur suit (and she uses Angel's profession as a photographer very well to highlight that exact point), and never forgets that Pessi's behavior makes sense according to his logic, not according to anyone else's. The inevitability of Ecke's death is carefully set up and convincing. And the kicker, suggesting as it does that Pessi has been playing Angel all this time, is a very nice kicker, making very creepy sense of the motif of the changeling child.
So, leaving aside the expectations engendered (so to speak) by the Tiptree and then not met, my problem with Troll is the problem I'm finding with more and more fantasy and science fiction these days, which is that the novel stops just as the story gets interesting. Or, in other words, a lot of sf is about setting up a catastrophe in the same way a joke is about setting up a punchline. Ergo, once we get to the catastrophe, we stop. But, see, the interesting part of a story is what happens after the catastrophic punchline, when the protagonist has to pick him- or herself up off the floor and figure out what to do next. That's the hard part, both to live and to write, but by the same token, it's the part that matters. It's the part that would force Sinisalo's characters--Angel, Spider, Palomita--to become real people, queens (to borrow a metaphor from Carroll which has its own gendered and sexualized freight when applied out of the context of chess) instead of pawns.
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Date: 2007-11-28 09:34 pm (UTC)This entry is particularly interesting to read because I got -- and gobbled in one sitting -- A Companion to Wolves yesterday and my brain is still reeling and processing. Because, just, WOW. That's what ACtW is full of.
(I wouldl babble here about how much I love ACtW, but I am still processing, and really, it should be an entry of it's own, where I can share the love :-) Suffice it to say in short that my deeply slashy little heart is very very happy, and so is my angst, h/c and competentcy loving self.)
I like looking at the Tiptree and Lambda lists, for interesting and thought-provoking things. Sounds like this is one I don't need to read, though!
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Date: 2007-11-28 09:45 pm (UTC)