49. Atlan by Jane Gaskell (Book 2 of the Atlan saga)

After reading Atlan, the second book in the Atlan Saga, I am somewhat reluctant to recommend it.  I still need to complete the series to decide, but this one wallowed too long in elements less interesting to me.  It had its moments for sure and the ongoing world building of Atlan continues to be imaginative and intriguing as hell.  It's just that Cija spends pretty much the entire book being passive.  Her agency is almost entirely her own psychological processing as when she is not held against her will (which is most of the book), she is fleeing, hiding or lost.  Adding to the sense of futility is that she really doesn't seem to get beyond processing and come to any conclusions.  So a lot of the book is her in the (admittedly excellent) continent of Atlan and thinking about what is happening to her and how she is responding to it.  

Narratively, things move quite quickly in the beginning, as Zerd almost immediately becomes emperor of Atlan (the boy-emperor being so enamoured with him and decadent, he just cedes his power to Zerd).  Unfortunately, this brings the mainlanders over to Atlan and they immediately spoil it, taking the naive women, hunting the unicorns and introducing industrial farming (Gaskell makes an explicit point about chemicals in the foods in this and the first book).  The depiction of the colonization of Atlan is disturbing and realistic in the context of the world she has created.  As painful as it was to read, I wish we could have had more of that.  It felt like Gaskell rushes through the larger plot to get as quickly as possible to the internal stuff.  

She spends the first half of the book trapped in a remote inn, abused by the proprietress.  She is then rescued and spends most of the rest of the book trapped in an abandoned Atlan castle now given over to Zerd.  This is a bit gothic as the place is mostly unexplored and hostile to her.  There is a really great creepy ass wizard/necromancer here.  She ends up after being cast adrift and then wandering deeper into the continent in the camp of Sedili, Zerd's first wife sometimes enemy, sometimes ally.  Oh yeah, she also has two kids, son Nal and baby daughter Seka.  Most of the time, Zerd's forces, the north and the southern armies and the bandits are in various states of winning and losing against each other. 

The excellent Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff podcast had a great overview of melodrama that gave me a helpful framework to analyze and appreciate books where the emphasis is on passive and the internal (coded feminine) versus the active and external (coded masculine).  The melodrama was originally a play with music in it (melody drama), which in the 19th century became associated pejoratively with working class and female audiences.  In melodramas, the protagonist tends to have the world act on them.  The drama is in how they persist and then overcome (or not).  

This lens helped me to move away from my "why isn't she kicking ass" stance and accept that shit was going to be bad for her and let's see how she evolves in reaction to all this. The problem is that much of her internal stuff was being in various states of coercion with different at first creepy, then ambivalent, then rapey, back to ambivalent men.  I get a sense that Gaskell, who was a minor cultural celebrity was working through some of her own experiences with 1960s British men.

I'm hoping for the best in the next book, but I suspect this may be her groove.  I'm fine with some passive melodramatic internalizing, but would appreciate more of a balance with the cool world and larger plot (which is complex enough).