Review: Briarley, by Aster Glenn Gray

[missroserose]

Awhile back, a friend had a post up about a story she had been writing (and rewriting) for some time. It was a retelling of Beauty and the Beast where the beast is a dragon, the traveller a village parson who refuses to trade his daughter's freedom for his own; where he stays with the beast himself and they have discussions on the nature of affection and the differences between romantic love and humanitarian love; where they fall in love but the priest went to Oxford so he's cool with that, and also it's set in England during World War II and of course there's a Luftwaffe attack.

As y'all have probably guessed, my response was basically "I must read this immediately".

I am here to tell you that it is every bit as delightful as I'd hoped. The fairytale tone is charming without being twee, Briarley Hall has just the right amount of magic (lent help by Gray's heartrendingly lovely depictions of the landscape), and the English countryside feels real and lived-in and more than a little war-weary.

Most importantly, though, the leads are complex and beautifully rendered. The dragon's slow awakening to respect and eventual love feels genuine—as does the parson's occasional frustration with the dragon's self-pity. Their dynamic works well, emphasizing their humanity even amidst the fantastic surroundings.

It's one of my favorite truisms that you can write a good story about anything—a transsexual glam-rock singer from communist East Berlin, a trigendered alien race, a postapocalyptic culture of car-obsessed warlords—if you find the love in it, the place where the characters and their struggles speak to the shared humanity in us. For a tale about a person supposedly incapable of love, this story is suffused with it, as ever-prevalent and ever-blooming as the enchanted roses. Fear, too, and grief, and anger, and the whole gamut of emotions; they anchor the novella and make it real and immediate in a way that many authors spend whole books never quite reaching. I loved Briarley and I can't wait to see what Gray does next.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Just finished this too and am organizing my thoughts for a review. **Loved** how she looked at the different facets of love--and also morality and justice--returning to them with new insights and unfolding them in different ways,** and loved how this happened through *conversation*. Drama and tension can be very present even without people buckling a single swash. Plus: humor! I laughed at some of the parson's lines.

Gray is very good at creating prickly characters who are very sympathetic in spite of being prickly (thinking of some things written under a different name), but in those books, the prickly characters were the viewpoint characters. Here, because the parson rather than the dragon was the viewpoint character, I at first didn't really *like* the dragon, though I had pity for him. But he's grown on me a lot as I've let the book sit with me, and I think that's in part because I love the parson so much, and I can see *his* feelings about the the dragon deepening.

**I really loved, for instance, how at appropriate moments we first feel pity for the fairy, treated so badly by the people at the Briarley estate, and then see from another perspective how the fairy's own actions were excessively vindictive. Fairies are always laying down excessive punishments in stories, but while in fairy tales that has the effect of reinforcing aspirational norms (like "be kind to strangers in need"), Gray goes beyond that and looks at what it means for human failings to be punished so harshly. What I love is that the story carries off both things with sincerity and and passion.

She's a great writer.

[missroserose]

Totally agreed about the dragon, and how we see him through the parson's eyes. I think that was one of the things I liked most about the story—it refused to take the easy answer about any of its characters. Especially as I've been organizing my own thoughts on this Giant Writing Project of Doom, it's been coming home to me how difficult that is—tropes and cliches become tropes and cliches because they work, they're easy emotional shorthand. Depth, and real complex humanity, is much harder.

I loved the conversation too, although that's hardly surprising for me. Probably my biggest frustration in writing is that my characters end up standing around talking to each other all the time and never really *doing* anything. To me, the conversation's where the interest lies. :)

[asakiyume]

Probably my biggest frustration in writing is that my characters end up standing around talking to each other all the time and never really *doing* anything.

I say run with it! That's where life happens, for a lot of us.

[sovay]

I say run with it! That's where life happens, for a lot of us.

Seconded. Many of my stories are mostly people talking.

[kore]

ITA with your points about the dragon and the fairy especially. The book is very well-written, not just humorous and harming, but considering the people and events from various perspectives too.

[kore]

Here via asakiyume -- this is such a good review. I really like the point about finding the love in a story.

[missroserose]

Aw, thank you! I first came across it more than a decade ago, in a different form, in the program for a local production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (hence the reference)—the director was talking about how it was one of his favorite shows because it centers on such an outrageous character, someone with whom it seems we'd have nothing in common, who shows us that in fact we have everything in common with them. It's been percolating in my mind since then, and (speaking as someone who loves fiction in all its forms) has turned into something of a touchstone. I've seen so many stories (fantastical and mundane) that leave out that emotional core, whether through cowardice (because writing with emotional honesty is hard) or ignorance, and they always feel so flat and two-dimensional no matter how well crafted they might otherwise be.

[kore]

Oh, that's _neat_ (also, I love Hedwig and the Inch to bits and pieces). And you're right, so many modern stories leave out the emotional core, either because the writer doesn't want to be sentimental or they kind of shrink away from it, and what's left is unengaging, unsatisfying. (Jonathan Franzen is this for me. I've never been able to finish one of his books, even before he was nasty about Edith Wharton.) That's also kind of like that moment in Middlemarch where Eliot suddenly is all "But why always Dorothea?" and takes us off on a tour of Edward Casaubon's psyche, which is one of my favourite moments in all of lit.

[missroserose]

Franzen is one of those authors I keep seeing/hearing about and yet have never had any desire to read, so it's nice to know that there's at least some (secondhand) justification for my completely arbitrary antipathy! I do love me some Edith Wharton, she has that neat trick of balancing wry and satirical observation with that emotional honesty that keeps her from feeling flip—she's honest about her characters and their culture and foibles, but be damned to you if you think that means you can laugh at them from a comfortable distance, you're going to care about them!

[kore]

I tried to read The Corrections, I tried to read Freedom, and Purity sounded so off-putting I didn't even try. The atmosphere just seemed horribly airless and mean, and although he was supposed to have great sympathy for the aging couple who opens Corrections, I really didn't see it. It's like he really doesn't have that emotional honesty Wharton does, as you point out -- she has some attachment to all of her characters, even the awful ones. May in Age of Innocence isn't Ellen Olenska, but she isn't a villain either. Even Zeena in Ethan Frome isn't entirely awful. (It's a shame most US high school kids are forced to read Ethan Frome and become allergic to Wharton after that.)