Story time. I have an hour long commute to my job and being locked in a car bores the hell out of me, so I have started listening to audiobooks on CD, and since my library had all four books of the original Circle of Magic, I’ve been working my way through those. In the back of my head I always knew that I’d be listening to Briar’s Book at the end, but it wasn’t until halfway through the first chapter that I truly understood how this was going to affect me and why I felt the need for these books now.
For those that don’t know, Briar’s Book is about a plague sweeping Summersea, where the four heroes live, and them and their teachers’ attempts to deal with it. While not the most typical fantasy plot, the Mystical Plague is not exactly unknown among those who enjoy the genre….but the way it’s handled in this book is. There’s no quest for a cure (at least, not a simple one with a single flower in a distant mountain) or baddie that sent it or zombie side effects for an action scene. There’s quarantine, and masks, and the slow application of test after test after test. It’s slow, mundane, disheartening, and labor-intensive. Sure, the rooms are spelled against disease and the tests are conducted on human essence, but there are no magical shortcuts to take past the long, hard work of actually tackling disease.
This is hardly new territory for Tamora Pierce, in fact, it seems to be her trademark as a fantasy writer. The girl who wants to be a knight might have saved the day once, yes, but the social change she wants will take decades, possibly a century or more. War is less one grand battle and more a mountain of paperwork and logistics. The rebellion to overthrow the evil rulers isn’t one flash paper uprising, it’s centuries of conspiracy, spywork, smuggling away weapons, and misdirection. In her worlds, there are violent and sudden moments which can tip the scales, but true change, lasting change, comes slow and steady.
We as a society are obsessed with apocalypse, with sudden change, that something must happen all at once and immediately or it will never happen at all. The climate apocalypse, the COVID apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, it’s all happening suddenly and right now and our response must also be sudden and right now or it’s meaningless. The Pierce books, both Emelan and Tortall, are a refutation to this. Change being slow and gradual doesn’t mean it’s not happening, it just means that it’s taking its time to settle in properly. There are crisis situations and they require crisis response, yes. But much of what we do will take time and patience and hard work and a lot of boring, mundane things…..but it’s worth it, every second. Nothing we do is wasted.
So thank you Tammy Pierce, for giving me some hope in dark times.
The city was founded In 56 BC by the Romans under the name Darioritum in a location previously belonging to the Veneti. The Veneti were a seafaring Celtic people who lived in the south-western part of Brittany in Gaul before the Roman invasions. The actual name Vannes comes from the term Veneti.
