https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2022/12/2022162-cloud-and-ashes-three-winters.htm... ( )

Crowd of Bone

Sparse and perfect prose as poetry. Old tales piled upon myth and returning back to tale. If your bones could tell the tale through the ashes, they would step through the seasons. You would run in the clouds.

This is poetry. There's no other description for it. If anyone had been able to report on the days of the old Celts and extrapolate a real and magical landscape of both thought and being, then Ms. Gilman is the transplant from time. Not only is the fantasy world deep and complex, but I could feel the love between Kit and Thea, the bittersweet and beautiful, the tragedy and the delight. It was short, but so jam packed with information and gorgeous phrases that I was forced to taste every word and slow down to a point that I wanted to tear my hair out.

Of course, that just meant that the text was worth it, and I was suddenly in a different depth, requiring me to swim to a far underground shore.

Sure, I could sum up the plot in a few easy sentences, but that would rob the richness of the magical world in these pages. And certainly, I could point to the recurring imagery drawn out of old civilizations and myth and cultures, but it was done in such a smart way that I could never unravel just what was cribbed or imagined.

If this weren't a modern work of fiction, I probably would have assumed it had come out of one of the past masters, like Spenser or Pope. It's certainly thick enough to be the punchlines in Shakespeare's plays or sonnets.

Do I think this work is amazing? Yes. Do I think that you, the reader, needs to be willing and able to fly slow through the clouds? Yes.

This is not an easy work, but it is fantastically delicious and subtle. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3273210.html

Lots of people loved Cloud and Ashes; I didn't. Its a dense fairy tale set in northern England, with lots of sex (not at all titillating) and magic (which may or may not work). Maybe it will reward readers who put in the effort to understand who the characters are and what is going on. I read for relaxation and escapism, and this was too much like hard work for me. It won the Tiptree Award in 2006, along with the first two volumes of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, which I enjoyed. ( )

Three tales set in the realm of Cloud, which seems to be a medieval Europe-like world. Ashes is both a mythic figure and someone that women play at being, or become. It's all very interesting, but also difficult to follow. The book will suddenly start referring to "he" after a long section exclusively about women, with no indication of what man or mythic male character is intended. The writing is beautiful, but tangled. For example:

They are sisters, stone and thorn tree, dark and light of one moon. Annis, Malykorne. And they are rivals for the hare, his love, his death: each bears him in her lap, as child, as lover and as lyke. They wake his body and he leaps within them, quick and starkening; they bear him light. Turning, they are each the other, childing and devouring: the cauldron and the sickle and the cold bright bow. Each holds, beholds, the other in her glass.

Contains a whooooooole lot of sexual assault, which made me give it up after only about 30 pages. I can only deal with so much! ( )

Actually, it’s “Unleaving,” the third and largest part of Cloud & Ashes, that I read. I’d read the earlier parts, “Jack Daw’s Pack” and “A Crowd of Bone,” so I had developed a method for reading Greer’s stuff. Some people may be able simply to read and apprehend, but I’m not one. If I try that, I think the officious Organizer part of my brain tries too early, too simplistically, and too hard to impose a pattern, and that won’t work. I have—and maybe you have, if you try Cloud & Ashes—to read the way I dream. Just let it happen. Just let the words flow by. Enjoy them (marvel in them), or dread them, the way you enjoy or dread things that happen in dreams, and before you know it, you have the sense of it. The story has opened up for you, dreamwise.

And it’s a real story. It’s not arbitrary or capricious, the way dreams can sometimes be. There is a pattern, but it’s like Celtic knotwork. The story is deep and strong and dark—almost too dark, for me, in ways. Let’s just say the milk of humankindness is not overflowing, here. But that’s not to say the story is dreary or hopeless. It can be cruel or terrifying, but it is never dreary, and there is always hope.

“Unleaving” was much longer than either “Jack Daw’s Pack” or “A Crowd of Bone.” In itself, it’s a novel, though it’s only one of the three portions of Cloud & Ashes. In some ways this made it harder, for me. I felt at some points as trapped in Cloud—the name of the land in which most of the story takes place—as Margaret, the heroine of the third story. Sexual violence pervades all three tales, but “Unleaving” is the longest, and it’s just that much more present in “Unleaving.” Though to say “sexual violence” doesn’t really do justice to the importance of it for the stories. It has to do with generative power, creation, the desire to control or destroy that. It’s not the rape that you get on CSI: Special Victims Unit; it’s the rape that you get in myth. But because Greer makes myth real and immediate, played out by people we care about, it’s painful, awful.

And the full significance of the cosmogony of this world really bore down on me, reading “Unleaving.” It had been terrifying in “A Crowd of Bone,” with Thea, the goddess who can’t escape her fate and dies dreadfully, but in “Unleaving” you could see how it soaked into everyday life for people in Cloud.

But there’s a truth that the cosmogony gets at that can’t be avoided. Nature is beautiful, wondrous—but cruel, too, pitiless: demands death at times.

What made the whole not only bearable but transcendent for me was the climax and the conclusion, as time wove in on itself, and characters wove in on one another—characters from the edges of the world and from the past—and people’s cosmogonic roles and their in-time lives slid together like stereopticon pictures, and the characters changed the pattern of life forever. It was a tour de force, a true marvel.
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