Crowfield Demon---Pat Walsh
May. 3rd, 2011 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkelf105This is the second book in Pat Walsh's Crowfield series. I though I might have posted about the first book, Crowfield Curse, but I can't remember.
The series takes place in medieval England in a very poor monastery. It centers around a little boy named Will who has been orphaned and sent to live at the monastery. He isn't an oblate and he isn't a lay brother; he is one of those people whose status is ambiguous and has no place in the hierarchy of medieval society, which Pat Walsh manipulates to her advantage. While living at the monastery, Will discovers the very scary world of faery, and adventures, scary adventures, ensue in and around the monastery. Pat Walsh builds an excellent medieval world. She does a good job of keeping attitudes and thoughts, as well as character reactions more or less in period and manages to not jar me out of the story all the time. In quite a bit of historical fiction, the author makes characters whose views, values, motivations, and ideas are really, really modern and this always, always annoys me. While this isn't the best built historical world (mostly because it is a YA novel and lacks details, for which I am a sucker), it is constructed well enough to satisfy my classics and medieval studies major self, so I guess that's saying something? I believe Pat Walsh is an archaeologist, which probably explains why I don't find it as fail-y as some historical fiction books I've had to read.
Will is a likeable character. I find his reactions to his world both appropriate for a child and for a child living in medieval England. Walsh does a really good job showing how ambiguous the line between Christianity and the pagan past was for most people and does a good job showing that there were multiple viewpoints about how Christianity itself manifested. She shows a pretty good break in the monastic brothers' ideas and values regarding Christianity and those of the townspeople. Her choice of using a poor monastery as the setting also sorta helps her neatly sidestep issues of gender and class in medieval England as well. Which in a way disappoints me because she is an author that I think could handle them well. Her world contains faeries, and I think she does a good job explaining this without using the medieval idea that the remnants of the pagan past, pagan deities and faeries included, were somehow the work of the devil. HOWEVER, although the theological worldview she had made is not explicitly Christian, she does a good job of incorporating the fact that Christianity and its multiple, polysemous manifestations were the dominant narrative in the Middle Ages without looking down on medieval Christianity and making it evil, which is something I see quite a bit in ancient/medieval stories written for modern audiences. She does not, however, try to explore issues of soteriolgoy and Christology using her Creator/creations lens. Which I don't blame her for. Answering how Jesus fits into the scheme without completely invalidating Christianity by implying that he is not the son of God is sorta sticky (although I guess that sorta what's she's implying if you look at her cosmology as a whole). In fact, I have to laugh at the total narrative silence about that.. She does imply that the saints and Christianity itself has some power, but implies that this is because her world is dualistic and good has power over evil.
So while I totally appreciate her treatment of medieval Christianity and her cosmology does not call for anything non-Christian to be rendered evil, she doesn't show that so well. Like I said, while the narrative never calls for pre-Christian traditions and beliefs to be cast as evil or wrong, the one and only pagan in her narrative worships a fallen angel as an old god. While the evilness of this is situation specific and her treatment of faeries and their world as neutral, like nature, implies that Pat Walsh is not implying that this is the case for all pagan deities, the very fact that no good pagans are shown sorta kinda made me frown. It is awesome that she never belittles pre-Christian traditions explicitly, but there is no counter in Will's world to show that not all pagans were idiots worshiping fallen angels. I don't get the feeling that this is on purpose, in light of her treatment of faeries and the rendering of the Creator and his/her/its angels as non-Christian entities, but I still was not so happy with it.
So all in all fluffy books about medieval England with scary, non-sparkly faeries that are entertaining but also problematic because of how it deals with non-Christian beliefs and practices.. Also, I feel I have to add that Walsh does spooky scenes really, really well.
The series takes place in medieval England in a very poor monastery. It centers around a little boy named Will who has been orphaned and sent to live at the monastery. He isn't an oblate and he isn't a lay brother; he is one of those people whose status is ambiguous and has no place in the hierarchy of medieval society, which Pat Walsh manipulates to her advantage. While living at the monastery, Will discovers the very scary world of faery, and adventures, scary adventures, ensue in and around the monastery. Pat Walsh builds an excellent medieval world. She does a good job of keeping attitudes and thoughts, as well as character reactions more or less in period and manages to not jar me out of the story all the time. In quite a bit of historical fiction, the author makes characters whose views, values, motivations, and ideas are really, really modern and this always, always annoys me. While this isn't the best built historical world (mostly because it is a YA novel and lacks details, for which I am a sucker), it is constructed well enough to satisfy my classics and medieval studies major self, so I guess that's saying something? I believe Pat Walsh is an archaeologist, which probably explains why I don't find it as fail-y as some historical fiction books I've had to read.
Will is a likeable character. I find his reactions to his world both appropriate for a child and for a child living in medieval England. Walsh does a really good job showing how ambiguous the line between Christianity and the pagan past was for most people and does a good job showing that there were multiple viewpoints about how Christianity itself manifested. She shows a pretty good break in the monastic brothers' ideas and values regarding Christianity and those of the townspeople. Her choice of using a poor monastery as the setting also sorta helps her neatly sidestep issues of gender and class in medieval England as well. Which in a way disappoints me because she is an author that I think could handle them well. Her world contains faeries, and I think she does a good job explaining this without using the medieval idea that the remnants of the pagan past, pagan deities and faeries included, were somehow the work of the devil. HOWEVER, although the theological worldview she had made is not explicitly Christian, she does a good job of incorporating the fact that Christianity and its multiple, polysemous manifestations were the dominant narrative in the Middle Ages without looking down on medieval Christianity and making it evil, which is something I see quite a bit in ancient/medieval stories written for modern audiences. She does not, however, try to explore issues of soteriolgoy and Christology using her Creator/creations lens. Which I don't blame her for. Answering how Jesus fits into the scheme without completely invalidating Christianity by implying that he is not the son of God is sorta sticky (although I guess that sorta what's she's implying if you look at her cosmology as a whole). In fact, I have to laugh at the total narrative silence about that.. She does imply that the saints and Christianity itself has some power, but implies that this is because her world is dualistic and good has power over evil.
So while I totally appreciate her treatment of medieval Christianity and her cosmology does not call for anything non-Christian to be rendered evil, she doesn't show that so well. Like I said, while the narrative never calls for pre-Christian traditions and beliefs to be cast as evil or wrong, the one and only pagan in her narrative worships a fallen angel as an old god. While the evilness of this is situation specific and her treatment of faeries and their world as neutral, like nature, implies that Pat Walsh is not implying that this is the case for all pagan deities, the very fact that no good pagans are shown sorta kinda made me frown. It is awesome that she never belittles pre-Christian traditions explicitly, but there is no counter in Will's world to show that not all pagans were idiots worshiping fallen angels. I don't get the feeling that this is on purpose, in light of her treatment of faeries and the rendering of the Creator and his/her/its angels as non-Christian entities, but I still was not so happy with it.
So all in all fluffy books about medieval England with scary, non-sparkly faeries that are entertaining but also problematic because of how it deals with non-Christian beliefs and practices.. Also, I feel I have to add that Walsh does spooky scenes really, really well.