Factotum by D.M. CornishI took twenty-five pages of Hannah’s Tale, a novel project I’ve been working on this year, to the PNWA Conference this past August. Actually, I sent the pages ahead of me, to Book Doctor Jason Black. I’d used Jason’s services before and found them invaluable. While twenty-five pages isn’t a full doctoring, I hoped it would be enough to get me thinking in new ways about a novel I was a little sideways on.
Hannah’s Tale is set in a fantasy world, and part of what Jason and I ended up talking about during our session was the use of fantasy words to replace regular words in an effort to preserve the illusion. For example, I had described something as being “a foot and a half long”. The use of an English measurement tends to draw you out of the story, causing thoughts of comparison that maybe you didn’t intend. Better to have said that it was “three handspans across” or something like that. Of course, you can go too far.
Then, and this part alone was worth the price of admission, Jason recommended D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series, as an example of well done language and word creation to build a fantasy world. By the way, that previous sentence is a massive understatement.
I immediately enjoyed Foundling, the first book in the series. From the beginning, Cornish’s word-building was apparent. Mashing together latin-esque sounds with Germanic accumulations and covering the result in straight-up fantasy sauce, these new words are dropped into the story so smoothly that you’re never left wondering about these new words; they just fit, and you are compelled to accept them, their meanings and permutations creeping into your brain through an odd osmosis of the subconscious membrane. In addition to these subtle insertions, the author begins each chapter with an entry from an almanac that the main character carries with him through most of Lamplighter, the second novel of the trilogy. These entries both serve to expand the world and to teach you new words, while also foreshadowing the events and actions of the chapters to come.
I had two frustrations with the series, both due to my own linguaphile obsessions. First, in reading a copy of Foundling borrowed from the library, I was brought up short by the one-hundred-plus-page appendix. I thought I had enough reading material to last the day, and I was instead almost done. Of course, I got to spend several hours perusing the maps, diagrams, drawings, and definitions of the extensive end material.
Second, because I read Lamplighter on an eReader (again a library copy) and had access to a lookup feature, I was constantly being fooled by the author into looking up words that didn’t exist. Or did they? Cornish would occasionally drop a word into the manuscript that was a real word, in the real English language, but of such obscurity that the built in dictionary didn’t suffice. This constant doubting of my own ability to distinguish English from Nonsense was a bit troubling to my ego.
That said, I so very much recommend you try these books out. In the author bio printed on the inside dust jacket (I eventually bought copies of all three novels for my collection) Cornish claims to have spent the past seventeen years creating the world in which this story takes place. I believe it, and further, I believe it to have been time well spent.
View all my reviews
RSS Feed