Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 2011

[yatima]

I read Helen Oyeyemi's book White is for Witching in a sleeping bag in a tent in the Sierras during an ice storm, and found it spellbinding. Mr Fox has the same enchanting quality. It shifts seamlessly between realism and fairy tale in a way that reminded me of many of the writers I loved best as a child: Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Elizabeth Goudge, Nicholas Stuart Gray, Sylvia Townsend Warner, TH White. No surprises there, because Mr Foxis about the dissatisfactions both of being a reader:

With books you’ve got to know all about other books that are like the one you’re talking about, and it’s just never-ending, and it’s a pain.

and of trying to write:

I was sitting in my study, writing badly, just making words on the page, waiting for something good to come through, some sentence I could keep.

In particular, it's about reading a book and loving parts of it and wanting to smack the writer in the face for the other parts - the parts where women are tormented just to advance the plot, to choose an example at random.

As women, as queers, as POC, as any kind of Other, we all strike this devil's bargain with the canon as written by our oppressors, wanting to keep the good and rewrite the bad. Oyeyemi reminds us that this is the great work:

Tell the stories. Tell them to us. We want to know all the ways you’re still like us, and all the ways you’ve changed. Talk to us.

After all, our enemies do not rest.

Something terrible’s coming, and everyone in the world is working to bring it on. They won’t rest until they’ve brought it on.