I tell my creative writing students that their readers will surprise them. I say that, once their story’s out there, someone will come up with a theme they’d never thought of, or a take on a character that’s strange and new and yet totally credible. I tell my students this because it’s happened to me. (My favourite example: two very thorough thematic analyses of my first book, posted on the Internet on the same day—one by a Wiccan, the other by a born-again Christian. Both loved the book; both had odd, compelling, somewhat disquieting things to say about it.)
It’s just happened again.
Bianca finished The Pattern Scars a few weeks ago. Ray finished it around the same time. Their reactions to the book’s protagonist were so deliciously, diametrically opposed that I asked them to write said reactions down, for my own blogging purposes. Which is exactly what they did. (And they did not read each other’s pieces.)
If you’ve read the book, you may continue reading this post. If you haven’t read it and intend to, stop right here, because everything that follows will be rife with spoilers. (I’m going to try to insert a “cut”. We’ll see how that goes.)
Without further ado: heeeeere’s Ray.
*
Let me be clear: I despise Nola. Perhaps I pity her, on a generous day. I am fascinated by her, and decidedly interested in her fate (or I wouldn’t bother with the book at all), but she has neither my sympathy nor my respect.
She is wise and strong, we are told. Strong and good. But those who do the telling are wrong, or merely being polite. She is weak and evil, by the end of her time with Teldaru, at the end of his crimson-drenched schemes.
And she is most assuredly a villain.
If this were a more…old-fashioned fantasy story, our hero would be Bardrem, and his quest to free his love from the evil sorcerer’s grasp would be a noble pursuit, his death would be poignant tragedy, and Nola’s complicity in Teldaru’s acts would go largely unremarked. But that is not the story we have in front of us (and I wouldn’t have it any other way).
The idea of a villainous protagonist shouldn’t be as alien to us as it seems (perhaps, if we squint, she could be a Byronic Hero instead). Odysseus was a violent, vengeful, callous son of a bitch, committing genocide at will. Richard III kills and lies and schemes his way through, and we applaud the bastard. Our Mistress Bloody-Handed Seer Nola is no better, and we no worse for eagerly following her tale.
She leads a girl, Larally, to her death with her visions. We excuse this, because we know Nola is still a child, unused to the consequences of her power. She runs off with a man she doesn’t know, cannot know, leaving everything and everyone behind – we excuse this, because we do not know, cannot know, that Orlo is Teldaru, and Teldaru is a vicious psychopath. She kills Laedon at Teldaru’s prompting, but we know, as she does, that she had no idea what she was doing. (We, however, begin to understand before it is complete, but she cannot hear us say “turn back”.)
By the time she rips Selera’s neck open with her teeth, though, she knows exactly what she’s doing, and why – she wishes to be whole again, whatever the cost to others. She will only kill Teldaru once her curse is lifted, despite the blood he intends to spill in the interim, and we never get so much as a hint of daggerpoint touching breast.
(Let me speak of blood, briefly. It comes in drips, near the beginning, mentioned here and there. But the word itself drowns us in torrents near the end for lack of synonyms, and we have become so inured to the word that we scarcely notice the violence it describes. In the early chapters Chenn’s scars are of note – by the end, Nola is covered in them, and we barely register another, barely flinch when she cuts herself yet again.)
Leah Bobet claims this as the logic of an abused partner – and I would almost agree with her, if not for the body count which ensues. Nola kills again and again, and helps bring two nations to the brink of war, knowing full well of Teldaru’s intent. She has her chances to kill him herself, but instead it’s “kill him and the curse will never break”, as if her own curse was enough to offset the people who die in the meantime, either by her hand or his. And of course she refuses to take her own life instead, refuses to refuse to be his tool. (She claims she will, shortly after the curse is laid. Teldaru laughs. And of course, he’s right.) We are never shown directly that the curse would prevent Nola from doing so. We are, however, shown that she plays along, becomes his instrument, in the hope that someday he will remove her shackles (when she’s killed enough for him). And only then would she take her revenge.
This reminds me less of relationship abuse and more of the indoctrination of child soldiers. The constructed dependency, the escalating atrocities, the keen engineering of isolation, the impossibility of returning home. And it is in this context that I see Nola as worthy of pity, and agree with her house arrest by (dour, pragmatic, perceptive) Derris, along with her eventual reconciliation to her death.
Sins of omission are equal to sins of commission, or so I was taught. (I grew up Mormon, which entailed some…peculiarities. Eight years old was the “age of accountability”, and after that grace period we were expected to look after our own salvation. So perhaps this moral perspective is unique.) That she had the opportunity to end Teldaru’s plans, and did not (in fact coiled herself tighter around them), weighs as heavily as if the sins were her own. She does not stop him; she does not stop herself. She takes perverse pride in her scheme to steal Mambura’s bones from Zemiya’s wrist, and thinks little of the poor girl blamed for it, or the social chaos in its wake. She absolves herself time and again, claiming to herself and to us that she had no choice, when the limits of the curse are barely probed. She cannot run, and she cannot help but lie, but other paths remain unwalked and untested. And for her hand in the bloodshed, I can call her nothing but “villain”.
I’m glad her tale was told.
*
And now, Bianca.
*
“Nola, Nola, Nola”. That’s the way that I would begin, would I ever find myself face to face with Caitlin Sweet’s protagonist in her latest and most breathtaking novel, The Pattern Scars. There have been few times in my life as a reader when I have been so touched by a protagonist that I have felt compelled to carry out a conversation, but Nola has occupied my thoughts in the many weeks since I devoured the book.
What about Nola is so fascinating? you may ask. After all, at first glance she is nothing but a misguided girl, a twisted seer, a cog in the mad machinations of a psychopath. Ultimately she is Mistress of nothing: not the Pattern to which she clings, not the Paths that she struggles so hard to make her own, not even her own life, which she ultimately relinquishes in atonement. Some may call her selfish, twisted and evil, but is that all that Nola’s character truly embodies?
In a world of black and white, where there is right and wrong, it is very easy to condemn her actions. Whether intentionally or not, she murdered two people and was the henchwoman of evil Teldaru. She abused her sacred Otherseer powers by Bloodseeing. She reanimated the dead and took it upon herself to alter their Paths. She became entangled in Teldaru’s hubris, a mistake which ultimately cost her her life. So yes, in a world of black and white, a reader can satisfyingly conclude that “Nola deserved it”.
But did she really? Is Nola’s categorization as a spineless, evil pawn fair, or is that the explanation that we as readers prefer in order to exculpate ourselves of the guilt we feel for not being able to save her? It’s an interesting and intimate thing, the relationship between a reader and a protagonist, and in The Pattern Scars, the pervasive “I” consciousness of Nola’s character becomes so intertwined with our “reader” consciousness that by the end of the novel we become Nola. We savour her small victories against Teldaru’s tyranny just as strongly as we suffer through her failures and her mistakes. We feel helplessness, rage, injustice, entrapment and fear right along with her.
We grow up with her and become seduced by the same things. We lie to ourselves just as Nola lies to herself and we allow the secret hope for the knight in shining armour, the fairy godmother or the benevolent king to grow in our hearts with every turn of the page. Around the end of the first book, we transform both into Nola and into her staunchest supporters. We want her to succeed. We want us to succeed. We want to see Teldaru’s evil vanquished and we need to feel that satisfying rush of release throb through our veins as Nola ultimately outsmarts and defeats him.
So naturally, as we delve deeper into Pandora’s Box, we grow restless and increasingly more aggravated. With every evil deed that passes, the guilt grows stronger. “This can’t keep going on for much longer! Now she will finally succeed. Now she will thwart him,” the eternal optimist inside us cries, only to be quickly silenced.
By the end of the book, we have suffered through so much that quite literally we hate the part of our reader consciousness that is Nola, just as Nola hates herself for everything that she has done. It is only a very small leap from that self-loathing to the very simple (and morally satisfying) explanation that clearly Nola must be evil and deserving of her fate.
Once that thought occurs, our reader conflict is resolved and we attain that rush of satisfaction that we were searching for, for the last 300 or so odd pages, all the while forgetting that if Sweet had intended Nola to succeed she would have gifted her the tools and experiences to shape her towards that Path.
Nola was never intended to succeed. All the evidence in The Pattern Scars points towards this fact. Her early childhood, spent in abject poverty. Her overwhelming desire to escape it. Her mother’s callous treatment of her. The insular reality of the brothel where Nola was never taught to think independently or critically but always to unquestioningly trust in Yigranzi and her powers—all of these factors allowed her to be seduced by Teldaru’s promises. It was virtually impossible for Nola not to choose Orlo that night. With that one split-second decision, Nola sealed her tragic fate forever, in the traditional fashion of the Oedipal protagonist. She was deliberately constructed for this task and was intended to fail in defeating Teldaru.
So what was her purpose then? What was Nola’s raison d’être?
Despite the context of her fantasy world, Nola is very much a character grounded in harsh reality. She lives by rules similar to those which govern the reader’s reality. In Nola’s world there are no knights in shining armour, no magical potions, no soul-mate vampire lovers, no wands or fairy godmothers to right the injustices she suffers through. There is no one but herself to fight her fights for her, no one but herself to rely on, and no one but herself to draw strength from. If she cannot find a way, there is no way, and in Nola’s case she cannot manufacture it and therefore she is trapped.
Her brilliance and vibrancy, however, are hidden amongst Teldaru’s atrocities and easily overlooked by a reader seeking the traditional fantasy novel experience (get protagonist, go on quest, fight evil, vanquish evil, live happily ever after). Sweet almost purposefully understates Nola as a protagonist, such that the reader is allowed complete freedom in his or her own interpretation of Nola. Interestingly enough, just like everything in Nola’s world, that freedom is not quite what it appears since the first person voice of the novel makes it impossible to separate the readers’ consciousness from Nola’s until the very last chapter of the book. (And by then it is much too late for such a thing.)
Why, then? Why this entire web of narrative and plot, all centered around Nola? Nola’s purpose in the novel is not to be a hero, or even a protagonist (at least not in the traditional sense). We as the readers are the protagonists, and Nola is simply the avatar through which we embark on our journey. She is the mirror against which we must measure ourselves morally. If we do not like her, if we hate her and we condemn her, we are supposed to ask ourselves: Why? What part of her do we recognize and dislike in ourselves? How do we want to be better?
Nola’s experiences are the catalyst towards our own introspection. Throughout her tale, we are constantly prompted to evaluate ourselves. How well would we survive in her circumstances? Would we be able to resist Teldaru’s offer? Would we choose to kill? Would we be able to preserve our shreds of goodness as well as she has done? Would we be able to maintain blind hope for a resolution for as long as she has? Would we be able to find the inner strength to endure humiliation after humiliation and weather the storm of our life, living only for intermittent quietude? Would we be able ultimately to face the consequences of our actions and accept responsibilities for them?
The “what ifs” are endless, and with them, Nola’s purpose is fulfilled. By Pattern and Path, we have come alive.
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