Yesterday I finished reading The Story of Silence by Alex Myers. It’s a novelization of a medieval lyrical poem. The cover blurb says “the tale of a nonbinary knight finding the courage to be who they are,” but of course in 13th century France the understanding of gender was a wee bit different.
I have very mixed feelings about this one. The author (a trans man) chose to stick closely to the poem in some respects and depart from it in others, and I’m really not sure about those choices. I need to quickly go through the plot here though to talk about it.
A knight named Cador is given the earldom of Cornwall to hold in trust for his firstborn — but the king had recently decreed that women cannot inherit (even to pass their holdings to a husband). And so when Cador’s firstborn is a girl, he, his wife and a nurse announce the birth of a boy, who is sickly and needs to be raised in a remote lodge well away from court.
Silence is raised as a boy and identifies as one, but he bears the burden of guilt for “deceiving” people about his “Nature”. (In the original poem, Nature, Nurture and Reason are personified and argue about gender issues; in the book the nurse teaches Silence that his Nature is to be a girl but his Nurture makes him a man.)
Silence ends up running off and having adventures that lead to knighthood in France, and then a return to England to aid in a siege. He is the hero of the day, but his father the Earl is killed in battle. So the king promotes him, but has him stick around the royal court for a few months to get the education he needs for the role. And this is where the queen tries to seduce Silence.
Silence is chaste and honest, and even more to the point doesn’t want to be discovered. So he rebuffs the queen, and this pisses her off. She ends up accusing him of attempted rape, and tears her one clothing and hair and slams her face into a bedpost to make it look real. It all seems very unlikely — everyone knows Silence’s reputation, but the men don’t think a woman is capable of hurting herself to sell the lie. So the king decrees that Silence must go find Merlin and bring him back to determine the truth, which many believe is equivalent to a sentence of exile. (Merlin has been cursed, and has been wandering around naked in the woods as a madman for many years eating grass and mushrooms, unable to use human language most of the time; there is a legend that says only a maiden can break Merlin’s curse.)
Silence meets this weird goatherd — in a dense, enchanted forest, not exactly good grazing land — who instructs him how Merlin could be caught and tricked into drinking himself into a stupor. (Of course the goatherd is Merlin, who wanted to be caught to break the curse, and also gets a good meal and wine in the process.) Merlin sees the truth in everything and it’s all extremely hilarious to him. Back in the court — still naked and unwashed, because he convinces Silence this will be more convincing — he announces that there are two deceivers present.
And here’s where things get super problematic.
The first deceiver is the nun who has been hanging around with the queen — a man wearing a habit, the lover with whom the queen has been cheating on the king. That’s right, it’s the transphobic “man in a dress” trope, in what is supposed to be a trans/nonbinary story, written by a trans man. And it’s some random one-off character we have never seen before, we will never see again, has no bearing on Silence’s life and could 100% have been left out.
The second deceiver, Merlin says, of course, is Silence. (Not the queen, who has been cheating on the king and literally tried to get Silence killed with false accusations…!)
Now, by this point Silence — who previously swore on a holy relic to always be true to himself, and who has had some talks with Merlin about gender and about how magic is a thing of in-between spaces — has been starting to think of himself in ways approaching a modern nonbinary understanding, rather than “girl pretending to be a boy and feeling guilty about it.” And despite Merlin being extremely rude with this, he’s determined to air the truth about everything. So he ends up taking off his clothes (with Merlin muttering “see, public nudity isn’t that bad”) and showing everyone his, uh, “Nature.”
The king sentences the queen and the “nun” to death… and says he will marry Silence because “she” is beautiful. In the original poem, this is the happy ending; Silence stops pretending and is a woman again and everyone lived happily ever after (well, the survivors did).
In the novel: Silence starts getting they pronouns. They tell the king: no. They explain that they are both what society made them — a knight, a man — and what nature made them — a woman — and that they cannot choose to be half a person. Silence gives up becoming the queen, gives up their knighthood and earldom, and chooses to be themself.
All of this tale was framed as Silence telling their story to a bard. The bard, enthralled by the whole tale, nevertheless decides it needs a “proper” ending and writes the one from the poem, with Silence embracing “her” “Nature” and marrying the king.
So really, the story felt like it was about a transmasculine character, with the very problematic trope of “deception.” It was only at the end that it became something else. Is that enough to make it a nonbinary story? I think so, maybe?
In the afterword, the author talks about the false rape accusation and says he thought about dropping it from the story, because of the seriousness of rape and the fact that it’s still FAR more common for them to be unreported than for false claims to be made. But there is no note about the nun disguise and the trope that trans people are deceivers.
I have all kinds of thoughts about the parents’ actions here. I cannot find that “forcing” Silence to be raised as a boy was abusive, because very few children even today give their consent to being gendered one way or another. In some sense, Silence did have more freedom as a boy than they would have as a girl, but of course it came with the burden of maintaining secrecy. The real abuse, IMHO, was the fact that Silence’s parents did not care about them as a person, merely as a legal token.
So yeah, mixed feelings. I did like the crazy trickster Merlin here though. It made me wonder what kind of character Merlin really was meant to be in most of the stories. The impression I always had of Merlin — through admittedly not really focusing much on Arthurian stuff but you can’t not be exposed to some of it — has been bland, very little personality. This Merlin was kind of a dick, but also a hoot. He also spoke and watched through ravens, which is totally an Odin thing so… yeah hmmm.
Next up I will read Lucy Holland’s Sistersong, a novelization of Child Ballad #10, the famous murder ballad called “Two Sisters,” “Cruel Sister,” “Dreadful Wind and Rain,” “The Bonny Swans,” “The Miller and the King’s Daughter,” “The Singing Bone,” “Binnorie,” “A’ Bhean Eudach,” “Der boede en Mand ved Sønderbro,” “Hörpu kvæði,” “De två systrarna,” “Gosli iz človeškega telesa izdajo umo,” “Ой, світив місяць ще й дві зорі”…
…you know, the one where a young woman (often royal) drowns her sister out of jealousy over a man. Optionally, the corpse floats downriver to a miller’s pond, and is mistaken at first for a swan. Usually, someone comes along, and decides that making a harp or fiddle from the body of a dead girl is a totally normal thing to do. Then the sound of the instrument accuses or curses the murderer.
I have four versions of this song in my MP3, collection and I actually think Loreena McKennit’s is the weakest of them (but not bad). Crooked Still’s is beautiful. Garmarna’s sounds great, and has Maria Franz from Heilung as a guest vocalist. Pentangle’s version, the first I heard, is probably the most coherent as a story, and is absolutely haunting.
I have often thought this would make a great horror tale. I imagine this musician feeling a compulsion, horrified but unable to stop himself from cutting bits off the corpse and building this cursed musical instrument, and then to play it for the king. If this is the “Wind and Rain” version, the only song that the fiddle will play is “Wind and Rain”, making it recursive, and thus the poor fiddler might have to relive the whole awful experience…
Anyway I’m very curious to see where this version goes.
It’s time for reviews of my Bandcamp Friday picks. For some reason, I still tend to choose a number of albums easily divisible by 2 or 3 to make a nice tidy rectangle for presenting the cover art in a post. I laughed at myself yesterday for still doing that, even though I don’t post them on Instagram anymore, while still intentionally choosing six albums.
Music of the modular ambient/”bleeps and bloops” variety on the Make Noise Shared System. I have had Vol. IV for quite some time and it’s among my favorite albums (keeping in mind that I have a lot of favorites). I chose this one based on a short listen to the start of a couple of tracks, and… it’s okay, but I think I can recommend IV much more strongly.
Abul Mogard does some absolutely gorgeous, warm blankety, kind of dark, slow but deep ambient music. From a forum thread this album seems to be many peoples’ favorite. I listened a little to one of the other favorites and greatly preferred this one. You can fall alseep to it or just listen and enjoy it.
Cujo was Amon Tobin’s first of many psuedonyms. This is a reissue of his only release under that name. For the most part, it’s jazzy breakbeats, often with a bit of Future Sound of London chillout vibe to them. Two or three of the tracks were familiar to me from a compilation or the old mp3.com days — certainly “Cat People” is a classic. A few songs have TV/movie vocal samples that I wish had been omitted because they kind of kill the vibe, but there’s some great stuff here.
There’s a sort of subgenre that is sort of adjacent to synthwave, associated with 1970s-ish “unexplained phenomena,” horror movies and low-budget British TV shows. (Oddly, this is not what people mean when they say “hauntology,” nor is it “Witch House.”) I am into this more than the neon sunsets and Ferraris and early computers vibe of actual synthwave, and I think The Night Monitor might be the best at that. This album is an absolute delight within that context. There are no samples from documentaries at all but none are needed. Just the right kind of composition with just the right kind of warbling, echoing, tape-distorted analog synth sound (or a close enough digital emulation) to carry the vibe.
More from nonbinary techno producer and game developer Zvrra. This album is not straight up techno all the way through, but all manner of things and they’re all good… sometimes lopsided polyrhythmic techno, sometimes no beats at all and I kind of want to say “ambient” or “soundscape” but it doesn’t have that vibe, it’s just… fresh and creative. I like this, a lot.
I have been waiting for another release from Belief Defect since the first one, but the pandemic and other factors delayed things. It was worth the wait. This sounds a bit different but as the album description says, we live in a different world now. It’s still deep and dark and heavy though. There are some live drum parts, and guest vocals/spoken words from activists Cornel West and Chris Hedges as well as an especially badass song with guest vocalist Ana Gartner. Here’s hoping that their next release will come in less than six years!
That Mesmer character in Guild Wars 2 is doing great now. With the staff, damage is gradual and tends to build up over time; meanwhile you’re shielding and dodging. It’s fairly survivable as long as you don’t get paralyzed. But as soon as you unlock Mirage Cloak, your damage gets a big boost, especially with some other synergies, and unless you get locked down even harder you can usually teleport, cloak or shield yourself somehow. The small fights become much smaller and the big ones are also smaller.
So between the Scourge (Necromancer), Scrapper (Engineer), and Mirage (Mesmer) I’m actually not sure which I like more.
I’m at 24 Black Lion Statuettes now and my goal was 25 for the crossbow pistol. I have still gotten exactly ZERO keys on this character from finishing 8 zones. According to a probability calculator there is a < 5% chance of this happening, so I have to wonder if there’s a bug or unannounced change… or if I’ve just been really unlucky.