Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden

In the first installment of Catherynne M Vaente’s In the Night Garden, the first part in duology entitled The Orphan’s Tales, the ingredients are all present and the conditions are met. Clichés abound at every corner, every three steps a risk at tripping on tropes, another orphan’s story, meandering prince in tow and a quest for each cast member, a jaunt into fantastic fiction that is epic in the truest sense of the word. On the surface, a description of another forget-me-soon, brand-expectation feeding, disappointment. - the next and last in the seemingly sempiternal line our hobby has to offer. Something happens, however, our memory fails us, the expected horizon blurs, while at times grimmly familiar, our once assured stride turns into adventures stumbles and off the paved path we still encounter homages, but homages turned vintage, as we encounter cynocephali, rapacious wizards, witches, shape shifters, assassins, mother goose, griffins, flame birds, we are like the prince aware of and living his intended story but in welcome need of the immediate contradictory and continuous afterword. It is a story of beasts and adventures on the high seas, in cities of dream, and where barkeeps wait for a divine promise kept, all residing below a star-studded pantheon. But it is always the garden we go back forward to.

Surrounding the palace of a Sultan, a garden serves as the dwelling place of an outcast child shunned for her ornate gaze, her eyes magically tattooed with stories carrying the weight of 1001 nights. Ostracized for the birthmark, she was only even allowed to wander the garden – relegated as a tolerated local gapeseed - out of fear of retribution from her kind – she must be a demon child right? A living taboo, it is only natural it would be the curiosity of a child of the royal house who would come looking for her, as even the greatest story ever told requires someone to listen. A pact is made between the two, the girl - the literary bastard child of Scheherazade and Ishmael – our narrator and the young lordling drawn into her tales like a strung out Bastian Balthazar Bux. We see a pact turn into symbiotic bond, a relationship growing with the story and it is through their exchange that the reader will experience a series of interlocking tales, myths in a myth, folktales told within a folktale, in a clever fashion never but never too clever, sidestepping contrivance. Valente’s ball of yarn seems infinite, as stories keep mounting, pieces fitting before, after, on top of, and under previous chapters and at times might induce some reader weariness, but the patient reader will start to see their breadcrumbs intersect. These are stories set to no particular or uniform emotional tone – in Valente’s world treachery, vengeance, camaraderie, love, independence, faith, tradition, shame, sacrifice and family – exist concurrently with each other, which is why one moment can be dementedly violent while the next may offer a worthy laugh or indeed both.

When critique is offered of a formidable stylist like Valente, noted strengths delegated are usually more aesthetic in nature, and while there is no depreciation in this regard from her previous work, perhaps the most significant achievement of In the Night Garden is the world she creates (or Harrison’s bane if you will). We will not be given the product of Valente’s world building, we will travel with her as she builds, she gives us no map, it’s drawn as you flip the pages. The perspective of the world around her characters allows the world to organically grow and shift even when standing in place – you do not buy into the background, you buy into the inherent belief system of individual character’s who inhabit backdrop – whether human, beast or divine in inspiration – revealing the secret life of the world around them, and that’s a mean trick. Readers will bask in the Arabian atmosphere and recognize Canterbury’s twisted roads but shouldn’t discount the bloody chamber or Heian myth – all harnessed by one of the most distinctive writers to come along in fiction in the last few years.

In short, In the Night Garden is downright folk-funky, with DJ Cat V scratching and mixing myth and lore with an original blend given previously untold life by a writer who ultimately made me ponder the question of what happens when a neverending story ends, while almost making me forget to ask about the power in the name of the teller. The Orphan’s Tales is the poet, short fiction writer, and novelist maximizing her entire skill set in an offering that caters to the sensibilities of the fan of all forms.

Not in the too distant past one of my favorite - now flawed - methods to describe my tastes in the fantastic or preferred reading in general was to make the distinction between those who had a story to tell and were simply given a venue to tell it – a capacity that I couldn’t help but view as seemingly having as much to with hat-drawn luck as much as existing as a true barometer of actual proficiency of craft - and to those who had the actual gift of conveying the story. It was well intended, putting more credence to the deft of stroke rather than the common root of vision – the for some reason at times abstruse distinction beyond base synop between a Celidon and Landover, a Severian and Rahl, a Conrad Metcalf and Harry Dresden, that separates fantastic fiction from simple fanciful fluff - but when making that refined and defining cut, judging works as either stroke or stencil, I think in less drastic comparisons it became all to easy to ignore the true end game, a combination of the intent of both circumstances. The Story and the Teller. We read In the Night Garden, but in the girl’s hands we experience, we feel, we live the stories as if we accompany the character’s journeys with blood soiled club in hand and yet simultaneously watch them from afar armed with S’mores on a stick. Like the young prince, we run off in the night, we steal time, lie to our obligations, indeed we may find ourselves in a dungeon and better for it with proper company, as we shut the world out for the privilege to have it told to us seeking our forbidden fruit - but mostly we listen for a glimpse of the miraculously cursed girl with the deep, beautifully-burdened eyes with the greatest gift of all…

Catherynne M. Valente is a storyteller.

Jay Tomio
The Bodhisattva