The Folded World

The Folded World is the second part of Catherynne Valente's Dirge for Prester John; I briefly touched on the first one here.

She says there will be a third, although I think that if there is never a third volume, the story will still feel complete.  As I said about the first one, Valente's usual beautiful prose is evident on every page.  There is also an attempt at satire in places, which I felt mostly fell flat.  Valente pulls the old trick of having an outsider comment on the absurdities within society; in this case, her mythological beings who can't tell the difference between, say, prayers and magic spells, or the difference between Islam and Christianity.

The problem is, she's mostly satirizing a medieval kind of Christianity which no longer exists, and, even if we widen the target to include all intolerant religions, she's satirizing beliefs which her readers probably don't hold.  The result feels a bit stale; satire is more biting when it picks on the vices we actually possess, as Thackeray does in Vanity Fair.

But, that aside, I really enjoyed the structural inventiveness of the novel.  Valente interweaves stories that are completely out of order, and her frame story about a monk trying to copy a decaying manuscript allows her to even do things like claim parts of the stories are illegible.  It's also got an emotional kick at the end, something that I think Valente's novels have lacked in the past.