(This was originally posted to Reddit's r/fantasy on June 24th. It's been a while but I figure I should put this up here, too. There are some minor revisions here and there, and arguably some small spoilers.)
A few weeks ago somebody complained about the deluge of posts about things being overrated and asked, why are there not more posts about things being underrated? I am pleased therefore pleased to present my attempt to fulfill that request.
Jo Walton is one of my favorite writers working today. She writes science fiction and fantasy in a distinctly literary, distinctly low-key style. She writes novels, short fiction, and poems, and has been doing so since the turn of the millennium. She also writes short essays/reviews for Tor, which have been compiled into two books.
I would like to make the case for you that she is one of the finest writers of genre fiction writing today.
In my opinion, the best of Walton's work are her standalone novels, and, once again in my opinion, the finest of those is My Real Children. Here's the publisher's blurb.
It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know - what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.
Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War - those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?
And that is the sum of it. It's worth noting that, excepting the first and final chapters, and those chapters covering her childhood and her time at Oxford, these are told as independent tales. Patricia is (once again, with those two previously noted exceptions) never at any point aware of the other life.
The story is, simply, the narrative of Patricia's lives. This is a novel devoid of action, of explosives. It's a quiet, gentle and moving tale of a relatively ordinary life: its happy moments, its sorrows; its triumphs and tragedies. And, in the background, the world she lives in. You may have noticed that history branches off in two paths, one that ends up darker than ours, one brighter. Without spoiling anything that isn't already obvious: the paths the worlds take are the inverse of Patricia's. But these alternate histories are background - they are, in fact, just about the only thing that keeps this novel within the trappings of "genre fiction."
These stories are told without padding: we fly first through years and then through decades. Events may pass by in a sentence. This isn't a short novel (the way Kafka's Metamorphosis is, to use an example without similarity to Walton's) but it's not long, either, the way Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 (a novel which a premise that does have some similarities to this one, albeit without genre trappings), either. And Walton's prose is as smooth as silk: not a word out of place, and so it's a pleasure to read.
If Patricia were a poor character, this wouldn't hang together. She's a great character, though: not a perfect Pollyanna, but someone who happens to be good. Not a genius, but still smart, practically-minded, and resilient.
It's said of lots of books that once picked up it's hard to put down, but My Real Children is one of the rare novels for which this was genuine truth: I'd been planning to savor it for a week and read it in two days.
The book that everybody besides me regards as Walton's masterpiece, on the other hand, is the Hugo and Nebula-winning Among Others. This one is a coming-of-age story, an epistolary novel, the diary entries of Morgana. Her mother, a half-mad witch, tried to bend magic to dark ends, killing Morgana's twin Morwenna, and leaving Morgana crippled. Thus she flees to her father (and his three half-sisters) and is placed in a boarding school, where she does an act of magic herself - and so attracts the attention of her mother...
...and that description, alas, is a dissimulation: no, I haven't lied to you, but I have entirely misdirected you on the nature of the novel. This is really a diary of adjusting as an outcast to life in a boarding school, a diary of finding friends when for a long time your only friends have been books. It's a love letter to the science fiction of the 70s. It's as concerned with math grades as with magic.
It would be fair to describe this as akin to a Miyazaki film in prose (and in Wales): yes, there are stakes; there is a story; but the storyteller is as much concerned with the small and domestic as with the epic.
The story of magic, fairies, and Mori's half-mad mother is therefore really a framework upon which a quiet, largely domestic plot is hung, one which also mythologizes parts of Walton's life. (Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, which Walton describes as giving her a "useful knowledge of evil," and her sister did die.)
Among Others isn't the only semi-autobiographical work Walton has written. Her most recent novel, Or What You Will, is semi-autobiographical in ways that in lesser hands would seem self-indulgent.
Sylvia is 73, an award-winning author of thirty novels over the course of forty years. And inside her head, there is a character that has played a part, sometimes major, sometimes minor, in each of these novels: scholar, warrior, lover, dragon. Sylvia has conversed with him for years. But Sylvia is 73, and he is trapped inside the cave that is her skull. Now she is starting a new novel, set in a Renaissance-inspired imaginary city that was the setting for a successful trilogy published decades before. He has a part to play, as he always has - and an idea, how he and Sylvia can shuffle off mortality altogether, not (or, at least, not just) the mortal coil.
And, as with describing Among Others, any description, any blurb seems inadequate. I read somewhere once that if a writer could write their book in a blurb they would do so, but they can not - they need the tens of thousands of words, the pages, and that therefore every blurb is insufficient, misleading, and incomplete. Walton, because capturing the pleasures of reading her (intimate, small-scale, character-focused) work is so difficult to capture in a blurb, suffers from this problem more than most.
This is a marvelous work, fresh, inventive without making bones about it. We alternate between Sylvia, in Italy, as she writers her novel; Thalia, the imaginary city of immortals that is the setting for her new novel; and the nameless narrator, that talks about Sylvia's (miserable, unhappy) upbringing, that plays a role in the Thalia story, that talks about the Renaissance and Florence and Shakespeare, death and the Black Plague - passages all the more affecting in the midst of COVID - and about the writing process.
It is, in its way, metafictional. And sometimes that gets a bad rap. But this is a warm, beautiful, deeply beautiful and intimate novel.
Those aren't her only works but they are, in my opinion, her best. So let's quickly run through her other works, in chronological order.
Lent is the story of Girolamo Savonarola, a friar in 15th century Florence - the Renaissance again! - that becomes involved in politics and, eventually, executed, in 1498. Savonarola was a real-life historical personage. But here is where fantasy, where fiction, comes in: when he is executed, he is damned to hell. And then he finds himself in Florence 1492 again... the story, therefore, follows Savonarola's attempts to redeem his soul, so that he may find himself in Heaven and know the love of God. Now I am not a Christian (my spiritual leanings are towards Taoism) but this is a beautiful story, the religious and spiritual themes handled intelligently and with care.
Starlings is a collection of short stories and poetry, alongside one play. It's a mixed bag: straight from the introduction, Walton says that her strengths are in the novel, and that the collection contains exercises, extended jokes, first chapters of books she never wrote - and that's true. A few of the stories are legitimately quite good, but if you're not already familiar with Walton's work, don't read it. The play is weird, sometimes wonderful, sometimes simply "huh," and I suspect it'd benefit from performance. The poetry is perhaps the most qualitatively consistent part of the collection.
The Thessaly trilogy requires a slight preface: I find Walton's standalones better than her trilogies. That said, this one is well worth a read. The Just City, the first book, finds us on the island of Thera prior to its destruction where Athene and Apollo are running an experiment: grabbing ten thousand children, along with an assortment of adult supervisors, and attempting to raise the children in the manner described by Plato's Republic. Fifteen years later, in The Philosopher Kings, the city has split into factions: five cities, and one lost group. Forty years later, in Necessity... well, I can't say more without spoiling the previous two books. The first two are smart, intelligent, humane works. The third, though well-written, suffers from a misplacement of focus.
Lifelode is another quietly domestic fantasy that, equally quietly, does incredible things: the ingenious setting is a land where the rules governing thought, magic, and time are dependent on how far east or west you are; the lead characters are a happy, cheerfully polyamorous family; and it is a non-chronological novel, but told wholly in present tense. Unfortunately if you get this on Kindle (and good luck finding it in another format, because it was only printed in small quantities) there are a lot of formatting errors that make reading it difficult and frustrating.
The Small Change trilogy takes place in Great Britain, in the first book in 1949, after the U.S. failed to provide aid to Britain in 1940, forcing the U.K. to make peace with Nazi Germany. It starts out in Farthing as a "cozy mystery" involving the murder of Sir James Thirkie, who helped architect the peace, alternates between Lucy, his daughter, in first-person, and Inspector Peter Carmichael, in third-person. This is the narrative format of each book in the trilogy: a first-person woman character, Inspector Carmichael in third-person, with the stories of both intersecting. These novels aren't my favorite works, but they do have some strengths: the portrayal of the peace, the depiction of Nazi Germany - the Holocaust has rumor disbelieved by many - the slide of Britain into fascism... yet the ending seems disjunct with the rest of the series, and I didn't quite feel it had quite the depth of most of her other works.
Tooth and Claw is her earliest standalone, a Victorian romance wherein the protagonists are dragons. The kernel of inspiration was the cliches of gender in Victorian novels - specifically, in the works of Anthony Trollope. Walton remarked that Trollope didn't understand women particularly well, but he certainly understood dragons. Thus, taking the cliches of gender in Victorian fiction and making them biologically immutable. Once again, a largely domestic story, with a large roster of viewpoint characters (which I found initially difficult to follow).
Her earliest novels are the Sulien series: The King's Peace, The King's Name, and The Prize in the Game. They are a reinterpretation of the King Arthur story, apparently. Not having read them, I can't comment.
There are also two chapbooks of poetry, a massive collection of - I believe - all the poetry she's ever written, and two non-fiction essay collections. (I enjoyed What Makes This Book So Great more than An Informal History of the Hugos.)
So, then: the virtues of Jo Walton: a quietness. a total lack of flashiness, of showing off, no matter how inventive. an emphasis on the quotidian, the mundane, the everyday, the domestic. a powerfully humanistic philosophy. strong characterization. silky-smooth prose.
If those are catnip, what should you read first?
Well, Among Others and My Real Children are the obvious choices here being her masterpieces. From there, Lent and Tooth and Claw (and if you don't mind formatting issues, add or switch Lifelode). Then go to the Thessaly trilogy. Finally, Or What You Will. Now you can absolutely read it without having read anything else of Walton's, but I believe the experience is enhanced by having some familiarity with her other work.
From there... from there, you can join me in waiting with baited breath for an announcement of a new Walton.
Walton is one of those authors, like Daniel Abraham and Susanna Clarke and Robert Caro, where the announcement of a new novel would make for an instant pre-order. I love her work, and I hope I've made a good case for why you should too.
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