Sept. 10, 2016 "She seems human, but for the spells": I cut out this article by Philip Marchand in the National Post on Jul. 31, 2010:
It’s easy to see why adolescents might find this fantasy appealing
Future literary historians may well cite Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire as one of the 20th century’s most influential novels. It’s not a major work of fiction, but turning the vampire into a romantic hero was a brilliant idea, and launched a whole sub-genre, the vampire novel.
Not only that, Rice paved the way for similar, unapologetic treatments of other creatures with unsavoury eating habits.
Ontario-based Kelley Armstrong gave the Anne Rice treatment to lycanthropy sufferers, for example, in her 2001 debut novel, Bitten, featuring the world’s first female werewolf.
It was successful, and launched Armstrong into a series of novels about the modern paranormal, including the Darkest Powers trilogy for young adults, and her Women of the Otherworld series.
Waking the Witch is the 11th novel in that series, and features a heroine and first-person narrator, 21-yearold witch Savannah Levine, who made her debut in Women of the Otherworld.
Unlike a vampire or werewolf, Savannah has no need for fangs. Many horror fans, in fact, only yawn at the notion of a witch. Go to Salem, Mass., and see how they help draw the tourists, these modern day Wiccans.
Armstrong, in her series, attempts to restore the evil reputation of witches by making them a different species, like werewolves and vampires. If anything, these real witches, with bloodlines to the supernatural, have a mild contempt for Wiccans.
It is still easy to be confused by appearances. Because Savannah has a perfectly human body, rides a motorcycle and peppers her language with four letter words, the reader is often taken aback when she mentions “mingling with humans.” What does Savannah do that makes her so different from humans?
The answer is she casts spells. Again, this might not seem so unique. I remember riding a streetcar in Toronto years ago and overhearing a teenage girl announce to her friend, “I’m the head witch in my district.” When her friend suggested that she not talk about these things in public, she replied, “It’s OK. I’ve put a bubble around us. No one can hear what we say.”
Obviously her spell was not working. (The alternative supposition is that I myself have unusual psychic powers, able to penetrate cones of silence laid down by witches. I think this unlikely.)
It is also true that Savannah’s spells sometimes fail, but her batting average, we can assume, is much higher than the girl in the streetcar or your average Wiccan. Let’s say her spells work more often than not. I’m guessing here, but I’d say that makes her a supernatural non-human witch.
In her capacity as private eye, Savannah is always tempted to use spells. At the start of the novel, she is working for a detective agency concerned with matters paranormal, and she has been dispatched to Columbus, a seedy, decaying small town in Oregon, to investigate the murder of three women.
The crime scene shows signs of occult rituals. In the course of this investigation, Savannah attempts, or thinks about attempting, the blur spell, the perimeter spell, the persuasion spell, the sensing spell, the locking and unlocking spell, the cover spell, the binding spell, the knockback spell and a few others.
“That’s a lot of spells,” she admits. “But that’s what life is like for a witch.” On the other hand, a colleague tells her that she tends to go overboard on them. Her being such a young, feisty witch, you can understand.
The spells are also a bit of a problem for the reader. In form, Waking the Witch is a straightforward crime novel, a whodunit, with major and minor suspects, surprising revelations, and so on.
The spells are almost irrelevant. Until the very end, they do not advance the story. They are much less useful than Savannah’s iPhone.
But then, at the end of the novel, all bets are off as the plot takes a sharp left turn into the arena of the pure supernatural.
Waking the Witch switches from being a crime novel to a contemporary fantasy. These two genres are incompatible and the novel, as a result, is like a human body with a helium balloon for a head.
Waking the Witch, then, is a literary failure, but its appeal, especially to young female readers, remains a matter of great interest. Like many of the vampire novels, including the Twilight series, Armstrong’s work expresses strong gcostic impulses.
Gnosticism involves a belief in transcendent realities that are hidden from the uninitiated, and are experienced only by a kind of spiritual elite.
Members of the public are unable to recognize the existence of this elite, but members of the elite — vampires, sorcerers, mystics, enlightened ones, witches and even werewolves — know each other on sight. The gap between the elite and the non-elite is rigorously maintained. In Armstrong’s world, for example, witches are prohibited from sharing rituals with humans.
It is easy to understand why many adolescents, trapped in a world of clueless parents, teachers and classmates, might find this fantasy attractive. They are not put off by somebody like Savannah, even though this character is the product of a mistaken belief that “strong” young women are tough guys in training.
Nor are they offended by Savannah’s decidedly superior attitude to ordinary mortals. “Why are humans so enamoured with the myth of love spells?”
Savannah asks herself at one point. She herself would never use a potion on her heartthrob.
“My ego is way too healthy for that.” She is quick to describe people in Columbus as “redneck morons,” ignorant “townies,” “stupid bitches.” In fairness, she does melt a bit when some of those “townies” display kindness to her. “I mentally took back every nasty thing I’d ever said about smalltown folks,” she says.
This is handsome of her, and no doubt as she develops as a character in Women of the Otherworld, she’ll lose some of her rough edges. That superior attitude is still hard to lose, however, when you’re a member of a spiritual elite.
That is why the more interesting novels of this sort, like the vampire narratives of Anne Rice, have protagonists who are, at best, ambivalent about their possession of special powers. Their awareness of spiritual privilege is marked not by Savannah’s kick-ass mentality but by a tragic sense of life, suffused with melancholy.
"She seems human, but for the spells"
Sept. 10, 2016 "Agent vs. Publisher": I cut out this article by Mark Medley in the National Post on Jul. 31, 2010:
Andrew Wylie, arguably the world’s most powerful literary agent, and Random House, the world’s largest English-language publisher, are playing a high-stakes game of chicken.
It began on July 21, when Wylie announced the creation of Odyssey Editions, a digital publisher that would release e-books by some of the authors in his fold, including Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabokov, which would be sold exclusively through Amazon.
Random House, which claims it holds the electronic rights to many of these titles, launched an immediate counterstrike: “Until the situation [was] resolved,” it would no longer do business with his agency. Wylie was no longer a confrere but a competitor.
“It was not a decision that we took lightly,” Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, told the Post.
“It’s unprecedented for Random House to take such an action, but it’s also unprecedented for a literary agency to set itself up as a direct competitor of ours, selling editions of our own titles — titles they represent and we publish. They went into business in competition with us with our own authors. That’s unacceptable, and hence our response.”
The battle has two fronts. First, there’s the issue of who owns electronic rights to a title if the contract was negotiated before the advent of e-books. Second, there’s the question of the authors’ royalty rate:
Right now, authors get 25% of net proceeds. However, the agents and authors are aiming for closer to 50%, especially given the rising market share of e-books (Amazon recently announced that during the most recent quarter it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers).
“What agents are trying to identify is a way to maximize revenue for digital backlists because they feel that publishers are not doing the best job,” says Sarah Weinman, a New York-based Canadian journalist who covers the publishing industry for AOL’s Daily Finance web-site. “By cutting them off and dealing directly with Amazon to distribute these books exclusively for a two-year period, Wylie’s essentially signalled that he doesn’t want to deal with publishers, at least on a digital [backlist] standpoint.”
Sides have been taken: Several major publishing houses have criticized Wylie’s initiative. On the other side, the Authors Guild of America has released a statement saying, “publishers have brought this on themselves.” The feud also made its way to Twitter:
Last Friday, someone registered @EvilWylie (sample tweet: “After cutting out publishers, Evil Wylie will cut out authors next. I’ll write the damn books myself. How hard can it be?”); later that day @GoodRandomHouse materialized.
Wylie has several Canadian clients, including Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien and Miriam Toews, who is published by Knopf Canada, a division of Random House Canada. She won’t be affected by the stand-off as she’s already signed a contract for her next book. “We’re glad that we have the next book, but the Wylie Agency took a very serious action, and there are consequences, in our view, to that action,” Applebaum says.
Random House Canada declined to comment, leaving it to Applebaum to offer his assurance that Brad Martin, head of Random House Canada, is “100% supportive” of the decision.
The Association of Canadian Publishers hasn’t taken a position, though Carolyn Wood, its executive director, commented that “it’s just one more example of how business models are evolving, or devolving, depending on your point of view.”
Will Canadian literary agents follow Wylie’s example? “This is a very different market,” Dean Cooke says. “No matter how large or small the agency in Canada, none of us have this kind of leverage here.”
Toronto-based agent Sam Hiyate remarked it would take a Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje dealing directly with an e-book retailer to make a Wylie-sized splash: “I don’t think we have any [agents] big enough.”
And how do these Canadian players react to having the biggest issues of the e-book age decided hundreds of kilometres away? “I don’t feel powerless,” Samantha Haywood says. “I think it’s a reality that major corporations and major New York-based agencies are going to be setting precedent, but I very much see us — in terms of all agents and all authors — being completely involved in this battle and issue.”
Cooke says his agency is “sitting on large stacks of amendment letters from publishers saying, ‘We want you to sign these agreements. We want to bring out these books in Canada as e-books and we want to do it for 25% of net.’ And we have absolutely no reason that we have to sign those amendments. That, to me, is not a position of powerlessness. That’s a position of power.”
Agent vs. Publisher: Could the Andrew Wylie/Random House stand-off happen in Canada? | National Post
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