Among Others by Jo Walton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bibliotropism

Excellent YA reading with acute relevance to us oldies as well. A fifteen year old girl from the Welsh valleys learns about life, death, sex, love and friendship. Handicapped in mysterious circumstances, estranged from her mother for equally mysterious reasons, Morwenna has to cope with everything from family blending to the trials of social isolation at an English girls’ school.

But mostly Among Others is about Morwenna’s irrepressible attraction to books, especially to the imaginative construction of alternative worlds in sci-fi. These take up where her younger fantasies of faeries leave off. “We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one.” Faeries after all are very knowledgeable but they can’t do much in the world of people, not without help.

Morwenna loves fantasy but despises allegory. Things are what they are and are degraded by being made to stand for other things. “Fiction’s nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify,” she says. Fiction, in other words, explains things. It helps a person get from a magical view of the world of a child to the realism of adulthood, without the loss of one’s imagination, including one’s moral imagination: “One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.”

Books are the centre of Morwenna’s existence: “Sometimes it feels as if it’s only books that make life worth living.” Her judgment has been honed by reading all the best writers and understanding what makes them the best. Through her reading she also finds others who are sympathetic to her tastes and ways of thinking. By understanding them she understands herself and her situation. It is not an overstatement to say that she is redeemed through her reading.

Walton’s epigram for Among Others is a subtle mis-quote from Virgil’s Aeneid: “et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” that is “it will be a joy to remember these things some day.” She has left out the important first word of Virgil’s original: ‘Forsan’ in Latin; ‘Perhaps’, in English. For Walton, there is no perhaps about Morwenna’s life. She will always find joy in what she has read and what it has done for her life.

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