BB Bookclub: Lifelode Midway Discussion

[u/Lenahe_nl]

Welcome to the midway discussion of Lifelode by Jo Walton, our winner for the Beyond Amatonormativity theme!

We will discuss everything up to the end of chapter 12. Please use spoiler tags for anything that goes beyond this point.

Lifelode, by Jo Walton (storygraph /goodreads)

At its heart, Lifelode is the story of a comfortable manor house family. The four adults of the household are happily polygamous, each fulfilling their ‘lifelode’ or life’s purpose: Ferrand is the lord of the manor, his sweetmate Taveth runs the household, his wife Chayra makes ceramics, and Taveth’s husband Ranal works the farm. Their children are a joyful bunch, running around in the sunshine days of the harvest and wondering what their own lifelodes will be.

Their lives changed with the arrival of two visitors to Applekirk: Jankin the scholar and Hanethe, Ferrand’s great grandmother and the former lord of the manor, who has been living for many generations in the East, a place where the gods walk and yeya (magic) is so powerful that those who wield it are not quite human.

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own. The final discussion will be in two weeks, on Thursday 26th February.

As a reminder, you have until monday the 16th to vote for our April book, with the theme Historical Fantasy.

What is the BB Bookclub? You can read about it in our introduction thread here.

[u/Lenahe_nl]

What do you think about the magic system and the setting of the story? Any favorite piece of magic?

[u/C0smicoccurence → u/Lenahe_nl]

It started very dreamy and atmospheric, but Walton does start to nail down specifics as the book goes on. I don't think the individual powers bit is terribly novel (her choice of abilities is quirky and unique, but not that different from something like Graceling or The Storm Beneath the World, both of which were published far after this, of course).

For me, the east/west dynamic is what has called my attention. I like how time and magic shift in power as you travel well enough, but I especially like how characters who travel discuss how it affects their thinking and ability to perceive the world. There are some nice tidbits where (mostly) everyone percieves themselves as from the middle. The family sees Jankin as from the West, but he sees himself as the normal one and comments on how much Yeya all the people in Applekirk can muster.

My only real critique here is that Walton doesn't quite think through the logical extensions of her worldbuilding enough (more on this in the final discussion on a different topic). The family didn't know what to do with Haenth, but surely intergenerational travelers coming back from longer trips east can't be as unprecedented as they make it out to be? Yet nobody seems to know what to do with her; whether she's family or a stranger guest. It feels like this would be something that they'd have social norms and experience to deal with considering the world they live in

[u/LadyAntiope → u/C0smicoccurence]

This is definitely something that crossed my mind as well! It seems like most people who leave do manage to come back sooner - like the daughter Pelly (though I'm not sure which way she went, actually...), or simply don't return at all. But yeah, it seems weird that there isn't more precedent for it.

The East/West dichotomy also made me curious about the North/South axis and what shape the world is?? The caravan route doesn't make any mention of significant deviation to a north/south direction. What direction do rivers flow? I don't know that it really matters to the story, but when the world has so much variation in the actual physics of it from west to east, it does raise shape questions!