I was stoked enough by Katherine Arden's THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE to invest time in the second part of the trilogy. Though I've been a member of a couple of book groups for years, giving me exposure to various authors of the current century, it's been extremely rare that I've liked the first novel in any trilogy enough to follow up on its next chapters.
THE GIRL IN THE TOWER follows immediately on the events of NIGHTINGALE, focusing upon the exploits of protagonist Vasya Petrovna, a young woman seeking to chart her own destiny. Vasya is forced to depart from the township she's occupied with her family for her entire life, and to strike out on her own, in part because her talent for seeing the spirits of households and woodlands have caused her people to label her a witch. Of course, having consorted with Morozhko, the spirit of winter and death, also puts Vasya somewhat beyond the pale of ordinary experience. Her adventures implicitly have a modern feminist subtext, in that Vasya does not wish to be confined to the only two dispositions of young women in medieval Russia: lawful marriage or the convent. Yet, in marked contrast to the majority of feminist writers, Arden causes the reader to identify with Vasya's plight on a personal level, rather than using the heroine as a chess-piece to illustrate an ideology.
Unfortunately, other characters in TOWER have less organic substance than Vasya, and many of them exist largely to play limited roles in the "game" of the novel. Possibly I had this reaction because in NIGHTINGALE, Arden conjured forth a rich tapestry of Vasya's home life and her relations with all of her family members, even with the history of the mother who died birthing her. In addition, the woodlands around the township seemed alive with strange spirits, and dominated by an ongoing conflict between the demonic "Bear" of the title and his brother-deity Morozhko.
In TOWER, though, Arden places her heroine in a position where her supernatural gifts are at a disadvantage. Because medieval Russia exercises Muslim-like restrictions on the freedoms of women-- which is what the metaphor of "the girl in the tower" references, rather than any particular event in the narrative-- Vasya can only seek her destiny by masquerading as a boy. In this guise, circumstances force her to visit Moscow, where she encounters two of her family members, a brother and sister, who have become highly placed in the court of the current Tsar. Though in NIGHTINGALE the brother was strongly sketched even though he only appeared in a few early chapters, this time he has no character-arc beyond reacting to Vasya's predicaments. Additionally, Konstantin, a secondary villain of the first novel, appears in TOWER as well, but his development is also superficial.
I complained in my first review that the principal opponent was not well defined, and this is even more so of TOWER's main villain, who unlike the Bear is fairly well-known in major Russian folktales: the sorcerer Koschei the Deathless. Arden accurately reproduces the primary story-tropes associated with the character, but he never comes alive, least when the author tries to tie him into the mysterious maternal side of Vasya's family. Yet once Arden finally gets all of her chess-pieces in the positions needed for the big climax, she does deliver a killer conclusion, with a "eucatastrophe" perfectly in line with Tolkien's theory about the purpose of fantasy.
At some point I will probably read the third book in the trilogy. I speculate that its strongest myth-trope will be the same as that of the first two books: that of the relationship between involving the impossible relationship of Vasya and the Spirit of Death, inhuman, and yet given a patina of humanity by his contact with the young woman.
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