I begin my review of Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing by reiterating my observation that, as funny as it is that she accidentally named the war college “cows-wing” (bà-sgiath) instead of “death-wing” (bàs-sgiath), I do think Yarros owes reparations to the Scottish Gaelic world for this book/series. I refer anyone who reads this back to Orla Ní Dhúill’s “Do Fantasy Writers Think Irish is Discount Elvish?”:
Ultimately the issue is not the inclusion of Irish or Irish folklore in fantasy, the problem is treating Irish and Irish culture like it only exists as a reusable fantasy product.
the use of Gaelic in this book is relentless. almost every dragon’s name is (often misformed, though comprehensible) Gaelic, clearly a result of a non-speaker using a dictionary, as revealed by the dragon named “Sliseag”, which I assume Yarros thought meant “slice” in the sense of the act of slicing someone with a sword but which actually means “slice” in the sense of an orange slice, or also “chip”, including in the sense of french fries. at least, I assume she didn’t mean to have a dragon named “French Fry”, since most of the others have names like “Ice”, “Thunder”, “Deathweight” (misformed), “Anger’s” (possessive), “Blueshadow” (misformed), or “Brightgreenlogic” (missing the fact that loidsig is not a mystical Gaelic word but an English loanword adapted to Gaelic spelling).
this book is emblematic of the phenomenon I elsewhere identified as fantasy writers treating Celtic-language cultures as common aesthetic property (belonging to everyone and so to no-one in particular) rather than as the cultures of real people living in real, systemically marginalized communities. Scottish Gaels have been subjected to five centuries of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and attempted cultural genocide; to take up their language without engaging in any way with either that history or, indeed, with any other aspect of Gaelic culture — with the exception of “Basgiath”, dragon onomastics don’t resemble human ones; Gaelic is denied the dignity of human speakers — is an insult to the generations of Gaels who have fought to sustain their culture and to pass on their language and traditions to their descendants. I personally know Gaelic-speakers who were subject to corporal punishment for speaking the language at school: the history of direct institutional violence against the language is within living memory, without even addressing the ways Gaelic communities are structurally marginalized within Scotland even post-devolution.
Fourth Wing is the story of Violet Sorrengail, the youngest daughter of a general of the Kingdom of Navarre (don’t ask me why the kingdom is named after 1) a real place and 2) a place in Spain). on the annual Conscription Day for the war college “Basgiath”, Violet’s mother forces her to abandon her dream of being a military scribe and instead traverse the deadly parapet to become a cadet dragonrider, hopefully to magically bond with a giant telepathic dragon who will give her magic powers.
I cannot emphasize enough how much the people crave Pern, because this book is truly just Pern x The Hunger Games, with — to its credit — a little taste of Dark Sun. the dragonriders are ruthless: murder is not only allowed but encouraged, in the interest of culling “weak” potential riders — and, indeed, bonded cadets — to strengthen the wings. this does not seem like a good way to run what is ostensibly an elite military organization. obviously a volunteer standing army will always be full of bloodthirsty murderers, but typically, as I understand it, you want those murderers to be aimed outwards at enemies of the state, not at each other. Yarros never addresses the gap between the fact that riders are supposed to work together and trust each other (and do, in fact, seem to do so) and the fact that she’s placed her characters in a system that is actively hostile to the idea of esprit de corps. the novel is obsessed with the idea that being a dragonrider is deadly and that Violet is surrounded by enemies who want to kill her, but it also wants to be a story about how great it is to be in the U.S. military — Yarros’s husband participated in the occupation of Afghanistan and she’s the kind of person whose bio describes her as an “army brat” — and the virtues of military camaraderie; I’m thinking about the lyrics to “Some Kinda Time” from Dogfight:
A band of brothers you’ve been given,
Pride you never thought you’d feel
The shitty life that you were living
Barely seems like it was real
Cause when it gets rough,
Your buddies will pull you
Right through
You get that and more when you join the corps
You’re in store for some kinda time
the disconnect between what the text is saying (everyone is out to kill you) and what the text is showing (this band of brothers™) jars throughout the novel. this is a book that has taken from Pern the conception of dragonriders as de facto (de jure in this case) an organized military corps but instead of having them protect people from environmental catastrophe — albeit one with heavy anticommunist symbolism — says, what if dragonriders were the U.S. military getting ready to protect the country from “the hordes of evil that seek to harm it” (direct quote)? that the narrative of Navarre’s recent history is ultimately revealed to be a lie perpetuated by the highest levels of government in some ways makes this worse, because it means that all of Violet’s friends — those who aren’t children of the executed leaders of the failed rebellion five years ago, who were conscripted as a punishment — signed up to fight an endless war against the relentlessly-villainized normal people of their neighboring country and it didn’t have to be that way. perhaps later books will deal with this, though I don’t anticipate reading them.
anyway, Violet manages to survive long enough to develop a complicated psychosexual relationship with Xaden Riorson — the son of the rebel leader, who was executed by Violet’s mother — and eventually to bond with not one but, for the first time ever, two dragons, one of whom — Tairneanach (cf. Gaelic tàirneanach “thunder”), “Tairn” for short — happens to be Xaden’s dragon’s mate, foreclosing the possibility that Xaden will murder Violet, since that would lead ultimately to his dragon’s, and so his own, death.
(as an aside, Violet’s second dragon, Andarna, and Xaden’s dragon Sgaeyl are the only dragons where Yarros has bothered to even vaguely de-Gaelicize the names, though Sgaeyl is obviously derived from Gaelic sgàil “shadow”, reflecting Xaden’s shadow-manipulation powers. the fact that many dragons’ names reveal the special and ostensibly unique “signet” magic their riders will develop is another problem with the novel’s use of Gaelic: Yarros seems to have assumed no Gaelic-speaker would ever read the book and so that this wouldn’t matter, but it does.)
most of the novel feels like a pretty normal high school story, albeit one where a lot of people get murdered, which is weird because ostensibly they’re all adults (Violet is 20, Xaden 23). despite Violet living in a fantasy world and explicitly having grown up on fantastical folktales, somehow the idea of waiting until graduation to get married “might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard”. this is, like, Midwestern U.S. high school drama from 2006 — especially incomprehensible because there doesn’t seem to be any stigma attached to premarital sex in the first place — everyone else is certainly having plenty of it, though of course Violet isn’t.
the writing is...clunky.
“Still not sure why they call it the Gauntlet,” Ridoc says from my right, blowing into his cupped hands to ward off the morning chill. The sun hasn’t touched this little crevice, but it’s shining above the last quarter of the course.
“To ensure dragons keep coming to Threshing by weeding out the weaklings.” Tynan sneers from Ridoc’s other side, folding his arms over his chest as he casts a pointed look at me.
the non sequitur here — this doesn’t actually “explain” why this obstacle course is called “the Gauntlet”; it explains why the college administration makes the cadets run the Gauntlet — is emblematic of the writing in general. part of the Gauntlet is described as looking like “a ninety-degree ramp”, whatever that means (I found the whole description basically incomprehensible, I must admit). it is also riddled with bizarrely “anachronistic” turns of phrase, like Violet saying “Double standard for the win”. I would enjoy the anachronism if it both were consistent (it mostly was) and felt intentional (it did not), but there kept being phrases that not only jarred with the broadly medievalist aesthetic of the rest of the novel but also jarred with my present as a reader, feeling thoughtless rather than conscious. I think the last time anyone unironically said “for the win” was probably more than a decade ago. or look at this:
I [...] slide down on my butt like [Tairn]’s a bumpy piece of lethal playground equipment [...]
why does this medievalist secondary world have “playground equipment”? also they know about adrenaline — by name — somehow.
some of this I recognize as my own taste: there is, for example, a consistent verbal tic that really got on my nerves where characters will drop pronouns/verbs when trying to do cool quips (“Well aware!” / “Trying not to!” / “Still here!” / etc.). still, I think it’s a fair criticism to say that while if it were just Violet doing this kind of thing it would be annoying to me personally but ultimately whatever, but instead every character does this, resulting in a single interchangeable voice for all of them. the relentless use of “fall for [someone]” by both Violet and Xaden also felt profoundly unnatural to me. also did I mention the text is framed as if it were a translated document? I’d forgotten about this immediately, probably because it’s just a silly conceit when the novel is written in first person, present tense. if you want to be a found document you need to do something with the document.
now, were there any good things about this book? well, I do appreciate that Violet has (obviously(?) not named) Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, as Yarros herself does. the book is very obviously trying to be Disability Representation, and while I think it’s sometimes clumsily handled (Violet gets a saddle and riding straps as an accommodation but everyone else is expected to ride bareback for some reason?) there’s at least been some thought put into it, and she gets to deal with — and force others to deal with — the fact that this is a chronic condition and no matter how physically fit she is she will always have certain hard physical limits and that’s just the way it is. this is one of the only aspects of the novel that I think represents an improvement on Pern, where — with the exception of Readis in The Dolphins of Pern — the treatment of disability is messy, to say the least.
there are also a few background queer characters (queerness seems relatively unmarked), including at least one character whose pronouns are they/them. given how little other parts of the world-building deviate from the present I assume this means they’re nonbinary, but it’s not clear what that actually means in this setting. but Violet’s best friend is bi and in a long term friendship-with-benefits with another woman rider. it feels like an afterthought (even if a relatively positive one, rather than the raging homophobia and transmisogyny in Pern), but it’s at least nice that queer women exist.
the constant emphasis on Violet’s lust for Xaden did get a little old, but mainly because it was described so repetitively — I actually love that she gets to be unequivocally and unapologetically horny; it just needs to be written better. the sex scene, relatedly, felt perfunctory, though perhaps it would have landed differently if I were at all invested in Violet and Xaden’s relationship, which I was not (much more interested in Xaden’s relationship with another child-of-a-rebel, Liam, who was fostered with him and who he’s assigned to be Violet’s bodyguard). there’s plenty of better erotica out there.
the climax of the novel did, I will admit, get somewhat more interesting, though there were so many things happening that I found it difficult to visualize — perhaps ironically, since I think the prose is meant to be “cinematic”. certainly it got slightly more ideologically complex at that point — and the world-building got a little more interesting, in that suddenly there was a Dark Sun element — but it wasn’t enough to salvage the book for me.
this was, alas, simply not a good book!
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