it took much longer than I planned because other things kept coming up, but I’m pleased to report I’ve finally finished Pauli Kidd’s charming fantasy novel Mus of Kerbridge, which came to my attention thanks again to Bethany Karsten at The Transfeminine Review. originally published in 1995 under Kidd’s deadname, Mus of Kerbridge is set in the world of her 1989 tabletop role-playing game Lace & Steel, but despite being published by TSR it never felt to me like an RPG tie-in novel. notwithstanding some small complaints about archaisms and dialect, Kidd is an engaging writer — Mus of Kerbridge is vivid, fast-paced, and overall delightful.
the novel follows an ensemble cast of characters in an early modern (perhaps 18th-century) setting populated by humans and a variety of intelligent non-human species: satyrs, “half-horses” (i.e., centaurs), pixies, goblins, harpies, and more. the narrative centers around the title character, Mus, a mouse who has been magically gifted with intelligence and the ability to speak. the sorcerer who created Mus did so as part of a plot to murder the young half-horse noblewoman Miriam. Mus, however, breaks free of the sorcerer’s control and alerts Miriam, ultimately foiling the plot.
this sets off an elaborate fantasy of manners involving international diplomacy: Miriam’s father leads an expeditionary force from the Kingdom of Duncruigh (loosely Britain) to support the revolutionary republican government of Welfland (loosely the Netherlands) against an invasion by Queen Aelis of Nantierre (loosely France). there are conspiracies of spies, there’s a visit to court — in an effort to find Miriam a wealthy husband in order to be able to pay privately to bring the army home, since state funding is not forthcoming — there are further assassination attempts, there are pitched battles at sea and on land. a lot happens, but the novel never felt overwhelming or rushed to me, partly because Kidd does such a good job drawing her characters.
in addition to Mus and Miriam, we follow: Citizen Torscha Retter, the half-horse ambassador of republican Welfland to Duncruigh, with whom Miriam of course eventually falls in love; Willy Merle, Miriam’s disappointed suitor; Queen Aelis, a fascinating choice on Kidd’s part; and a range of other characters through whom the narrative is focalized for a chapter or two. if the characters are in some ways archetypal — there’s the well-educated damsel, the strong but secretly sensitive warrior, the gambling-addicted suitor, the naïve but determined aspiring Hero (Mus, of course) — Kidd nonetheless gives them an emotional depth that compensates for the predictability of their personal situations. it’s also very horny about centaurs, which I admit I enjoyed.
the highlight is, of course, Mus, who in some ways I think bears the imprint of Redwall and perhaps of some of the animated Disney mice but who transcends those influences by virtue of how he comes to be. the novel begins by asking: what if you were changed, physically and mentally, without your consent, into something that means your peers will forever shun you, something that you fear will make you forever unlovable (Mus laments early in the book that he will never again experience the pleasure of mating), but also something that opens whole new worlds for you to experience — worlds that you never dreamed were possible but which bring you joy you couldn’t have imagined? (not to biographize but there’s a reading of Mus’s arc as a kind of forcefem story.)
while queerness is not explicitly present in the novel — indeed, almost everyone ends up heterosexually paired off — there is nonetheless, I felt, an undertone of Something running through the text, both thematically in the handling of Mus’s arc and in terms of the portrayal of close relationships between men and between women (the satyr damsel Frielle does explicitly tell Miriam she loves her, although unfortunately she still ends up married to a man and pregnant with his child). the exception, however, is Aelis, the warrior queen, who ends the novel dead; there is a perhaps uncharitable but I think not altogether unwarranted reading of this as a disciplining — Aelis who refused to conform to the gendered expectations of womanhood (even for a half-horse) must be killed, while Miriam, a healer, gets her happily-ever-after. this is complicated somewhat by the fact that Miriam first attempts to assassinate Aelis by shooting her in the head, but nonetheless the undertone is there.
more generally the novel’s political imaginary does, I admit, leave something to be desired. I was particularly struck by a line late in the novel, from Aelis’s perspective:
Once Firined’s head had fallen, Duncruigh would be hers! She would inherit a colonial empire, trade routes, navies....
this is the one clear acknowledgment in the book that the early modern Britain, France, and Netherlands on which the novel’s polities are based maintained their political and economic power through colonial conquest and exploitation. when Miriam tells Aelis “Your empire dies with you”, it is not from any principled opposition to empire, but rather because Aelis’s imperial aspirations threaten the integrity of Duncruigh’s empire, and Miriam as one of its beneficiaries.
exacerbating this is the novel’s ultimate — explicit — rejection of republicanism: even as Aelis is defeated, the text affirms that Welfland’s republican experiment has failed; Torscha once again takes up the aristocratic title he was born with — which he had firmly (and violently!) repudiated — and decides to support the child king that Aelis placed on the throne. this was disappointing and also felt like it came out of left field.
other than that, though, my only real complaint is that while Kidd understands the difference between “thy” and “thine” (and “my” and “mine”) and that “thou” was an informal pronoun while “you” was formal, she doesn’t seem to have grasped that “thou” was exclusively singular, so throughout the novel there are characters using “thou” to refer to multiple people with whom they are close friends. kind of annoying, to be honest! there’s also a lot of eye dialect, in a somewhat perplexing way, which is to say that the characters from the “Channel Islands” between Duncruigh and Nantierre are both written with Scottish accents for some reason? perplexing.
overall, though, this book was really fun — I’m very glad I picked it up!
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