Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

 

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

 

published 2003

 

I don’t think I’ve ever had a category of The Most Unusual Book I have Read this Year, which is a pity, because the 2024 result is completely in the bag. And this book also has the best origin story.

Tooth and Claw is a book about dragons, but dragons living the life of 19^th century novels. Jo Walton has invented a world with important rules and standards, plonked her characters down in the middle of it, and then has them working their way through the conventions and excitements of life.

As sometimes happens on Kindle, I missed the author’s introduction to the book, and only read it afterwards. But first I am going to quote from Jo Walton’s website, where she explains how Tooth and Claw came about:

I had the idea for it all in a flash one day. I was reading Trollope. When my husband went to work, I was reading The Small House in Allington. Now The Small House in Allington is about Lily Dale, and all of Trollope’s weird fixations about women are in fine display in that book. Sometime during the day, the library called and said they had a book for me, so I went to pick it up. The book was Ursula Le Guin’s The Other Wind. Not sorry to have a break from Trollope, I started to read it immediately, so when Emmet came home I was immersed in it. “How’s the book?” he asked. “Pretty good, but it doesn’t really understand dragons,” I said. Emmet looked at me in amazement. “Trollope doesn’t understand… dragons?” And in that moment I had the great revelation that is Tooth and Claw, that Trollope understands dragons perfectly, and it’s only when he tries to write about human beings (and especially women) that the books lose psychological realism.

(Small House at Allington has featured several times on the blog – I liked it better than Jo Walton did.)

 

Anyway, it is truly a wonderful experience reading Tooth and Claw, I very much enjoyed it. I don’t read much in the way of fantasy, so cannot compare it with other such books.

The dragons live a life full of rules, dictated by money and social status. They eat other dead dragons, including close relations,  in order to grow bigger: this is part of life. There are parsons and churches. Upmarket dragons (apart from parsons) can fly – servants have their wings bound to stop them from doing so. There is a distinction between town and country, there is a Planning Office, there are parties and balls, treasure and dowries are important. Some of the dragons go for a day out, a picnic, which has life-changing results.

I loved this book, I thought it was marvellous and I was very impressed by how quickly you could pick up what was going on, without too much exposition.

Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy has featured on the blog – I was particularly keen on Farthing, the first of the three books – and, hem hem, Jo Walton herself has visited the blog and commented. I love her fascination with ‘what kind of world is Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar set in?’    -  Farthing is her attempt to answer that question, and once I’d read that comment I was very keen to read it, having wondered the same myself, and felt similarly about Miss Pym Disposes. All much featured on the blog, see tags.

She is original and clever and funny and has an incredible creative ability – she reminds me of Terry Pratchett in that respect.

There is, as mentioned above, an author’s introduction to the book, and this is part of what she says:

This novel owes a lot to Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. I grew up reading Victorian novels. People since, from Joan Aiken to John Fowles and Margaret Forster, have done fascinating things with writing new Victorian novels from modern perspectives, putting in the things the Victorian novel leaves out. That gives you something very interesting, but it isn’t a Victorian novel. It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren’t like that. Women, especially, aren’t like that. This novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology.

 

So then obviously I had to read Framley Parsonage to discover the roots of the story – so another blogpost will follow.

And I have to tread carefully here: the author is very clear that Trollope and Victorian fiction were the start points for Tooth and Claw, and she does not care for Jane Austen being brought into the discussion. But there are two sisters called Haner and Selendra, names which seem to resemble Jane and her sister Cassandra, and there are scenes that seem to resemble those in Austen books. But it is indeed obvious that Framley Parsonage is the key text, and that Walton sees Trollope as being very different from Austen.

Hats/bonnets feature a lot for the dragons, as they would for any 19^th century literary heroines  – sadly I was unable to find any pictures of dragons in hats. These show the best of what I could find.

Dragon knocker from Cornell University Library.

1806 picture of a dragon from Wikimedia Commons.

Almost too many connections and links dept: Some years ago Jo Walton also sent me to reread Some Deaths Before Dying by Peter Dickinson. And Jo Walton writes very perceptively about another Dickinson book, King and Joker here. My own post on the book is here. I also covered the sequel, Skeleton-in-Waiting, and see that I not only prefigured my recent obsession with first names

-and it was Jo Walton who identified The Tiffany Problem, a key element of my discussion -

but I also put forward my own important theories about Peter Dickinson, which I say are probably only of interest to other fans – but there have been comments on the post in the past month!

I looked at fountains in this post, and found a nice dragon one.