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 19th 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. 

[ADDED LATER: and, hem hem again, Jo Walton came in to comment on her use of Trollope in this book, in my later post on Framley Parsonage, see here]

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 19th 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. 



 

 

Comments

  1. This really does sound unusual, Moira, but I mean that in a good way. In the best books, you're willing to set aside disbelief, at least to an extent, and go with the story. And in this case, the story is really interesting. A look into the lives of dragons...... I'll have to tell my resident expert on spec fic (read: husband). He might be interested.

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    1. Oh I'd love to know what he makes of it Margot! It's not my natural home, and I loved it, so it was a reminder to me to take a chance every now and again.

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  2. The fountain looks like a chimera (lion/goat/serpent monster).

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  3. I agree that Trollope had some weird ideas about women, but I still think he wrote them better than other male Victorians! You'll probably recognize some characters from "The Small House..." in "Framley Parsonage."

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    1. I think Jo Walton is quite hard on Trollope - I'm of your view, that he wrote about women more perceptively than most of his male contemporaries.

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  4. This sounds fascinating! I haven't read any Jo Walton but her Small Change trilogy is on my search list - I shall add Tooth and Claw.
    Sovay

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    1. Small Change is less of a leap from 'straight' fiction than this one, but they are all good. I think she is a really interesting writer.

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  5. We usually see eye to eye, Moira, but here I am not at all sure that this would be my cup of tea .... Chrissie

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    1. Tee hee, a very measured response! You might think about reading Farthing, though, it is a leap less far as I say above.

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  6. Did Jo Walton use the taxonomy for dragons Dickinson used in The Flight of Dragons?

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    1. Now that's a question I can't answer - we should ask her...

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  7. Jo Walton is hit-or-miss for me (loved Among Others), and Tooth and Claw is one I can't get into, perhaps because I do love Trollope and agree that he's better with women than most male 19th-c writers. But I am very grateful to your posts and to her for showing up to comment because that was how I discovered books I did like very much, including Farthing and Brat Farrar. Even if I hadn't known in advance about the setting problem of the latter it is the sort of thing that I would notice and struggle with, so I greatly enjoyed your post, which allowed me to read the book without frustration!

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    1. Her books are so varied in setting and style.
      I am making a note of Among Others and will look it up.
      That is so nice to hear about Farthing and Brat Farrar - thank you.

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  8. I have thought about reading this book for years but haven't acted on it. I have a list of books to consider buying in September and I will put it on the list. Even having a ban on buying books right now, I am not making much of a dent in my backlog, but I have been wanting to read more fantasy. Walton's motivations for writing the book are very interesting.

    I almost forgot to say that I have just finished reading The Warden by Trollope and enjoyed it. It is my first book by Trollope and I hope to fit another book by him in this year.

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    1. I can never remember where I heard about books, but I do think you put me on to Jo Walton in the first place, and a recent mention by you led me to look around and I think amazon suggested this one? something like that. so you should read it, because it is your fault ultimately that I did!
      The Warden is one of his shorter books, be warned, though I never find them too long.
      There are varying ideas about where his books are set, but the charitable almshouses in the Warden are strongly believed to be based on those at St Cross in Winchester - a short walk from my house, so I am going with that.

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  9. Jo Walton drew a crowd outside Boston for a reading a few years before the pandemic and it was delightful to listen to her (also interesting to see the different types of people in the audience, some of whom I think were friends). I had only read Farthing at that point but bought several other of her books that night. I had not heard about this one - I do like dragons but might have to be in the mood (I liked that Naomi Novik series but after two I felt I had had enough). I would love to own a dragon knocker or a weathervane to go on my garage. I have read Brat Farrar so many times I know bits by heart but I still notice new things about it.

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    1. Thank you, that's fascinating. Her books are so varied...
      I would LOVE that dragon doorknocker. And yes, Brat Farrar I know pretty much off by heart.

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