Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales

by Greer Gilman

"A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of. Abandon hope all ye who enter here."—Paul Kincaid, SF Site

"A work that reads like language stripped bare, myth tracked to its origin."—Locus

"Sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect . . . readers who enjoy symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilman’s use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology."—Publishers Weekly

"'Green quince and bletted medlar, quiddany and musk': Greer Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories. Gilman writes like no one else. To read her is to travel back, well back, in time; to wander in thrall through mist on moor and fell; to sink up to the nostrils in a glorious bog of legend and language, riddled with bones and iron, sodden with witches' blood."—Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels"Greer Gilman is a master of myth and language with few equals in this world. Cloud and Ashes is a triumphant, heart-rending triptych, a mosaic of folklore, intellectual pyrotechnics, and marvelous, motley characters that takes the breath and makes the blood beat faster."—Catherynne M. Valente, author of In the Night Garden

"No one else writes like Greer Gilman. She is one of our most innovative and important writers, in fantasy or out of it. If you want to see what language can do, the heart-stopping beauty it can achieve, read Cloud & Ashes."—Theodora Goss, author of In the Forest of Forgetting

"Cloud and Ashes is a dark pastoral shaped from bits of ballads, scraps of nursery rhymes, fragments of Tarot, tatters of ancient myth, and shreds of archaic language, all shot through with luminous ribbons of Gilman's own personal cosmology.... Gilman's prose reminds us that most magical systems locate the power of magic in the power of language itself. Cloud and Ashes is particularly recommended to those readers who enjoy myth and folklore, especially the myths of Ariadne and Persephone. Cloud and Ashes is also highly recommended to those readers who enjoy fantasy which explores language and folklore."—Green Man Review

“Gilman's ‘A Crowd of Bone’ . . . is dense, jammed with archaic words and neologisms . . . but the story—complex, tangled in narrative as well as syntax, and very dark—rewards the most careful of readings."—The Washington Post Book World

“I am wind and memory who spells this . . .”

In the eighteen years since her Crawford Award–winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing, more beguiling and inventive.

Gilman’s second novel, Cloud & Ashes, is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. To step into her world is to witness the bright flashes, witty turns, and shadowy corners of the human imagination, limned with all the detail and humor of a master stylist. In Gilman’s intricate prose, myth and fable live, breathe, and dance as they do nowhere else.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Collections

448 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2009

About the author

Greer Gilman has been writing stories set in Cloud, her Northern mythscape, for a quarter of a century. Her love of British lore and landscape, of its rituals and ballads, is a constant in her work; her love of language at its roots. Her books are written for the ear, as much as for the understanding. Like the earliest stories, they are meant to be sung.

Greer Ilene Gilman was educated at Wellesley College and the University of Cambridge, where she studied on a Vida Dutton Scudder Fellowship. At Cambridge, she read Renaissance English and met with Jomsborg, a circle of fantasists. There she heard Alan Garner speak, had tea with Lucy Boston, and began to think of writing myth. A sometime forensic librarian and cataloger of the polyglot at Harvard, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and travels in stone circles.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Later addition)

As with all mythology, there is sexual violence here. I have been asked to add a warning in that respect. While my views on “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” when it comes to literature are clearly not in line with the way the winds are blowing these days, I am willing to concede that, as a “casual browser” of this site who has been a survivor of sexual violence may not want to read the quote with which I originally started this review, it is perhaps simply good manners to provide some sort of heads-up.

Personally I think the style and language of this quote speaks perfectly well for itself when it comes to the act depicted, not least with respect to the way it concisely delineates the multiple layers of power at play in this type of scenario (in terms of gender, age, class etc). But I think that is something readers should be able to determine for themselves.

(Original review)


"The boy kneels, drunken, in the barn. They hold her down for him, the moon’s bitch, twisting, cursing in the filthy straw. A vixen in a trap. He holds the felly of the cartwheel, sick and shaken, in the reeling stench. Cold muck and angry flesh. Their seed in snail tracks on her body, snotted in her sootblack hair. Their blood—his own blood—in her nails. She is Ashes and holy. He fumbles, tries to turn his face. He’s not thirteen. Get it into her, mawkin! calls the bagman, wilting. Ashes and fear. Thinks it’s to piss with. Hey, crow-lad! Turn it up a peg. Spit in t’hole. And the man with the daggled ribbons, his fiddle safe in straw, cries, Flayed it’s thy mam?"

I think I have said this somewhere in a review before, but if you really want me to get excited about a text, you need to be doing something on a micro-level with the prose that I have never heard before. And it also helps if your text is a giant "fuck you" to the market and "readerly expectation". What Greer has achieved here is a perfect example of that. Plus, as she gets lumped in as "fantasy" or "genre" writing, rather than being placed along side writers like William Gass, this means she will not get on the radar of those of us usually interested in such things, which is perhaps why I only stumbled upon it by chance.

This is an exceptional piece of work - incredibly dense and compacted, certainly impossible to parse on first reading and without external assistance. And the sound of it damn gorgeous.

The book is split into three sections - the first, the shortest, is perhaps the most linguistically dense, and sets out the mythical structure of the world ( called "Cloud") - which is somewhere with much in common with the North of England in the 17th century, but much is altered too.

As with all good readers of Fraser, the mythology here is closely tied to the seasons, the death of the sun in winter and its rebirth in spring. What she does with myth, and the depth of it, the way it comes to life in its re-enacting, the way it can place us within story, and, too, how it both structures and provides the means to dismantle the networks of gender and power that bind us, is deeply impressive.

As Greer has explained:

Cloud's gods are the sisters Annis and Malykorne, dark and light of one moon. Mally's at the root of things; Annis is abyss. In Moonwise [Greer's first novel], Annis tried to halt time and was defeated. She's been dwindling in the long years since, in exile in the underworld. She's begotten a daughter on herself, in her glass: her captive, her consort, and herself reborn. That daughter is Ashes. Like Persephone, she winters in the underworld; but unlike the Kore, she was born there: spring is her escape, her rising from her mother's grave. And every winter she is hunted down, recaptured. Ashes in the guisers' play is her winter stand-in; she keeps the year alive while Ashes is in hell. For the space of her office, she is Ashes: a perilous role.

Jack Daw's an upstart god. He wants to be Dis in the dyad, to possess the godhead carnally. Get bastards on it. Change the myth by force.

His gang is Jack Daw's pack.

Ashes' rape is blasphemy. And crucial: whether or not the guisers' Ashes is Ashes and their fiddler Jack Daw himself, they enact the breakpoint in the myth."

In the second and third books (which are a novella and a solid 300 page novel) a character called Thea, who is Ashes, runs away and has a child with a regular man, breaking from the mythical cycle. Her daughter, Margaret, replaces Thea under Annis's control, but escapes and eventually becomes the ward of a folklore expert and ends up, among many other things, inventing the telescope.

I will quote some pieces here as either this style will interest you or irritate almost immediately.

I will start with something more high-flown, from the start of the second book, which is the style most likely to annoy.

******************

Margaret, do you see the leaves? They flutter, falling. See, they light about you, red and yellow. I am spelling this in leaves. When I had eyes and hands, and hair as red as leaves, I was Thea. My mother fed me to her crows, she burned my bones and scattered them; my braided hair she keeps. I am wind and memory who spells this; Thea who is spelled is stone. My mother got me gazing in her glass. Her raven held it up and told her: what I tell you, you must do. Undo, the sly moon said. And so she did, undid. Annis was herself her glass, and I her shadow, A and O. She saw me in the stony mirror, naked as a branch of thorn. Devouring, she bore me, as the old moon bears the new, itself again. But I am left hand to her right: not waning, but the childing moon. The dark has eaten me; I bear it light. I cloak myself in leaves, I fly. The wind unspells this.

I will spell this in the sliding water on a web. At my birth, the Necklace had its rising, Annis' chain of stones. But they do give it other names above, that Elsewhere it had set. The Skein, they call it in the Cloudish tongue; in Lune, the Misselbough; that cloud of stars we name the Clasp, they call Nine Weaving, or the Clew. So I did write when I had hands and learned to cipher and to spell. When I had eyes, I saw another heavens through her glass, another world. I walk there now and gather lightwebs, plucking them from thorns of night; I spin them in a skein, a clew. The dark is labyrinth, but not the maze I thought I knew. I wander like a moon. See, Margaret, how the heavens dance, they dance between my hands. When I had eyes, I thought my seeing bound the stars; I knew the Cup, the Hallows Tree, the Ship, as if my naming them were law. There is another law. The stars are messengers; their shining comes from far and farther still, from hearths long cold. Walking, I have seen the hearths beyond the stars, like ashes on a dark hill. But the stars that travel, they are dark and bright, like travellers with scarves of light, like beings newly blown of crystal, each a single note, nightblack, and rayed with burning silver. Their moving is their voice; they do not speak, but dance. Ah, now the drops of water slide away. The web is shaken bare.

I tell this in the frost, the rime. I am not for my mother's necklace. Margaret, have you seen it? It is strung with stones, all flawed: some round as waveworn pebbles, others long and sharpedged. They are souls, the souls of witches, cold long since: the eldest of them ash these nine thousand years. Witches turn themselves to stone. Their gaze is glass. But they are isolate, unknotted souls: they dance by one and one. The necklace is an eidolon, a ring that never was. The souls are gathered on one string, as shadows of the starry Chain. That cord is time; the knot is Law. It is a place. I lay there once, a white ground where the blood is spilled, a place of bones and coins. All witches came there, bent on darkness; none had met. They spelled in blood, cast bones; they spoke in tongues of fire. There are witches still in Lune, on Law. Yet none is living that could read the word my ashes spelled; nor find the nine bones that I left.

**************

This is the first paragraphs of the first short piece - it was reading these sentences that led me to get hold of the book, so perhaps the same will happen for you:

He is met at a crossroads on a windy night, the moon in tatters and the mist unclothing stars, the way from Ask to Owlerdale: a man in black, whiteheaded, with a three-string fiddle in his pack. Or in a corner of an ale house, querulous among the cups, untallied; somehow never there for the reckoning, though you, or Hodge, or any traveller has drunk the night with him. A marish man: he speaks with a reedy lowland wauling, through his beak, as they say. He calls Cloud crowland. How you squall, he says, you moorland ravens; how you peck and pilfer. He speaks like a hoodie crow himself, all hoarse with rain, with bawl­ing ballads in the street. Jack Daw, they call him. A witty angry man, a bitter melancholy man. He will barter; he will gull. In his pack are bacca pipes, new ones, white as bones, and snuff and coney-skins and cards. He plays for nothing, or for gold; packs, shuffles. In a game, triumphant, he plucks out the Crowd of Bone, or Brock with her leathern cap and anvil, hammering at a fiery heart, a fallen star. (It brock, but I mended it.) Death’s doxy, he calls her, thief and tinker, for she walks the moon’s road with her bag, between the hedges white with souls; she takes. Here’s a lap, he says, in his shawm’s voice, sharp with yelling out for ale. Here’s a blaze needs no bellows. Here’s a bush catches birds. He mocks at fortune. The traveller in the inn forgets what cards he held, face down, discarded in the rings of ale; he forgets what gold he lost. He’d none in his pockets, yet he played it away, laid it round and shining on the sanded board, a bright array. On each is stamped a sun.

And elsewhere on that very night, late travelling the road between Cold Law and Soulsgrave Hag, no road at all but white stones glimmering, the sold sheep heavy in his purse, another Tib or Tom or Bartlemy will meet Jack Daw. He will stand at the crossroads, bawling in his windy voice, a broadside in his hand. There’ll be a woodcut at the head: a hanged man on the gallantry, crows rising from the corn. Or this: a pretty drummer boy, sword drawn against the wood, and flaunting in her plumy cap. Two lovers’ graves, entwined. A shipwreck, and no grave at all. You must take what he gives. Yet he will barter for his wares, and leave the heavy purse still crammed with coppers, for his fee is light. He takes only silver, the clipped coin of the moon: an hour of the night, a dream of owls. Afterwards, the traveller remembers that the three-string fiddle had a carven head, the face his own. With a cold touch at his heart, he knows that Jack Daw’s fiddle wakes the dead; he sees their bones, unclad and rising, clothing with the tune. They dance. He sees his girl, left sleeping as he thought; Joan’s Jack, gone for a soldier; his youngest child. Himself. They call him to the dance. He sees the sinews of the music string them, the old tunes, Cross the Water to Babylon, The Crowd of Bone. Longways, for as many as will, as must, they dance: clad in music, in the flowers and the flesh."



***************
From an interview here https://www.sfsite.com/02b/msgg170.htm

It's pretty clear, even to a linguistics slink-out like myself, that you're mining one particular corner of the English language here. What period and locale are you deriving your language from?

Gilman: Yorkshire, mostly, with Cumbrian outliers. Some of it is common to all Northen English, up through the Lowlands of Scotland; some is quite local. My earliest sources are 17th-century.

How deep does the archaic language go? I've noticed what seems to me, on a casual reading, to be a perfect absence of Latinate words and foreign borrowings. To what degree has the text been scrubbed of words that would be anachronistic to Cloud?

Latinities are scarce, yes, but not perfectly absent. A glance at the first section gives me "querulous," "triumphant," "melancholy."
"Scrubbed"? That seems oddly negative. Would you say that a limestone ecology had been scrubbed of say, pine trees? What grows in a landscape is what grows there.

This is not a radical statement of Englishness, such as Doughty's Arabia Deserta, or William Barnes's Outline of English Speech-Craft, in which the preface is the fore-say and a perambulator is a push-wainling. Much of what I write is out of love for what Alan Garner calls the "true and Northern voice," which is his by birthright and not mine. Have you read his book of essays, The Voice That Thunders? He writes of the tensions between his two languages, between his grammar-school and Oxford classicism and "talking broad": "Romance is rodent, nibbled on the lips. Germanic is resonant, from the belly. It is also simple, and, through its simplicity, ambivalent: once more the paradox." I know I have no roots in his north-of-middle earth. It's the riddling that draws me.

I love that a "riddle" is both the Sphinx's enigma and a kitchen sieve; that a "rune" is both a riddle and a running onward, a flow. A rune of blood. A rune of stars: which is their rise and turning. I love that "Cloud" and "Law" both mean "hill," that nebulous or iron-bound, they're one and the same place. I play interminably with "light" and "leave" and "wake" and "wood." And either you like this sort of thing, or you run screaming in the distance.

That kind of essential punning is hard, outside of Anglo-Saxon.

There's a tough strand in the language, running back through Hopkins to the Gawain poet (a northerner, like Garner). A green and thorny tongue, a covert of birds. Quintessentially English, being pied. "Counter, original, spare, strange." Not pure, but insular. Of many branched and braiding roots: one stubborn flowering. And I admit, the devil's own thicket to hack through. The older the hedgerow, the denser the tangle: Anglo-Saxon for rootstock; Old Norse and odd Celtic borrowings; and French gone wild, like a hedge rose. Oak and ash and thorn.

There are more voices in the second story of these three, "A Crowd of Bone": both Cloudish vernacular and a high Jacobean iambic, endlessly enjambed. But that is another thing altogether, a late Romance. "Jack Daw's Pack" is a riddle-story, almost a primary source: pure myth.

Also (but this may be unanswerable), to what degree does the language exist to serve the story, and to what degree does the story exist to serve the language? I'm of course talking about this particular story, rather than Story in general.

Inseparable. Words are what books are made of. The story makes itself through language, as the structure of a crystal feeds on salts.

As I've said elsewhere, "People ... talk of 'transparent' prose, as if the covers of a novel were a window on a world. And yet there's nothing there: no Middle Earth and no mean streets, no Sam Spade, no Lizzie Bennett. There is only code."

Or:

This is bloody opera, the music is part of it. It's badly scored at times--too many notes--but sound and sense are meant to be one thing.

Or:

What's Shakespeare in translation? Not that I come within lightyears of his hastiest scrawl, his least hackwork on a Beaumont and Fletcher--but damn it all, why can't I try for the thunder and lightning? My own teapot Tempest.

Do I sound self-defensive? I am. I've taken a lot of flak for my high language. Either people "bounce off it like an Ent trying to dig into Orthanc" (as Dorothy Heydt said); or they get drunk on it, like wasps on fermenting fruit, and fall over. What I'm trying for is synergy.

*******************

I really loved this, and will certainly be re-reading it (I have already read the first short piece 3 times and gained much from the re-reading). Certainly those of you interested in prose of an unusual nature should check this out.

[Charlotte Kersten]

“I am braided of them, of their voices telling. I am what they made. They made me to go on.”

CW: Sexual assault and attempted sexual assault of adult and minor characters, sacrifice of infants

So What’s It About?

(I sorely resisted the tempation to just write "fuck if I know" here...)

Gilman’s second novel, Cloud & Ashes, is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. To step into her world is to witness the bright flashes, witty turns, and shadowy corners of the human imagination, limned with all the detail and humor of a master stylist. In Gilman’s intricate prose, myth and fable live, breathe, and dance as they do nowhere else.

Cloud & Ashes collects three Winter’s Tales (“Jack Daw’s Pack,” “A Crowd of Bone,” and the longest, “Unleaving”) centering on folk traditions, harvest rites, the seasons, gods, and trickster figures. Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales.

What I Thought

I just fundamentally lack the brain power requisite to write a coherent review of this book. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So I’m just going to drop some quick thoughts and then bounce. I’ve never read anything like this before, and I doubt I’ll ever read anything like it again. That is at once a bit of a relief and a travesty. Gilman’s wielding of language is more than exquisitely, extraordinarily skillful, the imagery she evokes is gorgeous, and her mythology is fascinating and unique at the same time that it speaks to the fundamental elements of many human myths. Reading this book is a completely unique experience that I can’t compare to any other reading experience I’ve had - it is a challenge that feels so very worthwhile. Please note that that challenge is very, very real (or at least it was for me)- the insanely inventive, poetic, free-wheeling and archaic writing style and language make it quite difficult to understand what is happening at any point in time. In particular, the dialogue is written in an archaic, rustic dialect that is extremely difficult to parse. There is an interesting and powerful story to be told about trauma and cycles of violence and the breaking of old patterns that keep us trapped, but I often had to flip back and reread sections to make sure that I was understanding events properly. As of now, I think I have the overall gist but I am sure that there is a great deal more that would become clear to me with a reread. (I definitely will be rereading, but not anytime soon).

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crowd of Bone

Sparse and perfect prose as poetry. Old tales piled upon myth and returning back to tale. If your bones could tell the tale through the ashes, they would step through the seasons. You would run in the clouds.

This is poetry. There's no other description for it. If anyone had been able to report on the days of the old Celts and extrapolate a real and magical landscape of both thought and being, then Ms. Gilman is the transplant from time. Not only is the fantasy world deep and complex, but I could feel the love between Kit and Thea, the bittersweet and beautiful, the tragedy and the delight. It was short, but so jam packed with information and gorgeous phrases that I was forced to taste every word and slow down to a point that I wanted to tear my hair out.

Of course, that just meant that the text was worth it, and I was suddenly in a different depth, requiring me to swim to a far underground shore.

Sure, I could sum up the plot in a few easy sentences, but that would rob the richness of the magical world in these pages. And certainly, I could point to the recurring imagery drawn out of old civilizations and myth and cultures, but it was done in such a smart way that I could never unravel just what was cribbed or imagined.

If this weren't a modern work of fiction, I probably would have assumed it had come out of one of the past masters, like Spenser or Pope. It's certainly thick enough to be the punchlines in Shakespeare's plays or sonnets.

Do I think this work is amazing? Yes. Do I think that you, the reader, needs to be willing and able to fly slow through the clouds? Yes.

This is not an easy work, but it is fantastically delicious and subtle.

[Sherwood Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have actually already read this; the first two (award-winning) stories in print elsewhere, and Unleaving, the third segment, in draft. Gilman cut and polished this third diamond to exponential brilliance.

I think Greer Gilman is one of the best prose stylists working today, inside genre or out. She digs down to anglo and northern word roots, as the Cloudish world rises out of the fairy and folk tale traditions of the northwest of Europe. There are wisps of the familiar storylines and songs, but never stereotypical or trite, and sentiment is as rare and remote as the Cloudish stars.

Opening to a random page:

And the Fool flings wide--no door. There is no outwardness, no hearth, no hallows in this world. Though even nought is bounded, this is limenless. Winter's where they stand, their everywhere: nought else.

Yet he summons it. "Walk in, and Lightfoot."

Nothing comes. The Fool twists his cap of straw; the Fiddler sighs; Leap-fire quivers like a bow.

"Walk in."

If you've been wishing for something really different to scratch that fantasy itch, you really ought to give this book a read. I have read a lot of excellent books this year, but this is one of the top three, if not number one.

[Tiffany Turrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales is the best novel I have read in a long while.

I've compared it, in different veins, to John Gardner's Grendel, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, but with a more literary bent - those are the closest things I've read to this novel, outside of Shakespeare. There's simply nothing out there like it, or Greer Gilman.

The cycle of myth that Gilman has created is on par with anything you'll hear about from Joseph Campbell - an origin story, the lunar and solar yearly cycles, the hero journey, the lover's tryst, the folktales of the peasants, the relationships with the natural world. It's a synthesis of Western myth, told in a believably familiar, but completely entrancing and new voice.

The craft, the images, the themes, the sheer poetry of the three stories (two shorter ones to set the scene, and a long novella) can be difficult to slog through initially (especially if you've never encountered writing like this before) but if you keep with it you'll be very satisfied. The prose is told as if through a haze of all the words that came before it, and most of it is in dialect - I haven't read much Joyce but it's similar to that. Additionally, the abstraction and ethereal tone that Gilman evokes can give long spans of the novel no sense of place, but it works - the world of Cloud is held together tenuously, like the web in her story. Frankly I find it beautiful.
There are so many layers and planes that the story works on, from the celestial, to the everyday, to the literary. The experience of reading Cloud and Ashes is to be fully immersed in the present moment, being overwhelmed with the beauty that the hodgepodge English language can produce. Sounds kind of pretentious, but it's true. Of course it helps that the author-ess is a lexicologist.

The plot circles in on the unassuming and reticent girl, Margaret, who was born and raised in the celestial plane of Law by her sinister grandmother, the goddess of the moon, Annis - but escapes. Margaret is the product of an incarnation of Annis' daughter, Ashes, who was stolen away to the earthly land of Cloud with a simple fiddler. Her journey through Cloud to find her mother and escape the prying eyes and spies of her grandmother is a myth as rich and multilayered as any hero journey from the European tradition.

For anyone interested in literature, myth and folklore, or pagan culture, I highly, highly recommend this book. Especially for women!

[Wealhtheow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three tales set in the realm of Cloud, which seems to be a medieval Europe-like world. Ashes is both a mythic figure and someone that women play at being, or become. It's all very interesting, but also difficult to follow. The book will suddenly start referring to "he" after a long section exclusively about women, with no indication of what man or mythic male character is intended. The writing is beautiful, but tangled. For example:

They are sisters, stone and thorn tree, dark and light of one moon. Annis, Malykorne. And they are rivals for the hare, his love, his death: each bears him in her lap, as child, as lover and as lyke. They wake his body and he leaps within them, quick and starkening; they bear him light. Turning, they are each the other, childing and devouring: the cauldron and the sickle and the cold bright bow. Each holds, beholds, the other in her glass.

Contains a whooooooole lot of sexual assault, which made me give it up after only about 30 pages. I can only deal with so much!

[H. Anne Stoj · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember stumbling across Jack Daw's Pack in some anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and/or Terri Windling years ago. I found it utterly beautiful and utterly confusing. When I reread it in Cloud and Ashes, I think I pretty much felt the same way. The confusion isn't a bad thing, not at all. It's more that the three stories aren't quick reads (not a bad thing) or particularly easy (also not a bad thing.)

Gilman's mythos is complex, there's no doubt about that, just like her language is complex. There's a marvelous interview (which helped me ever so much while I was re-reading for the third or forth time) with Michael Swanwick that goes into both at a better depth than I'm going to even try. Perhaps complex, in regard to the myth presented, isn't the right word. The myth itself is old, one everyone knows (I'd imagine) in some shape or another. The death of the old year, the old god, the rising of the new year, the new god. There are parallels to Persephone and Hades, but there's just so much more. No doubt I'll have to read it a few more times to even understand what I'm getting at.

Complex might not do justice to the language either. Old, though, might. It isn't very often that I need to make lists of puzzling words, but there were more than a few which required some investigation. I can't say that it distracted me on either occasion, when I didn't know what exactly was meant or when I did. There's enough to understand what's intended, or for me there was, but I simply love language so I can understand where others might not have the same reaction.

All three tales are marvelously done. It certainly helps to have them all together, but I think they could be read out of order or spaced over time without much being lost.

[Sessily]

Cloud & Ashes is brilliant and confusing, the confusion necessary for the brilliance. Fantasy world-creation can mean anything from interweaving a few fantastical elements into reality as we know it to creating a completely distinct world that combines elements from reality in new ways. Cloud & Ashes is the latter type of fantasy, creating a new world through myth and language. From the beginning of the first story, the reader is immersed in unexpected sentence structure and new words and a whole cast of characters, some myth, some physical, but all real. Any reader expecting to understand everything that's going on from the opening pages will be far from their comfort zone, but the book is an immense reward for those willing and able to enjoy the play of language immediately and let the meaning come slowly. (This especially with the first of the three connected tales, which has the least traditional structure while also introducing the myths that form the base for the rest of the book and acclimating the reader to the new use of language.)

[Cate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonder of a book, and it is taking me a long time to read it, simply because the language is stunning, absolutely stunning.

Here are words to render a word lover stammering, intoxicated and euphoric, a banquet for one who has a passion for the wild, the mythic and the folkloric. Ballads, nursery rhymes and ancient tales are all woven together in a fabulous cosmogony, and in languages archaic, modern and completely invented. Every single word in the book sings, and I shall be reading it over and over again for years.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to love this. I tried, I really did. It seemed like something beautiful was lurking in there somewhere, but I couldn't find it through the way it was written. I literally understood almost nothing this author was saying. I've never encountered this problem before so...I don't really know what else to say about it.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too scholarly and pretentious in the text for me to enjoy it. Its also very easy to get lost in it and for those with ADD this book isn't for you. I can see the allure in it but I can't say its as good as a book everyone says it is.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

By one and one they rise and stare about them at the timbers of the Ship, and at the wreckage of their world's mythology: a sickle, buried to the haft in sand; a sieve; a shuttle wound with bloodred yarn; a bunch of keys, rust gouted; ruined hay, a dazed goat browsing it; the rootstock of a thorn, salt-bare. The tideline is a zodiac. [loc. 5214]

This book comprises three works set in Gilman's mythic, allusive, alliterative world of Cloud: the short story 'Jack Daw's Pack', the novella 'A Crowd of Bone', and a full novel, Unleaving. Cloud is shaped and kept by its seasonal rituals, by its goddesses and its constellations, by witches and mummers and sacrifice. It is pagan and cruel and densely layered, and the stories here will bear rereading, not once but many times. Which is to say that I'm not sure I have understood more than fragments of those stories, or their underpinning.

The axle of the story is Ashes, a role which a woman chosen by chance must play each winter so that spring will come; a role which steals her voice, bestows some arcane gifts and some sexual freedom (welcome in an otherwise judgemental society) but also imperils her ...and which requires the sacrifice of any child conceived when she was Ashes. All three of the female protagonists -- Whin, Thea and Margaret -- take on the role of Ashes: all three are changed, and in changing change their worlds.

There are no pretty fairytales here: there is raw, rough, rude language, and raw rude behaviour. There are rapes and murders, treachery and trickery, loves unrequited and doomed. But there is also great beauty, and a binding-together of threads by unbreakable bonds of story, and the celestial storytelling of constellations and zodiacs which is, in this world, literal truth. And there are echoes and mirrors of our familiar world: language that is often on the verge of iambic pentameter, quotations or riffs on Shakespeare and Donne and a dozen others, images familiar from myth and folksong. It's a dizzying novel, like looking up at a clear night sky: it's sometimes terrifying and sometimes brutal, and sometimes mercifully kind. I shall reread, in a future winter.

As an aside, I did have some issues with the ebook: I couldn't change the style of the font, and for a while I was trying to puzzle out why some 'i's were dotted and some not, until I realised that this was an artefact of my Kindle: searching the text or my highlights revealed no distinction between i and ı.

(Compare the i in eight and in grinning.)

Fulfils the ‘a book that intimidates me’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge. I have owned this book since 2011! I've started reading several times, but been awed or cowed or envious of the language: and it is not always easy to focus on the underlying story when one is glamoured by Gilman's language. I also think this would not be a good book for me to read if I were in the middle of writing something myself: I'd end up a mere mimic.

Handy lexical reference: A Cloudish Word-Hoard, by Michael Swanwick.

Interview from 2021: The Matter of Cloud: An Interview with Greer Gilman (Uncanny magazine). (Oooh, and an earlier interview from 2000: Inside Jack Daw's Pack: An Interview with Greer Gilman.)

[Rose Paris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much it pained me to finish it, knowing until the author publishes again I am unlikely to find anything else that is so completely immersive in such a myth-laden landscape. The language is challenging, but once you are in the rhythm of it, it facilitates that total immersion. As other have commented, if you read for the poetry and allow the meaning to emerge rather than seeking it too hard, it will reward, much like one of those optical illusion pictures hiding another picture within.

Jack Daw's Pack, the short opening tale, is a shifting deck of diamonds- tight little scenes that enchant and horrify without overly making much sense on first read, but serve as a introduction to the characters and rites of Cloud. Coming back to it at the end of the book is a good call and very pleasing to link it all together.

A Crowd of Bone is a beautifully drawn love story in novella form, with themes of the double, betrayal, motherhood, and sacrifice winding throughout.

Unleaving, is a 300 page masterpiece, following the daughter of the lovers from a Crowd of Bone, drawing all the threads together, with a truly Shakespearian finale. Gender tropes are challenged, identities confused, but all resolved most satisfyingly.

I am lucky enough to have read this with Gilman having shared a third book in the Cloudscape is in the offing, as of October 2023. It can't come soon enough!

[Jennifer Pullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose is lovely and the use of folklore well researched and interesting. However, the degree of work it asks of the reader, simply to decipher basic things, like where the characters are, and what they are doing, is a bit excessive. I love dense, complicated, language driven fiction, however, I believe that the level of work required of the reader should be bet with an equal reward. In this case, I didn't feel like the payoff sufficient for the work required. The first two of the three parts were wonderful. If this book have been 150 pages, instead of 400 plus, I think it would have been just right, and the payoff to work ratio would have been more equal.

[VG · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disjointed writing that focused more on being beautiful than any coherence in its story; the language is so overwrought, it felt at times as though a thesaurus had been held over the page and wrung dry. Stir in a ridiculous number of single-word sentences, unnecessary question marks and italics used so liberally that the emphasis is diluted entirely, and I felt exhausted at the end of each chapter. I think I would have enjoyed ‘Cloud and Ashes’ more had it been a novella or a collection of poetry, instead of 400+ pages without any variation. I found myself skimming over whole pages, and only finished in order to truly say that I gave it a fair chance. Really not for me.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it was my mood at the time, but a bit of a challenging read. Kept picking it up, and then having to take a break from it until I felt I was up for it. That said, some of the prose is quite beautiful.

[Tamara · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF

[Bett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderful language! I only sort of understood the stories, and may have skipped ahead a bit, but I enjoyed and admired the work.

[Francesca Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually, it’s “Unleaving,” the third and largest part of Cloud & Ashes, that I read. I’d read the earlier parts, “Jack Daw’s Pack” and “A Crowd of Bone,” so I had developed a method for reading Greer’s stuff. Some people may be able simply to read and apprehend, but I’m not one. If I try that, I think the officious Organizer part of my brain tries too early, too simplistically, and too hard to impose a pattern, and that won’t work. I have—and maybe you have, if you try Cloud & Ashes—to read the way I dream. Just let it happen. Just let the words flow by. Enjoy them (marvel in them), or dread them, the way you enjoy or dread things that happen in dreams, and before you know it, you have the sense of it. The story has opened up for you, dreamwise.

And it’s a real story. It’s not arbitrary or capricious, the way dreams can sometimes be. There is a pattern, but it’s like Celtic knotwork. The story is deep and strong and dark—almost too dark, for me, in ways. Let’s just say the milk of humankindness is not overflowing, here. But that’s not to say the story is dreary or hopeless. It can be cruel or terrifying, but it is never dreary, and there is always hope.

“Unleaving” was much longer than either “Jack Daw’s Pack” or “A Crowd of Bone.” In itself, it’s a novel, though it’s only one of the three portions of Cloud & Ashes. In some ways this made it harder, for me. I felt at some points as trapped in Cloud—the name of the land in which most of the story takes place—as Margaret, the heroine of the third story. Sexual violence pervades all three tales, but “Unleaving” is the longest, and it’s just that much more present in “Unleaving.” Though to say “sexual violence” doesn’t really do justice to the importance of it for the stories. It has to do with generative power, creation, the desire to control or destroy that. It’s not the rape that you get on CSI: Special Victims Unit; it’s the rape that you get in myth. But because Greer makes myth real and immediate, played out by people we care about, it’s painful, awful.

And the full significance of the cosmogony of this world really bore down on me, reading “Unleaving.” It had been terrifying in “A Crowd of Bone,” with Thea, the goddess who can’t escape her fate and dies dreadfully, but in “Unleaving” you could see how it soaked into everyday life for people in Cloud.

But there’s a truth that the cosmogony gets at that can’t be avoided. Nature is beautiful, wondrous—but cruel, too, pitiless: demands death at times.

What made the whole not only bearable but transcendent for me was the climax and the conclusion, as time wove in on itself, and characters wove in on one another—characters from the edges of the world and from the past—and people’s cosmogonic roles and their in-time lives slid together like stereopticon pictures, and the characters changed the pattern of life forever. It was a tour de force, a true marvel.

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Process of reading this book--

Me: "Wait, so by wood here, do you mean wood, a forest, madness, or arousal? Does Law mean... well, laws or a hill? Is Jack Daw's Pack a pack of cards, a gang, or something he carries his stuff in?"
Book: "Yes."
Me: "Cool, I guess I'll just take ten minutes to read every page, then."

Cloud and Ashes is a book that my brain doesn't fully get, but my gut does, to the point that I adore it both in spite of and because of its density and brutality. I can really probably only get as precise about my thoughts as those old Victorian reviews of Wuthering Heights going on about its "power." I get the plot, I could tell you the events from beginning to end, but that's really just the beginning of what this book is and hardly does it justice. Equally important is the tangled folk mythology of the world of Cloud--cyclical, circular, overlapping--and the language where one, two, or all possible meanings of a word can be the correct one at once. It's complicated and messy, but it makes perfect sense in a John Barleycorn sort of way.

Nothing about this is easy to read. Even the moments that are relatively simple to digest as far as what's happening are full of suffering, violence, and fatalism. Maybe Annis was onto something stopping time in Moonwise, because the things Ashes--and the girls who become Ashes--have to go through to keep the year turning are terrible.

But for all that, it's also beautiful. It's heartbreakingly beautiful. I've never read a book that feels like it's as old and convoluted as actual folklore that's been passed down through generations by oral storytelling traditions rather than writing. This is the best depiction of the power of lunar symbolism probably ever.

So that's incoherent and unhelpful, but I've gone through this book three times now and by then you start feeling like you need to say something about what brought on multiple reads and why they're probably not enough.

[Nick]

I very rarely give up on books, but I think the pandemic has made me look at things - life - differently, with more urgency, and I can't justify giving second chances like perhaps I once did. So a quarter of a way through I'm afraid I'm putting aside Cloud and Ashes. Which is a shame, as this has been on my to-read list for a long time now.

The story it attempts to tell through an incredibly dense prose-style only drips through on occasion. There are some truly stunning examples of lyrical prose that really stand out, but not enough to excuse the rest - which often trips over itself with needlessly burdened sentences and overwraught imagery (the number of times things are compared to foxes...). Likewise, while there are a few moments where dialogue and description becomes clear enough to peg down the otherwise obscure narrative, it is not enough to make sense of everything else going on.

It's a shame, as Gilman's mythic world - a medieval-esque Yorkshire landscape populated by witches and folklore - feels quite different and, of course, muscularly evoked. Ultimately, life is too short to spend on books that aren't working out.

[Amy]

This kind of writing is more like poetry-prose. The first "tale" is short story length, the second a novella, and the third more like novel-length, but reading them makes me think of poetry-prose, or reads like modern day Shakespeare. It's very hard to get through, in my opinion, so I won't be finishing this, but I will scan the rest of it here and there for Gilman's unique phrases and take note, because there are some real descriptive gems in Cloud and Ashes, same as you'd expect to find in poetry.

[Tara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have an inkling that this book might actually be brilliant, but I couldn't get through it all the same.

Can't tell you what it's about because I didn't get a clear storyline. It's lyrical fantasy, with a lot of invented words and concepts. It seems like it's well written for the genre. But I think I hate the genre.

I struggled my way through 60 pages, and finally abandoned it knowing I wasn't enjoying it and wouldn't get anything from it. If you're a hard core fantasy reader, with the space to really settle into something abstract - this might well be the book for you.

[Kelly Flanagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm giving this book 2 stars instead of one just in case it isn't all me, but this stream of consciousness led me to unconsciousness. I was unable to grasp the trye plot to the whole story, there were scenes, yes, but they didn't all make the most sense and re-reading everything 2-3 times makes it too hard for me to keep in the story. I didnt have a problem any other time with SoC writters, just this one. It was harder than A Tale of Two Cities was at 10!

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

On first reading - very complex . Will have to read again. Darker than Moonwise and perhaps richer and more complex. In an odd way it reminds me of the White Jenna books. It is not for a sit down and have a fast read but rather something you have to delve into and absorb.
Rereading it will revisit favorite sections and enlighten me on the other ones I didn't comprehend the first read. For me a book to read in winter as I do with Moonwise.

[Roby · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're into mythic fiction, I HIGHLY recommend this book. The prose is often thick and the dialog is archaic (I had to look up several words - clew means skein), but by 50 pages or so I was used to it, and it is well worth reading.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no idea what this book was about. I was constantly unsure of what was going on, but it was beautifully written so I slogged through it. If anything, I guess that's a testament to Gilman's lovely prose. I don't know who I would recommend this to though.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This seems more like a dream than a story. The writing is disjointed and confusing and leaves more of a feeling than a coherent plot. I struggled through a few pages and then looked at the reviews that said the entire book is written the same way. I couldn't get through this.

[William Gerke]

I saw Greer on a number of panels at Boskone. A little bit outrageous, a little bit sly, and a lot of smarts. I'm curious to see what her fiction is like.

[Katharine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Complex. Impossible for me to get into with distractions. But once I had peace.... Just beautiful. "A Crowd of Bone" is definitely my favorite. Gorgeous cover, but the type is smaller than standard.