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In between Pearl and The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman, I read a very dark mystery by Robert Wilson – The Blind Man of Seville. I have another of his to read, but I’m not yet sure if I can take another trip through such grim shadows so soon after The Blind Man. The ambiance is wonderful; I loved spending all that time (it’s quite a long book) in Seville and North Africa, despite the fact that most of it was spent plumbing the depths of darkness and moral despair.

But – The Ice Queen, now. I grew impatient with some aspects of the story, and wished she had concentrated more on the brother/sister relationship, and even more I wished she had put Ned’s whole paper on Magic and Chaos Theory into the novel. As an appendix, perhaps. But then, of course, she’d have had to write such a paper. It’s beyond me to summarize this story. If you know Hoffman you know all of her books are touched with magic. One of them, Practical Magic, was made into a movie that had very little of the charm and delicious wickedness of the novel. This one has lots of magic, plenty of passion, many references to fairy tales, and the most wonderful death scene I’ve ever read. One of the central themes of the book is loss, another is change, and they are of course connected. I have to quote a passage from one of the last chapters, about the paper I mentioned: Magic and Chaos Theory:

"At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory – if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything.The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can’t understand or explain."

Fairy tales have been much on my mind since last month's Artsy Essay Contest at Judi's place.  I didn't enter it, because I found the topic too late to write a story, but I did begin a story.  Which soon became bogged down in everything else I've been doing in the past several weeks.  It's waiting for me, though.   It's in my head, and on my hard drive, waiting and calling to me.  So I was interested in all the fairy tale references in this book.