It's Only Tincture Bile

No progress over night.  Every ninety minutes I was up, against my will, compelled to visit the stall off the master bedroom.  I’d stayed up too late.  Had a range of things to eat.  Drank scotch and waited for the fireworks with everyone else in the family, there on the beach on the last day of 2017.  A fittingly, painful passing to Don's year.

And as you unerringly, unpleasantly drive out all that was within till it's only tincture-bile your leaving behind, you realize you’re utterly depleted of the catalyst stuff:  the electrolytes, the mineral bits and the vitamin-reserves that keep your body lubricated, so the neurons fire and we remain capable of undertaking new things.  

All I wanted to do was sleep.  So I did.  And when I was up I read.  Ten pages.  Fifty pages.  There’s only two hundred pages left.  May as well finish.  A thin thread to some sort of goal.  I read the “Grace of Kings" by Ken Liu.  The test of wills between two sworn brothers, just like Guan Yu, reluctantly fighting against Zhang Fei, peach-tree-oath be damned. 

I explained to my daughters who were only so interested that it was a mix of “The Three Kingdoms” with “The Lord of the Rings.”  Inaccurate really.  There wasn’t that much magic as happens in Mirkwood.  Mr. Liu decided to keep things focused on the real and the possible with a few sparing exceptions:  The ride on the giant whale-like Creuben, the gas enhanced Mingen Falcons that soar for hours, a few special herbs and potions that did the impossible.  But largely it was a real physical world that was fought and fought and fought over by the shifting alliances on his island world.

I spent a bunch of time with the map that holds two pages at the beginning of the book.  There are a range of imaginary place names that are difficult to keep track of.  Some sound Chinese and some sound Italian.  Like Tolkien, the map of Middle Earth is at the center of the experience.  So I kept looking back and wondering why the “empire” should be an archipelago and not a continent like China.  Xana the hegemonic, dominant island off to the north east could metaphorically represent Japan, but no one in the story has any trouble communicating with one another and so, we don’t feel that the cultural difference would be as dramatic as those across the Yellow Sea.

I squeezed out the last hours out of the day, set on finishing it.  Kuni is now the ruler and Mata is dead.  Kuni has two wives, his kids needn’t be hostages any more and all his naïve benevolence will soon be tested from the hegemon's throne.  I was provided with a teaser of the next book at the end of this one.  Aren't they clever.  I suspect that this will stretch us out, beyond the current map.  Just a guess.  I don't think I'll pursue this second volume, though.  Let’s see what the map looks like. 

Monday, 01/01/18