I came to this book after reading the Temeraire series, in which Naomi Novik introduced dragons into the Napoleonic wars in a radical reimagining of the naval action adventure genre: the Hornblower books by C. S. Forester or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. In the first book of the series, His Majesty’s Dragon (2006), early nineteenth-century warfare has been transformed by the presence of gigantic flying reptiles, whose human riders are imprinted on their hearts and minds at birth like a duck on a hatchling goose – or like the dragons in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern sequence, whose lifelong attachment to their riders constitutes an essential defensive weapon in the struggle to protect a planet from a deadly invasive species. Since McCaffrey’s time the notion of imprinting dragons and riding them has become a familiar fantasy trope, re-emerging in Pratchett’s Discworld series and Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books, and Novik’s insertion of the practice into history successfully persuades its readers that dragonriding could always have existed, and that our past – and in particular women’s past – would have looked very different if it had.
Uprooted, too, has a Dragon in it, though in this case the mythical creature is a wizard who devotes his life, like the dragonriders of Pern, to protecting his homeland from an invasive species. The Dragon of Uprooted, then, is a Dragon only in name. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that his name neatly conveys the way its owner’s personality has been shaped by his protective function. The need to defend the realm – always vigilant, always aware that anyone he meets may be an assassin or a spy sent by the malignant entity known as the Wood – has prevented him from forging any close relationships. Instead he must labour away in scholarly seclusion to discover new ways of resisting the Wood’s insidious inroads into the human population: its contaminating spores, aggressive predators with infectious teeth and claws, stone-shattering roots and branches, and worst of all its agents in the guise of men and women, ordinary human beings who have been infected by its malevolence and whose unremarkable outward appearance means that anyone you meet could well be one of them. In combating this range of enemies the wizard has grown a metaphorical armour of protective mental scales, and the possibility of anyone imprinting themselves on his heart or mind seems at the beginning of the novel to be remote.
At one point late in the narrative the association between the Dragon’s name and his elaborate strategies for self-defence are given physical form in such a way as to suggest that his link with dragons is more than metaphorical. As the struggle with the Wood reaches its crisis the novel’s protagonist, a magically-gifted girl called Agnieszka, makes her way to the wizard’s room at the top of the lonely tower he has made his home. As she does so she finds her way barred by a monster. The carpet on the floor of the corridor that leads to the room is woven in the likeness of a dragon, and she must navigate its scaly body before she can reach the bedroom door. ‘I walked over one great ivory-clawed limb, over the sweep of pale golden wings veined in dark brown’, she tells us, and by the time she reaches the chamber the dragon-pattern has come fully alive beneath her feet: ‘The golden pattern turned back on itself, and a gleaming green eye looked up at me from a head filled with rows of silver teeth, waiting for anyone who didn’t know where to turn’ (p. 352). The dragon guards the wizard’s door from strangers or from seeming friends who don’t really know him, thus marking themselves out as potential foes. But by this stage in the book Agnieszka knows him very well indeed, and steps past the fearful sentinel with relative ease.
The wizard’s behaviour, too, is dragonish at the beginning of the book. In a reenactment of countless monster myths, Agnieszka’s village community sacrifices a girl to him every ten years in exchange for his protection against the Wood, and although he does not devour the girls he renders them unfit for continued human existence – at least, for existence as a woman in a medieval rural setting. They return to their families after ten years in the wizard’s tower forever tainted by the general assumption that cohabitation with a single man must involve rape and disgrace. They also come back with ideas above their station: most of them leave home a few weeks later to study for a degree at University. The wizard, then, combines the properties of the dragon he is named for and the armoured prince who traditionally defeats the dragon. Both prince and dragon are given to snatching young women from their families without consultation, though for different purposes – a meal or a rise in status, usually through marriage; and as an embodiment of both figures the wizard is almost as terrible to the local peasants as the infectious Wood. His longevity, too, makes him hard to deal with. He has lived in his tower for many generations, and as result finds it almost impossible to communicate with the human mayflies who are his vassals. In other words, at the beginning of the book the Dragon has all the traits of the Beast in the fairy story, a misanthropic recluse ripe for taming by Agnieszka’s Belle, an eligible Darcy ready to be captivated by Agnieszka’s Elizabeth Bennett.
In fact, however, the relationship between the Dragon and his latest sacrificial ‘victim’ turns out to be tangled up in the wider political troubles of the kingdom of Polnya, where the tale is set. The Dragon’s antisocial tendencies are symptomatic of a general breakdown in communication across the various communities that populate Novik’s alternative Poland. His preoccupation with the Wood has detached him from the power politics at work in the country’s capital, Kralia, as well as from the local villagers; and Kralian politics are dominated by the machinations of a prince even more socially dysfunctional than the wizard. Twenty years ago the Queen of the realm was abducted by the Wood, leaving her eight-year-old son in a state of trauma; and as Prince Marek grew to maturity all his energies became devoted to the hope of rescuing his mother from the clutch of the forest. This obsession alienates him from everyone around him, including his family (he sees his father and older brother as guilty of abandoning his mother to her fate), his soldiers (who are expendable) and other women (the pre-eminence of his mother reduces lesser female mortals to tools to be used and discarded at the prince’s whim). Meanwhile the nobles of Kralia focus their attention on the cutthroat competition for power, like plants competing for light in the depths of the jungle. Some align themselves with Marek, others side with the King or Marek’s older brother, while still others watch dispassionately from the sidelines to see how events play out, waiting to commit themselves to the faction that proves strongest. And all the while the hostile neighbouring kingdom, Rosya, hovers on the Polnyan border ready to pounce. What starts out, then, as a book about the relationship between two isolated individuals – the Dragon and Agnieszka, cooped up together in a lonely tower – quickly develops into a meditation on the various forms of isolation that split one section of society from another, pitting class against class, gender against gender, nation against nation in a pastiche of the Darwinian struggle for survival.
The expansion of the story’s focus from tower to city to kingdom illustrates the extent to which the metaphor of the Wood, which is pointed up in the novel’s title, also supplies its central plot device or narrative technique. The story is constantly twisting, turning and shooting out in new directions, and its language is packed with vegetable references: tendrils, buds, vines, roots and thorny branches link each of its characters and episodes to the destructive Wood. Gradually too, as one reads, the forest’s role as the novel’s chief antagonist becomes increasingly unsettling. For one thing, the Wood seems so unambiguously evil, so totally committed to erasing humanity and supplanting the species with a warped and murderous sylvan population made up of monsters, such as the puppet-like ‘walkers’ and giant green mantises, as well as twisted versions of more conventional birds and beasts, wolves, squirrels and crows. In its unrelenting hostility the Wood conjures up memories of the deadly forests of folklore: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and the impenetrable thicket of thorny rose-bushes that hemmed in the Sleeping Beauty. But in each of these stories there’s a more deadly danger lurking among the trees: a wolf, a witch, a wicked stepmother, resentful fairies. The notion of a wood as chief antagonist seems particularly disturbing at a time when thinking people everywhere have been made aware of the ravages inflicted on the ecosphere by the consuming self-interest of global capitalism. For readers of post-Tolkienian fantasy, woods have long been established as the last bastions of defence against the depredations of industry, fragile oases in a tortured landscape laid waste by toxic chemicals and mechanized logging. As a result, I found myself always waiting as I read for the moment when the novel’s war against the Wood would be exposed as misguided, an appalling mistake which could easily be averted by a simple change of perspective on the part of the fighters, an access of empathy on both sides that rendered fighting redundant. Instead, the savagery of the war grows more intense as the book goes on, beginning with individual beasts and people being hideously transformed by noxious spores, then burned in purging bonfires; escalating with the massacre of Prince Marek’s military expedition into the forest; and coming to a climax with the final siege of the Dragon’s tower by a merciless ‘Wood-queen’ and her minions, while Agnieszka and the Dragon rain down flames of destruction on them from the upper windows. The breathless pace of events, the raising of the stakes involved in each successive battle, mean that there’s little time for contemplating alternative approaches to the problem of dealing with the forest. There’s no Sleeping Beauty in Novik’s tale because there’s no time for prolonged sleeping, as crisis follows crisis and Agnieszka and the Dragon have to delve ever deeper into their knowledge of magic in order to repel the Wood’s advances on all fronts.
And that’s the second thing that’s disturbing about Novik’s Wood: everyone in the book is profoundly complicit with its actions in one way or another. The violence meted out against the Wood is as shocking as the violence it inflicts, and the mutuality of this violence is clearly something Novik is concerned to stress. She underlines the lack of distinction between both sides by the ease with which the forest takes possession of its human victims: the peasant Jerzy, transformed into a wild-eyed murderer by a toxic bite from one of his own infected cows; the monkish wizard Father Ballo, who mutates into a dog-headed cyclops after reading a book infused with the forest’s poisons; the Queen of Polnya, whose lengthy imprisonment in the depths of a ‘heart-tree’ turns her after her rescue into a genocidal ‘Wood-queen’. In each case, the Wood locks onto some damage already present in its victim’s mind, exploiting their psychological readiness to erupt in anger (Jerzy at his undeserved poverty, Father Ballo at the thought of any magical power that fails to conform to scholarly conventions, the Queen at having been trapped for twenty years in a tree trunk) in order to turn them against their fellow human beings exactly as the Wood has been turned against them by centuries of unprovoked aggression. In addition, every attack against the Wood gets appropriated by the Wood as the basis for a counter-attack against its human enemies, so that assaults on the Wood become in effect acts of wilful self-harm. As a result of this destructive collusion, by the time we reach the siege of the Dragon’s tower there seems little chance of reconciliation between the warring forces. The forest is too deeply entwined with the human population to be ‘uprooted’ from their minds and bodies, yet too poisonous to cohabit with men and women without killing them. Humans and trees are locked together in an unending cycle of reciprocal violence, and Novik meticulously underlines the length and complexity of the cycle’s history.
History is a problematic concept in this novel. Contaminated by prejudice, myth and rumour, narratives of the past get handed down through generations without adequate scrutiny, reinforcing the hostilities of the present by adding to the confusion over who may or may not have been responsible for starting the war between Wood and people. Near the beginning we get the impression that the enchanted forest was originally a malignant invader from outside Polnya, a noxious foreign influence. Taking advantage of the continual conflict between the neighbouring countries Polnya and Rosya, Agnieszka tells us, ‘the Wood crept a little further into both realms every year, feeding on [human] deaths’ (p. 50). A little later, Agnieszka begins to discover the full extent of her people’s ignorance as to the historic roots of the human-forest hostilities. As she works under the Dragon’s tutelage to master a spell written in a strange script on an ancient manuscript, the girl begins to wonder about the origins of the script itself. The wizard informs her that it’s ‘Older than Polnya’, that it might indeed ‘be older than the Wood’, and that it was ‘here before this valley was ever settled’ by either Polnya or Rosya (p. 118). He goes on to assert that the people who invented the script arrived in the valley many thousands of years ago, and that afterwards ‘the Wood rolled over them, brought their fortresses low and laid their fields waste’. Agnieszka then asks him the inevitable question: ‘if the Wood wasn’t here when they first settled the valley, where did it come from?’ – and the Dragon admits that there are as many conflicting stories about the ‘rising of the Wood’ as there are inventive troubadours willing to sing them.
A little later, when Agnieszka and the Dragon have made their way down to an ancient tomb at the base of the tower, the confusion over origins is further compounded. The Dragon tells Agnieszka that the builders of the tomb – which is covered in the same strange script as the ancient manuscript – either ‘woke the Wood, or made it’, and that ‘it destroyed them’. The obscurity of the Wood, then, has crept into the writing of the Wood’s history, obliterating all traces of its source or seed (much as the source of the river Spindle that flows through the forest is untraceable). Appropriately enough, the script that covers the tomb is described in floral terms: it resembles ‘tall flowering trees and vines curling over each other’. Later, the participation of the Wood in the act of writing gets confirmed when Agnieszka discovers a contaminated book in the Polnyan royal library, its penmanship capable of infecting the unwary reader at a glance; it’s this book that transforms the scholarly Father Ballo into a raging demon. Writing has no more claim to be authoritative or reasonable in Novik’s novel than folk tradition or court gossip. Each is caught up in the same emotional and political turmoil that besets relations between individuals and nations in the world of Novik’s readers, and a pen-wielding scholar is as likely to succumb to violence as a warrior-prince or an embittered wife and mother.
As if to underscore the involvement of history in any conflict, the past gets materially caught up in the climactic battle between Wood and people, the siege of the tower. In a bid to protect the tower against assault by Prince Marek and his ally, the murderous Wood-queen, Agnieszka uses her magical powers to fashion the ground outside the building into a protective wall. As she does so, pieces of history begin to protrude from the newly-formed earthworks: ‘there were broken pieces of carved blocks jutting from the dirt, the bones of the old lost tower. Ancient words were carved upon them in places, faint and nearly worn away, but still there to be felt even if not seen’ (p. 347). The tongues of the dead murmur from these fragments in a ‘chorus of deep voices’; and later the Dragon uses a necromantic incantation to bring the owners of these voices to life, co-opting their decomposing bodies in the desperate struggle against the Wood-queen and her minions. The legacy of the past lives on, then, in the siege of the tower, though in a warped and twisted fashion; and it soon emerges that this legacy forms an integral part of the timeworn fabric of the tower itself.
At the defining point of the siege, when Prince Marek and the Wood-queen have penetrated the tower’s defences and driven its defenders down to the ancient tomb at the building’s base, Agnieszka and the Dragon brace themselves for one last stand against the Wood among the traces of a ruined civilization. And it’s here that the ‘deep voices’ of history make themselves clearly heard for the first time, in response to a spell of summoning jointly uttered by Agnieszka and the Dragon. Most works of modern fantasy use the term ‘summoning’ to denote a spell that brings the dead to life, as the Dragon did earlier in the siege; that’s how the term is used, for instance, in the Earthsea sequence, where the Master Summoner of Roke specializes in calling up departed spirits to commune with the living. In Uprooted, by contrast, summoning is a quest for truth rather than resurrection; the art of finding out what really happened in the past and of tracing its current consequences. This quest for truth might at times be best achieved by interviewing ghosts; but it might equally be achieved by a careful diagnosis of past troubles that still afflict and motivate living beings – a kind of necromantic cognitive therapy. The Dragon explains this approach to summoning early in the novel when he and Agnieszka decide to use a summoning spell to cleanse one of Agnieszka’s friends, a girl called Kasia, from the Wood’s infections. Before deploying the spell, the wizard dismisses the notion of calling up spirits as ‘nothing but charlatanry’ (p. 133) (a view he has clearly set aside by the time of the siege). Summoning, the Dragon asserts, ‘does nothing so trivial’, though he finds its function hard to describe in lucid terms. Eventually he explains to Agnieszka that it concerns itself with ‘Truth’, and she considers this explanation both intriguing and incomprehensible: ‘I didn’t understand how you could summon truth, unless he meant seeing past something that was a lie’ (p. 134). As it turns out, seeing past a lie does indeed seem to be the point of summoning, which seeks clarity by examining things as wholes rather than from a partial perspective. This is why the spell is described as being so taxing for its casters (pp. 134-5): one can only cast it by reading out the entire book of summoning in one go, since omitting any part of a seamless whole must inevitably compromise one’s quest for truth. In addition, casting a spell of summoning is ideally a collaborative project. ‘I’ve seen it cast only once,’ the Dragon tells Agnieszka before they try it for the first time, and this was achieved ‘by three witches together, each having taught the next younger, passing the book from one to another to read. It almost killed them,’ he adds, ‘and they were by no means weak’ (p. 135). Collaboration and facing up to the truth are difficult matters, and the process of casting the spell to cure the infected Kasia shows why.
The incantation involves an uncompromising diagnosis of the state of mind of the spell’s casters as well as of the so-called patient. In order to recover her friend Kasia as she is, rather than as a shadow of her former self left behind by her exposure to the Wood, Agnieszka must acknowledge the negative aspects of their friendship as well as the positive ones:
I saw my own face reflected in her wide glassy eye, and my own secret jealousies, how I had wanted all her gifts […] I’d enjoyed a dream of being special and nursed a secret seed of envy against her […] She’d hated me for being safe, for being loved […] oh, I hadn’t even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk. (pp. 140-2)
This act of reimagining Kasia in terms of her blemishes as well as her gifts – above all, in terms of the flawed relationship she shares with Agnieszka – succeeds in bringing her back, so to speak, from the past, restoring her to her former place as Agnieszka’s closest companion. And it also marks the first step on the road to rewriting the tangled history of the relationship between humans and the Wood.
The second step takes place at the siege of the tower, when Agnieszka and the Dragon work another summoning spell, in the same location as the first, but this time on the deadly Wood-queen. Up to this point in the novel summoning has been associated in Agnieszka’s experience with the recovery of lost friendship rather than with enmity – though as we’ve seen it has also revealed to her the fact that enmity (resentment, jealousy, ‘secret bitterness’) can play an unacknowledged role in one’s friendships. On this occasion Agnieszka decides to use the spell on her enemy the Wood-queen as a means of showing the Wood-queen’s allies, Prince Marek and his soldiers, that she has been possessed by the forest – that she is not, in fact, the friend they thought her. Instead, the two casters of the enchantment find themselves confronted with a replay of a crucial incident from the Wood-queen’s past, the incident that made her the enemy of humankind. The spell shows them that the tomb at the base of the tower, where both acts of summoning take place, was built for a king from the same ancient civilization that invented the floral script which covers it; a human king who loved the Wood-queen long ago and married her. But the tomb also had another, secret purpose: it was devised as a trap to hold the Wood-queen after her husband’s death. The reason for constructing this trap doesn’t emerge until some time later, when Agnieszka learns from the Wood itself that the king’s advisers didn’t approve of the match between their monarch and an immortal, non-human, immensely powerful being. But one thing becomes clear at once, as soon as the spell of summoning has been cast. The Wood’s predilection for trapping its enemies – for shutting them in the trunks of heart-trees and overwhelming their personalities with its desires and hatreds – was learned from human beings, whose hatred and suspicion led them to shut the Wood in a human tomb.
Something else emerges from the summoning at the siege; something that concerns the act of writing. The ancient script that covers the tomb, and which itself resembles a Wood with its ‘tall flowering trees and vines curling over each other’, conveys a double message. It is both a benevolent statement of blessing or farewell for the king’s long journey into the afterlife and a curse designed to imprison and destroy the dead man’s wife. Through Agnieszka’s eyes the reader witnesses the moment when the Wood-queen reads the script for the first time and understands the betrayal it articulates:
The letters around the sides [of the tomb] were catching the light, shining out, completing the long sentence from the stairs. She whirled, and I could read them with her: REMAIN ETERNAL, REST ETERNAL, NEVER MOVING, NEVER LEAVING, and they weren’t just a poem for the king’s rest. This wasn’t a tomb; this was a prison. A prison meant to hold her. […] They had quarried this room out of the roots of the mountains. She couldn’t get out. (p. 384)
In this passage, then, the written word is exposed as a two-edged sword, capable of comforting and cursing, of lying and conveying truths in the selfsame sentence. It partakes, that is, in the double nature of the war with the Wood, which is both a struggle against an alien menace and a self-destructive assault on the human beings who fight that menace. No wonder the Wood later chose to appropriate writing as a weapon in its own attack on the people who sought to destroy it; writing played an integral part in its betrayal, helping to transform it from loving spouse to avenging demon. Thanks to the duplicitous words written on the tomb, the Dragon’s statement that the ancient folk who invented the script and built the tower may have ‘made’ the Wood begins to make sense, and Agnieszka begins to understand that this particular thing of darkness must indeed be acknowledged as partly hers – or at least her people’s.
Agnieszka’s affinity with the Wood goes much further than their common experience of being shut up in the Dragon’s tower against their will. From the beginning of the novel she is associated with woodland, living at the edge of an ordinary forest – though close to the Wood – as the daughter of a woodcutter, and playing with Kasia among the trees on a daily basis (‘I never wanted to be anywhere inside when we could be running hand-in-hand beneath the branches’, p. 6). Her aptitude for magic, which is what prompts the Dragon to abduct her in the first place, has a close association with sylvan foraging: ‘I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of the forest that I had never seen before, [with] another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope, or Good mushrooms by the birches over here, or There’s an easy way through the brambles on the left’ (p. 92). And when she learns to combine her magic with the Dragon’s for the first time, she does so in a spell to create a growing thing, a rose:
[T]hen abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow.
And not only the rose: vines were climbing up the bookshelves in every direction, twining themselves around ancient tomes and reaching out the window; the tall slender columns that made the arch of the doorway were lost among rising birches, spreading out long finger-branches; moss and violets were springing up across the floor, delicate ferns unfurling. (p. 95)
Much later, during the siege, the same effect of vegetation overwhelming the rigid structures of the Dragon’s tower is deployed by the Wood-queen as a weapon: ‘Thin wriggling shadows were climbing through every crack, narrow and quick as snakes: the squirming tendrils of vines and roots, crumbling wood and stone as they found ways inside’ (p. 375). But where Agnieszka’s vines embrace and transform the tower, softening and enhancing its rigid contours, the Wood-queen’s vines dismantle the building and dismember its occupants, ripping stones and limbs apart in a frenzy of retribution. The Wood-queen, too, operates uniquely on her own behalf – a fact that gets confirmed when she kills Prince Marek as soon as he seeks to contravene her will. Agnieszka, by contrast, works with and for others, casting spells in collaboration with her captor, embracing and appropriating the books in his library instead of using them to damage and destroy, directing her powers towards rescue and redemption rather than revenge. She is in effect a benevolent version of the Wood-queen, and the aim of her journey from village to tower, from tower to capital city then back again to tower and so finally to the village at the journey’s end, is to find a means of productive collaboration with the Wood and its avatar, the Wood-queen. In effect, she must learn how to work on the Wood-queen the same metamorphosis she works on the Dragon; to humanize her, and in the process to humanize too the many humans who hate the forest.
Another trait Agnieszka shares with the Wood-queen is a mutual distrust of or unease with the authority of letters. Agnieszka finds formal written spells difficult to follow (something she also shares with Tenar in Ursula le Guin’s novel Tehanu). She can only put such spells to use by supplementing them with her own improvised magic, a magic based on domestic activities of small account to historians: cooking, cleaning, gathering food, singing restive children to sleep. The book she finds most useful in the Dragon’s library is one the Dragon has dismissed as useless: a journal rather than a book of spells (though it has spells in it), written by a long-vanished woodland witch who shares a name with the legendary Slavic enchantress Baba Jaga. The volume corroborates Agnieszka’s preoccupation with collective action rather than with isolated contemplation, and the magic it contains refuses to shut itself away from communal practices as the Dragon does; each spell and incantation springs from some aspect of the village life with which Agnieszka is so familiar. That life is founded on principles of help freely exchanged: assisting one’s neighbours at harvest, lending and borrowing tools, caring for each other’s children, walking together in quest of herbs or mushrooms. The book’s everyday nature is confirmed by the fact that Agnieszka thinks of it as a journal rather than an instruction manual, a record of action effectively taken rather than a prescription for set words of power or ritual gestures.
Like the woman who wrote the journal, Agnieszka finds that her village roots make it easy for her to sympathize with other people, since mutual understanding is necessary for collective work. She is capable of forging bonds even with people like Prince Marek, who tries to rape her when they first meet, or the monster which was once Father Ballo and which she must destroy to save the inmates of the royal palace, or the soldiers of Prince Marek, who exert all their energies to kill her at the siege. She finds it possible to sympathize with her stand-offish abductor, the Dragon, despite the emotional armour he has assumed to seal himself off from approaches either friendly or hostile – to imprint him, in fact, as the Dragonriders of Pern imprinted their reptilian mounts. And she eventually finds herself able to bond with the Wood-queen, thanks to their mutual experience of merging themselves with others, sharing their own minds and feelings with the minds and feelings of strangers. The Wood-queen is the product of a process of forced merging between the Queen of Polnya and the Wood, one of many that take place in the so-called ‘heart-trees’: sentient plants whose mood sets the tone for the rest of the forest. For much of the book the mood of the heart-trees is bitter and vindictive, and the merging they practise – drawing their victims into their trunks and slowly erasing their personalities over time, replacing their wills with the heart-trees’ own – is wholly involuntary on the part of the people they absorb. This means that the walkers and other forest-dwellers who feed on their fruit are bitter and vindictive too, as are the heart-trees’ victims. The Wood’s habit of consuming other people’s personalities could be seen as the direct antithesis of Agnieszka’s wide-ranging sympathy for others; but it becomes clear towards the end of the book that a change of mood – a change of heart on the part of the forest – could transform its oppressive tendencies to a similar kind of reciprocity. After all, Agnieszka and the Wood-queen are made of the same basic ingredients, possess the same gifts, and are written of by Novik using similar language, despite the very different purposes they serve.
Sure enough, by the end of the narrative Agnieszka succeeds in forming a new community that embraces both the Dragon and the Wood, and that spreads its vines throughout the kingdom of Polnya in a benign inversion of the Wood’s campaign for dominance. Cooperation, collaboration, community, empathy, inclusion – all the things Polnya has greatest need of are second nature to Agnieszka, and the pattern of words associated with her makes it both satisfying and seemingly inevitable that she should eventually make her home in the Wood itself – effectively becoming part of it – since she has effectively been part of it since the beginning. At this end point of the novel the imagery of plants and flowers entangling themselves with the structure and contents of a building turns out to have foreshadowed the way Agnieszka’s understanding of the Wood and its enemies will embrace and transform the familiar materials that make up Polnya – the same materials that for much of the story have been coopted for violent purposes, just as the young women of Agnieszka’s village have been coopted in the Dragon’s fight against an enemy betrayed by his ancestors.
Agnieszka’s redemption of Polnya and its history could be described as an imaginative redemption of the history of Poland and the Baltic nations, a part of the world in which Naomi Novik’s family roots are firmly planted. It’s clear enough from the beginning that the two kingdoms at the heart of the story, Polnya and Rusya, are fairy-tale versions of Poland and Russia. The details of Agnieszka’s village life will be familiar to all Poles (‘I ate a big bowl of sour zhurek with slices of boiled eggs floating, and a plateful of stewed cabbage and sausage, and then four blini full of sour cherries’, p. 434). Poland even has an authentic historical counterpart to Novik’s Dragon, Smok Wawelski the Dragon of Wawel, who lived underneath the castle that housed the Polish royal family and whose name may have contributed to the naming of Tolkien’s Smaug. Like nations elsewhere, the Baltic states have experienced their share of atrocities, and the theme of burning that runs through Novik’s novel summons up the worst of these: the Auschwitz complex and the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s. It invokes, too, another fiery holocaust that threw its shadow across the country for many generations: the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War. The distinctive tastes of Polish cooking, the rich traditions and artistic accomplishments of Polish artists, musicians, writers and thinkers, the democratic impulse that dominated long periods of Poland’s political past, coexist with parallel histories of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, misogyny, colonialism, slavery, class oppression and the various brands of despotism – all the usual suspects of European history – many of which find a place in Novik’s narrative. Yet despite all this, Novik’s fantasy imagines the possibility of foraging for the best things in Polish soil; not easily or simply, as I hope I’ve shown – the process of uprooting the past is too painful for that; but hidden away beneath its tangled trees, or among the village communities that find no place on the historical map, or in the hearts and minds of individual Poles, with their deep affection for the valleys that bred them, in spite of all the pain those valleys have witnessed.
Agnieszka’s eventual decision to settle among the heart-trees of the Wood is as hard-won as any ending in fantasy fiction. But it’s also a confident declaration of the possibility of staying in love with one’s roots, despite the corruptions and calamities that have been bound up in them, despite the difficulty of nurturing them inwardly back to health. And that’s just one of the many good reasons to read Uprooted.
