Review: The Bear and the Nightingale

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this, I am reminded again of the potential joy in fantasy when writers looks outside the narrow Tolkien-lineage for inspiration. Here, Arden sets her story in a world informed by – maybe even set within – 14th Century Russia. There’s a dash of history, a heavy dose of an almost familiar set of fairy tales, and a rollicking mythos of a winter king and his brother death.

Our protagonist, Vasya, is a young girl who’s born when her mother – descendent of a purported ‘witch’ with second sight – decides she must bear one more child. The mother dies while giving birth, and Vasya survives as a representative of a wild beauty. We learn much of the fairy backstory through her eyes.

We get the almost predictable stepmother here, but she is not evil. Instead, Anna is frightened. She too has second-sight, can see the many little fairies and demons who populate the house is rural Russia, but they terrify her. Vasya recognizes them as the protectors of her home and village, but Anna – raised in the church – thinks they are an evil the church has warned against. She does not trust Vasya, but there’s something sad, rather than the conventional ‘cruel,’ in her inability to understand her stepdaughter.

Behind this family drama lies the title conflict. We learn gradually that “the bear” is a winter king, a creature bent on freezing the world. His brother, whom we see sometimes as a handsome knight, sometimes as a bird-figure, and sometimes as death itself, defeated him long ago. In the time of our story, though, death’s power over his brother winter is weakening. That’s because, above all, the people have stopped acknowledging the creatures of fairy who stand as their immediate and local defense.

In that light, then, Vasya represents a folk wisdom that stands against the catechistic Christianity that has crippled Anna. From the start, we get the sense that Anna might discover joy in her new home if only she could drop the prejudices of her earlier education. She cannot, though, and much of the sadness of the story comes from that.

Her cold religiosity is later reinforced by the arrival of Konstantin, a priest exiled from Moscow to their home because he is so charismatic that a superior fears him. Rather than being a cold and unfulfilled man himself (though he does later become more of that), Konstantin is a gifted painter, one whose ikons inspire all who see them. He, too, has a sense of the beautiful and abstract, but he cannot open himself to the truth of his senses because he has bound himself too fully to an orthodox fate.

So, I enjoy this novel most for the way it sets religious faith against the capacity to be open to enchantment. Arden may start with what seems an obvious good/bad distinction – those who see the fairies and demons have the inside track on “goodness” in a fairy story, of course – but she does not leave it so straightforward. There is much to admire in Konstantin and Anna, and there are petty cruelties and inconsistencies to Vasya and the creatures she seeks to sustain. All of this is set in a harsh world, a world where winter has such power that villages die every year to misfortune and bitter weather.

At some level, this is a novel of ideas, one that asks how we should negotiate faith in a world that seems too rich for any single path to render the world clearly. At another more evident level, it’s a story that surprises with colorful depictions of an imaginative tradition most contemporary fantasy doesn’t think to explore.

This is the first in a trilogy, and I’m already onto the second. It’s a good and rich distraction in this strange time of quarantine.


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