The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

How often do you see a book cover that doesn’t just catch your eye, but makes you go, “Wow!”

For me, not so often. But when I saw the cover for The Bear and the Nightingale, that’s exactly what I thought. And when I found out that it was a historical fantasy based on Russian fairy tales, I was sold–hook, line, and sinker.

You have to understand. I’m the exact target audience for this, not least because this is exactly the kind of book that I write, as well as read. So I was primed to love this from the start. I want you to understand that from the start.

Because I liked this book, but I didn’t love it. I should have loved it.

First, the positives.

• An excellent, feisty main character who is straight from the fairy tales (and from real life. I know plenty of Russian women like her).
• A gorgeous, lyrical writing style and a clear love for Russian history and stories.
• A unique, sometimes dark take on some of the common tropes of the fairy tales. It goes very dark sometimes. That can be good or bad, I think, but in this case it was always tied to character, not simply done for effect. Overall, it made for a compulsive read.

I recommend it to anyone who likes historical fantasy or unique takes on traditional fairy tales.

But there were some negatives, as well. If you like your reviews to focus on the happy-clappy stuff, then stop reading. But if you want your reading to be more than just fluff, let me tell you what I had issues with.

First of all, the characters too often acted like 21st century people transplanted into 15th century Muscovy. The way they talk, the things that interest and bother them–too often they’re clearly concerns that would have never bothered anyone in the 15th century. Particularly Vasya’s desire to be free of feminine constraint. She sometimes sounds like a poster child for 21st century feminism. Although I think the constraints put on women at the time would have obviously chafed, Vasya didn’t react to them as a woman of her time would have. It often seemed simplistic and anachronistic.

The second issue has to do with the author’s treatment of religion. Arden is good at showing the tension between paganism and Christianity. However, she makes a problematic choice. The gods and spirits of the pagan world are real, living and breathing characters. But there is not even a whiff of a possibility of the Christian God being real. In fact, Christianity is almost disposed of in a very modern way, as something inconvenient and full of rites that have no meaning outside of appeasing an angry God.

The character of the priest shows this especially well. He is a tortured soul, a fascinating character whose spiritual descent into what is essentially demonic delusion is rendered extremely skillfully by the author. But in the end, his journey doesn’t really make sense.

He’s not a charlatan, he’s a man who seeks God. But he is also intelligent. When a demonic force begins appearing to him in the guise of an angel of light, he accepts the vision as his right (something that happens a lot in the Lives of the Saints, by the way). The problem is that the author also suggests very strongly that there is no God of the Christians. If that were true, then how could this priest have come to a spiritual state in which he was susceptible to such delusion? Surely someone as intelligent as he would have noticed the lack of any palpable presence of God during his journey toward the priesthood?

So when one of the characters expressed his bewilderment with the very idea of a Creator God, and yet the spiritual world of the pagan deities is shown as an attractive, fascinating reality, it stopped me short and took me WAY out of the story. If there is no Christian God, how can His religion supplant something so vivid and real as the old paganism the Rus, as described in this book? It really doesn’t make sense.

There were also some mistakes that most practicing Orthodox will notice immediately. The fact that the priest is a celibate, but not a monk, is unlikely for that period of time in Russia’s history. The Christian devotions in the novel look and feel more like 21st century Catholic mass than the Russian liturgy. Stuff like that. It just shows that the author was far more interested in the pagan aspect of the equation. Which is entirely her right, of course. I just feel that it makes her novel less complicated, less interesting.

That being said, I’ll probably see this series to its end. It’s lush and evocative and exciting. I’m curious to see what happens to Vasya and to the rest of these flawed, fascinating characters.

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