‘The River Has Roots’

This is not that.

In 2019, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone had a surprise hit with their co-written, nonlinear narrative novella This Is How You Lose the Time War. Despite its challenging style, people enjoyed the antagonism and poetry of the literary love letter across time. While professionally sabotaging the other, two agents of the warring blue and red factions drop secret notes to each other across time and alternate universes. At worst it was a five dimensional Spy vs Spy; at best a genre-defying masterpiece.

El-Mohtar’s long-awaited follow up is totally different.

The River Has Roots is a magical story of humans in precarious relation to each other, to nature, and to magic (or, in the book “grammar”). In this, her debut solo novella, El-Mohtar harks back to the brilliant evocations of nature that underpin her Rhysling award-winning poems (for the best science fiction, fantasy, or horror poem of the year) and Locus and Nebula-winning short stories.

Set in a mythic medieval English town of Thistleford on the border of a relatively friendly but utterly strange faerie domain, The River Has Roots tells the story of two sisters, Ysabel and Esther. As representatives of the Hawthorn family who own land along the magical River Liss, the sisters sing to the Professors — two willow trees on either bank.

Time and appearance transform thanks to the magic that imbues the land of Faerie. As small children, Esther and Ysabel emerge unscathed from an accidental venture into Faerie. They somehow wandered beyond the Professors and the constantly-relocating stone boundary known as the Refrain. This episode deeply affects Esther who later, as a young woman, falls in love with Rin—a magical being from Faerie.

Almost no one who travels to Faerie, though, returns. Though sometimes meaning something less pleasant, the townsfolk do refer to it as “Arcadia, the Beautiful Country, the Land Beyond, Antiquity.” Whether people stay lost through misadventure or choice no one knows.

The sly narrator evokes and dismisses the hope that time-slippage might account for some of those yet to emerge. Perhaps only a few seconds have passed for them, and yet, to this point, that has not been the case for anyone in history. The narrator also implies that others do indeed come out of Arcadia “marred” — changed into the shape of “grey rabbits with uncommonly human eyes; [or]… a bird singing with a dolorously human voice.”

The mythic structure feels a little like a reengineered Persephone-tale with Rin’s intrinsic but loving strangeness, Esther’s profound connection to her sister, and her disgust with her neighbor’s transactional wooing. This is the hazard for Esther. She cannot live with Rin and visit her sister, she cannot simply abandon her sister for Rin, she cannot simply, or easily, reject her neighbor.

El-Mohtar expresses the power of Esther’s world using the metaphor of language. The opening pages spell it out poetically: River Liss is full of “grammar” which is raw magic for the willows to filter. Songs are vital for the maintenance of natural balance. Landscapes and spells work according to the logic of riddles and puns. For example, the book’s title invites us to wonder how a river can have roots. And readers would point to the Professors whose roots are inextricable from the river. Yet there is not just one layer of clue. Riddled in with the Professors is their etymology: they are not teachers, but are lovers, “professing” their love to one another from across the river.

The text is both simple and, on its face, innocent. One paradox is sung: “I gave my love a cherry that has no stone.” Though, in puzzling out the question of “how can a cherry have no stone” El-Mohtar only implies the obvious, ribald answer, while characters earnestly evoke a plant (cherry) stretching over a timeline beyond the stone fruit (cherry) it produces. Just as the loss of virginity is implied by this example, there is a more basic procreative answer to the chatty narrator asking “what is a conjugation but a transformation.” But that fertile sense remains implicit as the narrator (and who is this narrator?) distracts us immediately by asking and nearly answering: “Now where were we. Ah yes.”

Fittingly for a poet who evokes magic through the vocabulary of language, the prose is beautiful, notwithstanding a certain cliched Ren Faire aspect of the setting. Despite the magic of grammar, the plot is a relatively simple love triangle but, as we know from world mythology, love triangles can generate endless intrigue. And this generative aspect feels like a form of English myth, the text’s examples of partial explanations of riddles, inviting us to examine the text more closely.

Although this brief novella ends calmly and apparently resolved, it feels like it also carries unfiltered grammar along with its current. The author tells us early on in the book that “Ysabel loved flutes and murder ballads best, while Esther favoured harps and riddle songs.” The River Has Roots contains all of those elements yet also, like a myth that bears repetition and scrutiny, feels like a satisfying, but unsolved, riddle.