The Starving Saints 2: Medieval Boogaloo

Or, the over analysis of a well written book

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling

I told y'all I'd be back.  I was going to tell you all that I have been thinking about this book nonstop for the past three weeks.  Y'all.  It's been eight days.  Eight days!  Because time is a flat circle and means nothing (which is also weirdly relevant to this book...).

Regardless of the fact that I no longer have a meaningful concept of time, I have more thoughts about this book.

Last time, we talked about the loss of faith and what that means and how intense, confusing, and lonely it can be.  We focused a lot on Ser Voyne, especially if you read my Instagram post (because character limits suck.) and the destruction of her faith in her king and the Constant Lady and the finding of faith in herself and her own personal strength, both physical and mental. Today I want to talk about knowledge and all the things that can come from it.

This was another theme that hit close to home: I love to learn. I always have, I collect pieces of information like a magpie and I'm fairly indiscriminate about what that information pertains to (Can I produce these facts on demand? No.  Can I find them even if I flip through my mental Rolodex? Also no.  But it's all in there and given the right prompt, I'll tell you all about how babies don't have kneecaps (and before you come for me, they have cartilage where an adult patella is located) because the patella is a sesamoid bone, which arise from friction and use, so they only develop after a baby has been mobile for a while).  I'm always looking for something new to learn, half the reason I write books is so I can justify going down yet another research rabbit hole. So, to find a book that discussed the consequences of learning something you can't unknow and of the unchecked pursuit of knowledge was fascinating.

As interesting as I found Voyne and her struggle with her faith, it was Phosyne I related to the most.  She is a nun who basically educated herself out of her faith.  She asked too many of the wrong questions and discovered the world wasn't at all like she thought and was excommunicated for it. She's then picked up by one of the most revered knights in the castle, given rooms, funds, resources, and protection, to keep asking those question, but even still, she is called a witch, a mad woman, and a heretic, and shunned by those in the castle who know who she is and ignored by those who don't.

All of this is compounded by the interminably frustrating fact that she cannot explain her logic to anyone, the connections her mind makes hardly make sense to her, and in trying to explain it, disintegrate into a pile of mushy facts that are just inert pieces of information.

As it becomes clear that outside help would not be coming, Phosyne is ordered to produce a miracle to save the inhabitants of Aymar Castle.  And produce a miracle she does, she creates a substance that cleans the water and makes it potable. 

Water is great, but people are still starving, and the pressure to perform another miracle, something bigger, something better, ratchets up day after day, even as Phosyne herself grows weaker from lack of food. At the height of her desperation, she sends up a prayer to the Constant Lady, a thing she has not done in years, and when the Constant Lady appears, Phosyne fears she somehow conjured a god.

Throughout all of this, Phosyne is frantically throwing every idea against the wall to see what, if anything, sticks.  She makes several breakthroughs besides the water; she summons two strange shadow creatures that act a lot like cats and makes a candle that cannot be extinguished and ignites using blood.

What caught me about Phosyne is the way she talked about how her mind worked.  She doesn't always know where her ideas come from, in fact, most of the time she doesn't, sometimes things just come to her, other times it's a convoluted series of connections that make sense only to her. My first thought was holy shit, this is how I feel when I write.  My next thought was holy shit, this is how it feels to have ADHD. 

Often times, when I get an idea for a new story, it just smacks me in the face with no warning.  Sometimes, there's a spark of inspiration from a piece of dialogue in another book, or a specific clip of motion from a movie, or the vibe of a song.  Occasionally, it's petty one-upmanship after reading something and knowing I could write it better or queerer or whatever, one of my works in progress literally exists because I read ACOTAR and it was so aggressively hetero-normative that I had to make it queer. But most of the time, it comes out of the blue on Tuesday while I'm working on a spreadsheet. 

If I sat down and thought about it long and hard, I could probably identify a few specific influences for a given idea (like that time I wrote almost an entire novel before realizing it was basically just Mulan in a dystopian middle America so generic it didn't even have a name), but I doubt I'd be able to tell you why that idea came to me when it did in the form it did. This is well and good for writing a novel, but it's less good for life.

The way Phosyne describes her non-linear game of connect-the-dots is a poetic description of what it's like inside my ADHD brain.  Things just click sometimes; I can go from point A to point Q in an instant and the connection is perfectly logical to me, the blank looks from my peers tell me it's not so logical to them.  But every time I try to explain it to someone else, the connections fall apart and I'm left feeling like a mad person. Or the connections are so specific and sideways, I might as well be mad. 

It's one of the most frustrating aspects of being neurodivergent, the feeling of being a step out of sync with everyone else, of feeling stupid because I can't put my thoughts into coherent words. Even among other neurodivergent people, there's a constant need to justify my thought processes, and a niggling worry that if I was just a little bit smarter, I could have made them understand, which drives me to collect more information and be at least a little knowledgeable about everything because the more I know, the more likely I am have to a piece of information at hand that could help me seem a little less crazy when someone asks me to explain myself again, which makes me worry that if I was just a little bit smarter, I could make them understand...you see, it's nasty cycle.

Which leads me nicely to my next point: the consequences of the unchecked pursuit of knowledge.

There is a point part way through the book when the false Lady asks Phosyne if she would like the Lady to teach her how to use magic properly. Phosyne is tempted, even though she knows the source of that knowledge is tainted, and eventually she says yes.  It's not quite a deal with the devil, it's close, and really, who can blame her?  She has been spinning her wheels for weeks with no progress, outside help is not coming, people are dying, she's starving to death herself, her only ally has gone missing, and she can feel the answer in her head somewhere, if she could just get to it.  She's curious by nature and used to making some kind of progress on a problem when she sets her mind to it, and with that kind of frustration (not to mention desperation), of course when she's offered a chance at new information, she'd say yes, even when she knows it's a bad idea.

That first taste of knowledge only breeds a desire for more.  She takes one leap forward, more progress than she's made in weeks, but its not enough. She still can't conjure food, she still doesn't know how to save her allies, she doesn't know how to oust the false Lady, she doesn't even know ht the false Lady is.

As things grow truly desperate, Phosyne makes one final deal with the Lady to learn the full extent of her magic. This isn’t a strictly altruistic decision, yes, she’d look for a way to help her friends escape, but really, she makes the deal because she needs to know more, anything and everything she can. It is her voracious hunger for knowledge, to prove to herself and everyone who ever called her a witch or a madwoman, that she is smart and capable, a genius who performed not one, but three miracles, that she had single handedly saved the castle from dying of thirst where the nuns of her order had failed again and again and again. She alone had done what they could not and she alone was smart enough to save them now.

I think this is a theme that will resonate with a lot of women and female presenting people in the workplace, especially those in male-dominated fields. One of my first adult jobs was in alcohol merchandising for a national grocery store, I was 22, bubbly, wore a lot of skirts, and attractive (if I don’t say so myself), in an industry that is about as “male swagger” as it gets. I knew all those men judged me, they thought I was a silly little girl who didn’t know anything and could be manipulated and objectified, so I had to be smarter than them, I had to be better at knowing the alcohol, knowing the business, knowing people and marketing and anything else that might be even tangential relevant to a conversation I might have with a sales rep or distributor.

I’ve always like to learn, but I’m pretty sure I can trace the compulsive need to be smarter than my elders back to this job. Of course, it’s not all tied to this, I was an awkward, undiagnosed ADHD nerd in a small Catholic school who was bullied mercilessly until they got to high school, I compensated for a lot of that by trying to be smarter than my classmates. It really is a life long thing for me.

And I saw that reflected in Phosyne, her frustration, her anger, her futility, her inability to get any to take her seriously not matter what she did. It drives her to make some terrible decisions and to the edge of sanity. It nearly destroys her, the only thing that saves her are her relationships with Voyne and Treilia, as toxic as those relationships are. Phosyne does terrible things in her pursuit of knowledge, furthering the Lady’s depraved pantomime, sacrificing those she deems extraneous, barely resisting the temptation to use her new, immense power to serve her own purposes.

She’s given every advantage (given the circumstances) to pursue her studies and it’s not enough. The drive corrupts her, that sort of elevation that sets her on a pedestal makes her feel entitled to that knowledge, that she deserves to know more, and lets her justify anything she does to get it.

I once again have to sing the praises of this book. Starling rolls all of this up in a gruesome and lyrical package that creeps me out like nothing else. I’m so impressed that she can weave such complicated, nuanced themes through her book and still tell a good story. I can’t do it justice here, you really should read it for yourself and then attend my Ted Talk.

#readqueerbooks #queereadersofinstagram #dancepuppetsdance #NOTTHEBEES