Book Review: The River has Roots by Amar El-Mohtar
Magic and Grammar and Language and SPOILERS
So first off, beware of spoilers, as I literally give away the ending in this review, but the book is still very good even if you know the ending, so you make take this warning as you please. With that out of the way, we can get on to the review.
The first sentence of Amar El Mohtar’s short novel The River has Roots immediately arrested my attention.
“The river Liss runs North to South, and Its waters brim with grammar”
The waters brim...with grammar? Not with magic, or mana, or light, or energy? What does this mean? Grammar, it seems, is of two kinds. There is the tedious dull grammar of the school and the classroom, the grammar that “corrects who into whom; can I into may I.” (1) But then there is the mysterious, wild grammar that “shifts shapes” and “unleashes new forms out of old.”
It is this latter grammar that overflows the banks of the River Liss and seeps through the pages of El Mohtar’s book. It’s the same kind of grammar that linguists spend their careers studying and describing. What is most beautiful about Language, to me at least, is its capacity to make meaningful patterns. The River has Roots does not feature any conlanging, which might make it surprising that I am reviewing it here. And yet, while not being about the magic of any particular language, it expresses a deep truth about the magic of Language itself. “What is magic but a change in the world?” It asks us. “And what is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another. She runs, She ran; she will run again.” Grammar is the capacity of language to fit an event into a perspective. Be that temporal (when did it happen), aspectual (how did it happen), evidential (how sure are you it happened), spatial (where did it happen), or thematic (to whom/with who did it happen). It is the ability of language to build words from sounds, and phrases from words, and sentences from phrases. Grammar is the blueprint in the mind. But like any blueprint, it needs materials to make it real. “But that is the nature of Grammar--it is always tense, like an instrument aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.” (3)
In the River has Roots, Magic is Language is Grammar. This is an interesting take. It differs from the view of magical language taken by other authors, where the essence of magical language is the true connection between the word and the thing. Rather than naming things the way they truly are, or uncovering some fixed permanent truth, the grammatical magic of the River Liss blurs the boundaries between here and there, now and later. Out of season flowers and grasses blossom on its banks, as though anything that could grow there will grow there. “Spring bluebells, autumn asters, towering cattails, blooming marigolds” The magical grammar of Liss is one of possibility. “So long as you can hear the waters, anything seems possible: that the sun is the moon, that a star is a cloud...that everything is hallowed and haunted at the same time.”
Amal El Mohtar, does a brilliant job of building a world around her central conceit, that of Magic is Language is Grammar. She has put particular attention into showing how a magical grammar would work, from a general standpoint, without delving at all into grimy details of ergativity or the morphophonosyntactical interface, or any other such complications. The characteristics she identifies are actually real properties of primary-world grammars, which in the story are elevated to magical status. There are five properties that she identifies, and I’ll go through them one-by-one, giving a resume of the story as I go.
So the most important aspect of grammar in The River has Roots, and the one I will talk about first, because it’s also the most important aspect to linguists, is that there is a difference between the Grammar of Faerie, the wild true grammar, and the grammar of the Grammarians. This is the in-world analog of the real-world distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. The grammar that corrects and the grammar that creates. The story opens in the Town of Thistleford, located somewhere between Faerie, the Levant, and Britain. The River Liss flows downwards from Faerie, conjugating the landscape as it goes, until it reaches the Willows that grow on the Hawthorne sisters’ land. These willows are valued for their wood, which has grammatical properties. “Grammarians wanted the wood for their wands, and the common folk wanted it for its more passive enchanted properties: a willow flute might lead rats from a barn, while a willow bed might ease the weary into lucid dreams” (6) In the town of Thistleford, adventurous entrepreneurs would “pan [the waters] for raw, unfiltered grammar” and then sell them to the supercilious Grammarians “clustering like clauses at the universities” who would only accept language that had been “refined and made regular.” The deeper distinction between the grammar of Faerie and that of the grammarians is one of what grammar is versus what grammar is for. A distinction of existence and essence.
The Hawthorne sisters, Esther and Ysabel, are the recipients of a generational charge to sing to the Willows, a duty which they joyfully fulfil. “By ancient treaty this was required four times a year at the turning of the seasons; by long standing tradition, it was done every day, at sunrise or sunset, the way one bids one’s family members good morning on waking and good night before bed.” Through their voices the sisters have a deep connection to the primal source of grammar. Their ability to sing to the willows in their own ancient tongue, is a gift they cherish without entirely understanding. “Strange to tell [the song] wasn’t in English; they couldn’t say what language it was, only that the shape of the words fit so differently into their mouths that they felt their voices shift in deference to it.” (9) The mystery language of the willows is of great antiquity, and yet somehow resembles fairly disparate modern languages. “Their mother told them that her parents had thought it was Welsh, until the day a Levantine woodworker staying with the family had said it sounded like Arabic, but a dialect she’d never heard before.” (9) Perhaps the willow-song sounds like every language and like no other language, because it, like the River Liss, is constantly changing? Into English, into Arabic, into Welsh? This plasticity of the Willow Song strongly evokes the ability of infants to acquire any language whatsoever, given proper input. After all, children will learn even the most complicated languages perfectly by age four, and often even younger, just by sponging up linguistic input. What kind of brains do children need to have to be able to pull that off? The grammar of Faerie is a universal grammar that can change freely, in the child’s mind, into English, or Arabic, or Welsh, or any language whatsoever.
It’s interesting too that it’s easier for children to enter Faerie than adults, just how it’s easier for children to acquire new languages than their overgrown counterparts. Adults must make preparations, set aside indefinite amounts of time, steel their consciences for their know that “life is about to irrevocably change by having embarked on the journey, by the rigours of the journey itself, and by all the mysteries attendant on arrival.” (43) But children--still growing, still changing--may enter the Faerie easily. When they were seven and five, Esther and Ysabel, went off chasing a chicken into the Modal Lands (more on those later), and “the stone arch of the Refrain had been tugged shockingly close--so close that Esther barely had a moment to frown at it before she and Ysabel where through, and only stopped, in stunned silence, when they turned to find the way behind them back to their home vanished like a shadow.” (60) Eventually the sisters, following the advice of a wandering witch (and of course taking care not to eat anything) find their way back by singing the Willow Hymn.
This inherent changeability is the second key property of magic that El Mohtar identifies that flows from the first. The true grammar, the grammatical magic of faerie, has the inherent power to assume a variety of forms. It’s the potential grammar that we’re all actually born with. Its strength comes from its immense flexibility, rather than unyielding rigidity. The Grammar of the grammarians needs to be “refined and regulated.” But the end result is a lie, as no such thing is found in nature.
The distinction between the different types of grammar--the regulated and the metrical versus the wild and creative--is the central theme that runs throughout the entire storyline. The Book follows a fairy-tale love quadrangle involving the two sisters, Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne; Rin, a fairy from Arcadia; and Samuel Pollard, a gentlemen farmer who wants to matrimonially join his lands to the sisters’. Rin, who can change his form as easily as humans change clothes, promises Esther a life connected with the primal source of the River Liss, the root of all grammar; whereas Samuel Pollard, who “had gone to one of the great Universities...and came back speaking Latin and Poetry,” offers her what essentially amounts to a business relationship. He wants to sell more willow wood, and would find it easier to do if he married one of the Hawthornes.
Pollard is the kind of person who would only bother to learn to words for “buy” and “sell” when learning another language. To him, the only real grammar, is that of quantity over quality. Pollard entirely dismisses the notion that there might be a difference between wild and regulated grammar. Grammar for him has mere use-value. “All willow works the same in conducting grammar,” he earnestly explains to Esther, “every educated person knows that, but the common folk still cling to their superstitions, while the city folk crave anything with the stamp of rustic authenticity. There’s a fortune to be made...” (38) But Esther is not interested in making a fortune. Her heart is set on Rin her fairy lover, whom she is soon to marry. And when Pollard learns that his ticket to a bumper crop of willow wood has become an “elf-shot whore,” he promptly drowns her in the River Liss which alters course in response to that outrage.
Of course, death is just another kind of conjugation. And, naturally, Esther revives. But what specifically ends up saving her is the third and forth key properties of grammar: grammar as potential, and grammar as perspective.
Let’s talk about grammar as potential. What do we mean by potentiality. Well, linguistically speaking, potentiality is a kind of mood, an attitude that a speaker may take about an event. The event may or may not have actually happened, it might be entirely hypothetical, and yet she may run; she would run; she could run; she ought to run all describe real possibilities. In the Modal Lands, the border territory Between Arcadia and Thistleford, where the grammar of mood is particularly prominent, one might be fascinated by “small grey rabbits with uncommonly human eyes” or frightened by seeing “one’s name spelled out by a clump of nettles,” or “feel a deep ache in your breast while hearing a bird singing with a dolorously human voice.” Anything that you can be, is something that you may be, in the modal lands. Indeed it’s in the Modal lands that Esther and Rin are able to meet. Rin has no physical form. But in the Modal lands they can appear as a storm “a great weather mixing...a swirl of hail and thunder,” (21) as an owl, as a woman with a harp. The Fae is pure potentiality. Rin cannot listen Esther’s songs without paying her back somehow, much to Esther’s puzzlement. As it turns out, the beings of Arcadia can make music upon enchanted instruments, but they cannot sing. And so Esther’s magical songs were to Rin, “a gift far greater than the cost.” (23) Rin prevails upon Esther to receive an enchanted harp as payment for her songs, which she very happily accepts, together with the promise of future music lessons with her fey friend.
On one such occasion Esther sings to Rin, a kind of puzzle song. It goes like this.
I gave my love a cherry that has no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that has no bone,
I gave my love a story that has no end,
I gave my love a country with no borders to defend.
Rin at first, feigns puzzlement at this enumeration of seemingly paradoxical entities, and asks in a voice “like snowmelt, cold and fresh” how it can be that a cherry has no stone, or a country be borderless? To which Esther, smiling, replies
A cherry when it’s bloomin’, it has no stone,
A chicken when it’s piping, it has no bone,
The story that I love you, it has no end,
A country in surrender has no borders to defend.
The trick, she explains, is to shift your temporal perspective. “There are two ways to answer these riddles: with the past or with the future...the song says that this thing you are used to, it has a past, and that past is part of it; what the cherry was before the cherry is part of the cherry.”
This is the forth key aspect of grammar, namely that it permits for speakers to access events from a more complete temporal perspective. When we conjugate verbs for tense, we don’t often think of the magical slices in time that we make. But then again, when one talks with Faeries, one is more aware of such things.
And now we can return to what happens to Esther, who gets drowned and resurrected. So First off, it’s necessary to mention that Rin had worked a powerful speech act in the chapter previous by accepting Esther as their wife. “Esther gazed at her hand and wondered at the grammar of it--not the shift of hair to jewels, but of woman to wife.” (50) They, Rin, had marked this transformation with an exchange of signet rings, carved into the likeness of intertwining willows. Esther’s body, being immersed in the grammar of the River Liss becomes subject to the fifth key property of grammar--its productivity. Productivity is where you put a language’s grammar to practical use. It’s the ability of a language “to unleash new forms out of old.” To take a fun example from our own language, the ending “-ology” has its origins in professional and academic contexts, and is used for rather serious subjects: :biology, geology, theology, etc.. However, on the basis of hundreds of “-ology” words English speakers have picked up on a pattern and freely produce forms like “food-ology” or “phone-ology.” Take another more boring example: the “-ed” ending in English which you can attach to literally any verb (except irregulars and modals) to make it past tense or a predicate adjective. So strong is the “-ed”-goes-on-a-verb” pattern that if you smack it to the end of a noun, that nouns gets reinterpreted as a verb. Like how “wheel” turns into “wheeled,” or steel turns into “steeled.”
The River Liss’s grammar does the same things. It can “unleash new forms out of old” can transform lovers into willow trees, or a woman into a swan. The wood from the grammar-thirsty willows can be crafted into beds and flutes and wands. The key insight here is that we are not dealing with creation ex nihilo, but rather with a developmental, progressive creation. Creation that builds up from previous creations. So what kind of creation did the River Liss accomplish to save Esther’s life? Well it used a pun, you see. It built upon pre-existing meanings. Esther had been wearing a signet ring, which sounds an awful lot like cygnet, which is a type of swan, and so the river had asked and answered the question “when is a signet not a signet. When it’s a swan.” (72) And it transformed her, in classic fairy-tale fashion into a Swan, which Rin would later re-transform into their harp. Death itself is not annihilation, but rather transformation, because nothing can ever be created of destroyed. It can only change form. And this is the deep truth of the grammar of Arcadia: it is “always the wild, unruly grammar of ballads and riddles... which breaks the real into the true,” (98) The real and the true is the key distinction here. Pollard killed Esther for what was real--for tangible, measurable profit. But Faerie, or grammar, with its inherent ability to perpetually become, represents the undeniable truth.