Books of promise

A Companion to Wolves
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

The basics

This is, as the authors describe, not the animal-companion book that you might have come to expect. They quite firmly take a lot of those tropes and stand them firmly on their head. I’ll join a number of other commentators here, and say that the two of them working together play beautifully to each other strengths: this book has evocative description, a sense of needing to keep your eyes open in case you miss something fascinating, and incredibly rich worldbuilding.

[I'll apologise here: my limited book budget means I do not yet own a copy of this, and the library copy had to go back before I got the brain to write this. I believe I'm accurate in terms of the summary/etc. below, but I'm not trying for most names or titles for fear of messing them up. The mix of language bases used - which I otherwise liked - meant that none of the precise terms stuck reliably in my memory and I keep second-guessing them.]

The basic premise is that there are trolls (who are nasty, and prone to destroying villages, killing people, and generally problematic.) There are villages with a geographic minor aristocracy - and there are the trellwolves and their human companions, who fight the trolls.

Each wolf bonds to a human - a male human - as it grows (but not instantly upon birth). While the wolf might survive the man, or the man the wolf (in which case, another bond may but does not always happen), it’s also a great loss. The wolves are governed by the alpha female - the queen wolf.

The story, in short, is the tale of Isolfr, who bonds to a young queen wolf, and of how they grow up together. Below the ‘more’ tag, I’m going to talk more about some details - I’m not actually talking about plot details as much as world-building details, but if you’re wanting to avoid spoilers, come back when you’ve read the book.

The actual coming-of-age pulled me in entirely (I admit, it’s a favorite theme of mine). That said, there is explicit sexuality in the book, some of it is fairly graphic (in the context of the wolves mating, and the effect it has on their bonded brothers) and that if you add the first two parts of the sentence together, yes, there are men having sex with men. Me, I think it’s totally appropriate in context, handled with a particular delicacy in some ways (as I discuss below), and made me think. But if you have issues with that, you probably want the warning. (It is possible to skip the page or two where the explicit stuff happens and pick up again and not miss too much, though you’ll miss a few minor hints of future plot developments.)

It’s a fantastic book, and one I think that will continue to deepen on re-reading. But really, I want to talk about other aspects of it now - like power, and ritualised roles, and informed consent, which is where we sort of hit spoilers. (Also, because I’m talking about this on the Pagan-focused book discussion blog, I’m talking about parts of this from that context, as you’ll see.)

Roles

As you may know, I’m in the middle of forming a new coven. I’m also in the middle of figuring out what I might want, not want, give, not be able to give, and generally what pieces are in the air in terms of new relationships (not that I have one yet, but in the hopes I’ll be healed enough from the last one to take advantage of new possibilities.)

One of the things that fascinated me about this book - on both levels - was the interplay between wolfcarls. Within the wolfpack, you have the queen wolf (the center of the pack, though there may be subordinate females under her.) You also have who she chooses as her mate. In a heavily male society of the wolfheall (there are women who live there, tend to various tasks, etc. but the story - and the wolfheall in general is very male-centered), that gives a lot of power - but it also means that the wolfbrother to the queen wolf is of necessity placed in what we might refer to as a high priestess role.

It’s his job to pay attention to the underlying emotional stability of the others, and because (obviously) the queen wolf will sometimes be pregnant, he is sometimes limited in what he can do. If she is in heat, and it would be a problem for the wolfheall, he may be sent away until she’s done (in the book, this happens earlier in their lives, where they are sent off alone or with a single partner). If she is bearing a litter, she cannot go and fight while she’s heavily pregnant, or when she has young unweaned pups - so her human brother must also stay behind.

What I found fascinating, though, was the conversations between Isolfr and the brother of the queen wolf of the pack he is initially a member of - there are lots of quietly passed along tidbits and pieces of information that are evocative of my own training as a priestess (learning from my own High Priestess), and that made me think about how to teach in future. It’s the quiet word, in the right place, that sometimes provides the critical information.

There are also some really interesting dynamics - in terms of shared leadership, assumptions about roles, and how different people act or act out in specific roles that made me think a lot about my interactions. For me, at least, moving it outside of the normal gender division on the human level (but with the very biological demands and dominance demands of the wolf mixed in) gave me a new perspective on several issues I’ve been mulling over - things like the question of presence, of what choices imply, and where and how you might exert a particular intention.

There’s also another culture introduced, which works entirely differently. I’m not going to say much about it here, because it’s hard to talk about without spoilers, but I really liked the non-dualism model going on throughout the book, in a culture that kept overtly tending towards dualism.

Informed consent

One of the most disturbing scenes in the book was also one of the most powerful for me. Our main character experiences his queen wolf’s first true heat with other wolves around - and yes, has sex that he would not normally consent to.

Except that, as he points out “She’s worth it” - his relationship with his wolf is worth everything, and if this is part of the price, he’s willing to pay it. It’s not easy (and I think they do a good job of showing exactly how terrifying and shattering the experience is). But he’s also very clear on why it’s necessary, and he doesn’t turn aside.

There’s power in that. And it’s his power.

We talk, in part of my religious training, about being willing to suffer to learn - and about being willing to suffer to serve, at times. It’s not that those things should be suffering all the time. But that the willingness to take the parts we would not otherwise choose, but which serve a particular purpose and goal we care about a great deal, is very powerful. It’s not something to do lightly - the experience can utterly reshape you. But is that not one of the classic definitions of an initiation in a religious mystery sort of sense?

Reading the experience there made me reflect on my own initiations - and on what was asked of me to take them - in a new way. And it also made me continue to reflect on what consent truly means.

Some people I’ve talked to consider some of the rituals I’ve been to abusive - because they required me to do things that would not otherwise be my first choice, or to walk away. The thing is, though - I chose to e there, I chose to continue with the process. I chose to say yes, even knowing the potential cost. No one is wrong for chosing to avoid that. But no one is wrong for saying “Yes” to it - even if the consquences are shattering. Power - true power - demands that we be able to make our own choices and bear the consequences.

And ideally - as they do here - the consequences are not what we expected, the outcome is not what we’d looked for - but it’s something far richer, finer - and all in all more glorious than our minds could wrap around at the time we made the choice.