Witch World Book

The reason I (and maybe many other people but let me not make any bold claims) return to childhood and adolescence favourite reads is to access that carefree (careless?) fourteen-year-old who would lose herself in the book like the real world didn't exist and the worlds her imagination created were so powerful and absorbing she could almost touch them. However, re-reading is a futile exercise, not only can I not connect with that inner child, I don't even know who she was anymore. She is a stranger to me. Still I'm reading those books to see if through them I can at least catch a glimpse of that foreign girl who grew up to be me, so that I assure myself of the continuity of my own self.

The fourteen-year-old me LOVED Andre Norton. The fourteen-year-old me didn't even realise Andre Norton was a woman but she didn't much care. She was excited over the trashy covers with half naked women and buff guys, often accompanied by dangerous wild animals. What kind of titillation she was getting out of those books?

I am not and never have been a particularly introspective kind of person. My diaries just talk about what happened, often in a funny way but hardly ever about how I felt about any of that. And I am not any smarter after re-reading Witch World. This was a lot less sexy than I remember but it is entirely possible I had never read this particular instalment of the series. I read them out of order, based on whatever was available at the library at the time. I just remember when I borrowed my first one I was afraid the librarian wouldn't let me take it home because there was a woman on the cover with very little clothing. ( I think this might've been the one).

Have I ever read the very beginning of the series? Did I even know how it started? Did I know that it started in our world with Simon, a WWII veteran who got himself in a pickle and was looking for a way out and he got maybe a little more than he bargained for when he got teleported into an entire different world of magic and whatnot?

From then on the book takes place mostly in Etscarp - the feminine land ruled by benevolent, wise witches, facing threats from all sides, but mostly from Kolder - the land representing technology gone rogue and masculine ruthlessness. Our hero, Simon, finds himself helping defend Etscarp and discovering his feminine side.

Norton was trying to do some interesting gender things in her series (or at least interesting at the time), she was a proto-Le Guin if you excuse the comparison. It is sad to think that the concepts here were revolutionary mere 50 years ago. There is a lot of female power/magic, which unfortunately goes when they lose virginity (barf, how I hate anything that makes female virginity into a thing), but at least that means the main character couldn't go round screwing every woman he meets which is what happens in other fantasy books. Of course that means the only way to disarm a witch, conquer her, was to rape her - which is spot-on the main thing about rape, it's never about sex, but about power. And if a witch decides to marry and give herself to a man, she essentially relinquishes her power.

So that's why things get interesting when Simon discovers he might have some magic powers of his own. Will they go away if gets laid? Unfortunately I will never find out because I won't rush to re-read the remainder of the series. There is not enough world building and character development for my liking and the ending is a bit anticlimactic. Therefore I'm leaving those books where they belong - with my 14 year old self.