Haunted Kingdoms: Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore and Melina Marchetta's Lumatere Series

It was impossible for me to read Bitterblue (2012), Kristin Cashore's latest contribution to her Graceling series, without recognising its remarkable thematic resonance with Melina Marchetta's Lumatere series.  If you enjoyed one, be sure to try out the other.  Both feature haunted kingdoms.

Cashore's novel is narrated by the eponymous heroine, Bitterblue, who featured as a child character in Graceling but now reappears eight years later as a young woman struggling to rule a kingdom which has been traumatised by decades of monarchical abuse.  Bitterblue's father was King Leck, the villain of Graceling (and its prequel, set 35 years before, Fire).  Leck's Grace (his magical gift or power) was an ability to convince others to believe everything he said, even at the second or third degree; his disgrace was an obsession with manipulation and the infliction of physical and emotional pain. 

Bitterblue, whose memories of her father and her childhood are piecemeal due to the fog-like effect of Leck's Grace, spends the novel trying to discover (and uncover) what actually happened during his reign.  She believes that only by understanding the past can she help her people to recover their wits and remake the kingdom.  What did Leck actually do to people?  What were his crimes?  And how can those abused by him recover and move on with their lives? 

The story is metafictive in many ways, with a strong focus on the creation and passage of knowledge through conversations, letters, diaries, oral storytelling, reading and books.  This is a novel that concedes the power of language, a novel that features both ciphers and printing presses.  But the significance of knowledge goes beyond mere language:  fabrications and truths are also weighed against each other in symbol, in art, and in behaviour.  The final revelations are harrowing, but the sympathetic characterisation allows for hope and healing.

Bitterblue, unlike its predecessor, Graceling, demanded a comparison with the work of Melina Marchetta, because Marchetta's fascinating Lumatere series also features a haunted kingdom.

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In the first novel of Marchetta's trilogy, Finnikin of the Rock (2008), the people of the kingdom of Lumatere are divided into two:  those who were trapped by a magical barrier inside the kingdom when it was annexed ten years before (and have not been heard from since), and those who escaped the annexation of the city only to be trapped outside its magical barrier and forced to live in exile as refugees, forming diasporas where they could, and suffering wherever they could not.  The novel is about attempts to break down the magical barrier and bring the exiles home.  

Its conclusion and the next two novels, Froi of the Exiles (2011) and Quintana of Charyn (2012) deal with the consequences of re-unification.  Those who had been trapped both inside and outside the kingdom endured tragic abuses and now they must try to find some way to heal as individuals and as a community.  Such healing doesn't come instantly or easily.  And their kingdom is not the only one to be so haunted.

Although both Cashore and Marchetta's series reveal traumatic details of abuse and suffering, neither are voyeuristic; both approach this theme with sensitivity and a genuine attempt to explore the issue of how large groups of people can rebuild lives which have been broken and battered by widespread abuse.  Given the world we live in, with its many haunted individuals and communities, their attempts seem, to me, incredibly worthwhile reading.