Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m thrilled to welcome author Gabriela Houston to the site to talk about the fascinating concept of tricksters in fiction! I read Gabriela’s debut novel The Second Bell earlier in the year and loved its Slavic mythology-inspired magic, and themes of family and community. With Gabriela’s second novel (and her Middle Grade debut) The Wind Child due out in February 2022, this fantastic guest post is a great opportunity to see how the familiar figue of the trickster relates to The Wind Child. Check out the publisher’s synopsis for this brilliant-sounding story of friendship, gods and monsters, then read on to enjoy Gabriela’s article on tricksters and the balance of power.
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No human has ever returned from Navia, the Slavic afterlife. But twelve-year-old Mara is not entirely human. She is the granddaughter of Stribog, the god of winter winds and she’s determined to bring her beloved father back from the dead. Though powerless, Mara and her best friend Torniv, the bear-shifter, set out on an epic journey to defy the gods and rescue her father.
On their epic journey they will bargain with forest lords, free goddesses from enchantments, sail the stormy seas in a ship made of gold and dodge the cooking pot of the villainous Baba Latingorka. Little do the intrepid duo know of the terrible forces they have set in motion, for the world is full of darkness and Mara will have to rely on her wits to survive.
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Aesop’s Fox, Norse God Loki, West African God Anansi. Charming, cunning and mischievous, tricksters have long captured human imagination around the world. We hate or love them, but they never fail to entertain, to upset the odds, to change the balance of power. They make for fantastic protagonists and villains both, by disrupting the laws governing their environment, and forging a different path.
Take the Fox from the fables, for example. Its one consistent feature is how it will always change the power dynamics within each story. It can be a villain or a hero, but it will always seek to pursue its own agenda outside of the existing system. It will use the tools at its disposal: the other creatures’ vanity, thoughtlessness, boastfulness, and it will succeed time and time again against opponents much stronger and faster.
In my own writing I like focusing on the underdog: the rejected, the misunderstood, the powerless. The Wind Child’s protagonist, Mara, while she is the granddaughter of God of Winter Winds, is herself powerless. Yet she is constantly surrounded by gods and monsters and spirits, who, by the virtue of their magic, feel entitled to dictate the rules and to expect the outcome to always serve them.
She lives in a world where the rules and the laws have not been created to benefit such as her. She can’t win, because she is cast as a loser from the get-go. Her one way of securing the outcome she wants is to go around the rules, by using the vanities and the overconfidence of those more powerful than her against them. She knows that the world will not give her another chance should she lose, and so she relies on her wits to bend the will of others to serve her agenda. Like most archetypal tricksters, she can’t always afford to consider the ethics of what she does, because once she sets things in motion, she can’t stop. The power of the trickster is to go from moment to moment, never backtracking, always analysing the situation they’re in for the ways out and the ways forward. Because once the rules are broken, to pause is to unravel. To acknowledge one’s powerlessness would be to become consumed by the powerful.
Tricksters are rope-walkers and rope-dancers, mesmerising in their defiance of gravity, but always aware that, should they stumble, there is no net to catch them.
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Gabriela Houston is a Polish writer based in London, UK, writing Slavic-folklore-inspired fantasy. Her adult fantasy debut, The Second Bell, came out in March 2021 from Angry Robot Books, and her MG debut, The Wind Child, is coming out from Uclan Publishing in February 2022.
You can find Gabriela on Twitter, on Instagram or at her website.
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Thanks so much to Gabriela for writing this excellent article. I’m really looking forward to reading The Wind Child and meeting Mara and Torniv – it sounds fantastic!
Check out my review of The Second Bell, and my interview with Gabriela talking about The Second Bell.
The Wind Child is available to pre-order now, ahead of its release in February 2022. Check out the links below if you’d like to pre-order a copy*!
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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